There is a tawdry quality to the buildings lining the main street into town that even we find it difficult to romanticize, as it does not recall an excess of abandoned grandeur (in this regard we have been literally ruined by Washington Heights) but a desperate, opportunistic desire to skim off the hordes (us among them) flocking here to take in the natural monuments on display. There is concrete brick in abundance, a completely unrestrained excess of over-sized, italicized fonts on the storefront signs; there are billboards for “luxury townhouse condominiums” starting in the “300’s.” There is an incongruous amount of traffic; we end up behind a purple, double-decker tour bus that inches forward and spews exhaust. We leave Lake Placid for the somewhat more forgotten town of Saranac Lake, where we pass a village square and note a group of goth punks who have collected under a small gazebo; they stare vacantly back at us, not knowing that we can see through this facade of boredom to a deeper longing to escape these confines for the anarchy of the metropolis.