is New York City dead?

NYC seems genuinely out of fashion for the first time in my life, and maybe its history? Williamsburg is a punchline, Manhattan both above and below 14th St is just rich fuxors, seems like everything that used to happen in only NYC or LA now happens in LA or some other ascendant metropolis. I am not particularly worldly or sophisticated or mobile these days so I can't offer much more evidence, this is just my lay observation. What u think?

New York isn't dead.
There are still lots of great things about this city.
The things I value might not be the same things others value, of course.

https://saysomethingvague.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/lcd-soundsystem-t-shirt-losing-my-edge.jpg

no you're dead

okay

I mean, IDK, I was out in bushwick recently on a saturday night and it still seemed happening and teeming with young artsy cutting edge types brimming with energy. However it's been rough for a good amount of time now as far as being a city that young people without a bankroll or a professional job can live in, and that definitely cuts into the creative energy of the city some. I mean I don't even think the bronx offers the kinds of rents today that could be had 20 years ago in brooklyn.

like if you mean "dead" as in "no longer can birth a 'scene' the way it could in the 60s/70s/80s/90s, that might be true just because rents are so high.

I think that is what I mean. Although "scene" sounds a little tinny/reductive, scenes kind of matter. A city births a scene which creates stuff that matters.

Is Paris dead? How about London? Those cities are pretty expensive too, and have been for some time. New York is still a place that attracts ambitious young people, including artists, and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

well yeah, I mean a scene as in the beats or the greenwich village folk scene or disco or no wave or whatever. Like the combination of cheap living and high density and educational and arts institutions and economic activity that allows for a scene that actually produces something of worth. Like I just don't think there are many corners of the city left where a bunch of musicians could live close to one another and work more or less full time on their music and pay rent waiting tables part time or whatever. And to the extent such pockets exist, they're scattered at the edges of the city instead of centralized.

All cities are dead because culture travels faster through the Internet than it ever could geographically.

Rising rents making it hard for young people to live there unless they're being bankrolled is basically true for all major international cities now. Even Berlin's getting expensive these days.

But hey, there are always aspiring artists with trust funds, so the city will never die

i don't know the deal w/rents in NYC but i find it funny when people come out to L.A. from there and rhapsodize about how comparatively inexpensive the rent is here.

I don't go out much anymore, so maybe there's some lively cheap shit I'm missing out on.

It's also really hard for some people in late middle age (w/out a LUCRATIVE CAREER) to live here.

I'm also old and have a family and work a lot, and I just don't really know what's happening anymore. When we went out in Bushwick, we saw some local DJs/electronic artists in a little club and it was absurdly packed and seemed pretty alive.

I guess another thing I've noticed is that galleries tend to show artists from all over the US and world, and I'm guessing that's more true than it used to be. But that's also an internet-erasing-borders thing.

All cities are dead because culture travels faster through the Internet than it ever could geographically.

― treeship 2, Tuesday, February 6, 2018 3:28 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is pretty otm

it's all about the rust belt, my friend

we eat the cheeses here too

they are artisanal

our cities are the envy of all, their livability is primo

Here's how I think about New York, after my last visit there last summer:

New York is good and the only actual large city in America on the metric of everything existing there. Big cities are the ones where there is everything; you can tell Seattle is a small city because there are things that are not here.

New York is bad in that it smells of garbage. In the summer, hot garbage.

If more American cities grow to populations in the millions, New York will be more dead by comparison due declining uniqueness. Is this going to happen? Who knows.

i kinda want to leave, but i have a job i like okay and an unusually fortuitous living situation. there's no real reason for me to be here; i don't partake of the cultural opportunities available

it'll probably be the subway that finally drives me away

NYC: where if you can make it there as a successful artist, you can also have a successful time crowdfunding your medical bills.

Telecommuting will finish it off.

Less of a joke, not as dead as San Francisco?

Feels like people have been waiting for a rust belt/flyover city to take over since our traditional metropolises are more 'playground for the rich' than ever but I still don't hear kids looking to move to Columbus or Pittsburgh.

Have the media decided where the New Portland is?

There was a Tooze tweet recently, where he showed stats on how professional actors in the USA, vastly outnumber coal miners. I forgot by much, but it was significantly much.

I do hear murmurings about ppl aspiring to move to Pittsburgh, Detroit, Denver, a few others

According to @BLS_gov and @TheEconomist there are 51,200 people employed as coal miners in the US v. 785k in 1920. In 2017 there are more florists, actors and personal fitness instructors than miners. pic.twitter.com/m913tHokI2

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) January 2, 2018

Less of a joke, not as dead as San Francisco?

Feels like people have been waiting for a rust belt/flyover city to take over since our traditional metropolises are more 'playground for the rich' than ever but I still don't hear kids looking to move to Columbus or Pittsburgh.

― louise ck (milo z), Tuesday, February 6, 2018 6:27 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hear rumblings about Pittsburgh now and then. Also tons of my friends moved to Philly over the years and it did seem to be producing bands at a good clip for a while.

And no one talks about how many administrative assistant, secretarial and receptionist jobs were lost in NYC due to automation, because... women, a lot of woc. Breadwinners for their families. Fuck coal miners and their sooty tears.

I’m moving back to new york soon bc of my job but it’s not a nice place to live.

I still have my apartment in Astoria. But I really don't want to go back. I dread having to deal with the subway.

The subway is inexcusably unpleasant

i get more anxious/aggro in nyc in my old age. i don't know what it is. impatient. people bug me more. i think its just a case of the olds. i will always love the city though. in general. i've loved hanging out there my whole life.

it really is me being set in my ways. we stayed in brooklyn one summer with the kids and i seriously didn't want to leave the hotel room. get on a subway to go to a museum in manhattan? kill me now.

Everything here is comically more stressful than any other place.

I car commute to the suburbs now and it's glorious to not be taking the subway anymore

Why is the ceiling always dripping down there?

Second and third tier cities could attract people by just showing how messed up the MTA is in their promo material.

I haven't lived in nyc full time for almost two years now. I miss it, but I really don't miss it. Just the thought of having to take the subway to work gives me anxiety.

Part of me really regrets accepting another job here. As a teen my dream was living here but it’s not that fun.

NYC misses Yerac and Znarf

Fix the subway and get rid of GOP madness and I am there!

fuck the subway, i drive most places now. and when i do take the subway it's in the middle of the day.
sorry can't do anything about the GOP.

Do you have to go in and out of manhattan a lot or no?

I remember taking the subway maybe 1-2 times a month when I worked in Williamsburg. It was the best. My tweety truck got sold like 3 years ago.

i've honestly not experienced the subway horrors that many have, but i will say that the subway is nearly unusable on nights and weekends

just not enough trains

I want to get myself to love it again.

Not the subway—the city

The last job I had there, I almost had a breakdown every time I took the subway. I would sometimes using the plodding R so I wouldn't have to deal with the insaneness of the 4,5,6 during rush hour. That train really has the worst people to be stuck with in the tunnel.

I do drive into the city regularly. Many mornings I drive in and drop my wife off at work and then drive home. It helps that we live near the Manhattan Bridge and her office is in chinatown. We also might drive in and park for any number of special events.

I had the same commute. Bushwick to East Harlem. L to union square than the green line. Sometimes I found myself wishing I would just spontaneously die.

Interesting, ian. I don’t have too much experience driving in manhattan but when I’ve done it I didn’t have a good time.

Last time I tried to take the L train during rush hour I almost had a panic attack trying to change from the G at Metropolitan; just a slow moving mass of people slowly slithering thru the tunnel. Really grim.

I used to drive in the city all the time. It's fine. It was parking that was the issue.

I miss DUMPLINGS! and pizza. And things not being closed on Sunday, Monday, half of Wed. or for whatever random holiday/break pops up.

driving from Queens to Manhattan is not terrible, although sometimes you wind up having to park in a garage that costs more than whatever you're actually going to the city for.

Agreed that the real issue with driving into the city is the parking. Ive gotten used to cruising the grid to find street parking; even if it's metered it's way better than paying a garage imo.

I commuted into the city every weekday for work from roughly March 2000-May 2016. Since May 2016, I've been into NYC maybe 20 times - roughly once a month, on average - and I don't miss it at all.

Uptown is really nice and feels weirdly timeless, both the east and west sides.

new york is obv dead bc we are now just talking about the subway

subway complaints otm though it really is awful

I’m planning to move to east williamsburg soon — with friends — but maybe that isn’t my scene.

tbh i've never lived in ny, just visited a ton over the 15 years i lived on the east coast. i love visiting. there is a manic creative energy there, i enjoy being around all different kinds of people, and last time i visited (a month ago) it really struck me how globally, ethnically, socioeconomically diverse it STILL is

claims of a rust belt migration are overblown, though i do meet a fair share of folks who moved back to cleveland like i did after spending time in more expensive cities. there is a cool art scene in cleveland, there is stuff happening. but come on as cool and livable as rust belt cities are (and i do genuinely love them) they are provincial compared to a place like new york

i've been in NYC for eighteen years now and got through 9/11 and sandy evicting me and the 2003 blackout and am now old and fat and running into people I haven't seen in a decade on the way to the dentist
i would likely be a great deal less patient with city life if i had to still be doing daily subway commuting but I've been freelance for about five years and while that comes with its own hassles, i recommend it.
i would say one of the three major reasons i wanted to come here was because i hate cars and car culture and this was one of the few places you could get by without wheels... in the uber economy, this may be less true now?
NYC has ridic good live music and theater and film and art and general performance and lectures every single night of the week and the food is great
you can do all the above for a lot of money or for free/nearly free with a fair amount of due diligence
the rent remains too damn high but i remain amazed that the melting pot is still melting: every ethnicity/gender/class/creed is slammed together and we mostly all get along cheek by jowl without fucking killing each other somehow and that's a small miracle
there are days when i hate everybody and everything here but they're rarer than the days when I'm utterly floored by what the city has to offer.
i <3 ny

also treeship comment about the internet is partially right to some extent those more clearly defined scenes are happening more online than geographically. everywhere has scenes though

Everything here is comically more stressful than any other place.

Try living in London, there's a real shithole for you.

they are provincial compared to a place like new york

you can get people to piss on you anywhere in america

xp That’s what i’m talking about ulysses. I need to rediscover some of that love — that Whitmanian view of new york. That’s what makes stuff like the stress of commuting bearable. It’s hard to feel that sometimes with all the grotesque and out of control wealth. And also I am just bitter now

"Try living in London, there's a real shithole for you."

Don't talk to me about sophistication, Ive lived in Woolwich.

The East River Ferry is sort of a life-changing alternative to subway commuting. You can spend an entire week without going underground ever. But yeah, to get back to the thread topic, RIP New York.

new york city is dead but where in america isn't? america is a failing nation. we should all be trying to immigrate to asia!

I love NYC more when I am not in it. I don't like to shop, my favorite restaurants/bars are closed, the weather was getting to me. Cell phones/internet kind of ruined most aspects of going out (but that is true for a lot of places, just other places can have better manners about it). Tourism is killing a lot of cities. I say that as someone who is frequently a tourist to other places. But at least tourists from NY walk fast and try not to gawk.

I've been spending a month in France and London. It's cold and grey. I would always choose them over NY because of all the ways they are different.

There are still millions of young people living, drinking, making music, etc. in NYC, but apparently the city is dead because it's the wrong TYPE of young people?

Most of what I love about the place has gone away or I've been priced out of participating.

I hate it. And I can't leave.

I've never thought about NYC as being for "young people".

it seems like it's exclusively for young people. most people get out of dodge when they have kids to avoid paying for private school.

ok maybe not most people, but a lot of people. i think when i'm in my 40s i would probably rather live in a house in a less exciting place than a tiny apartment in the city. but idk, i haven't gotten there yet.

Some of those young ppl won't be here much longer because there's nowhere affordable to live while you work nights and go to community college or start having kids before you have a "career." There are even a lot of young people coming back from college who can't afford to go back to the communities that they came from.

Anyway, whatever, I'm over it. My bf just bought a house in the Hudson Valley. I'm not moving up there with him but I am saving money for my own house somewhere there-ish or near-ish. I want a porch.

i enjoy living a few miles away in NJ with the ability to either drive in, take a train, bus or ferry. Im not sure i could deal with living there day to day. i only have to go into the city for work a few times a month so any other time is for entertainment and that's cool with me.

I've never thought about NYC as being for "young people".

― Yerac, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 10:18 AM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Manhattan is for old people with yorkshire terriers.

I think people are kidding mostly but there are a lot of seniors living in NYC. And not on the UWS either.

It’s a little annoying when people plug their ears about the economic differences between NYC today vs 20 years ago because it’s pretty obvious that it’s become a much harder place for any non-monied person to live and undertake creative pursuits.

i've been here for 14 years and i am definitely worn down to a nub. life here has defeated me. we are dangerously near to being served an eviction notice this month so i might have worse problems than nyc exhaustion soon. i've been stuck here mostly because my wife is very very rooted to the city, with a broad tree of good friends and useful contacts. We'll see how it goes.

If so, it's about time. It's had a good run, and maybe it should be grateful for all the time it's had as being the coolest hippest best biggest etc.

Maybe it should follow the example of straight white men: recognizing that it's had more than its share of glory, and gracefully stepping aside so that other entities might get a share of the spotlight every now and then.

nyc should step to the left, into NJ, or to the right, further onto long island

new york's alright if you like sex and phones

america being a country descended from farmers who went west for 40 acres and a mule, i think it's a wonder the NYC exists at all. there are really no alternatives to NYC infrastructure-wise, easy to see why people come here. nobody, the feds or the state is willing to invest in it anymore so it's going to die a slow death. america!

new york's alright if you like sex and phones

I hear some other cities may be getting those things soon.

Everyone in Williamsburg pivoted to video

grass is greener lads

it depends where your priorities are and what your tastes are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycR3K1IIf9U

Twenty years, for me--my entire adult life. But I'm so tired, every day, all the time. Taking the subway is an exhausting chore and it doesn't even count as part of my exhausting workday. Even with a vehicle, it takes an hour to travel 8 or 10 miles bc of traffic and lights. The things I like about NY are now limited to my friends and my immediate residential community, and I can transplant/develop those things elsewhere. (PS I hate all music and shows and movies and bars and loud noises.)

NYC is the best if you are older and have no kids. You're not the weirdo, old person with no kids. You can get everything delivered, never have to drive, the doorman can do welfare checks if you have no family.

I hate it. And I can't leave.

No, that's Minneapolis that people hate and can't leave.

I think I just happened to luck out by buying a super shitty Trump Sr. row house in Wburg in 2004 before I knew any better.

xxxp Sure if you have $$$. Otherwise you can be any of the mobility-challenged seniors in my neighborhood who are confined to their homes bc they can't walk or climb stairs anymore, living alone or being checked on by one or two children, refusing to leave their homes but not able to care for them anymore. Two of them died in a house fire a few days after Christmas, right across the street from me. I worry about my next-door neighbor constantly but she's too stubborn to budge. I don't have children to take care of me, or own a home to die in, so I figure I'd better get started making something stick.

Seriously tho, this ...

The things I like about NY are now limited to my friends and my immediate residential community, and I can transplant/develop those things elsewhere.

... is basically true of every major city. They're all fucking exhausting and at a certain point you age out of city life.

NYC does have some advantages with kids -- I'm across the street from the playground, 5 min walk to the preschool, 20 min walk to the elementary school (and we still get a bus fwiw). The corner store has anything we need in a pinch and costco is accessible by a very short drive or even subway (although I'd hate to lug a load of costco groceries on the subway).

That said, we're in one of the last "affordable" neighborhoods with good schools and our monthly housing costs for an apartment are still comparable to a nice house in Jersey.

well eventually i will be stored in my sister's house in CT. Maybe in ten years, maybe in 5 months.

eventually i'll be stored in a cremation urn

I like living in a major city with access to everything but at the same time, when someone I know here cashes out there home they bought in 1998 (for 200k-ish) for 1 million and then they buy a massive place in Vermont or Carolina I get vv existentially bummed out knowing I moved into this city at the wrong time.

i'm planning to be sprinkled in the parking lot that used to be Shea Stadium

xp

I wish I could eat the pizza that my ashes char flavor.

xp

actually i was just thinking it'd be cheaper if i'm sprinkled over english bay

i think most americans want to live in a castle and want to live alone and be left alone. NYC is pretty antithetical to that unless you're the kind of person who can own at one 57.

No, that's Minneapolis that people hate and can't leave.

tbh i liked it and left

a new hope

https://www.wnyc.org/story/affordable-housing-plan-back-area-next-citi-field

the Midwest is gonna become cool again in like 15 years tops

Pittsburgh is already the next Seattle and Cleveland is probably the next Pittsburgh, all cities are inherently attractive places to live

Try visiting San Antonio sometime.

Upon returning to U.S. my wife and I wanted to give somewhere else besides NYC a shot. We had one kid at the time and were planning on a second and had sold our place in BK and knew we were now priced out for good. We decided on western MA as I had history/friends in the area. On the drive up from my parents' place in FL (where my car had been parked for a couple years) we got increasingly worried that even visiting friends in NYC would be too much—we missed it so much and were afraid of falling back under the city's spell and changing our minds about getting out. So we drove inland on the Thruway without stopping, right past it. That was fourteen years ago.

I would echo everything said upthread about the city being easier to soldier through on a daily basis when you are younger. (And about that ease returning in old age.) I used to enjoy waiting for the train to come, even late at night, so long as I had something to read. In my 40s I have less patience for all the city logistics—not just the subway but shopping for groceries more frequently, dealing with manic co-op or condo people, landlord whatever.

xxp it depends, some places have mountains/oceans/temperate climates and they have a certain cachet for people who like those things nearby

i think most americans want to live in a castle and want to live alone and be left alone.

― 龜, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:11 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I used to hate that American, suburban mindset — which is so wasteful and misanthropic and implicitly right wing — but now I think it makes sense and I want to live in the woods.

xxp I shld add that all the same I go down pretty frequently, for several years commuted once weekly to teach, and that to this day I feel more at home and more in sync and somehow more relaxed (?) in New York than I ever have in pastoral New England

western MA is dope, i have lived there and i loved it

xxp I was reminded that, even in high school, I used to say I wanted to be a hermit in the woods and not have to deal with people ... but I think that stemmed from still being in the closet

Yeah it's cool but really one of its advantages is its relative proximity to NYC xp

you have educational & cultural institutions and progressive attitudes of the city but there is abundant nature around. so many cool little towns too

I don’t know myself anymore.

I would like to visit western MA but y'know i don't drive. (Which is also why i can't live in other places, besides there not being jobs I could get.)

sometimes i think about moving to the okanagan ya

like starting a little vineyard and just looking after my grapes and riding my horse

Xpost that is the other thing for us. K cannot drive so moving to any other city equals in her mind, perhaps correctly, isolation and loss of independence.

xpmarcos All of these things are true but there if you are not from New England there is something about the character, the social vibe—even in the hotbed of progressivism where I live—that makes for tough acclimation. What I miss most about the city is people, random exchanges, a sort of affection strangers have for one another, an ease of intercourse.

I used to hate that American, suburban mindset — which is so wasteful and misanthropic and implicitly right wing — but now I think it makes sense and I want to live in the woods.

― treeship 2, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:30 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark

it's okay, you're returning to your native state of being. you probably grew up in a suburb didn't you? it's alright, for a few generations americans were able to achieve the dream of buying and living in their own house in the countryside, far away from other people, like the feudal lords of old, until the world ran out of oil and the massive famines and droughts caused by climate change.

Morbs we now have a train that comes to directly to downtown Northampton. I'll show you all the yarns shops.

how many are there?

137

i'll spin you a yarn or two

uh oh y'all are gonna make me miss Northampton

i miss northampton. i lived in that cool brick apartment building above the watering hole and northampton coffee. that town is so rad

it's pricy now afaik, though other western MA towns are less so i tihnk? easthampton & greenfield are still pretty cheap i think

i was there last month, went to the montague book mill which is one of the best little spots in western MA imo maybe all of new england

One of my favorite places to live was a small one bedroom above a bar and coffee shop in a college town in upstate NY. If one of us got a job offer there I'd move back to that town in a heartbeat tbh.

driving isn't really that difficult

Nah driving sucks

One of my favorite places to live was a small one bedroom above a bar and coffee shop in a college town in upstate NY. If one of us got a job offer there I'd move back to that town in a heartbeat tbh.

― omar little, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:57 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what town?

i grew up in a driving city so i don't find it that bad. driving & listening to music is fun

there is basically no traffic in cleveland though so that helps

Driving would be difficult for me, I'd crash in the first week. Also a car would be a money pit.

driving isn't really that difficult

― mookieproof

Nah driving sucks

― direct to consumer online mattress brand (silby)

These are not contradictory btw. It can be easy WHILE still sucking.

(It is also possible to not-drive in places other than NYC, but that's a whole nother topic)

gotta get morbs a bike. or rollerblades.

car 100% money pit tho. can attest.

i've been running a $300 monthly deficit lately w/out one, so...

One of my favorite places to live was a small one bedroom above a bar and coffee shop in a college town in upstate NY. If one of us got a job offer there I'd move back to that town in a heartbeat tbh.

― omar little, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:57 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what town?

― Evan, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 10:02 AM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ithaca!

Went back for an overnight visit a couple summers ago and it seemed like things had actually picked up a bit since I left way back in 1999.

Gotta say it's been somewhat gratifying to see all of these down-on-NYC posts. I'm one of those who left (six years ago) for the suburbs once kids arrived, and while I have no regrets or doubts about the decision I can't help but wonder sometimes what things would be like if we'd tried to make a go of it in the city. I do still come in every day for work and like HVIII said (I might as well just quote him here) "I feel more at home and more in sync and somehow more relaxed (?) in New York." Maybe not the relaxed bit -- I'm pretty relaxed at home too. I really really miss the easy access to live music and amazing food and non-blockbuster films. But I don't know if I'd be able to enjoy and take advantage of the city like I did in my 20s. And we have fantastic neighbors where we are now, we love the schools, and we can spread out a bit -- we're not on top of each other all the time. One of the nicest things has been how my relationship to the outdoors has changed. Particularly with a small child it felt like there was always some planning involved just to get a little fresh air; now I walk out to the backyard in my pajamas with my coffee without a second thought, and I can spend hours outside with the kids without worrying about what to do if someone gets hungry or has to go to the bathroom.

Walking around the city now it feels like it's less interesting than it used to be, but I hope I'm wrong about that and that's it's down to me being older and not in touch with where the cool things are happening. My wife and I try to bring the kids in at least once a month because we want them to know something beyond suburban living, and I hope it'll be a place where they'd like to live when they're out on their own. But I don't know if the kind of neighborhoods I lived in and hung out in and loved will exist in 15-20 years.

It really was an outrageously great city to live in during my pre-family days though.

gotta get morbs a bike. or rollerblades.

thanks buddy, but most of my lifestyle problems would be solved with a rich husband

let me know when you find one, i'll be your butler.

fwiw I feel like this thread represents a massive turn either for the board or NYC sentiment generally -- it used to seem like any time you knocked NYC in these parts people would jump on you for being some kind of butthurt man-who-doesn't-like-bob-dylan type

Hate Bob dylan

we're just old now

Hipster replacements the next big thing

older and poorer

new york is pretty good though. still got gray's papaya and papaya king.

the thing is that nyc is never not getting knocked by New Yorkers. everyone has nostalgia for one or more halcyon nyc's, even the wasteland versions. This is an especially rough period because real estate, gross income inequality, etc. but after the impending cataclysm it will enter a new phase again. The ghosts of the city linger and it will never be truly dead-dead

https://brokelyn.com/union-pool-hookup-homages-now-trending-twitter/

When I first moved to NY in my 20s I so naively thought it was the coolest thing that a lot of bars didn't have signs. Now I think that's super annoying.

does underwater count as dead-dead?

ha yes probably

Driving is easy but it's a constant mental drag. Driving in an urban area is just unpleasant and closed off.

One of the worst experiences in my life was when I had to drive less than a mile in Boston from a hotel garage to the MassPike but maybe this is too off topic at this point

will take driving in nyc over boston any day of the week

I don't really want to live in NYC because my midwest town is ridiculously livable, and there are lots of great restaurants everywhere now (or here at least). It would theoretically be nice to see world-class jazz musicians on any night of the week, but some of those have moved here from NYC, and I don't go see them very often.

All I really pine after is the diversity and club culture (although how healthy even is that now, in terms of DIY-ish spaces?).

will take driving in nyc over boston any day of the week

― Entrepreneurial Jism Unshackler (Hadrian VIII), Wednesday, February 7, 2018 2:52 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh HELL yes

Driving in Boston made me feel insane, I encountered intersections without precedent in my 21 yrs of driving.

it is the earthly worst!

i was saying to Doctor Casino after the FAP for Wins that maybe, just maybe, the slow march to ruin of the subway system might do what street crime once did for nyc rent prices

I don't really believe it though

I still don't hear kids looking to move to Columbus or Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh: they do
Columbus: they should

there is a guy who has always hung out in front of the bodega on my block, a massive friendly guy named Frankie who apparently writes poetry, and once about ten years ago (when my part of williamsburg was still only somewhat gentrified) I heard him tell his friends "There's only one thing that can save this neighborhood. Street violence."

i never drove in Boston or NYC, for which i feel pretty fortunate. however i live in Los Angeles, which is a very different form of insanity. it's less a sense of constant panic or anger for me, it's more a subconscious murmur of apocalypses to come. no one will be able to get out of here alive.

i got to be a goddamned pro driving in boston and it is a point of pride now, these midwestern simpletons here don't know how to drive

https://www.theonion.com/mta-reminds-new-yorkers-they-can-fucking-walk-1822734848

columbus seems to be booming right now but cleveland is the cooler city imo

Pittsburgh is regional, though, right? There's not a lot of small-town teenagers from Georgia gunning for their shot in Pittsburgh.

i would choose columbus because of the comix library and attached scene

I also have been hearing about Pittsburgh from artist-types who have lived in NYC at some point and are looking for cheap rent + a decent scene of some sort, some friends recently moved there.

I have been to ballgames in Akron, Dayton, Cincy and Cleveland, but not Columbus

everything is regional, apart from nyc/chi/la and whatever the seattle of the moment is

yea migration to pittsburgh is regional, so are all the midwestern cities

i'm trying to find it right now but i'm not having luck - some migration patterns thing that showed which cities people were moving from to other cities, e.g. people moving to new york are coming from london, new delhi, etc, and people moving to denver are coming from san francisco, seattle, etc, and then people moving to cleveland are coming from like akron, canton, columbus. highlighting how global, national, or regional migration to different cities is happening

My last Union Pool hookup was Dec 14 2009, age 24, night before my GREs. He was a dashing and successful painter 13+ years my senior. The affair was on-off for 8 years. I missed a whole section of the GRE but still got into Yale. Blessings, Union Pool. https://t.co/47hWA5e8lx

— Alana Massey (@AlanaMassey) January 31, 2018

this person sounds deeply obnoxious

xxp yeah, that was my initial thought w/ bringing up Columbus and Pittsburgh - nowhere else is even close to challenging NY's status whether it's dead or not. Other cities can aim for being the Austin of their tri-state area.

Union Pool evokes a lot of memories for me but they're not particularly good or bad memories, it was just a place I happened to go a bunch of times and play a couple times. It seemed very central to a certain group of people that I was just sort of peripheral too by way of being in a band with a couple of them.

i still wind up at union pool once or twice a month it seems. friends work there, friends have played there, it's fairly centrally located. never got laid cuz of union pool tho.

is union pool closing or something?

not while there are hookups to come

i will go to the free shows in the yard in the summer (2x a year)

i depend on my buddy who works there to let me know if something special is happening (sadly he did not text me about the free richard bishop show til a couple hours before start by which time I was buried in laundry or some other adult chore)

i saw some good old fashioned slutishness @ union pool when i was in ny a cpl months ago, it was pretty late and mostly empty, & right in the middle of the main room some girl was giving this total knob of a dude on a chair this, like, ultra drunken, showgirls-style lap dance. it was p hilarious and all the bartenders were taking selfies w/them in the bg.

nowhere else is even close to challenging NY's status whether it's dead or not

la has completely eclipsed/ultramurdered ny in all creative fields. ny still reigns supreme for salarymen

if i had a lot of cash i would definitely choose LA

pic.twitter.com/iTvkRhUZ3H

— Joel Irwin (@irwindigital) January 31, 2018

i moved from nyc to la last year. both are great cities, but both could use an infrastructure week or two.

You'd have to pay me a fuckload of money to live in LA.

would you consider an extra bathroom and two spare bedrooms and a garage in lieu of the money?

Well... probably not! We have a really nice apartment to be honest. Two bathrooms, one spare bedroom, big open space, don't mind street parking in our neighborhood.

I have only spent a little time in LA, but I think it would be tough for me to live there. The constant driving, all your friends being spread out, too hot.

It feels too suburban, and the parts that feel walkable seem bad. Of course I'm sure there are plenty of nice neighborhoods, I've just never spent time in them.

and also just that feeling of a city built where the land did not want a city to be...

I didn't find it too hot, and better transit than I expected. But not enough rep cinema.

i think new york definitely took a massive blow when i left, because a lot of people find me very compelling, but yeah, that's a fair description of LA ian.

i work from home here so the driving affects me much less here, but fwiw when i drive to the kinds of places i go it takes me less time to get to them than it did in new york, unless those new york places were walking <10 mins walking distance. but i do miss walking.

Ian, where do you live now? Or is it the place you have been living in for a long time?

life seems great in LA, I have enjoyed visiting, and friends who have moved there in last ten years seem happy abt it, but it doesn't cohere for me as a "city"...like I never have a sense of a single, specific energy coursing through it, never the feeling that something happening in one part is relevant to any other...and this is the quality I most appreciate in a city, above and beyond the robustness of a given scene or whatever

Some friends moved out to LA a while back but didn't stay. I will always remember when they moved back, saying that the only place they saw their friends was by chance in the grocery store.

xp Yerac, I live in Clinton Hill, where I have lived for 6.5 years.

i think new york definitely took a massive blow when i left, because a lot of people find me very compelling

otm!

Ok, the last apt. I remember was when we took Pete to the park nearby (Prospect Heights?). I like having small spaces because it doesn't take me long to clean and we literally hang out in the same 100 sq feet of space all the time.

i find LA a very visitor-hostile place compared to new york, both in the sense that it's physically challenging and it's culturally inscrutable and inpenetrable to the average non-american because it's so unlike anywhere in, say, europe. when i have family over it's a ton of work and they don't like it anyway. i can imagine that feeling persisting for a while, maybe years, when you first move here. i moved here with a local which helps.

ha xp!

i miss the compelling caek too

I've alao been told i should stay somewhere besides Hollywood next trip. I understand things actually go on Downtown now.

Well... probably not! We have a really nice apartment to be honest. Two bathrooms, one spare bedroom, big open space, don't mind street parking in our neighborhood.

I have only spent a little time in LA, but I think it would be tough for me to live there. The constant driving, all your friends being spread out, too hot.

― ian, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 1:04 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It feels too suburban, and the parts that feel walkable seem bad. Of course I'm sure there are plenty of nice neighborhoods, I've just never spent time in them.

― ian, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 1:05 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like we live in the exact right neighborhood for us, close to good friends (or close enough) and one block from our son's elementary school. we're even in a bit of a valley, so we're not baking in the sun all day during the summer. there's even a vv good bookstore nearby, and movie theaters. you can walk! it's very comfortable right here. but a lot of the trendy hoods I don't really dig. I didn't like Silver Lake and Highland Park isn't really my "thing." I think if i was coming to town now, I'd aim to live in downtown or Little Tokyo.

My issue I guess is I've never quite felt at home here, I'm not really a big fan of the climate and eventually it'll be a city only a war boy could love. And really the real estate prices are just depressing for us, a family trying to scrape by and stick around to help out my wife's parents.

i also like to run around strange cities with paper maps in hand, which usually involves getting lost for 30 minutes here and there. I was wandering among all these nice houses in Los Feliz a few summers back with nary a human in sight, and was sure someone was gonna call the cops.

That Judd Apatow show "Love" made me think that LA could be ok. I don't think I have outright ever enjoyed being there though.

My friends in LA who hate living there say they don't want to move to NYC because everyone in NYC thinks they are too smart.

tbf we are pretty smart

i stayed in echo park when i went to LA (at a friend of a friends') it was really pretty; i love cities on hills and think i disagree with 'a city built where the land did not want a city to be'. however the spread out driving around thing totally sucks. nyc always rules, although i always wonder why so many people who move there seem disapointed

everyone i know who has lived in new york moaned a lot about their commutes. i guess it can be quotidian things like that that make or break something for you

I have enjoyed my couple visits to LA, I even walked and used transit during one of them. It’s unlike anywhere else that is for heckin sure.

A lot of women I know had a terrible time dating in NYC and had to leave to find partners.

I have had a terrible time, and stopped looking. Cheaper.

I feel like I can maybe do two years here then I’ll need to figure something else out.

A lot of women I know had a terrible time dating in NYC and had to leave to find partners.
― Yerac, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 5:07 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was an accepted truth when I lived there briefly in the late 90s. Wonder how far back it goes.

reading these responses makes me feel like i like NYC for different reasons than everyone else. i like living here because i like the density! i like that walking is part of my daily routine and that most everything i need is within a 15 minute walk of where i live, and for everything else there's amazon. subway sucks but not so bad for me because i don't take it during peak rush hours. being around people in general is good, i think, even complete strangers. it's good to know other people exist and also i'm an inveterate people-watcher. i like that when it's 70 on a summer evening i can go out an walk about an hour without any particular aim. what kills me about suburban living is how deterministic it is, you drive from your house to the supermarket and back and all in between is is a bunch of grousing at other cars, stopping at the train tracks. grocery shopping can be a pain, i acknowledge, i'm pretty close to getting a little grocery cart.

the artist communities, bars, are not something i'm really even aware of. probably the movie scene is what i'd miss most if i were to leave but even now i rarely go to any movies, as morbs knows, because most movies are longer than 89 minutes for some reason, and in DCP.

no, everyone is just moving to queens now

xp tbh all of those reasons are exactly why I loved visiting NYC and want to return soon, but the state of the subway did make me sad

i like that when it's 70 on a summer evening i can go out an walk about an hour without any particular aim

dan thank you for living my nyc flaneur fantasy <3

I would say that most people in NYC love that they walk a lot and can walk anywhere.

read that as dad xp

i love walking in every city but nyc walking that's a whole other level

I really don't know how anyone is going to be able to open any kind of new business in a commercial space without some wack monolithic investors.

dan thank you for living my nyc flaneur fantasy <3

― flopson, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 5:38 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark

<3

also +1 on the city being a lot less compelling now that caek's gone!

learn another language and leave the USA, it’s a challenge but the satisfaction is worth it. if you have kids they’ll be bilingual in like 3 months

Dublin guys Dublin

I can attest that Dan likes to walk and look at ppl

i've lived in los angeles six years now

when i first moved here everything did look suburban and 3/4 of it look like a third world country, which i've gotten used to now

and it took me a while to know where the part of the county was that feels like a proper city and then i moved there, lived there for a few years and good lord it was slightly horrifying

nyc never appealed to me though and but i never "got it"

i do miss vancouver a lot, mostly because all my pals are there and it's my base, i'm glad i'll be moving back at the end of the year if everything goes well *knock on wood*

but los angeles is a weird place. like you can find anything and everything and that's what makes it cool and horrific all at the same time. it's got these "underground" worlds (plural) that reminds me of tokyo

and if you're caught staring a little too long you'll get shot which is kinda cool because staring is not nice (something vancouver can learn from)

i'm visiting again in a week. I still love it there.

i've actually really learned to love los angeles and it has a very special place in my heart now

everyone i know basically hates it though

but i love all the different cultures and parts of the city, like it's no big deal if you need to visit compton, it's not like "oh shit COMPTON" which is what a lot of people outside of la feel

one sad thing is los angeles is so segregated by race, so for all its diversity, there might as well not be any but i guess this exists pretty much in most very diverse cities

i was in vancouver last month and everyone there was so friggin nice. ime they display the warm, welcoming attitude usually misattributed to american southerners (usually by southerners themselves)

stay a little longer and you'll change your mind

you make your own new york
for me, landing between Prospect Park and Greenwood Cemetery was such a blessing. Both are complex outdoor spaces, heavily landscaped and considered; one is absolutely jammed full of people above ground and the other is virtually empty of living people. Both are wonderful options to reset from the city's chaos. I try to get to both at least once a week and that helps keep me balanced. that and the medicine.

Seems like NYC is not dead. thanks for confirming, everyone

everyone is just moving to queens now

I have noticed this a little bit, but I'll prob notice it a lot more soon since the L tunnel shuts down next year

no chili, it's like when the electrical energy is still pulsing thru a corpse

I'm a queens booster but you still need like middle class income to live here, other than maybe Jamaica.

i don't think new york is dying as much as i am.

it is however meeting a lot of less interesting cities half way.

What’s it like in Mexico City these days

Friend's little brother has lived there for a few years, loves it. Last I heard he made enough to live playing online poker for a few hours a day but he might be doing something else with that degree in applied mathematics now.

I loved from Brooklyn to Queens in 2015. I was really hoping for Jackson Heights or Sunnyside but landed in Astoria.

i used to live out in jersey city, walking distance from man alive.... i have nostalgia for that neighborhood, though i think MA's neck of the woods was a bit rougher. didn't some guy get shot in that bar out front of your place?
anyways, i miss hangin' with you and your wife in those halcyon pre-kid days.

What’s it like in Mexico City these days

― direct to consumer online mattress brand (silby)

friend moved there a couple years ago and loves it. i'm making plans to go visit soon

I didn't read this whole thread because I missed it.

Williamsburg is a joke but greenpoint and bushwick and ridgewood and still "cool" by most people's standards.

It's still expensive but there are cheap ways and places to live and people willing to spend 75% of their salary on rent and creative trust fund kids oh so many trust fund kids.

There's cool pockets in manhattan, particularly lower east side to chinatown. Just go to Commend or 2 Bridges.

I've lived in Woodside Queens for 12 years and still pay less than 2K for a large 2 bedroom apt in a nice building, plus 175$ for parking in the garage underneath, take that.

But people still move here to make it. There's no competition in the states other than LA. We still have the best food, the most record stores and just the most everything, except for decent vietnamese food.

It's the same as it's always been, scene-wise, sure it's not a packed Max's Kansas City or empty lot show in Williamsburg but the amount of kids doing techno/electronic music type stuff through bushwick and DJing and whatnot, still is overwhelming. Still more things going on in a single night than any other american city has in a month.

But half of those things are empty and lame.

i moved out 11 years ago. two kids now. i can't fathom the school situation?? isn't it sort of apocalyptic? primary schools in london are largely excellent, even in deprived boroughs.

Is there decent indian food? I've never been able to find it.

in london??

i'm no expert but off the top of my head you've got rasa in stoke newington, tayabbs in whitechapel, chor bizarre in mayfair

I found NYC quite depressing when I was there last spring for the first time in many many years. So many empty storefronts, etc. Obv there are great things about it that will always be there, and some of those great things are things I appreciate more now that I'm older than I did when I was younger (ie: I'm there with my kid so I'm not looking for vibrant nightlife, music clubs, etc so much now) but it seemed like a categorically different city than it used to be.

London on the other hand I still adore, find vibrant and intensely enjoyable, look forward to being there every year. I'd sooner move there than anywhere else.

decent indian food exists just not at the most obvious places in jackson heights. Like some of the smaller more random places or curry hill or out in richmond hill. Indian food in jackson heights has been largely replaced by nepali food.

i stayed in greenpoint over new year's, and what surprised me was how little had actually changed? i think of new york as growing and changing too fast, favorite restaurants closing within months, but greenpoint just kinda looked like it always had, maybe a couple of new bars, a new restaurant or two, but in general it was the same old weatherbeaten vibe, everything half run-down, the same inscrutable interlocking latticework of jealously guarded private property honeycombed within networks of utterly begrimed common land

huh

greenpoint is massively overhauled to my eye

the storefronts are physically the same (weatherbeaten for sure) but the businesses are all 'owl & butterchurn' twee shit now

and driving down manhattan ave is now comically hair-raising, like walking a hippo through the eye of a needle

the winos remain as scary as before though.

i didn't walk down manhattan ave - i never took a step in the direction of bedford actually, maybe this is why

i moved out 11 years ago. two kids now. i can't fathom the school situation?? isn't it sort of apocalyptic? primary schools in london are largely excellent, even in deprived boroughs.

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Thursday, February 8, 2018 10:20 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In some ways the schools are probably much better than they were 10-20 years ago, but any decent one is going to be really crowded. My daughter's school has had a growing waitlist for K every year, and they've managed to get everyone in each year so far but eventually they'll hit a breaking point.

And probably the only thing keeping it from being worse is the limited amount of buildable land in my neighborhood, so there aren't tons of new rentals and condos springing up everywhere like in LIC. It's mostly just turnover from old to young that's caused the increase in school population.

Sorry, that was an xpost asking about decent Indian food in NYC. My number one thing to do while in London is to eat a curry.

Best indian in the area is Hicksville Long Island, Edison and Iselin and Jersey City NJ, I think it follows a standard development as certain immigrant groups move out to the suburbs you have to follow to get the good stuff. That's why the best stuff in Queens now is Tibetan/Nepali, and there are literally hundreds of places.

I was telling Virginia Plain that I feel bad that I have never had a momo.

they are delicious

I have a friend forced to move his family to either New York or London for work. He's lived in both places before, but London is leading on pretty much every front, from schools to cost of living (!) to commute to parks, benefits, etc.

The last time I was in New York, about a year ago, I never left Brooklyn and I guess never felt the need to. I used to be (years ago) half jealous of New York exclusivity, of the stuff they have and get that no one else has or gets, but I really think that's increasingly overblown. It's just so dense and such a media hub that its identity gets aggressively projected, but it's pretty rare these days that I kick myself for not being there, besides not seeing all my friends and stuff. Fortunately, it costs a bit over $100 to fly there, so: problem solved!

Yeah, I would say London too.

my secret conservative idea is that if you have all these cultural events and cool things there all the time you don't appreciate them. poor yokels who get one really good concert a month in their whole area, they appreciate that show

i think for people who aren't like the heroic ulysses, that is correct

also i am always so broke bc rent that i can't go to most of things that do look awesome to me (it's a shame that classical music is my staff of life and i live here and i can only go to free events)

Which is the irony. As my pal pointed out, no one lives in NY to save money, they live in NY to take advantage of all NY has to offer. Which costs money, which leaves you with no money and therefore unable to take advantage of all NY has to offer.

My theory was that cell phones broke New York. In a city where there are so many things happening in so many places at once, it just perpetuates this sense of ... aloofness? Maybe not that word. People constantly looking for something else to do as soon as they get to the first thing because they know there is something else going on and it's easy enough to get there. Vs. Los Angeles, which requires a certain commitment, due to travel times. Chicago is obviously a huge city with tons to do, but I don't get the same perpetual motion machine vibe.

Anyway, NY, I know lots of people who just don't go out, and of those that do, many seem to be always en route to or from something else.

xp a large part of my job is to convince people to come see very good free and cheap entertainment and it's hard as hell to do! people are tired all the time.

But there's also a ton of competition! It's a vicious cycle. All I know is that I have friends who have the same job in NY that my wife does here, and they're done by 8 or 9 while my wife is heading home between 5 and 6 (at the latest)

People constantly looking for something else to do as soon as they get to the first thing because they know there is something else going on and it's easy enough to get there. Vs. Los Angeles, which requires a certain commitment, due to travel times.

For people who can't afford cabs, the disintegrating subways are making travel time a factor here too.

my secret conservative idea is that if you have all these cultural events and cool things there all the time you don't appreciate them. poor yokels who get one really good concert a month in their whole area, they appreciate that show

Yes. It's always been this way. You can get bored and jaded, or you just think "eh I'll skip this lifechanging event because I can always go next time. When I used to go elsewhere it always blew me away how excited people were. I DJ'd a Making Time party in Philly and it was so huge and it was like THE event. Another time I came down to DC to DJ a Rapture show at the Black Cat and there were like 4 events going on there with all these different scenes but like, all the kids were out at that one venue that night. In New York it's easier to keep to your own little scenes because there's so much going on.

My theory was that cell phones broke New York. In a city where there are so many things happening in so many places at once, it just perpetuates this sense of ... aloofness? Maybe not that word. People constantly looking for something else to do as soon as they get to the first thing because they know there is something else going on and it's easy enough to get there.

Nah, this used to be worse pre-cellphone. Back when everything was still in manhattan you'd just go from bar to bar to club everyone hopped around. Now things are more spread out, you're less likely to hop from like PS1 to Nowadays or something. Though Uber/Lyft certainly works, esp for the trust funders.

The internet does have the weird effect of letting you just parachute into any scene you want with no prior knowledge. Pre-internet I never would have found BNSC and been able to show up on a random saturday night as probably the oldest person there by 5-10 years. I still suspect people largely do stuff in the immediate neighborhoods around them though, bc cabs are expensive and the subway takes forever

is NYC that bike-friendly? seems like it'd be the best way to get around

I don't know, I used to use Flyer magazine like that. Or even Time Out. Just look at the listings and go over to any event that seemed interesting. But I was fearless (and lonely) in my early 20s. I've never even been to Bossa Nova.

I do assume unless you can handle lyft, people aren't hitting as many spots as they used to, but usually two. When I've dj'd places in bushwick it used to be common that everybody would show up at like 2 am. So like the kids would go out in manhattan or some trendier fancier place but then go home and end up at Tandem.

I'm trying to remember the pre-cell phone/internet era. I seem to recall always going out for specific reasons to specific places, often as a group, and if we went anywhere else it was as a group as well, perhaps meeting up with others. But the post-internet years, I get a real ships passing in the night feeling, of people popping in for a few then vanishing again, off to the next thing. But that could be because people are indeed staying closer to home, which makes popping in and out easier, or more convenient. Vs., say, borough-hopping.

Chicago is obviously a huge city with tons to do, but I don't get the same perpetual motion machine vibe.

I was basically raised in and around Chicago and it remains my favorite city but I was just amazed the first time I went to NYC and felt the massiveness, and it was like this living thing. It's not larger geographically than Chicago but when you're driving up on it, just the entire scope of Manhattan and the boroughs is another level vs Chicago's more central energy that extends out, slowly lessening as you move outwards.

I don't think Chicago has less to do and I appreciate how it's easier to navigate, the beauty of the downtown, the food, the relative affordability....but otm about the perpetual motion machine thing.

My year in NYC also saw me mostly confined to Manhattan and damn it's amazing how I felt that I was set, I could just stay there and hang out on that island forever and never even go to the other boroughs. I think I went to Brooklyn once tbh.

Things were just so much closer when it was all about Manhattan, and that's something that's definitely lost. When everything shifted to Brooklyn, it was still much tighter around the Bedford L, but now like I said above, it's spread out.

maybe kids are rocking it like that in bushwick now, I'm just not a kid and I have a car.

But when I was in my 20s and the east village was still cool, and the meatpacking district was kicking in, I don't know, manhattan in the 70s/80s/90s/early 00s is probably hard to beat regarding the density. There were nights where I'd to to so many different places.

sounds exhausting

is NYC that bike-friendly? seems like it'd be the best way to get around

but we got bike lanes! i have friends who bike interborough and swear by it. one's an ilxor!

i'd new york to get dockless bikeshare hehe

there was definitely sort of pre-gig, gig, party and afterparty and the farthest you'd need to go was like chelsea to LES

i remember when southpaw opened i was like whoa new paradigm

I hadn’t realized how bad the nyc subway decay was, reading about it here and elsewhere today. dang, that’d be a main reason to live there imo, not needing a car. I love not having to drive so much (haven’t had a car in four years bc it’d be nuts here). will never live in nyc but it’s really the only USA place you can live a full adult life without a car, or at least used to be

Believe it or not, there are other places you can lead a full adult life without a car.

I don't know, I've never experienced a big city in the US that was a compatible with non-car living.

I really like Samudra in Jax Hts for Indian, and I’m trying Boishaki in Astoria this weekend.

I'm not sure if we went to Samudra when it first opened or if it was a different place, it was a bit of a revolving door for a while. Delhi Heights, though popular with the white people, actually has some really good dishes. Never heard of Boishaki, looks good. There's a place near me called Ruma's that's was surprisingly good bengali...surprisingly because it's always empty and when we went the woman seemed really confused that we wanted food. But it seems popular.

Whoah Boishakhi's photos on yelp look amazing.

We kinda stick with seamless too much these days, not easy to get out esp for dinner, with an 11 mo old. But Opal loves Momos. Have you been to Dawas in woodside? Kinda new american hipster stuff on one side from chef, other side sort of refined but still super tasty himalyan stuff from her chef father. No fusion, but both sides are great.

the brooklynization of the world + the internet is what i meant when i say new york isn't so much dying as meeting a lot of less interesting places half way.

it wasn't my experience that travel times for either day to day living and getting things out of the city are that much larger in LA than in new york.

like anywhere you get most things in a 15 minute radius. beyond that is a colossal pain in new york as much as LA, at least for me. yeah, it can take 90 minutes to get from where i live to ... venice or something. but i go to venice about as often as i went to fort tryon when i lived in brooklyn (also 90 minutes).

buried lede for me though: we decided to move the LA like the week we found out a baby was on the way. obviously people manage it, but the sheer logistics of a baby in new york were terrifying to us.

mustang is my spot for nepali

baby isn't much of a problem for us, but it takes me 40 minutes to an hour to get from queens to flatiron for work and that's some MTA subway bullshit.

mustang is great. Have you been to Woodside Cafe on bway and 65th? They have this thing called Chatamari which I've never seen anywhere else that I'm obsessed with. Some kind of rice crepe with ground chicken and black-eyed peas cooked into it and an egg broken on top usually cooked hard and then a goat curry covering it all.

Ive been a non-car-owning adult in Seattle for over 5 years now! And we barely have any trains at all.

I also didn't own a car when I last lived in Northampton MA tbh but I was unemployed

You don't need a car if there's nowhere you want to go, is the thing.

(nearly) all my Indian meals come from Kinara in Pk Slope

Re: Los Angeles, the big difference is there are things you really *want* to do, reasons people move to LA for in the first place, like the ocean (or yeah, Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu, etc.), the mountains and the desert, that take a long time to get to, and only by car, and typically in traffic. Vs. something like Fort Tryon, which I just had to google (looks neat!).

Amazingly, I know an increasing number of people in NY (mostly Brooklyn and Queens) with kids. I have no idea how they do it. Kids without a car seems really hard to me.

I have a car shhhhhh

when i see 2 to 3 family members teaming up to hump a military grade stroller sideways down the subway stairs, as a queue of blocked impatient randos accumulates upstream of them, I just think no X 1000

lived in NYC for 28 years: '89 to 2012 in the EV, and since then in Ditmas park/ Kensington (Morbius said at some point that he lives nearby). While living there in the 2000s, I began to hate Manhattan so much that going to visit girlfriends and most of my friends in Slope area was incredibly refreshing, And now living past the Slope and on the bleeding edge after which beards and warby Parkers are unheard of is so different from my life in the EV that it seems like I have moved very far away.

I never thought I wanted to have a baby here and would move before then. But my wife's job is good, so we stayed when my daughter was born last december. We had a car because I thought we would need it and from this part of brooklyn to coney island, everyone has a car and can easily deal with it.

Then this past October, said car caught fire with me and the baby inside on the BQE right before the Kiucsyncki (however the fuck you spell it) Bridge and soon totally immolated. a subaru, safest car on the market. It's really something to walk around on the breakdown lane of the BQE, cradling your infant daughter while other motorists scream curses at you. Well before that, I had long thought that an area where NYC still has a so-called edge of dickishness is with drivers and driving.

Xpost: men with beards in Borough park and Midwood are of a different stripe than what I refer to above

veronica, i'm kensington; where at?

oh wait, we've done this i think

Man I am sorry about that automotive ordeal that sounds fucking awful and scary

fwiw the oceans (or the beach towns) are not something i particularly want to go to. they're certainly not why i moved to LA they're just not a part of life for me in LA (or most of my acquaintances), in the same way that the beach (or tbh, manhattan) wasn't for me in new york. i go to them when i have visitors, in the same way i went to midtown when i had visitors in new york. if you've moved to LA for the ocean (or a job in santa monica or whatever), you live near the ocean.

The internet does have the weird effect of letting you just parachute into any scene you want with no prior knowledge. Pre-internet I never would have found BNSC and been able to show up on a random saturday night as probably the oldest person there by 5-10 years. I still suspect people largely do stuff in the immediate neighborhoods around them though, bc cabs are expensive and the subway takes forever

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Thursday, February 8, 2018 3:33 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw the new trend in cool parties is to have 0 social media presence and spread only by word of mouth. in part a response to police busting afterhours spots & underground venues, in part response to this

People constantly looking for something else to do as soon as they get to the first thing because they know there is something else going on and it's easy enough to get there. Vs. Los Angeles, which requires a certain commitment, due to travel times.

i think this happens everywhere. or at least, it did in montreal. which is p dense so i guess yeah. a friend in my early twenties was infamous for a zeligish ability to be at every part in the city every night, pronouncing each of them 'dead' within minutes of arrival

oh god I both understand that because the ability to hop around until you find something that is great is justifiable when you can do it

but some people just do that every time, like a night out means just rotating to a new location every X minutes until bar close

And now living past the Slope and on the bleeding edge after which beards and warby Parkers are unheard of is so different from my life in the EV that it seems like I have moved very far away.

This very much describes where I live. The only vintage clothing I see in my neighborhood is worn by central asian jews without any fashion intent.

I mean not literally, but there is maybe like 1 remotely hipstery or trendy person for every 50 of those.

kensington is newly hipster infiltrated and i'm aware i'm part of the problem but it's mostly families of the type that can't afford park slope or who have been here for a long time or (more commonly) folks who own. living across the street from a school, between a graveyard and park, just far enough away from the main drags where nobody much drives through and on a block where all the businesses close at ten is a tremendous blessing.

Since this is the most active New York thread I'll just ask here...

A bit hard to describe what I'm looking for. Recommendations for calm-ish bars or venues playing good music at non-deafening levels. The kinds of places where you could sit and drink and read or write at the end of a day of traipsing around the city. Places playing ambient, drones, minimal techno, minimal anything really.

I know about Nowadays in Queens which looks promising.

seattle was quite walkable but not as much as NYC. NYC not a patch on basically any european/UK city tho obv

I can't with Nowadays. It's outdoors, right? You pay money to get inside the fence and then sit outside and then you pay money for the food and drinks? Edited to add: I guess they have an indoors now.

Anyway. Biking is so great in New York if you're not spread out over the entire city! Like between the LES and North Brooklyn, or getting around within a few miles' span. Not as much when you're in, say, Gowanus, and talking about going to the city at 1am, like some fashionable people I overheard last weekend on the sidewalk. I have so many great memories of riding between Crown Heights and Wburg over the years, mostly to meet ilxors tbh.

Then I got a scooter and basically stopped biking. I miss it sometimes but the scooter life is so amazing. You can get places not-sweaty!

i wanna get an e-bike except dickhead de blasio is intent on outlawing them for some reason

Nowadays has an indoors and a full soundsystem and kitchen and everything.

(of course I haven't been though)

There was no cover when I was there.

e-bikes are being subsidized this year by my city, up to 600 euros! but the new docked bikeshare bikes (as opposed to all the new non-docked bikeshare bikes all over the place like gobee & ofo, which interest me too) are e-bikes so that might suffice for me. at least for side-ish streets, I'm not gonna bike on well-trafficked streets here, because they're pretty narrow yet people find ways to fit multiple lanes of traffic.

ofo needs its own thread. I think they might be the locusts the bible refers to in revelation

Nowadays is very nice imo and feels hip without being vibey or exclusionary at all. I haven’t been since they added the indoors though, apparently.

You don't need a car if there's nowhere you want to go, is the thing.

^^^ gets it

Relevant to this thread.

Also relevant, I hope:
Redd's Roster of Restaurants of the Old Weird New York

No blight is as depressing as rent blight :(

belatedly: the subways may be hell but so far the buses are not, at least not in my area

visiting nyc last year I was able to walk or hit up the subways for everything I wanted to do, mostly work in midtown manhattan but stayed in the east village for a bit and travelled to brooklyn for a show. the subway system routes were ok but the state of them made me sad, as if the system was there for what I wanted but my needs were scorned

the bus system is not in freefall but it is in real trouble - ridership is in decline despite population growth, and mostly people seem to be chalking it up to the unreliability of service, which in turn is largely due to the difficulty of implementing any major changes which would actually fix things, like truly dedicated bus lanes and signal prioritization. anecdotally I've had a ton of issues in the last six months to a year with late and bunched buses.

to compare again, the extent to which London public transport is great is basically the extent to which its buses are great. dedicated bus/bike/taxi lanes on most big roads, the congestion charge obv. relatively nice vehicles. you rarely need to wait more than 6 or 7 minutes. it doesn't feel low-rent to take a bus, it feels normal

The Paris bus system is also very good, matching what you said about London’s. I take it as often as I can over the metro because I’m lazy about stairs; this is why its ridership leans older than the metro’s.

I mean, I've never taken the bus during morning rush hour because it already takes long enough to get to work via the subway, but I take the M4 and M5 all the time coming home and compared to the 1 they're both absolutely delightful

Xpost that is the other thing for us. K cannot drive so moving to any other city equals in her mind, perhaps correctly, isolation and loss of independence.

― Winter. Dickens. Yes. (Jon not Jon), Thursday, February 8, 2018 4:37 AM (four days ago)

Jon I don't know how long you've been with your partner or where she's lived but you used to be in Seattle! you can walk almost anywhere, or catch a bus to where you can walk to the other bits. the tram has opened up a few neighbourhoods but will take another decade and drivers aging out of the population (so that funding can go back to transit) to be as transformative as it should be already.

I doubt any city in the world could beat NYC for film.

We’ve been together 14 years, so no, not stretching back to my Seattle days. But you make a good point. Manageable size, good transit, car not needed, pre-built friend pool due to comics scene. Is it much cheaper than nyc/sf these days though?

Rent has been climbing like wild for years but the trend may be finally leveling off. Unlike San Francisco there are actually new apartment buildings being built, though we still haven’t got the political will to start bulldozing single family homes.

Doesn’t Seattle have more working cranes on high rise construction sites than any city in the us?

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-has-most-cranes-in-the-country-for-2nd-year-in-a-row-and-lead-is-growing/

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Sarus_Crane_%28Grus_antigone%29_at_Sultanpur_I_Picture_151.jpg

*Flintstones voice* eh, it's a living

When a man is tired of London etc.

A little bit of apocalypse that doesn't involve the subway, for once

http://gothamist.com/2018/07/19/exploded_steam_pipe_asbestos.php

Exhibit C: there is LITERALLY a man on a @CitiBikeNYC commuting to work out of a plume of steam in this video https://t.co/eCLCizPdXC

— Rebecca (@RebeccaEgler) July 19, 2018

All,

Further update:

Please advise your employees to steer clear of the area on 5th Avenue between 19th St and 22nd St. due to environmental concerns related to the material that was dispersed from the explosion. Office of Emergency Management is currently involved in the cleanup and environmental testing to ensure there is no additional danger.

Thank you,

Anthony

https://www.villagespoke.com/2019/05/03/a-city-for-the-rich-built-poorly-the-construction-of-hudson-yards/

http://i0.wp.com/www.villagespoke.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/4.29.19_HYardsBroken7.jpg

You get the distinct sense that you’re walking through a computer rendering rather than a real place. Aesthetic is prioritized over function everywhere you go. It’s easy to get the feeling that the faceplates of brand-new signs popping off their fixtures were simply pixel-off details unnoticeable in a 100:1 scale virtual world.

Considering the scope, ambition, and execution of this project as a whole, pointing out an "overextended saw cut" in the ground seems ridiculous

https://thebaffler.com/latest/fuck-the-vessel-wagner

From some points on the Jersey side, the view of the Empire State Building is totally blocked by Hudson Yards

In so many ways New York is a great city that has embodied what is best about America, particularly multiculturalism and innovation. (Never perfectly, of course). It’s where many generations of my family grew up, and most of them are buried out in Green-Wood Cemetery. However, the city also kind of sucks and is dumb now.

There is so much luxury housing development, all over the place.

despite President deBlasio's promises

I feel like the point of the above articles is, if you're going to do seamless luxury, do it right (i.e. the beautifully alien Oculus). Which as a point is.. okay I guess. But maybe we could forget about seamless luxury altogether?

Anecdotally I walked past the Barclays Center a couple of months ago and was astonished at how jank-ass it looked

i can't imagine going anywhere near hudson yards, but fuck the oculus

i even wrote an article once about how stupid the oculus was

It's oppressive even to walk from the subway to the PATH there

how many people fall on these stairs every day?

https://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/09/08/89a46d4b-2070-4fb8-9bcd-39b435dc69f0/resize/620x465/b3933a85612b51f6ee02f60ea41e57fc/daniel-jones-steps-from-path-trains.jpg

I hate the way that thing is wedged in there, w evidently zero regard for any of the space around it

i kind of like the barclays center though

xps

and yeah, like, "a bird in flight" makes no sense as a concept for a building hemmed in by skyscrapers. calatrava's buildings look nice on a waterfront. but this looks like a trapped bird, or else some kind of unidentifiable carcass that has been picked apart by vultures... which maybe is a good visual metaphor for wall street

spent some time in hudson yards a few weeks ago. It is not good. It's suffocating and claustrophobic and mostly ugly. People were confused about how to get to things. Pro tip though, I walked into the rear entrance of The Shed and found my way to very clean public bathrooms which as any New Yorker knows, is very valuable knowledge.

parts of NYC might not be so impressive these days, but tbh 99% of the rest of the country is the same fucking corner with a gas station + fast food restaurant + abandoned strip mall, on every other intersection, every highway ramp exit, everywhere, the fucking worst and least aesthetic combination of buildings, monotonous and interchangeable. so even a shitty set of stairs that hurts people seems impressive and potentially groundbreaking

A while ago, I was offered a job as Calatrava's personal assistant. I recall the pay as being $32k. I remember telling all my architect friends and they were a little horrified about how little he was offering considering... He had a very nice dog though.

treesh otm

That’s interesting. I used to write about architecture as a freelancer, and the website I wrote for had a run-in with calatrava. I forget the details, but he doesn’t like criticism apparently

many xps to calstars: if you think pointing out poor paving is petty, check that full article. the point is that the structure just opened and already the shoddy, non-union construction is showing serious wear and poor consideration. hudson yards was supposed to be the hermetic future and it's suffering near instantaneous mcmansion breakdown.

also xps to dan: https://www.charmin.com/en-us/about-us/sitorsquat

I think it’s annoying that it’s the final stop on the high line, because the high line is actually really cool. I love the newish whitney too

yeah the whitney is great

here's the problem with the highline in a nutshell:
http://gothamist.com/attachments/arts_jen/agora-43.jpg

Sometimes it’s like that but not always. It feels legitimately like public space though to me—not like I’m loitering in a corporate plaza

i'm prickly about public land issues and park space in particular and i'm glad that highline exists but c'est ne pas une parc

it's more like an amenity

i like the new whitney too, though i haven't had any luck catching anything good there.

There is just too many people everywhere, all the time. I thought once about going to the Queens Night Market once when it opened but then saw that it's always a mob.

it's easy for the crowding in the city to color everything and leave you jaded and cranky... though i bitch about it when it's in full swing, going to smorgasburg at the start of the season during a light rainstorm two weeks ago was great fun! not so much in mid july.

Give the night market another shot xp. It's not always a mob, especially if you wait for the excitement to die down after opening. Going early is always good too -- I think they start at 6pm. I say this as a person who hates crowds -- the ones at the night market are pretty manageable by NYC standards.

You can also try going in the fall as it's sort of under the radar that it closes and then reopens in fall for a few more weeks.

That said, I fucking HATE most of manhattan. I no longer work there and love not working there.

I just visited the Hudson Yards area because a relative won an affordable apartment lottery there -- the whole thing was a dystopian nightmare.

Smorgasburg is comically crowded in the summer

Even when it’s 195 degrees people are queuing for hot food

people pollution, incidentally, iswhy i prize greenwood cemetery so much. you can go out there in the heart of a metropolis on a June weekend at 75 degrees and walk for an hour and see maybe fifteen (live) people... that's changing too though!

i jog around prospect park and, at one point, had made the smorg grounds an irregular part of my route. there was a point last year where you literally could not jog within a football field length of the grounds; ridiculously overrun with drunk kids taking photos of their arepas

Prospect park has some semi-quiet spots

I used to have a couple of spaced out spots all over manhattan that I would hang out because I had to frequently kill an hour or two during the day during work and all those places have been completely overrun by "where did all these people come from?"

I gave up on smorgasburg pretty early on in its history. I couldn't get over spending $15 to eat streetfood while standing in a parking lot.

Astoria Park is a spot that I feel like is really beautiful and accessible and not insanely crowded IME, plus close to good food.

mods please redact that post

anyone know what's going on with the street construction in the meatpacking district? it's been going on, constantly, for maybe a year now i think, and nothing ever seems to be completed -- more and more lanes are closed and torn up all the time. (i don't care about the lanes, just tired of the honking as i walk through.)

i assume it has something to do with google buying the entire area, but i don't understand why it just keeps going

I hate smorgasburg. The Night Market feels to me like the anti-Smorgasburg. The food is much less gimmicky and more varied as well as more reasonably priced, and the crowd is also less gimmicky and more varied.

xpost every time I go to Astoria Park, I think "what a weird fucking place." I say that in a good way.

I just visited the Hudson Yards area because a relative won an affordable apartment lottery there

not gonna lie, i'm desperate enough to envy that

there's LOTS of quiet spots in Prospect! But I love the park deeply, even the batshit spots.... drummer's circle and LeFrak and the Audubon Center are routinely mobbed and that's part of the fun. Luckily it doesn't take much work to find some solace nearby.

Also, as someone who would happily move out of the city, I feel like the secret to staying sane here is just to avoid the hype. Whatever the latest restaurant to get big-upped in Eater or receive a new Michelin star or whatever is, there are dozens of equally good restaurants that maybe haven't gotten the hype since five years ago (or never) and the crowds have died down. People in this city line up to line up. They do things so they can say they did them. The city is so vast that it's always possible to find some out-of-the-way slice of goodness and peacefulness that isn't overrun. Our equivalent to prospect park -- Forest Park -- is practically empty. Almost too much so. It's a little run down but it's a very nice large urban park that even has hiking trails.

i love the Highline in the winter

Yeah, warm weather spots on a cold day are a great example. We went to Coney Island in early spring when it was windy and 55 degrees and had a great time.

Governors Island has yet to get out of control as of last year; good place to go and explore and chill on a thursday.

tbrr, you can find totally quiet spots in Central Park without much effort.

You have to go pretty high ime

But central park is incredible. Just the fact of it

yes i still enjoy chillin there all the time

i love central park altered and au naturale; going for a reason or just wandering around

re: queens night market, went the first night and it was terribly organized and a huge mess but went back later and it was fine. Totally reasonable and not at all smorgasborg'd out.

There's a little LIC Flea that has a few stands and isn't crowded and can be pleasant.

WPLJ, a pop/rock/Top 40 hits station since 1971, is going off the air at the end of May and is being replaced by a Christian contemporary station. Not a gospel or religious station, but a Christian rock station. NYC is dead if it's seen as a place that can support Christian rock radio.

i live right next to astoria park! it extremely rules!!!!

for the most part astoria has changed v slowly which is why i still live there. can feel a shift coming regardless

my place is just a tad too far to make it super convenient to go there all the time but when I do go there I love it.

kensington is being annexed slowly by park slope parents but i'm part of the problem i suppose

I hope they never Mccarren Park-condo it out but I feel like it's going to happen.

parts of NYC might not be so impressive these days, but tbh 99% of the rest of the country is the same fucking corner with a gas station + fast food restaurant + abandoned strip mall, on every other intersection, every highway ramp exit, everywhere, the fucking worst and least aesthetic combination of buildings, monotonous and interchangeable.

"This place is the worst" / "This place is better than all other places"

being a NYer is the ability to hold these two thoughts simultaneously, ime

new york sucks ass and i long to move to philly but as long as my band and job are here i'm here

but i do still love astoria for real

I must admit, having first visited NYC as a teenager and gone regularly through my 20s and 30s, I felt a palpable lack of magic when I was there a couple months ago. It didn't feel like the city had "died" so much as it felt so extremely ordinary, that there was nothing particularly anything about it. A functioning city filled with music and art and stores and so on... the equivalent of a big box of urbanity. Even as the sun set on London and Paris and Los Angeles and they became less interesting, they never lost their particular identity the way that it felt NYC was completely stripped of it. (San Francisco feels unmagical to me also, but it never ever really felt magical to me. It's just the freezing cold city where restaurants don't let you make reservations so you have to wait 45 minutes every time you want to eat.)

It doesn't help that most of my friends have left or are leaving. Even the NYC lifers are packing up and going.

I almost moved to around Sunset Park because of those finnish co-op buildings around the park that are hopefully never going anywhere.

I certainly can't afford Kensington anymore, especially while underemployed, but looking for a cheaper place than I have now is daunting. So here I sit waiting for oblivion.

if i'm ever forced to move (i've been in the same apt for 13 years) i'll probably just leave town

everyone otm except calstars. smdh at finding anything about hudson yards ambitious or exciting.

"This place is the worst" / "This place is better than all other places"
being a NYer is the ability to hold these two thoughts simultaneously, ime

Morbs, I feel you. I assume you're on ninety lists and trying to find any program that works.this is maybe a good thread to discuss what you're finding in that process and for anyone who knows the inner workings of the city housing world to chime in?

remains fun to visit, wouldn't particularly care to live there.

ulysses, apparently I've never told you I'm lazy? I saw a couple eligibility criteria and threw in the towel.

I've never been to the High Line and I feel like it's too late now--I regret not having gone like 15 years ago. But I'm low-key obsessed with the head garden designer, Piet Oudolf, in the sense that I'm loosely basing my gardening plans for this year on his hallmark style.

I've only been once. It was fine. It was fine for walking higher up than you normally would? I remember it seeming dark.

the high line on particularly empty days is a fun diversion. sometimes i get ice cream and chill out

i don't exactly love it but it's WAY better-designed than it could have been - lot of subtle variety built in so that it feels different at block 15 than at block 10 and block 5.

also appreciate all of diller & scofidio's little arty things trying to remind you of the artificiality of 'city views' and even of the 'nature' being put on display. there's ideas there. any other city you're just going to get a bunch of pavers, some plants and novelty benches.

I like the high line but I find it more frustrating when crowded than other city walks just because nobody's really "doing anything"...if the whole point s a cool place to stroll—and not shopping or going A to B or whatever—then being hemmed in w/ tourists is especially :-/

wow i'm surprised at the hate for the Oculus! I mean, I hate Westfield, and they chose terrible shops to go inside it - upscale fast-casual but completely anonymous - but the space itself, and the elaboration of it back inside the mall - i was completely blown away. it's both alien and totally familiar. the latter in that it's explicitly retro on two levels: the slanting ribs of the Oculus which pretty much have to be a direct quote of the famous shafts of light that used to fall in Grand Central before the buildings on either side blocked it out; and a globular 70s Kubrickian modernism. the alienness in just the sleek, slightly non-human vibe going on - those weird benches in the center that look like they might not be designed for people's actual asses to sit in; the Giger-esqueness of the "ribs". i felt like i might have to become something other than human to feel welcomed by it - which is a feeling i kinda like?!

I have no gripe w the design, independent of context it's super cool! I just don't get the logic relative to the surrounding buildings

oh yeah. well, all those buildings down there look like they were just sort of pushed around a chess board and left there.

i don't hate the interior space, but yeah the exterior is completely out of context. you have to go too far to make various transit connections, but there's not a lot they could have done about that. mostly i resent that it's just a nice mall that you *have* to walk through and that it cost $4 billion

tbf it's not as bad as penn station

morbs, you gotta fight for life up in this dumb motherfucking city! keep hunting!

also mookie otm

the slanting ribs of the Oculus which pretty much have to be a direct quote of the famous shafts of light that used to fall in Grand Central before the buildings on either side blocked it out

I like that idea but I don’t think it was intentional, given the architect.

Also for some reason Manhattan doesn’t feel like the right environment to encounter an “alien” or Kubrickian structure. I have to meditate on why I feel that way.

mostly because i gotta get to fucking work!

it'd be cool if the atrium was either not a mall or was a totally functionless space adjacent to the mall, for just going and breathing and looking at the light. a secular church, idk. as it is, it feels so much like the mall that it is that the things that are special/fancy or potentially-breathatking fall into the background (for me) - just feels like i'm in a mall.

the High Line is really nice early in the morning before it fills up with tourists

agreed w Treeship, I really do like the building but it's a square peg, it flirts with overreach the conservative abeyance of which for better or worse made the city look and feel like the city

it doesn't feel like "new york" but whatever that's a lost cause I guess

it's not even a USEFUL mall, it's a fucking apple store and high fashion storefronts. no arcade! NO ARCADE!?!?!?

I don’t get why the mega powerful developers seem to think that New York needs more upscale malls. Doesn’t Hudson Yards have a mall too? Don’t they know that malls never did well in the city even when the rest of the country loved them?

Does anyone who really lives in ny actually go to these malls to buy things? Or even to brick and mortar retail stores regularly? All this stuff is for tourists.

Like, how many times a year does one really need to go to uniqlo (it's 2 for me). I guess maybe it's a cheap pastime for all the NYU students.

"This place is the worst" / "This place is better than all other places"

being a NYer is the ability to hold these two thoughts simultaneously, ime

― One Eye Open

this kind of thinking is literally how certain forms of clinical depression work

I lived in NYC from '99-'11 in every borough save SI. Longest run was in Bushwick but my fondest memories are from the South Bronx in 2004. Got robbed by kids for groceries and accosted by cops thinking I was lost/buying drugs but it was super cheap (900/month for a 1200sf loft) and pretty convenient via the 4/5/6. My spot was 112th and Liberty (near Bruckner). I don't even want to look up what it's like now.

It's the repertory movie theaters and the restaurants that are keeping me here

Still Sh1tty, nothing to worry about

I have fantasized about living in New York since college years ago, but every time I get down to the details it seems like too much and I lose interest. It's great to visit though

I love my goddaughter and her parents. They live in a fantastic apartment on one of the High Line blocks in West Chelsea, but it still feels kind of industrial to me - no trees and lots of galleries and storage businesses. My friends who have apartments on Sutton Place on the East River are living in the best version of NY imo

chose terrible shops to go inside it not including the Cole Haan shoe store who's interior signage and window displays are produced very well considering the extremely tight turnaround given no doubt due to an extremely capable team of production artists with excellent mechanical skills and print knowledge.

I feel no need to kvetch about present-day NY anymore. I’m well through the several stages of grief. But the NY I started visiting in ‘75, age 11, and then throughout the late seventies into the eighties, was an indescribable metropolis beyond dreams. NY is definitely not dead now, far from it, but it’s certainly more prosaic, more commonplace, cleaner (in more ways than one), and tamer... not just a matter of degrees, but really a profound qualitative difference; a separate ontological plane dare I say.

lol dan

Being real, if this was 1980 there is a zero percent chance I would live in Williamsburg and maybe a 10% chance I’d lcie in the city at all.

Which makes me part of the problem.

I felt Williamsburg was slightly more exciting when I’d visit in 2009/2010 but that could have just been youth.

I was apologizing for living in williamsburg back in 2003. I should've saved a lot of them up.

I felt Williamsburg was slightly more exciting when I’d visit in 2009/2010 but that could have just been youth.

― Trϵϵship, Saturday, May 11, 2019 8:41 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah it's practically unrecognizable from what it was then

feels like an extension of manhattan now

you don't have to go toooo far out of the bedford/driggs stop bubble to get back to something that looks not too different than it has for a long time.

I live off grand

There are good bars around. I like greenpoint a lot too and its close—my brother lives over there

you don't have to go toooo far out of the bedford/driggs stop bubble to get back to something that looks not too different than it has for a long time.

― dan selzer, Saturday, May 11, 2019 10:14 AM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is also true enough!

i miss Domsey's :(

i got mugged coming back from Galapagos

/90s

an in-law lives in that Kushner building on Kent and there is no deeper pit in hell. apart from what they're planning to go right next to it, which looks literally like it belongs in Dubai. that building on Kent isn't even nice. yes there's a gym etc but the reception area, hallways, all the unavoidable PUBLIC SPACE of even a place like that has the same shitty lack of attention that typifies every other public place in New York. the corridors feel like JFK.

Galapagos was cool

Now I'm reminiscing about Williamsburg. Anyone remember Kokie's. That must now be an Amazon locker.

Still the Levee I think.

https://youtu.be/uuxE5ZA4WPM

Does anyone who really lives in ny actually go to these malls to buy things? Or even to brick and mortar retail stores regularly? All this stuff is for tourists.

I guess you're right. Time Warner Center is another one. I was there today. For all the local character of the place, you could be in LA or Dubai or anywhere. It's probably reassuring to the rich tourists who just want to have all the high-end shops collected in one convenient place.

I went to the Metropolitan Club in NY for dinner with friends a few weeks ago, after a lecture on Hoyle and a miniature book exhibition at The Grolier Club (a truly fantastic place). it was a very "old NY" experience, the rooms at both locations were incredibly evocative and the food was really good. I don't have any illusions about who would belong in places like this (not me), but I kept thinking I wouldn't have any experiences like these anywhere else in the world

One thing I learned when I briefly lived in New York is that the places in New York that, when I was a tourist, I rigorously avoided as being "for tourists only" are, in fact, filled with New Yorkers who were less uptight than I was.

i also miss galapagos. interviewed there once!

Lol Kokie’s. I’ve read about it.

The Levee is, or was, functionally the same as Kokie's though Kokie's was clearer in its intent. They sold only the finest laxatives that helped one talk out of turn.

Having never lived in nyc proper but been a frequent visitor over the last 20 years, i've definitely noticed a change over the years in the way people I know there (older and younger, different walks of life) talk about the city and their relationship to it... a gradual transition from a sort of fun-cynical "this city is fucked up and everything is hard and all the good stuff is gone and i love it" to depressed-cynical "this city is fucked up and everything is hard and all the good stuff is gone and i wish more than anything that i could leave but i am stuck here".

Last time I was there it was almost surreal, everyone I spent time with, inevitably at some point they would circle around to the universal topic of how badly they wanted to leave, "we're thinking about in the next year or so", etc... wistfully telling stories of people they know who've left in the same way folks talk about survivors of risky operations: "she's doing FINE now, I just talked to her the other day and she says she's NEVER FELT BETTER, honestly!" Definitely some kind of slow psychic change that has not been super fun to observe from a distance.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard
live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft

Last time I went to NYC was 2005. Stayed with my sister who was on a business trip at some fancy hotel near Grand Central, visited friends in Astoria & Park Slope, saw Jonathan Richman play (!) somewhere in Williamsburg. W’burg felt measurably busier than when I was last there in 2002, but everything still seemed cool and New Yorky as a tourist might want to experience it. Has much changed since then?

I worked on Bedford for about 3 years in the mid 2000s. You could still walk around normally to grab lunch, find quiet moments, there would be maybe a smattering of japanese street photographers. Now it's a throng of euro/asian tourists, recent transplants, a Chase, Whole Foods, Sephora, Apple Store all in a row. Oddly enough Sea and Earwax are still around.

I still have a velvet suit jacket I bought new off the rack at Domsey's. It's been a while.

they used to have racks of old tuxedo jackets, pants, etc! i was an idiot for not buying that stuff. oh wait, not an idiot just broke.

It would be hard to convince me that NYC has not become a bland, (even more!) expensive and sad shadow of what it was even ten years ago.

It’s been hit hard by the “death of retail”. Lots of empty storefronts in central-ish Manhattan neighborhoods. Perhaps more noticeable than in car-centric cities where the downtowns were hollowed out a long time ago.

i got drunk and threw up in Max Fish. That was my first NYC experience in the 90's. Every subsequent visit has been tamer and less interesting.

It’s been hit hard by the “death of retail”. Lots of empty storefronts in central-ish Manhattan neighborhoods. Perhaps more noticeable than in car-centric cities where the downtowns were hollowed out a long time ago.

and the packed subways are very efficient!

i remember reading some article a couple of years ago that claimed Bleecker St mainly hosts "performative" retail now. that rents are so astronomical, only companies able to take on losses purely for the cachet of having an address on Bleecker can afford to open up a shopfront there.

I was reading a thing too where most landlords jack the prices up so much now to inflate the property value so that they can take cash money out to invest elsewhere (if they can't land the uber corporate tenant of their dreams).

i remember reading some article a couple of years ago that claimed Bleecker St mainly hosts "performative" retail now. that rents are so astronomical, only companies able to take on losses purely for the cachet of having an address on Bleecker can afford to open up a shopfront there.

just tra lala dee fuckin la, apparently, is how it goes, for some people

NYC is a vanity project.

I think I'm moving to the Bronx!

https://1010wins.radio.com/articles/man-stabs-bus-14th-street

xp to "looks like the onion" and fucking mass transit and every other damn thing

I was frightened when I went to Hudson Yards. It’s everything I came to New York to escape basically. It’s, like, a shopping mall. The whole thing is just like suburbia. In the middle of what used to be a great neighborhood for hookers. That to me is not progress, but I understand to most people it is. I’m not saying I don’t understand the other argument. It just doesn’t seem like New York to me.

NYC not dead, love this story

http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/signs.jpg

A dispute between neighbors in Kew Gardens has become a real-life horror story — as a Queens man has decorated his yard with a Halloween-like monster mannequin that has left his next-door neighbors scared to enter their own home. “It’s gotten to the part where I can’t sleep. My daughter has nightmares about the mannequin. The whole thing is a nightmare,” said Jennifer Feldman, who is so upset at neighbor Shlomo Klopfer, she gone to the police over his yard display.

Feldman said the trouble on 147th Street began 11 months ago, when she asked him to remove a sign on his fence that read “Dead End” because it “creeped” out her then 6-year-old daughter. Klopfer, however, said he collects signs and he chose not to take it down. “I love signs, man. I collect signs,” Klopfer told the Post.

Things escalated from there. Feldman alleges that whenever she called 311 to make a complaint, Klopfer, 62, added more signs. She even went to the cops and talked to officers who deal with community relations. There are now more than a dozen signs that say “Private Property,” “No Trespassing,” and “Dead End” on a wrought iron fence separating the two 147th Street properties. There is also the gruesome-looking monster figure, featuring a blood-splattered t-shirt topped by a Halloween mask with stringy grey hair and blue bulging eyes.

http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/mannequin.jpg

Klopfer’s wife, Ilana, said the couple is angry that Feldman never asked for a face-to-face sit down to settle the issue before going to the cops. “You see a sign. Why won’t you come over and talk to your neighbor like a human being? You knock on the door. You ask nicely. ‘Is it possible to take the sign down?’ She never has,” she said.

For her part, Feldman says: “We just want peace. It’s not just us. He fought for decades with the woman next door. We would like an end to the harassment of our family.” Feldman said she even approached Klopfer’s rabbi in good faith to act as a mediator but things did not get better. Feldman also thinks her neighbor is harassing her because of her interfaith marriage, a charge that Klopfer denied. “The only thing I can think of is I’m Jewish. My daughter and I go to temple. My husband’s Christian. I can’t help that.”

Police can’t force Klopfer to take down the display, since it is on private property and not a criminal offense. Neighborhood Coordination Officers from the 108th Precinct are working with both parties to resolve the issue, the NYPD said. Klopfer is a chaplain who owns a landscaping company called “S&K Tree Service.”

A neighbor who lives down the street said he is to blame and that he generally has beef with a bunch of people. “Klopfer has been in disputes with two other people. I’ve never heard complaints about Feldman,” said the 39-year-old neighbor who requested anonymity. “I don’t know how it started. But it’s getting way out of hand. The evil eye, the scary Halloween thing and all the cameras. I think it’s going too far,” he continued.

https://nypost.com/2019/07/09/queens-neighbor-fight-becomes-real-life-horror-story/

lmao

contradiction here though:

Feldman said the trouble on 147th Street began 11 months ago, when she asked him to remove a sign on his fence that read “Dead End” because it “creeped” out her then 6-year-old daughter.

but

"You knock on the door. You ask nicely. ‘Is it possible to take the sign down?’ She never has."

🤔

he just loves signs, man

and hideous ghoulish lifesize dolls, it's a continuum

“You got beef?” Is one of my favorite expressions and one which has been directed at me during a mugging years ago

love that the monster is perched next to ye olde time telephone with 311 painted on, so petty

like at some point you just have to give the guy credit and bake him a pie or something and call for a truce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY&

It's weird to watch video now of crowds of people out in public, walking around, with no one looking at or talking on a cell phone.

heh, my thoughts exactly.

to me every day I walk among the zombies is weird

you are legend

tonight the UWS is dead

Living dead

Glad i didnt go by midtown as planned!

Yeah. At around 10:30 ran into a neighbor who had just returned home from his canceled Broadway gig.

Ha, I was having an early dinner in the financial district. Jumped on the A to go to Penn and it only went one stop to Chambers. Transferred to the most packed 2 train I'd ever been on, which immediately became all local. Transferred after a few stops to a 1 train that was going so slow, we eventually just got out and walked. Minimal lighting and no AC at Penn was spooky.

people got stuck underground for hours! some real nightmare shit there on a hot july PM

Corey Johnson was all "THANK U GOD" cuz he got to play mayor on Twitter

(such a ho)

https://vimeo.com/238073511
^pertinent

the midi cheese was really wearing on me but it was all worth it for “when people ask me what my block is like, I tell them one time they faked it for Syria.”

he has a good deadpan humor but why does he act like he can't read

this sucks
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/business/media/wbai-pacifica-layoffs.html

I agree... WBAI has sucked for awhile

yeah maybe but fuck's sake, they were one of the few remaining independent on the air

they drove me away around the time Mike Feder disappeared

oy this guy needs help
https://nypost.com/2019/10/10/bryant-park-pigeon-vampire-arrested-for-burglary/

https://nypost.com/2019/10/11/city-bakery-home-to-nycs-best-hot-chocolate-may-close-after-28-years/

Oh bless. A former ilxor took me there as a special treat when I first moved to NYC.

worth it? never been.

Hit or miss. Expensive as hell but some great treats. Pretzel croissant is crazy

man this SUCKS
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/arts/music/wnyc-new-sounds-schaefer.html

Tomorrow and wed he’s presenting some crucial Reich live downtown.

https://www.wolfgang-hite.com/#/xxxhy/

Wolfgang & Hite has designed a scaled set of architectural sex toys that reimagines each of the new buildings at the Hudson Yards as a unique dildo. The full set of custom molded silicon toys fits snugly into a scaled replica of the entire 28-acre development.

text gets better as it goes, nice

yeah, i liked "The design team warns that research is not conclusive as to whether or not the developer will own the rights to any sexy pictures taken with the Vessel Buttplug."

The subway is a porno...

To challenge what critics have claimed "placeless" and "mindless materialism," the design team purposefully exaggerated cues in the architecture of Hudson Yards to make sensitive and stimulating forms for penetrative and external masturbation.

vg

Every day, it seems like New York City dies a little bit more https://t.co/FSK90ofPaq

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) October 21, 2019

never forget
defend the indefensible: SBARRO

truly can't tell if that piece is tongue-in-cheek or not

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8463/8104389200_660fede01b.jpg

tbf sbarro's IS new york pizza for a generation of thirtysomething city kids

to me it's I-95 rest area pizza

I think I ate some... 30 years ago

my old boss and I like terrible food so we got lunch there a couple of years ago because it is near our office. It was kind of pricey! I also made her take me to the Times Sq Olive Garden for one of my birthdays.

was gonna say at least tad’s is still around but
https://nypost.com/2019/10/09/tads-steaks-finally-closing-its-last-nyc-outpost/

did you guys know there are two chock full o nuts in nyc but they're both in fuckin' midwood?
https://www.chockfullonuts.com/cafe-locator/

Ulysses, did you make thay T✧✧@K✧✧.E✧✧ shirt?

naw, it's from the original thread

That thread reminds me of The Flashy Crawl on Biryani Carts, Convenience Stores, etc.

Now I have the Chock full o’ Nuts jingle in my head on repeat.

https://amp.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/aptahm/saddest_place_in_nyc_sbarros_penn_station/

https://hyperallergic.com/524007/a-monument-to-tourists-killed-by-wolves-in-nyc-tells-a-tall-tale

Wolfen?

might as well be dead this weekend... don't get run over by the motorcade, skeletal runners!

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-trump-ufc-new-york-marathon-20191101-6etpd4daave6bephiz5zquknli-story.html

i would pay $500 american to watch trump run even a 5k

Stayed at the TWA hotel last night (not dead, embalmed) and saw a motorcade heading down the van wyck while driving home this morning. Did I miss an opportunity for a roadblock protest?

F you and your Marathon

Wolfen is one of those odd thriller-horror films from the early 1980s, along with Looker - which also stars Albert Finney - and Brainstorm that isn't very good and bored me when I saw it, but it feels years ahead of its time and has some great shots of 1970s New York:
https://images2.static-bluray.com/reviews/11940_16_large.jpg

They all feel as if they belong to the last gasp of downbeat brown-coloured 1970s sci-fi even though they were released in the new decade. I've never been to New York. It's one of those fantasy places that exists in films. The practical objection is that although transatlantic flights are £400 or so the only cheap hotels in New York appear to be hellholes because everybody wants to go there because it's New York.

How cheap is cheap. Might be able to find something one the outer boroughs that’s affordable and more interesting anyway.

i don't think i linked this earlier but, speaking to Ashley's point, omg the NYC in the linked film below is just amazing
italian post-apocalyptic science fiction The Warriors pastiche set in the far flung future of 1990. jump to 3.20 for a great fight sequence and 7.22 for the best bridge/body/drum solo ever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEqOnHclmh8

been meaning to toss that on for ages... the sequel, "escape 2000," was a very good mst3k episode iirc.

That was the episode with Toblerone! He was one of the resistance leaders. He overacted like mad, he was fantastic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXBEqMtOk5g

Unusually for that kind of Italian knock-off film it was apparently filmed in the actual Bronx.

You know, for years I assumed that Trading Places was set in New York. It has all the hallmarks. Snow, everybody wears greatcoats, the colour palette is grey, there are lots of posh stone buildings, most of the cast are elderly white people. But it was actually set in Philadelphia. Only the trading scenes at the end were in New York, specifically the WTC.

I mention it because I grew up in the 1980s, so I tend to associate the city with Wall Street, Ghostbusters, Working Girl and The Secret of My Success rather than the Bronx-is-burning films of the 1970s. In my mind it's a cold, hard, unsympathetic place rather than the loved-up hippie lovefest it probably is nowadays.

my dim memory of Escape 2000 is that it's mostly filmed on Roosevelt Island which at the time had some great rubbley ruins and weedy fields with views of Manhattan in the background. maybe parts of Jersey for the same effect. but i could be wrong and anyway your overall point is correct - it's actually New York! they could have easily picked some run-down part of Italy (thinking of Warrior of the Lost World using under-construction Corviale and other suburban-Rome locations for a post-apocalyptic future), or of America (like East St. Louis in Escape From New York).

all time best for that kind of thing has to be Rumble in the Bronx which just says fuck it and immediately shows you skyline views of Vancouver, complete with mountains in the background. i almost think the title might be on the screen for some of that. beautiful."

I saw Wolfen at BAM the other night for the first time in 38 years. Thought it was a good film both times! Biggest scare is the scene shot on a catwalk atop the Manhattan Bridge.

otoh, the 30ish couple in front of me who came in late, babbled to each other, and the female half of whom told her complaining neighbor "You have a stick up your ass": NYC is dead.

SAVE THE CITY
KILL THE LOUDMOUTH

Bloomberg's record in New York is perhaps the biggest, fastest, and most unrestrained application of "trickle-down economics" in this country. New York isn't rich because everybody is rich. It's rich because more and more only rich people can live there. https://t.co/lT1voHDX7r

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) November 8, 2019

https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/12/06/murders-up-8-7-percent-in-new-york-city-in-2019

Western Massachusetts

aspiring congressperson and Azealia Banks signee Paperboy Love Prince
https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/personality/interviews-profiles/rapper-costumed-subway-entertainer-congressional-candidate

from a friend who was born in Manhattan and finally moved away 'The Liberals have ruined New York City. The smell of pot is everywhere. Half the people I meet in the street are stoned. Teenagers think it’s funny to blow smoke in the face of little school kids. homelessness '

— Michael Savage (@ASavageNation) January 1, 2020

The bitching of one's friends is an infallible indicator of universal truth.

friend otm about the pot though

Bet this guy’s never been to LA or SF to be complaining so much about NY

that guy needs to smoke a blunt and chill out

boomers bitching about marijuana while doped up on opioids is still on trend.

I once didn't air out my car enough when I was a teenager and my ultra conservative dad went to move the car the next morning and it totally still reeked and he was soooo upset "I was in the military, I know what marijuana smells like!!!"

TOURISTS GTFO DAY

related - has anyone ever run for mayor of NYC on the platform of less tourism, bc I think that would be a winner

but the holy revenue

I've lived in heavily touristed places and untouristed places, and I way prefer the former because the latter are boring wastes of time.

nb I live in the 2nd most touristed city in the world

boredom is v underrated, esp when all the fun places (for the nonrich) have been shuttered

I could suggest some boring places then

I was in New York recently (lived there for a bit a while ago, now I'm just an occasional tourist) and as always I like the way New York is so damn big that they can knock down tons of stuff and build tons of new stuff and it's still very visibly the same place it was in the 1980s.

my platform for mayor:

1. less tourism
2. cars banned in manhattan

Brad 2021

get me a cheap apartment to seal the deal

affordable housing for all of course, after i kick all the rich people out of their glass condos

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/12/30/how-new-york-is-zoning-out-the-human-scale-city/

In 2018, Chase Bank announced that it would tear down the fifty-two-story, black-and-silver-ribbed, early Modernist tower at 270 Park Avenue in order to build a new tower at least seventy stories high. This will be the tallest-ever demolition of a perfectly viable building in New York City. In 2002, Chase began a total renovation of the building to LEED standard, a green building certification that gave it “platinum” status, a rating that acknowledges the value of preserving the embodied energy of an existing building and avoids energy use for demolition, landfill, and new construction. Landmark skyscrapers across the country—from the Empire State Building, Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly Sears), and San Francisco’s Transamerica—have taken this environmentally responsible approach and upgraded their buildings to LEED platinum standard. And in doing so, Chase also benefitted from the five years of federal environmental tax credits that go with that designation. Then threw it all away.

To achieve the extra height and bulk of the new 270 Park, Chase is taking advantage of the “upzoning” of nearby mid-Manhattan that was applied in 2017 to a seventy-three-block area around Grand Central between 39th and 57th Streets. Upzoning’s relaxation of city planning regulations expands the development potential of new buildings by allowing increased height and density (the number of units or amount of floor area on a given lot), and simplifying the transfer of “air rights” from landmarked buildings to new sites within the district. Chase was thus able to buy air rights from the landmarked St. Patrick’s Cathedral, some six blocks away, and construct a taller, bulkier building. Preservationists have identified at least thirty-three buildings worthy of landmark protection from such redevelopment in this Midtown district, but after fierce resistance from real estate interests, only twelve have been so designated. By no logic—design, environmental, planning, zoning, landfill capacity—does demolition of 270 Park make sense, especially when at least some in the architectural community are trying to advance sustainable design. The planned destruction of 270 Park exemplifies how a vital aspect of the urbanism on which this city has evolved and excelled over decades is now being dangerously eroded.

I weep for my city; it is committing urban suicide.

they really need a broad tourism tax or resident discount for public transport, museums etc. and yeah everything about real estate needs to be overhauled.

at work last week i saw one of those city banners advertising nyc as "the real estate capital of the world" and thought about how that's nothing to be proud of

'money laundering capital of the world' is much catchier.

it's still very visibly the same place it was in the 1980s.

plus the 95-story glass towers w/ empty Bahrainis' apartments

apparently i never mentioned an incident from my nyc trip last april

it was a cold windy day and, being in the area, i decided to see how bad hudson yards really was. the mall was a lot of wasted space, the vessel was foreboding, and something -- either the vessel or some of the residential buildings under construction -- were channeling the wind in a way that created this ungodly howling noise

maybe the vessel just screams? something's haunted

"the vessel just screams" stealing this song title for my metal band

'The Vessel Screams' also a solid name for a metal band.

I'd tweak to "This Vessel Screams" but yes

afaict the streets of midtown during the work day is just tourists asking other tourists for directions

hey some of us are walking to the least abysmal place we know of for lunch

are the corporate feeding troughs still basically places where you can order your own salad to spec, mixed in a big metal bowl, or alternatively order a panino? or is that like 15 years out of fashion by now?

My office used to be right across the street from rockefeller and sometimes a couple of us would walk together to the other building in times sq or to get lunch/run errands. It would be hilarious if one of the ticket touters approached us because unrehearsed all of us would yell "DO WE LOOK LIKE TOURISTS!?!" This usually only happened though when the NJ'ian was vaping.

it was an odd time to visit, compounded by my complete mental fatigue after three full days of training. got to see a mostly-empty high line, and after completely failing to notice my dinner location was next door to the empire state building, i was able to instantly go to the top with no real line! even the high line was relatively empty

fwiw I was both tourist and direction-giver to the confused older visitors

obviously i visited the high line, and my brain may in fact be mush today as well

xpost it is still a ton of salad/sandwich places or the ones that have both of those and pasta, udon, sushi, hot bar options.

I am not a sandwich person but there is this newish awesome cambodian sandwich chain that I would go to sometimes. Num Pang. And also a Lebanese wrap chain, Naya. Both super good.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/business/sweetgreen-salads.html

pushing the envelope of midtown mass salad prep. love it. the best minds.

is there anywhere else that people wait so long in line and spend so much money for a lunchtime salad? ( I have never been to sweetgreen)

I have to say in all about the updated and rebranded “Dig” formerly known as Digg Inn who serve serious chicken thighs. Cava also ranks highly in the lunchtime fast casual scale.

buy lunch? those days are gone for me

I brought my lunch (salad) to work 95% of the time and hate ate that salad at my desk. I hate salad.

I am not a sandwich person but there is this newish awesome cambodian sandwich chain that I would go to sometimes. Num Pang. And also a Lebanese wrap chain, Naya. Both super good.

― Yerac, Monday, January 6, 2020 4:13 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I know this is the most obnoxious possible take but num pang was better before it morphed into a chain

(the actual best, for some value of "best," of the somewhat overpriced fast-casual-cafeteria chains with shitty exclusionary no-cash policies is mulberry and vine)

I am looking up which one was first (around NYU?) The one I used to go to was around 48th St. in 2013-14ish.

the one that used to be on 12th street

(maybe 13th? in that area. it might still be there, I haven't been in years)

I think first num pang is the one on broadway around 19th. I used to like it. Would get pork and noodles but they don’t do that any more.

The Num Pang near University Pl is still there

agree that num pang quality has declined over the years. there was one day where the tofu salad container switched from ~8x8" square to a ~8x5" rectangle with no corresponding price decrease = do you take me for a fool num pang

i have many thoughts on the horrible lunch options around union square. long ago i worked way downtown and the breadth and quality of falafel carts and sandwich shops etc was strikingly better.

The best food in union square and flatiron was Taste of Persia which closes end of this month. So if you haven’t gone, go.

What’s good there?

another vote for DIGG/Digg in here

taste of persia is great, i hope that dude finds another spot quickly. the eater thing i read said that the new owners of that nondescript pizza place are kicking him out! why would you get rid of the only interesting thing about your anonymous pizzeria half a block off the avenue!?

calstars he has a couple different things every day but dude will be happy to describe each thing in effusive detail. never had anything less than good.

The chicken thighs are good at Digg but the sides tend to be a bit oily. I kind of like the grilled salmon at Little Beet, but it’s a bit pricey.

I was happy to stumble into Xi'an Famous Foods on my last trip after having heard about it and it hit the spot

they are pretty good for a chain

Xian is another one where it seems portions have shrunk while prices have risen. Its still good but seems pricey for essentially a snack. Other decent chains include Kati Roll, Dos Toros, and Toasties.

generally if i'm eating for under $10 in midtown it's a deal. i had some $9 noodles at xi'an last week and they were delicious and filling

Hey I ate at X'ian recently too! I think general standards of US Chinese food have risen enough that it didn't stand out for me, but it was good and a plate of those noodles is definitely a full meal for me

I think the competitiveness of NYC food raises the bar to the extent where a local NYC chain is probably tastier than a lot of single establishment restaurants in smaller cities :(

I hate Dos Torros. Would rather stick with Chipotle.

For taste of Persia I always get the kebab and one is the other dishes. Greens or lentils with beef usually. Persian meatballs etc. it’s all good and he’ll give samples time permitting.

Other things I eat a lot of? The spam onigiri or roll at Enju.

xp I feel just the opposite, I have always experienced NYC as a place where the propensity of people to eat every meal out means just-OK restaurants have a better chance of survival than they do in smaller places where people won't pay unless the food's good.

also a fair take

xi'an's an exception imo

agreed that dos toros sucks but in a fight with chipotle no one wins

ennju donburi are another go-to for sure.

dan do you fuck with rainbow falafel? that's my first choice if i have cash in my pocket and i am down for some heartburn

Oh X'ian is definitely well above the standards of chain restaurants, what I'm saying is "even in my small city there are now hand-pulled noodle places that are really good, which wasn't true 10 years ago," so I'm saying X'ian is now merely "as good as the best Chinese places in small cities w/o large Asian populations," not "much better than the best Chinese places in those cities" as it would have been formerly

National chain restaurants in NYC always seem to be full of people (whether you're in a tourist area or not)

Never done rainbow because I don’t eat pita or tahini so options limited. What I do do is bistec encobollado w avocado and jalapeños from great burrito on 23rd. I love when you find real Mexican home in the walls surviving in Manhattan. There’s another on 6th ave below 14th.