Having had the opportunity to go to New York last April I found it definitely to be an extremely interesting city with literally countless things to do. Being confined to Manhattan, I was almost never intimidated (even at Times Square or Empire state Building) and certainly was never scared. In fact if nothing else I was impressed by the cleanliness of the city, my previous big city experienced mainly confined to Los Angeles.
And you know there’s some hipster bakery in Brooklyn that’s doing that too. (At an astoundingly high price – have you any idea how short is the shelf life of a pure young virgin in NYC?)
And yeah, fer cryin’ out loud it does not all smell urinous. That’s another overwrought meme/trope. Sure it does not smell sweetly of big sky and sagebrush, but come on, 8million people and their lunches and vehicles, you can’t have everything. Go into Katz’s to get your good smells there.
Look at Houston’s too. Apparently about one in a hundred inhabitants get murdered there. Who the hell made this chart that they left such glaring errors on them?
The poster I was responding to was referring to safety from violent crime. The overall ranking includes things like “economic safety” and “health safety,” and NYC is in the top 10 when those metrics are included. It’s not in the top 10 on the violent crime index (hence the reference to pages 25-26).
You do not. You might have access to better bagels than me, but great bread has been increasingly easy to get in America for a long time.
Oddly enough, I just finished a bagel. A freshly baked onion bagel with Nova cream cheese and slices of ripe Jersey tomato.
I like it here.
You know, I can’t tell if you are feigning the persona of a NYC snob, or if you really are one. Good job.
Poe’s Law.
Now be off, thou patch, thou rude mechanical, that works for bread upon Athenian stalls, ere an ass’s nole I fix upon thy head.
Count your blessings. The Bay Area is great, but the best bagel anywhere near me is mediocre, and most are awful.
Some people may get nostalgic about their ponds and hay rides, but I get nostalgic for Saturday nights with a snack of bagels, lox, whitefish, and an early edition of the Sunday New York Times. Ah, bliss.
I thought the good tomatoes came from the Hamptons.
Farmers were priced out of eastern Long Island ages ago. Good local tomatoes (grown in sufficient abundance to keep the price under $2 a pound in peak season) come from either New Jersey or up the Hudson River a piece.
But your local produce is ooh la la ALL YEAR ROUND, not just in summer/fall. (If I were in your shoes, I would just put me cream cheese and whitefish on a thick slab of sourdough toast from the nearest bakery. And you can buy the Times anywhere.)
Yeah, but in Chicago you can only get deep-dish Times. 
I lived in New York for almost four years:
Interesting? I realize I’m an outlier here, but…no, definitely not. This is not to say that New York is un-interesting, but it is far and away the most overrated city I’ve spent much time in and is definitely not as interesting as it is made out to be. The Manhattan grid pattern, for example, is great for orienting yourself, but is often very boring to walk through. A lot of New York, I think, trades off of incessant self-boosterism and reputations earned in the past as opposed to the current reality.
Intimidating? Not particularly, if you’re used to other cities. If you’ve never been in a big city before then I suppose it might be intimidating at first
Dangerous? No - as others have pointed out New York is currently one of the safest big cities in the US.
For my birthday my daughter sends me whitefish from some nice place. There are many wonderful types of fish here, but whitefish is not among them. And you can’t get red horseradish here. When we visited our old town in NJ I bought some to bring back.
I get the Times delivered - but reading it on Saturday night is the thing I miss. That you can’t do here.
Yeah, produce is great, but in the winter we more or less have winter vegetables only. The rest come from Mexico. Oh, Donald Trump …
You can get Coney Island whitefish year round, but you have to harvest 'em yourself.
Josephson’s Smokehouse in Astoria, Oregon, makes smoked whitefish equal to or better than anything I’ve had in the East.
As for your horseradish…1. Boil beets. 2. Use boiled beets to make pickled beets. 3. Stir some of the broth into your horseradish. If you want, you can put it back into the bottle and pretend you bought it at the store that way. Sheesh, us New York Snobs have to explain how to do EVERYTHING.
Ewwwwww!
Really? The example of how uninteresting New York is to you is to point out its geographic layout? Well, I guess I live in the city of grids, broken up by the occasional diagonal (Chicago), but… really? That’s about the last thing that comes to mind in terms of making a city interesting for me. Different strokes, I guess.
That’s probably because you are a big “E” extrovert who isn’t happy unless you have someone else’s elbows in your ribs 24/7. For anyone who wants to feel alone for more than 5 minutes at a time it is a nightmare.
I have never been somewhere that vibrates before. Doesn’t matter where you are, in the street, in a house, in a sky scraper, everywhere within the city limits literally vibrates. You can put your hand to any surface and feel the rumble. It’s exhausting.
Add to that the need to plan in an hour each way to get to anything “interesting” and I have to challenge your definitions. I can get across my state in the time it takes to get to a grocery store in NYC. And I can make my car payment with what I would save on the groceries.