It’s very early in the year but our workplace may have gotten our dumbest phone call of 2010 already. This one will be hard to top.
A woman called up and told us she was in Manhattan. She asked how she could get to us.
Via subway.
“You want to take the subway from Manhattan to Rochester?”
“Yeah, what stop do I get off at?”
“Well, Van Cortlandt on the Number One Train’s probably your best bet but you’re going to do some walking.”*
(I realize many of you are probably also unfamiliar with the geography of New York. But presumedly you don’t live in New York. Or at least you grasp that the subway is rarely an available option to a destination 250 miles away.)
No, we didn’t actually tell her this. We were very nice and explained that she’d be better off taking a bus.*
**After we had to explain why flying here was a bad idea also.
When I was going to school at RIT I always enjoyed the six-hour Amtrak trip back to civilization. It’s a very scenic route, especially once you get past Albany.
Obviously her image of New York is like this famous New Yorker cover.
To give her the benefit of the doubt, there are a number of neighborhoods named “chester” within New York City, including Eastchester, Baychester, Parkchester, and Westchester Square (my neighborhood). She may have assumed Rochester was another of these.
A little off topic, but last night we were watching As Good as It Gets, and I remembered that the first time I watched it, I thought it was unrealistic that the Helen Hunt character would ride a bus all the way from Brooklyn just to work as a waitress in Manhattan.
Then I went to NY and it seems that Brooklyn really isn’t that far. Plus, I talked to a guy who worked in a gift shop in Canal Street and he told me he lived in Staten Island, which seems even further away.
I probably have a skewed view (I was only there six days, after all) from riding the subway everywhere, and things seemed so close. On the other hand, if it was just a 10-minute subway ride, maybe for all intents and purposes it IS close and people commute all over the place in NY.
It’s a different world from where I live. People often commute to other cities for jobs here, but me, I like being within a 10-minute drive from home, work, school, church, and shopping.
Yes, Far Rockaway (in Queens) is accessible by subway. It’s not near Manhattan, though, but about as far away as you can get and still be in the city (not counting Staten Island).
Downtown Rochester isn’t 35 miles from the airport, so without knowing where your site is (which she obviously didn’t) it’s not an unreasonable idea. I mean, I would take the train but I don’t see why it’s so obviously wrong to think you might fly there.
That was my thought also. There are also a number of other “chesters” outside the city proper but still within commuter rail line: Port Chester, or simply “Westchester” (county) as an umbrella term.
To many NYC’ers, Western NY State is sort of a fantasy land. Even I, a pretty well educated type person born and raised in NY and who has lived here most of my life, it takes a fair amount of concentration not to assume that everything “upstate” (past Westchester County) is not some kind of spur off of the NY Thruway going north to Montreal. It’s very easy for me to imagine even Buffalo and Niagara Falls as being only two hours or so off the Thruway, until I remember it’s not (having done the drive to Niagara and realized, damn, there’s this huge space going WEST in NY State that nobody ever talks about).
Buffalo is probably less than 2 hours off the thruway- people from NYC tend to forget (or not know) that the Thruway makes a left turn at Albany and is I-90 while I-87 becomes the Northway. When people at my job are sent to training, if it involves taking either the Thruway or 1-87 past the Albany exits, they invariably choose the wrong one.
I know a girl who lives in Brooklyn and works as a bartender in Manhattan and walked home in the middle of that bad snowstorm back in December. It was 4 am and the subway never came and all the cabs were “off duty” so she eventually started walking.
I mapped it and it’s only 3 or 4 miles, but it involves walking over a bridge across the East River, and in the absolute worst conditions.
Part of my job for the state was in supporting a group that provided technical assistance to small towns in an extremely rural part of the state. I can remember one conversation, between my immediate boss at the time and a state auditor from NYC, who couldn’t understand why a snowstorm would keep the Town Clerk from depositing the town’s receipts (money paid in) in a timely matter. The fact that she was 17 miles from the bank along roads the State Police had closed to non-emergency driving during that blizzard never occurred to him – he apparently thought she could just walk a block or so to a bank branch.
I once had an online author friend from Colorado invite me to a book signing she was having in New York City. I had to explain to her that Schenectady is a three-hour drive from Manhattan (if you’re lucky).
I’m not originally from NY and I’m pretty disdainful of NYCers. I’ve lived in Dutchess county about 12 years.
The stereotype is that NYers are tough and street smart. From my experience, tough=unable to survive anywhere that doesn’t have public transportation and seeing two trees next to each other means an attack from wild animals is imminent. And street smart means they lie a lot.
