aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand amandaw nails it in one! well-played, slow-claps, this is fucking beautiful, i co-sign the shit out of this (check out this fucking tumblr post!), & i say this as an unabashed NYC parochialist (apologist?) who is kind of fucking sick of other New Yorkers telling her why she should love New York! fuck you other New Yorkers, and your nonsense about a big stage, because midtown is the #1 worst part of the city & i hope for a future career that enables me to spend no time there whatsoever, which automatically disqualifies me from all the big-player professions! you people are the reason people think New Yorkers are assholes! well that and the fact that excessive profanity in casual conversation is apparently considered “offensive” in other places, or something, which sometimes confuses people in places where people don’t curse as much into thinking I’m angry all the time when actually I just tend to say the word fuck a lot unless I remember not to. though, someone from Texas once told me that’s a Northerner vs. Southern thing. I have no idea if that’s true. WHATEVER.You get what you pay for.
foureleven:katoleary:jackieheartsb:
Reason #1: Julia Allison’s $2,550 apartment
Brandon and I pay half that for a two bedroom townhouse with close to 1,800 feet of living space, a full washer/dryer and a backyard. I am 30 minutes from DC by train, less than that by car and only 25 minutes from Baltimore.
I guess it depends what you want out of life. Do you want a yard, lots of closets, a large-screen high-def TV, and the treasures of Baltimore and DC less than an hour’s drive away when you get bored? Or do you want 375 restaurants, bars, and galleries filled with the most fascinating people on earth and the entire social/intellectual/artistic/professional landscape of NYC at your doorstep? Do you want to live where a new coffee shop gets everyone excited, or in a center of change where the future is being reinvented? Do you want to live in a place that’s only of interest to the people who live there, or in a city the whole world is watching? New York is for people who want to play on a big stage, and for those of us who care about that, there’s nowhere else and you could mark up my living costs tenfold with no complaints from me (like, what else is the money for?). If that doesn’t concern you, I agree you’re better off saving your money.
There are also plenty of ways to save and live in NYC, if you don’t mind roommates or non-“status” neighborhoods. I’m a little boggled by Julia’s willingness to pay so much $$ for a one-bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen (or midtown). Apartments on the UES are much more reasonable than they’ve been in a long time and, for the post-college set, there are huge apartments in Harlem and Inwood. (Not to mention the options available in Brooklyn and Queens, both of which are an easy distance from/to Manhattan.)
Yeah, I used to live in Brooklyn. It gave me time to confirm that New Yorkers aren’t any smarter or more innovative than people in any of the other cities where I’ve lived and that they are far from the most intellectual or artistic. It’s also the only place I’ve lived where people have been *proud* to say that they’ve never traveled far from their own city. Not very cosmopolitan if you ask me.
But when you live somewhere that’s expensive, dirty, and stressful, you have to justify it to yourself somehow, right? Thus the myth of New York superiority is born. (The notion that bigger is better helps it along too, though I’ve spent time in three cities that have larger populations.)
Now to be fair, New York is probably one of the best cities in the world for people who like to hustle, network, and work systems to gain money or status as well as one of the best for people who like to claim to be the best in any given discipline based on their ability to do those three things (whether or not these three are relevant to the discipline itself). If that’s your thing, or if you’re in one of a few industries that are deeply New-York-centric, then living there is probably good for you. More expansive claims are just the deep parochialism of New Yorkers showing through.
I just wanted to highlight and respond shortly to peterfeld.
Different people value different things.
I could never live the life of busy business, the hustle, the constantly-“on” — I could never keep up with the networking; bars and pubs and fancy restaurants don’t excite me; I am drained of all energy working 37.5 hours a week, much less the 60+ that seems to be required to be able to sustain oneself in NYC.
It is the culture of hustle that I would never survive in, and it’s not because I’m wedded to the often-harmful culture of suburban flight. It’s not because I’m a country gal or because I have to have thousands upon thousands of square feet for the explicit purpose of never using, because that somehow sweetens the square feet you do use. It’s not because I worship the hours-long commutes and the white picket fences.
No, I just know that New York, an area more set-apart from the rest of the country than any other US city could ever dream of being, does not fit my likes and needs. I like urban areas; I demand good public transportation, and like the community and social structure that goes with the closeness; dense walkable areas are awesome. But I also need to be able to get in a car and drive somewhere and find a parking space nearby, rather than walking anywhere from one to four miles or more to get where I need to go. I need the slowness, I need the quiet, I need the option to take things at a pace more reasonable for my particular life, rather than feeling — not just left behind, but trampled over, in everyone else’s rush to be at the front of the rush.
That’s why I could never live in New York, even though I still admire it from a distance, would absolutely love to visit it at length someday, and realize it does fit other people’s needs. But that’s the thing. I recognize that different people have different needs.
I think the most fascinating people on earth live everywhere on Earth. I think that the most amazing things on earth are happening everywhere. I think that people have value no matter where they live, and make incredible impacts no matter who they are.
You play on your big stage and tell yourself you’re the most important people in the world. Have fun. The rest of us will continue living life with the knowledge of how awesome and precious it is, no matter how big or small our stage, where it is or how expensively it was constructed.
THE POINT is… can we all stop pretending like if two people from New York say “I love New York” they necessarily have anything close to similar images in mind for what they mean? seriously now. is anyone going to seriously assert that my friend who is planning to direct opera who has lived in a shoebox-size apartment on the Upper West Side her whole life because her mom is a voice teacher (opera = NYC is a good place for that; no money = shoebox-size apartment; students don’t want to travel outside of Manhattan for lessons = Upper West Side) has anything like the mental image of New York that her friend the life-long Upper East Sider who plans to go into finance does, or that either of their mental images of New York are all that similar to someone who has grown up in the South Bronx, or that any of them know what life is like out in Brighton Beach, or that any of them even remember half the time that people from Staten Island also refer to themselves as New Yorkers?
i mean, jeez people, yes, the Upper East Side is one of the richest fucking areas in the country, it belongs to the congressional district that pays the highest percentage of income tax per capita in the country (which I think means it’s the richest? I think that’s what that article means? I’m a little confused today), but, as that article also points out, it’s a fuckin 20-minute subway ride from right there to the poorest congressional district in the country. how about we not pretend like this is not also a part of New York, okay? and how about we also don’t simplify that into “New York has rich parts and shitty parts” because those rich parts are often populated by awful boring stupid people like the kind of people who get written up in the NYTimes Style section for getting annoyed with NYC for messing up their all-white interiors (to THOSE people: YOU CAN MOVE ANYTIME NOW), and meanwhile one of those “shitty parts” is also the birthplace of hip-hop & currently the site of a whole lot of really awesome work being done by places like environmental justice organization Sustainable South Bronx, youth-outreach program Rocking the Boat (which teaches teenagers how to MAKE BOATS, how fucking cool is that), grafitti group Tats Cru, arts collective Mud/Bone, arts-based community center (for adults and, even more awesomely, kids) the Point, and probably a ton of things I’m forgetting or don’t even know about?
(which is not to say the South Bronx doesn’t have more problems than you can shake a stick at, because holy pollution/violence/drug/hunger/poverty rates, batman, yes it does. just to say that things are complicated, and places can be shitty in some ways and awesome in others).
and all that, I guess, sort of sounds like I’m just hopping on the NYC RULES! train, but that’s not exactly what I’m going for here, though, yes, in my personal view, it does. but that’s sort of besides the point, because in reality, when people talk about loving NYC because of loving being in the center of the most important status/money/whatever type things in the universe, they are not actually talking about NYC at large. they are talking about a very small, very obnoxious, area of NYC, populated by a very small, often obnoxious slice of NYC’s population, many of whom are actually commuters anyway. and i’m kind of sick of this coming up every time New Yorkers defend NYC, because inevitably it does, and inevitably I wonder if maybe I actually live in a different city than all these people (who go to MIDTOWN! on PURPOSE! if you don’t live in NYC and hate midtown like I do probably I can’t convey to you how baffling I find this)
and also i am sick of, essentially, being told people who are not at the top or aspiring to be at the top of the food chain shouldn’t want to live here, because i don’t aspire to the top of the food chain, and because actually part of what i like about NYC and cities in general is the way you can feel so anonymous, and also because who the fuck do you think is keeping running for you all those museums, restaurants, bars, and, yes, train stations that stay open 24/7? you can’t ACTUALLY have a city made entirely of, what, lawyers and ibankers, half of whom are out of a job right now anyway? NYC, like everywhere else, needs its janitors, librarians, teachers (REPRESENT), waiters(/actors), social workers (MORE OF THESE PLZ), small business owners, laundromats, etc., and if you are actually willfully blind enough to pretend that all these people are not just as fucking essential to the character and lifeblood of NYC as anyone else, then you are an asshole, and also giving New Yorkers a bad name!
