Coming so close to the airports and then stopping seems deliberately perverse, almost as much as Las Vegas’ monorail, their only grade-separated line, making a near-beeline toward McCarran and then stopping almost across the street. I bet taxicab interests are behind both of these cases.
Another drawback of too many stops other than speed is staffing. When the rest of my family had just gone through the turnstile but the ticket that I had just bought didn’t work on any of the turnstiles, I looked around for an employee but there were none at the small station, so I bought another ticket to avoid being separated while I found out what I should do. They might be able to have staffed help kiosks with fewer stops.
Yeah, the experience of taking a train in Boston or DC is better than the experience of taking one in most of NYC, but as far as the system goes, hours of service, etc. , there’s really no comparison. I do agree Chicago comes closest.
How many of those are free?
(Smithsonian fan here).
San Diego makes my list because of climate and beaches.
Baltimore makes my list because it’s still real. The people living in Baltimore are the people that have lived in Baltimore for the last 100 years. The culture and institutions are long lived. They have largely avoided the ‘Death by Transients’ phenomenon of many large cities in the US where no one you talk to is actually from the city that you’re in-where everyone is a tourist and staying there for five years makes you a long-lived local. Baltimore still feels like a real city as opposed to a bunch of buildings and people that you’ve put together in the same place. It’s a high-crime slum perhaps, but it’s its own high-crime slum.
What I have found in my 40 years of travel is that largely, if someone were to blind-fold you and magically drop you in a city, most of the time you couldn’t figure out where you were until you saw a monument or building that you recognized. They are cookie-cutters of one another. Same types of people, same types of places. They have the same types of food, the same types of immigrants, the same of everything. It’s very rare for me to go to a city and go, “Wow, this place isn’t the same.” New Orleans isn’t the same. You could be dropped in New Orleans and know you were there within two minutes - shoot, you could be dropped in freaking Slidell and still know where you were. New York, not so much - largely because it’s the template for every other large city in the US. Everywhere wants to be New York, so you end up with the same hipster-districts, the same immigrant areas that no longer have immigrants, the same eateries serving the same food that they all say is the greatest ever using the same number of exclamation points. They all have an old train station that has been converted to shops and restaurants and a market district that has the best ‘insert regional delicacy’ in the world and was featured on the Food Network in 2013. They are all populated with the same people who have the same stories and are all convinced that their city is somehow more alive and exciting than wherever they came from. They all have the same ‘hole in the wall’ bookstores and the same plaques talking about the same historical points with the same children’s museums, natural history museums, science museums and art museums filled with the same periods and the same vaguely artsy people stroking their chins staring at paintings they only pretend to get. You can argue over whether the museum with 2 Titians and a Cranach is materially better than the one with 6 Renoirs and a Bruegel, but the people and the things are repetitive. New York though it would beg to differ is no exception.
Ahem
I think though that I was defining real as the people existing there are people from there and have a cultural attachment to that place. If I were to move to Boston tomorrow, would I be a ‘real’ Bostonian? I guess from a certain perspective in that I would currently be living in Boston, but I don’t embody anything about Boston other than the fact that my bed happens to be there. You wouldn’t say that hanging around with me embodies ‘real’ Boston culture simply because that’s the town I ended up getting a job in. It’s really transience that I would define as ‘not real.’ Not particular ethnicities, classes or businesses.
He has a point that the rent is too high. It is a huge problem in most cities, but New York is one of the worst places. Having rent be so high bifurcates the city into the rich and poor. The middle class moves to the suburbs and what is left is just rich people living in luxury and the poor living in squalor. However, he blames developers which is like blaming farmers for famines. Rent control means fewer places being built and those places being built being only for the rich. Politicians keep prices high be making it harder to build and rent properties.
Leaving out the debate as to whether “real” is the proper term, many parts of Baltimore I have experienced do not match this. Except the ritzy condo on the north shore surrounded by panhandlers, and a decent indoor market. The other parts I’ve experienced are the gentrified Federal Hill and the harbor area which seemed similar to other harbor areas. That said, I don’t dislike Baltimore because Federal Hill is an extremely walkable neighborhood, and the rest of it seems pretty compact: from Federal Hill to the Walters museum is only 1 1/2 miles but it feels like you’re on the entirely other side of the city.
Varies a lot, some are, some are 1 day a week and many are never free.
I love the Smithsonian, I really do. I love the concept and the execution. But NYC just offers so much and In over 50 years of living in or somewhat close I have only visited a small portion of it all.
I have seen NYC at its worse (well in the last 130 years at least) and I’ve seen it grow back into the #1 US tourist destination. I miss aspects of the worst time. I use to go to Bronx Zoo and it was only lightly crowded, the top of the RCA building which is not Top of the Rock was like $2.00 and no wait.Walking Manhattan at Christmas time (not near the tree) was actually not too bad. On the other side my Grandmother was 3 blocks from the burnt out section of the Bronx, the subways were really bad and really smelled of piss very strongly. The museums were a lot cheaper in the 70s & 80s. Oh, at the old Yankee stadium until about 1998 you could just do a walk up to nearly any game and get tickets. Often excellent tickets. Far more so in the 80s. But again, the City changes. It always changes. Old neighborhoods change.
As to San Diego, I lived there 3 years, if you like the climate, I don’t really, it is great, but it offers little compared to NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, NO or Boston. I like Chicago a lot, I think that has come through. I love New Orleans except it is far too hot and humid for me. Never liked LA much, but has plenty to recommend it. Back to San Diego, I’ve been to the Zoo 4 times. It is a great Zoo, the Bronx Zoo is as good. I know, gasp, that can’t be true. But it is.
If that makes a great city, then Aruba is a great city.
Baltimore makes my list because it’s still real. The people living in Baltimore are the people that have lived in Baltimore for the last 100 years. The culture and institutions are long lived. They have largely avoided the ‘Death by Transients’ phenomenon of many large cities in the US where no one you talk to is actually from the city that you’re in-where everyone is a tourist and staying there for five years makes you a long-lived local. Baltimore still feels like a real city as opposed to a bunch of buildings and people that you’ve put together in the same place. It’s a high-crime slum perhaps, but it’s its own high-crime slum.
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I certainly agree that Baltimore is a real city. Just not a great real city.
Transients are good. Most of the vibrant culture of the Bay Area comes from new people, though I know the old people often don’t like it.
New York and San Francisco have just as many old traditions as Baltimore. Some of the delis are nearly 100 years old.
I’ve been traveling for 50 years, and I generally have no trouble identifying real cities as opposed to suburban cities which are strip malls and indoor malls.
I wish food was identical across the country. There may be one or two places with good pastrami in the Bay Area, but they are far away from me, and the only decent bialy I’ve found here is in the Contemporary Jewish Museum. But the diversity of food here is as good as New York, just different.
No way you could mistake a California city for Boston or even New Jersey. Different tree population, the streets are wider here, in some places you see mountains.
All the subways are different too.
Now I will admit that smaller cities have been chained to death. Boulder and Princeton used to have distinctive downtown areas, now the independent stores have been replaced by The Gap and such. The similarity of those cities (except for the mountains and such) I’ll give you.
The thing about museums in New York is not just the size of the big ones, but the number of smaller ones, like the Carnegie, which lots of tourists never get to.
Really, if you can’t tell the difference between cities, you aren’t looking hard enough.
“All the phonies come out at night - bankers, secretaries, real estate developers, fashion designers, Web developers, systems analysts, Californians, slick, venal. Someday a real collapse will come and put the scum back on the streets.”
It’s utterly amusing to hear people getting all misty-eyed for JDs*, drug gangs, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and crack cocaine. I’m motivated to ask them “In what year would you rather be dumped into Times Square at midnight? 1978 or 2018?” if only to see the cognitive dissonance playing out across their great big round faces.
*(Juvenile Delinquents. See, back in The Real Fifties, people were afraid of teens who dressed in black and carried switchblades. Maybe because they weren’t much for dancing.)
Hey those Jets are dangerous, I’ve heard they’ll kill your brother.
Ah, but at least in the case of JFK, you can get the Subway to Howard Beach Station (and for that, you Take the “A” Train so you even got some cultural connection) or Suthpin Blvd/Jamaica and then connect to the Air Train to the terminals. Sure it means 5 more bucks on the metrocard but that makes a grand total of $8 (or if you subway to Penn Sta. then LIRR to Jamaica, then it’s a grand total of $18 - that’s how I’ve been doing flying into NY for years).
Newark? only if I absolutely have to and that has an AirTrain connection to NJ PATH that takes me into downtown. OTOH, yeah, how come in 80 years nobody has bothered sending a rail line near LaGuardia?
Let’s be faithful to NY, the authentic phrasing is The Rent is Too Damn High. 
I mean, how come we did not get THIS NY candidate to make it to national prominence?
I did forget about Newark, and after my last post I discovered that there was an AirTrain option for JFK, so on the basis of this and the 24-hour service I am ready to place the Subway above the Metro, while I still think that the T and the Tube are superior.
If anyone has a minute, can someone explain the hatred of gentrification to me?
Why the hate for the immigrants (i.e.: wealthy people of uninteresting, to some, culture)? Doesn’t blame for ‘gentrification’ rest with the natives who sell their property to them?
people don’t like it when a poor area starts becoming not-poor, because it supposedly prices out the poor people who then have to leave. Which is actually something to be concerned about, because you risk just moving impoverished areas around rather than making everything better (Detroit is a great example; downtown is revitalizing, but the neighborhoods surrounding downtown have been blighted for a long time and people who can’t afford to live downtown get pushed further out.)
of course, most people screaming “Gentrification!” don’t actually have any workable solutions to it, they just want to scream about something to make themselves feel better.
I’ve worked in Manhattan since 2001. Lived in Union Square for about 5 years before moving just over the river to Hoboken with my wife. For all intents and purposes, Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken and the rest of the towns along the Hudson have become a de facto “sixth borough” of New York. But technically they are not New York, so that should be considered as well.
People also seem to forget that New York City includes vast swaths of areas that aren’t Tribeca, Soho or the Upper East Side.
The article does sound like the same “Urban White Liberal Intellectual Screed” about New York I’ve been hearing for the past 30 years. A lot of it is true though. From my own experience and observation, New York does tend to cater to a young, single, somewhat affluent demographic in their 20s and 30s. That’s the New York presented in TV shows like Friends, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother, Sex and the City and Girls and countless romantic comedies. Young people crammed into small crappy overpriced apartments, spending all their extra cash on drinking, dating, eating at fancy restaurants, etc.
Once you start having kids, it’s a lot harder to stay in the city. Space is way too expensive, so other than the commute, there is just too much of an advantage to get a house out in New Jersey, Long Island or Westchester and take the train in.
So yeah, the long term effect of that is you end up with a city where everyone is either a kid right out of college or a millionaire celebrity or hedge fund guy.
One of the problems I see is that a lot of smaller buildings get knocked down and replaced with gigantic self contained glass yuppie ghettos. So you lose the feel of an actual neighborhood as people just come home, lock their doors, order take out, work out in their building’s gym, swim in the building’s pool and hang out in the building’s lounge.
Spoken like someone who has absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
Also, the article mentions Hudson Yards. Between that complex, all the new skyscrapers in Midtown and the new World Trade Center complex downtown, New York looks less like the iconic New York from my youth and more like a glass dystopia where one might go to purchase a cyborg in the not-too-distant future.
I only dislike buildings being knocked down for the first 3-7 years after their replacement, since new buildings always look gaudy until they’ve acquired several years of natural aging from the elements. After that, some of them look better than what they’ve replaced, some worse.