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.

Also what J0rdan already said but with 200% more soapbox.

sure would be nice there was enough housing to go around

Full mayoral primary vote results are released: Mamdani beat Cuomo 56-44 and it only took three rounds. The 2021 primary took eight rounds to resolve.

I didn't realize this last week, but it seems like it was always going to be three rounds based on the initial results. The second round distributed the 2nd place votes for the ballots with a write-in candidate at #1 (only a few hundred, so the effect was negligible). The third round eliminated all candidates except Mamdani and Cuomo because the cumulative number of votes for those other candidates was less than the amount Cuomo received.

Perhaps having been beaten by 12 points will convince Cuomo to fuck off back to whatever golf course suburb he lives in.

imagine if it were actually close and we had to wait a week for this lol

btw good posts laurel thx for the on the ground reporting

Perhaps having been beaten by 12 points will convince Cuomo to fuck off back to whatever golf course suburb he lives in.

A know a couple of people who basically live their lives in Brooklyn as if it's a golf course suburb and vote accordingly, and I don't know why the fuck people like that don't just move to the suburbs instead of ruining the city. They actually hate traveling beyond their block, and the only thing resembling culture in their lives is going to a fucking sports game.

do they drive to the grocery store and to work?

i find his insistence on 'we' odd but understandable. but he's pretty good at this stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjgI-nK1PHE

imagine if it were actually close and we had to wait a week for this lol

how old were you in autumn 2000?

also that graph about the ages of ZM voters was wrong because the nyt is garbage. this correction took six days!

A correction was made on June 30, 2025
: An earlier version of the chart in this article showing voters by age incorrectly identified the age group with the largest turnout. It was voters aged 30 to 34, not those aged 18 to 24.

millennial power!

do they drive to the grocery store and to work?

Both work from home. One actually has a car, but they never use it unless they take a road trip out of the city, like upstate.

i had a car 15 years ago and tbf it was nice going to fairway and loading everything up. also for going to play hockey at chelsea piers.

for a while, after the car died, i took the subway/bus to/from chelsea piers with my stick and horribly smelly bag in tow. on the bright side, i met a whole bunch of canadians in the subway

inspired by an in orbit post elsewhere: a true new yorker knows which and in what combination one can use electricity without tripping the fuses/circuit-breakers

My apartment doesn't have that problem, which I never realized I needed to grateful for but I am now! I already had to flip the breaker here once when I tried to boil the kettle with the AC on, two rooms away.

Every time my wife wants to iron I have to turn the lights off in my office. We can run any other combination of lights/devices, but the one outlet situated in a good spot to set up an ironing board blows the breaker about one time out of three.

you are a true montanan

(unless it's something absurd like montanahn)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp2_39Fjai8

oh there's a map. but that doesn't mean it corresponds to reality

i didn't even know there was a sub-basement until i had to wade through ten thousand xmas decorations to get to the circuit breakers

Can’t use the ac and hair dryer at the same time. Can’t use the toaster and microwave at the same time.

I do drive many times a week though and it’s totally awesome.

can't use microwave and coffee maker

electric kettle + instant pot here

At least those things are in the same room! My friend's whole 4-room apartment is on one circuit. (It's rent stabilized and she's lived there for 20 or 25 years with no maintenance/upgrades which is truly dire.)

I bet her rent is insanely cheap though.

dang man
how is the bathroom

luckily in our house the only issue is vacuum and microwave on the same breaker, which is rare enough that we haven't had many issues.

Surprisingly okay but the biggest problem throughout the place is how old and yellowed the wall paint is. My friends aren't DIYers, apparently, or not enough to spend their time reno-ing an apartment that they don't own. (Maybe they're not allowed to paint?) I thought there was a rule that even if you don't move out you're entitled to a new paint job every 5 years but that might have changed.

Maybe the landlord is in a war of attrition about doing maintenance or repairs to the apartment because the renters have a protected tenancy and if they left, LL could make more income. I’m freaking out reading about all these unsafe electrics!

it's only unsafe if the breaker doesn't trip ;)

Zohran appeared onstage with a Haitian artist (Bayo?) to an apparently sold-out majority Haitian crowd at the Barclay Center a few days ago and said that as the next mayor of NYC he would "fight to get Haiti off the travel ban" AND he pronounced it "Ay-ti" which is the Haitian way that honestly most people probably don't know/use--and that he would fight to protect people who lose TPS, AND THEN he said "We're going to stand up for Haiti because you taught the world about freedom; it's time for us to return the favor" which honestly slays me every time I hear it.

https://✧✧✧.tik✧✧✧.c✧✧✧@descenda✧✧✧.r✧✧/video/7521214115386248461

Local tiktoker Widlin (who I absolutely clocked on the shuttle platform at the Franklin stop lol) made a jokey but still very moving statement about it that came across my FYP maybe this morning.

The comments on that Barclays footage are ON FIRE. I'm verklempt just reading them. I just realized the link doesn't work, maybe let me try this but all as one url with no spaces.

https://www.tiktok.com/
7521214115386248461

that didn't work either but you can search for it with Bayo + Mamdani probably.

some election numbers from zohran https://bsky.app/profile/anildash.com/post/3lsw5k6wvik2p

https://www.instagram.com/p/DLm0E1PuqsK/?igsh=bHNmenhqdGpmNHh5

Boys keep swinging

focus on turning out new voters payed off, something conventional consultant wisdom considers not worth the trouble

"Give them something to vote for, not just tell them what to vote against." Hell yeah.

but then they'd have to win, idk seems easier to act righteous and collect paychecks esp since that's already who they are to their core

.........?

This is a Zohran thred

(It's rent stabilized and she's lived there for 20 or 25 years with no maintenance/upgrades which is truly dire.)

this is pretty much my situation except it's not legally rent controlled

I’ve heard three 7/4 m 80s this year. Last year was like forty

Another day, another great Mamdani video:

https://bsky.app/profile/zohrankmamdani.bsky.social/post/3ltg7ymzrn22a

I wonder if he’s behind this:

https://mamdanitimes.com/

This is a Zohran thred

― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Wednesday, July 2, 2025 6:39 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

What Are Zohran Mamdani's Flaws?

Another day, another great Mamdani video:

https://bsky.app/profile/zohrankmamdani.bsky.social/post/3ltg7ymzrn22a

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Monday, July 7, 2025 11:02 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

bsky/twitter mutual makes these, it was cool to learn about a long shot mayoral candidate from him

https://bsky.app/profile/boringstein.bsky.social/post/3lqt5niyqoc24