Having never been closer to Manhattan than the east side of Indianapolis, Indiana (where I was born), I must plead ignorance about New York County, NY.
Some of my misinformation:
The traffic suffers from permanent gridlock, so cars never move at all.
Wherever in Manhattan you are you run a very serious risk of being mugged.
There are no vacant lots. (And I am not talking about Sept. 11…:()
Taxicab drivers are by definition rude, reckless, and greedy.
All New Yorkers speak in an incomprehensible nasal whine.
There may be others, I confess; but for now I’d just like to hear from those of the Teeming Millions who are New Yorkers and are ready to defend their city verbally, even if it means disillusioning me to do so. [ to me]
IANANY’er but… some friends and I, visited just over a year ago, and I actually felt very safe (not what I was expecting!) No huge traffic jams. We met some really nice people, (no nasal whine lol). However, there really was steam coming up from drains in the sidewalk :eek: just like the movies lol (I assume heating for the underground?) The taxi drivers tooted at each other constantly! When we eventually took a taxi, we of course had to ask why, and he said "because most of them are such s****y drivers and keep cutting each other up. All in all a really enjoyable week.
I’m not a local, but I spent some time in Manhattan around the Y2K New Year’s and loved it. I saw cars moving swiftly (though there was lots of honking), and at no time did I feel in danger of being mugged. I live downtwn in a large Southern city, where I constantly feel in danger of being mugged; at all times I felt safer there than I feel here, and this is after years of having my mugger-sense fortified (and yes, I’ve been mugged; it was not fun).
No, there are no vacant lots that I saw. I spent two years in Tokyo, and in that time I saw exactly one vacant lot, which was so shocking I took a picture of it.
The taxi drivers were wild–but extremely competent–drivers, and I never saw one in an accident. Also if you get in a cab on Wall Street and shout, “I have to be at 37th and Lexington in ten minutes, and I have to smoke!!!,” they’ll get you there on time as long as you roll the window down and give a big tip.
The short version: I have not spent much time in New York, but my impression was that if you dress for it (get a good-looking, nonstandard-color blazer from the thrift store) and learn a smattering of geography before you go, you’ll love it. After one day, tourists started stoping me for directions.
I spent entire days at MoMA, the Morgan library, Times Square, you name it, and I have never felt so welcomed. (And this was pre-Sept. 11.)
I am a New Yorker, and have been one for over a year. (Working in the city more than living here… I only stayed in the city for a couple months before I got into my apartment on Long Island)
The worst traffic jams I’ve found are during rush hour - just like anywhere else. But even on the busier streets (thinking particularly of 7th Avenue, which I cross every day to get to work), it’s never safe to cross even when it looks like they might be gridlocked – the smaller streets (like 31st) you don’t usually have to wait for a light for, though.
I’ve never felt unsafe walking anywhere in Manhattan. Of course, you need to take the proper procautions - if you have a zippered place to put your money, put it there, don’t have expensive items hanging out of bags where you can’t really see them – that kind of thing. But, really, even when I was up in the Harlem area, I didn’t feel nervous about walking around alone.
As far as vacant lots go - I’d have to say that’s pretty much true. Real estate is at a premium here. I’ve seen lots become vacant, when they’re tearing down a building, but they usually have the construction walls up around it, and they’re working on putting another building there immediately. Of course, I’ve not been everywhere in the city, so there could be a few scattered here and there that I don’t know about.
I haven’t had the experience of rude taxi drivers, but that could be, in part, because I’ve only ridden in one since I moved here. (I prefer the subway if I’m getting around.) I’ve found the taxi drivers here no more rude to pedestrians than the every day drivers. I’ve even had several stop to let me cross the street when I have the right of way – which is NOT a given here!
I know several native New Yorkers, and I can’t say that even one of them speaks in an incomprehensible nasal whine. Of course, neither do us transplants, either.
If you have any other questions, I’ll answer them to the best of my ability, but I also know there are a lot more native New Yorkers who are far more versed in everything than I am!
New York has to be one of the most diverse places in the known universe. It’s full of all types of people, and they are content for the most part to live and let live. You can sit in Washington Square Park, for instance, and just people watch. You’ll see everything imaginable, from stylish sophisticates to grunge college student slackers to ordinary mom-types out for some air with their toddlers. All just hanging out there, integral parts of the great mosaic.
Most people outside the area think of New York City as some enormous, amorphous megalopolis – faceless and dirty and crowded. But when you get right into it, most of it is nothing more than a lot of little neighborhoods cheek by jowl with each other. There’s the barbershop on the corner, and the deli with its regular customers. And there’s the bodega and the shoe store. And people live there, the same as they live in smaller cities and towns, mostly within their little sphere of influence at home and at work. There’s always the possibility of branching out and going someplace special, of course, and that’s what makes NY really great. Movies, plays, opera, concerts of all kinds, baseball, basketball, museums…all readily accessible and many of them among the greatest in the world. You’re not seeing community theater, man, you’re seeing Broadway! You’re not seeing some scruffy single A team, you’re seeing the Yankees!
And the odd fact exists that many native New Yorkers have never visited many of the sites that the city is famous for. Which, when you think of it, is charmingly provincial.
I’ll limit myself to addressing your five questions. But I dearly love New York, which as of January has been my home for longer than any other place. So I could go on…and on…and on.
This does happen on rare occasions - but only when there’s catastrophic weather or a big shindig, usually involving the United Nations. F’rinstance, for the UN’s 40th anniversary in 1995, there were scores of heads of state or government in town. Security was absurdly tight, so traffic barely moved. But everyone knows about these things in advance - the city actually issues a “Gridlock Alert” to persuade those who normally would drive switch to mass transit. (Why any able-bodied person would normally drive in Manhattan is a separate rant.)
Now, “moving” may be pretty damn slow under the best of circumstances. The big problem is getting crosstown, since our road network was designed with a few nice, broad north-south avenues and 230 itty-bitty crosstown streets. If all you have to do is go north or south, you can often keep a pretty steady 25-30 mph clip even in rush hour (provided you avoid Times Square or Midtown, where so many cabs are stopping that it throws everything off). Crosstown may be about 6 mph, at which point walking starts to look pretty good.
I have been mugged exactly once in 10 1/2 years of living here. Them’s pretty good odds for anywhere. In my case, it took place on a Saturday afternoon on the subway, between Wall Street and Clark Street stations. The guy got all of 14 bucks off me. Pretty scary, but minor-league. Mainly due (a) to police reforms that started under Dinkins and strengthened under Giuliani, and (b) to a stabilizing of the drug trade, this kind of random crime has plummeted. New York now has a much lower per capita crime rate than lots of smaller cities, including (IIRC) Seattle and Minneapolis.
Actually, there most certainly are, but many people don’t know how to recognize them:
Parking lots. Most parking lots are there only because the owner is waiting to get the absolute maximum price for the lot - or because there’s a zoning or other legal dispute inhibiting development. As soon as the dispute’s over or the market changes, the parking lots start to disappear. For example, the soon-to-be-former flea market area in my neighborhood, Chelsea. The flea market used to cover about six parking lots on weekends. Now it’s down to two. Due to a zoning change that now permits high-rise residential construction in that area, the other four lots are now 39-story, 30-story, 32-story and (as of this morning) 29-story apartment buildings. (The last one’s still under construction.)
And, don’t forget that tourists usually only see about half of Manhattan - the part below 96th street. Above 96th - and especially above 125th - there are lots of vacant lots that look like vacant lots. Often quite dangerous and depressing, covered in crack phials and razor wire. In years past, many of the lots were owned by the city, which inherited them through tax liens. I know some have been sold since then, but I’m not sure about the fate of many.
A couple of years ago one of the news channels, in cooperation with some outside consumer group, did a test of taxi drivers. It found them almost uniformly honest. For example, a person pretending to be a tourist would get in the cab, asking for an address a block away. The drivers tested all told her that she could walk there for free. With longer routes, only one or two drivers (out of dozens) took out-of-the-way detours to inflate the meter.
Considering that the job pays dreadfully and cab drivers suffer astonishing rates of crime themselves (the murder rate for cabbies is shockingly high), it’s a real tribute. (There’s a reason most cab drivers are immigrants, and somewhat desperate.) The Taxi and Limo Commission deserves a bit of credit too - they imposed flat fares from Manhattan to the airports, and started enforcing testing requirements more consistently, especially in English comprehension.
As for rude and reckless - a lot of that can be put down to language/cultural barriers and low pay. Fare economics work to give incentives to deliver as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Your cabbie wants to dump you off fast, because he makes more money off someone getting in the cab door than by keeping her there a long time. (This is part of the reason the long detours are less common now - assuming they were ever more than urban legend.) A note for visitors: please tip your cabbies well. Cab fares are high, it’s true, but your driver keeps almost none of the fare, which goes to the rental he pays for the cab. He’s depending on tips. I give a minimum of 20%, and then round up to the nearest dollar. If you can’t afford it, take our incredibly complete, 24-hour mass transit or walk.
This accent, typically associated with white ethnics, is not that common among Manhattan residents anymore. There aren’t that many white-ethnics left living here - either they’ve moved up in income, and adopted more standard speech patterns, or they’ve left because it’s gotten too pricey. It’s much, much more common in middle- and working-class enclaves in the outer boroughs or the suburbs.
Any more questions?
Not yet, Oxymoron. So far you and the others have answered my questions quite well.
I did, however, once read that if everyone who works on Manhattan drove to work, they’d have to use all of the space south of 60th Street–perhaps half of the island’s total 23 square miles–as a parking lot! (I know a doctor who grew up in the New York area; she said that for all of the dismal ambience the New York subway system allegedly has, it is efficient in getting you where you want to go. :))
I had always equated Manhattan with, oh, say, East Berlin, until I was in town on business about this time last year, and stayed right between Times Square and Rockefeller.
I was entranced! I want to go back!
The streets were about the same as my beloved Atlanta, except they were a bit cleaner and a whole lot more interesting. The people were friendly in a busy sort of way (just like Atlanta), and the options for food, drink, and fun were wide open (a lot better than Atlanta).
So, enough with the sucking up, here is the question.
How do you do grocery shopping?
Picture my life. Every Saturday, I get in the car, drive about 5 miles, and blow $100-$200 on “groceries”, which means everything from food to dog food to diapers to mesquite chips; load it up in a big-ass cart, roll it out to the bird, put it in the trunk, haul it home, and lug it in. How on earth do you live in Manhattan if you have no car?
How do you manage to get 200 lbs. of crap into your apartment every week?
And where do you buy it? All I saw was tiny stores with really oddball stuff.
You take the subway from your worksphere back to your neighborhood.
On the walk back home, you stop in at your Friendly Butcher and pick up a couple of lamb chops or whatever. Alternatively, you stop in at the Friendly Fishmonger for a piece of sea bass or a couple handfuls of scallops.
Then you go by the Friendly Greengrocer and get your broccoli and Idahos. Occasionally you go to the Friendly Bodega to get some dried pasta or light bulbs or toilet paper. And you buy what you can carry. And it’s no problem, because all the places to GET this stuff are only a short walk from your door.
And you do this every day. See, you can decide what to have for dinner sometime before lunch that way.
Ike’s is the standard answer for a lot of people, but there are supermarkets here. It’s just that it would take about five or six of them to equal one standard suburban megamart.
Also bear in mind that people in Manhattan walk a lot. And we’re used to carrying things. You don’t buy more than you can carry, or you get what people call a granny cart - a tall, narrow, wheeled basket. My problem is that carts really are designed for grannies, so they’re too short for my 6’2" height. I just carry everything.
Oh, I almost forgot - every store in Manhattan delivers. People with larger families (even one child counts as a “larger family” in Manhattan…) often buy the groceries, then wait for them to be delivered. That’s a bit of scheduling issue, since you often have to wait for hours on a busy weekend; in the meantime you carry the dairy and meat home yourself. It’s also a bit of a labor issue. Recently several supermarkets on the Upper West Side were caught using illegals, mostly Africans, and paying them pennies to force them to rely on tips.
There are at least five or six supermarkets within five minutes’ walk of my apartment, but the quality is so uneven that I have to shop at several. I have a palm pilot program that lets me easily split my grocery list up into several stores. The Associated around the corner has lousy produce and meat, but they’re convenient, the lines are short, the staff are nice and the prices on dairy and staples are good. Western Beef on 9th Ave has great meat and dairy and OK produce, but the staples are kinda spotty. Chelsea Market has wonderful produce and fish, but the meat selection is small and there aren’t any staples at all, plus they close the earliest. Strawberry Fields is pricey but their produce is nice in a pinch. I never go to D’Agostinos because they’re horribly overpriced for everything. Gristedes is grim but has good prices on cereal, and they’re open 'til midnight so they’re good for emergencies. See?
You mean I’m supposed to go to the grocery store?blink blink
Actually, I live in Brooklyn, where there are larger and more “American” style super-grocery stores. When I lived in Manhattan, grocery shopping was a bit of a challenge, as Oxy outlined. Either way, there is still a large restaurant culture in New York – either eating out, or stopping to pick up take-out type stuff and bringing it home and making salad to go with it. The most annoying thing about grocery stores in Manhattan is that space is at such a premium. Aisles are tiny, and you would laugh at the mini version of shopping carts that most stores use. The actual shelf space is at a premium, at many Manhattan groceries, you get a choice of exactly one brand. Tough luck if you want Skippy and are in a Jiff supermarket. Also, Manhattan grocery stores run out of things that would never happen out in the burbs, because they don’t have space to keep much stock in the back. Out of sugar – well, the sugar delivery is Tuesday, so come back in a week.
(Having been raised in the Land of Wegmans, this is a big sore point with me)
On the up side, you can find tons of interesting and unusual ethic foods at your local market.
What else – oh, my favorite thing about NY – we have a lot of trees and nature! Ok, well not a lot, exactly, but much more than you see on TV. Our parks are beautiful, and many businesses cultivate tiny but interesting green spaces on their property. There are block associations that keep up lovely trees and plants, especially in historic neighborhoods. It’s not the concrete jungle that it always looks like on NYPD Blue or whatever.
As for grocery shopping I do it about once a week. I walk about half a mile to a large suburb style grocery store. I have this little folding cart. I’m not sure how to describe it as I’ve never seen one outside of NYC. But I take that to the store. The cart there has little hooks on the front for me to hang my cart on. Then when I’m done I load up my cart and push it all home. About 100 dollars worth of stuff a week for two people and two cats.
All these posts, and nobody has mentioned that MANHATTAN IS EXPENSIVE? Don’t get me wrong–it is a great city, and I wouldn’t move out of New Jersey to go anywhere but there, but it costs. My advice to you: put all the clothes you think you’ll need in one pile, and all the money in another. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.
What’s the rest of the city like outside of Manhattan? Is the Bronx really like another Beirut circa 1983? Is Staten Island still distancing itself from the city? Are Brooklyn and Queens the same as they’re portrayed on tv?
I’ve only been in Manhattan and have no clue what the rest of the city is like. Is the city still expensive outside of Manhattan?
The “outer boroughs” are huge. There are parts of the Bronx that are in pretty bad shape and there are parts that are very nice. The same can be said for all the boroughs, including Manhattan.
I’m sure you are thinking about the South Bronx of the 70’s. Blocks like those on this page don’t really exist any more. Sure, it’s still a poverty-stricken neighborhood, but the endless blocks of rubble are a thing of the past.
Here are pictures of the infamous Charlotte street now.
The image that New York has of being a crime-ridden, dirt filled crowded mushing of failing infrastructure and failing neighborhoods are a lasting image from the 70’s when the city really was turning into a crime-ridden, dirt filled one. I remember how the city struggled: the president told us to drop dead, the lights went out and the natives went wild and the neighborhood I grew up in was left to die.
But that was 30 years ago. This is the best city in the world. New York can take anything you throw at it and come out smelling like a, well. . .a hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut.
And Ike? Bite me.
to me]
