I’ll admit I edited the conversation down to its essential points. The woman began by asking where we were and we explained we are “between Buffalo and Rochester”. We then explained we are closer to Rochester and, when she told us she was coming from NYC, that Rochester was enroute (which Buffalo is not). This is when she began asking about subway routes.
When I was going to school in Rochester, my advisor used to get calls from people asking him to come down to NYC for lunch. Lots of folks in the City have that “New Yorker Cartoon” view of the rest of the country, sand don’t realize how big “upstate” New York is.
Having made the trip many times by auto, train, bus, and plane, I am also flabbergasted by your statement that “you don’t want to flu”. Even counting the time spent going to and from the airport, it’s a helluva lot faster to fly.
Regarding the bolded part, real NYC’ers call that part “Canada”.
(I used to mercilessly kid a friend from Buffalo about being lucky to get into a military exchange program with the US and allowed to enter the USAF. And when the Giants beat the Bills, a game we watched together, I bragged about how we kept the trophy in the US.)
It’s pretty common to commute in from the Outer Boroughs to Manhattan for all sorts of jobs.
What I find funny is how people who live in Manhattan create these sort of mental borders which they don’t like to go past. For example, I used to live in the East Village near Union Square. For the most part, I tended to stay between E Houston and E 14th and between Broadway and Avenue B, plus the blocks immediately surrounding Union Square.
Even though it was only a 5 minute cab ride or about a 15 minute walk, going to nearby neighborhoods like Soho, Murray Hill or the West Village constituted “effort”. And forget going to the Upper West Side.
This phenomenon was comically portrayed in Seinfield when Kramer frantically called Jerry from the “nexus of the universe” on E 1st Street and 1st Avenue. (There is actually a lounge there called Nexus).
Over the years, navigating the city via public trans has skewed my idea of distance. On a whim I just checked out how many miles it was from my home in Brooklyn to my job in Long Island City. 12 miles. Mapquest says that’s a 29 minute car drive (best time I ever made in a car was 45 minutes and that was uncanny). By train it takes about 1 hour and 12 minutes.
Rewind about 10 years to when I lived in Sullivan County (the sticks). The nearest town was 12 miles away and it took me about 17 minutes to get there by car doing roughly 55 mph the entire way. I had made the walk or rode a bicycle this distance on a number of occasions without much of a problem. Now, the thought of walking or riding a bike back to Brooklyn wouldn’t even occur to me. It’s another borough for chrissakes! Same distance though. Go figure.
What used to always make me laugh was the weather reports from NYC television stations. They would give you tomorrow’s weather prediction for Manhattan. Then, with a straight face, they would give you the predictions for Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island.
Weatherman, please. New York City is about thirty miles across: it does not have five different weather zones. Times Square and Tottenville and City Island and Rosedale are all going to get the same weather tomorrow.
We love you too.
And sometimes by bus. My mother took an express bus from Fresh Meadows to 34th street - much easier than a bus and subway combo, and you got a seat. I commuted in for summer jobs by bus and subway.
I didn’t know anyone from Queens who was limited in what part of Manhattan they visited (aside from what were seen as dangerous parts) but I can Manhattan residents doing this.
We San Franciscans are like that too. Oakland’s about 10 minutes away by subway but if someone invites us there, they might as well have invited us to Rochester. And god help them if they’re not within three blocks of BART; they’d never be seen again.
A friend of mine who lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn takes the bus into the city all the time. It takes a fraction of the time of the R subway.
Each of the outer boroughs as well as the de facto “sixth borough” of Hoboken/JC/Weehawken/Union City NJ each has its own local culture and activities. But people who live there often work in Manhattan and travel in regularly for recreationsal purposes. It’s very difficult to drag people in the other direction. The biggest reason it probably because it’s a lot tougher to get transportation back to Manhattan late at night.
If you are already coming into the city anyway, you have a much wider area you can go to vs just wanting to walk outside and go to the nearest local bar. But I do notice that certain bars attract the so-called “Bridge & Tunnel” crowd more than others. They tend to be in Midtown or by the PATH stations on 6th Ave.
Actually I thought it means I’m about to be ass-raped by hillbillies.
D’oh! I did mentally equate The Thruway with I-87. I knew it was called “The Northway” north of Albany, but thought that was just a local name for the road.
So yeah, case in point – to this NYC’er, I have to really concentrate to remember that stuff west of I-87 constitute a lot of (even most of) the area of NY State.
I grew up in Westchester. We never went up to Duchess just because of all the ass-raping hillbillies. I’ve been in the city since I went to college starting in 96, and honest to goodness, I haven’t been ass-raped once.
But of course, I am pretty street smart, so I might just be lying.
Dutchess County: come for the ass-raping hillbillies, stay for the British-style driving!
And how about the vast expanse to the north, referred to by residents therein as the “North Country”.
I too found that I measured distance by time. “How far away is it” was more accurately answered in terms of how long it took to get there, not the literal distance traveled.
A New York Guide to geography
“The City”, is, of course, the city. Which curiously doesn’t include the Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn, or Queens. Those are properly identified by name (even though they are technically part of New York City). “The City” is actually only Manhattan, the rest are called “boro” (plural “boros”) even though they are actually “boroughs”.
“The Island”. As far as most New Yorkers know, there is only one island. And it isn’t Staten Island. It is “the island”, and contains towns with unpronouncable names ending in -ogue. Queens and Brooklyn are not part of the island, although it is impossible to tell where one stops and the other begins.
“Westchester”. The borderland to the north. Alternately indistinguishable from the Bronx, and completely unlike the Bronx.
“Putnam County”. The farthest reaches of the realm. The neighboring kingdom, “Connecticut”, can be reached by traveling through Putnam County. Or Westchester. Most New Yorkers aren’t sure which.
“Jersey”. That wanna-be city/state where the Soprano’s live. They have pine trees and high auto insurance rates.
“Upstate”. The mythical, magical land beyond Putnam County. All of the rest of New York State, everything that isn’t the city, the boroughs, the island, Westchester, or Putnam, exists in “upstate”. Albany? Upstate. Buffalo? Upstate. Grand Island? No, silly… everyone knows there’s only one island. And it isn’t Staten Island. This “grand” island of which you speak must exists only in the immaginary land known as… upstate.
Lots of people talk about it. It’s only people in NYC who think that “upstate” is Westchester County.
I’ve never actually done, but I understand that the full run of the A train from northern Manhattan to Far Rockaway is two hours.
It is eminently feasible to commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan, especially lower Manhattan. My son and his wife and my daughter all do it and my son-in-law commutes to Hoboken, NJ (by subway and PATH train).
Flatbush to NoHo in 27 minutes for me. Yay B-Train.
I used to take the train from the north Bronx to go birding at Jamaica Bay, and once or twice to the Rockaways. It involved a couple of transfers between lines, and often took a couple of hours (not to mention a having to pay an additional fare).