I’m not talking about old buildings; of course they’re still there. I’m wondering if, in Manhattan at least, there’s any remnants of the New York that was the norm about 30-40 years ago; a place that was the antithesis of the Manhattan of Sex and the City and other media depictions of a hip, upscale, and mostly wealthy Manhattan. I’m thinking about such things as:
Surly cabbies that are native New Yorkers, not immigrants from the Asian subcontinent or Middle East.
Neighborhoods where Italians spend the day screaming down from windows to the street below. “YO FRANKIE! AYYYYYYYYYY! ANGELO! YO!!!”
Tacky electronics stores with ghetto blasters piled high in the windows.
Little four-story and five-story walk-up buildings with the floors above filled entirely by a warren of independent jewelers, watchmakers, and the like.
Clusters where the streets are filled entirely by Orthodox Jews, all speaking Yiddish as a first language.
Really rough neighborhoods south of Central Park.
Places where fire hydrants are opened during hot weather to cool bored kids.
As a total outsider (I’ve never been to New York state, let alone the city), I’m curious as to how much of that ever existed. I’m young, but I always assumed that much of that New York was something of a stereotype.
Oh yeah. Around Midtown it seems like there’s about 4 or 5 of these on each block. Most of them have since substituted the ghetto blaster boom boxes for digital cameras, but still.
There are a lot of Orthodox Jews in the “diamond district” and also in parts of the Village. The East Village in particular had a large Jewish immigrant population at one time, but I’m not sure how much of those old neighborhoods still exist.
The fire hydrant thingy I don’t think would fly in areas with a lot of commercial activity. I realize that it’s probably illegal anywhere, I just associate it more with predominantly residential areas like in Do The Right Thing.
I’m a regular visitor to NYC, and I have yet to see an American-born cabbie.
There are some. I’ve mostly caught them in the Bronx, rather than Manhattan itself. In Manhattan, they’re South Asian/African, in my part of Brooklyn they’re Russian.
I don’t take cabs often, but I think I’ve only had an American-born cabbie once in the nine years I’ve been living in NYC.
There are clusters of Orthodox Jews residing in Manhattan. There are Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews who work in Manhattan. The two groups are almost entirely non-overlapping, and the big groups of Yiddish speakers in the five boroughs live in Brooklyn. (Head to Boro Park or Williamsburg if you’re curious.) I’m unaware of any large community of Orthodox Jews in the Village - perhaps you’re thinking of the Lower East Side? In Manhattan, the major concentrations of Orthodox Jews are in the Lower East Side, the Upper West and Upper East Sides, and Washington Heights. There are also smaller communities scattered around, but those four are the biggest, each with very different demographics from the others.
Fire hydrants are routinely opened in the summer up here, in what a friend refers to as the nosebleed seats in Manhattan.
I don’t think there are any really rough neighborhoods south of Central Park anymore. There are some lonely areas that I might not want to be alone at night in (Ave. D, or the very far West Side), but I don’t think they’re all that dangerous.
There are plenty of tacky electronics stores, especially in Midtown.
I’ve never seen a multistory apartment-type building with lots of independent stores above the first floor.
I’ve never been in a coffeehouse like that (we tend towards Starbucks here too nowadays), but I’m sure one or two must still exist. I’m just not big on coffee.
Not sure about people yelling for Frankie, but Little Italy has been mostly emptied of Italians. It’s slowly being taken over by an expanding Chinatown, but the shell is still there for the tourists.
Yeah, that’s probably it. I was looking at a road atlas that had a detail map of Manhattan, and most of the larger neighborhoods were labeled. The title for “East Village” was conspicuously sprawled all across the area I was thinking about; there was no mention on the map of “Lower East Side”, and though I’ve hear the term before, I just assumed it was a blanket term for an area with a bunch of smaller neighborhoods.
My extended family has some Russian heritage in it, and some of them grew up in that part of the city. I gather that there are (or were) about a gazillion distinctive ethnic neighborhoods, especially in Manhattan below midtown. I do hear people occasionally lament that a lot of this cultural diversity is being homogenized, but AFAICT some of it is still intact. I was particularly impressed with how the NYC Chinatown seems more “lived in” than the perhaps more famous one in San Francisco, which seems more Disneyland to me.
I spent time in Brooklyn on my last trip to the city, and it looked as though there’s a quite sizable West Indies community there, particularly from Trinidad & Tobago.