is New York City dead?

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.

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSTdddiadS8

Weekend update
Bike still fuckin there

What's the punchline

Can’t do it without a picture

The smoke last night was something else. Last year even when the sky turned orange, it didn't smell like anything particularly, iirc? But it was full on campfire about 7-9pm in Bed Stuy.

I was at a party with a view of Jersey last night and sunset looked like an LA sunset on a bad fire day.

last year the air quality was bad and the sky was crazy but the smoke was coming from canada right? This week it was the palisades and prospect park.

p sure it was coming from your apartment dan

It was getting here. We had to close the windows!

Friday night I was out in Bushwick, in infamous "jefftown" to check out some night-life situations. It was so windy, kids were flying all over the place.

Had been wondering why my eyes were hurting yesterday until I got the first alert on my phone.

https://i.imgur.com/mHHxi6X.jpeg

They’re not allowed to remove that. See definition of “unusable” at https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02218.

They’re not allowed to remove that. See definition of “unusable” at https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02218🕸.

Scroll down to the definition of unusable.

it has wheels, a seat, pedals…

is . . . is it raining

Driest fall in NYC history so far. October the least rainy calendar month ever. Restrictions on water use could be a-comin’.

at least congestion pricing is coming back