You can link to Google Street (look for the button on the top right). Here’s where John Lennon was shot. There’s a memorial in just inside the park to the right. Here’s where they shoot The Daily Show. I grew up half a block from that spot, and my father still lives there, paying $57 a month for a 2BR (the building is part of a rent subsidy program, and dad’s just living off social security so he gets the max). Here’s Gracie Mansion, where the mayor lives (if he wants to; the current mayor prefers to live in his apartment, which I’m sure is much nicer). My mother lives a block away from there and pays $4500 for a 2.5 bedroom that’s only slightly larger the 2BR my father pays $57 for.
OK, that made me laugh out loud. An apartment for only $350,000:eek: That would be a 5 bedroom, 4 bath house with full basement, 3 car garage on a wooded half acre of land. Maybe even a washer and dryer.
Hey, my city sucks more than yours. Wait, that didn’t come out right.
Excellent. I even looked at the buttons earlier and it didn’t register. The only downside is that it defaults to satellite and you’ve got to pick out the same scene again. THANKS. I’ve wanted to send street images from Google Earth and didn’t realize that was possible.
Adding to my post above, I like navigating on google map even better. You can get a split screen of the satellite view showing a figure pointing in the direction of the picture as you move around.
I thought I read the OP wrong at first - you want to live here without even visiting first? Jeebus.
First, living here “for just a year” is pointless. It doesn’t sound to me like you can afford an extended vacation. So, this is your life. You need to invest in it as a long-term thing, because it will likely be at least two years before you settle in and really find your groove and friends and your favorite places. Plus I think you are underestimating how costly it is not just to live here but to move here. By the time you pack and ship and travel, then pay first and last month’s rent plus security deposit plus 12% broker fee you’ve put down (conservatively) $5000 minimum just to start living (presuming you’re in a borough or Jersey, and aren’t married to having consistent heat or water pressure), and you don’t want to have to do that again in twelve months, especially when it means your kid has to change schools (again).
You might imagine you’ll spend your days gliding through the Met and going to the Opera or Broadway or having picnics in Central Park. But you know what you end up doing? Laundry. Dishes. Your kid’s homework. Hating your boss. It’s the same life that everyone has everywhere, but more expensive and a lot more maintenance. Have you researched schools your kid would go to or how you apply, or where you need to live to get into a decent one? Do you know what the rents are in those neighborhoods? While I know from experience that apartment-hunting is practically bloodsport here, I can only imagine that when decent schools are involved it’s a whole other level of competition, not to mention cost.
At the bare minimum, you have to visit once for 10 days, with your kid, during the depth of the season you hate the most (for me it was July, for you it might be February). Ideally, stay with a friend in a neighborhood you could likely afford and make a point of making meals and cleaning up after yourself, including a week’s worth of laundry. When you live here you won’t be able to afford to go out for dinner every night or daily maid service, so make a point of living, not just visiting.
If you don’t have a friend to stay with, then, honestly why would you move here? Living in NYC doesn’t take great genius, but it can be difficult, and you need a support system, especially as a parent. Yes, people in NYC can be wonderfully giving, but we are also busy and guarded. You have to work harder to earn friends here more than, I suspect, you have to do other places. I’ve been here over 7 years and with a couple of exceptions my best friends are still those from my home town I knew before I moved here. Moving here without at least a trustworthy friend or two around can be an extremely lonely proposition indeed.
This has been a message from the New York City Chamber of Commerce.
[Patton]
and because of that I predict that’s exactly what she’ll do. 
[/Patton]
I second Rachael Rage’s bit about schools. It’s nuts. In general I would opt for a smaller place in a neighborhood with good schools rather than a larger place in a neighborhood with worse schools. The top schools can be tested into, and waivers/variances can be granted, but those are long shots.
While we get the occasional blizzard & deep freeze, hot & nasty, Nor’easter, the weather’s actually a fairly moderate four season affair. Not too much of anything, really. If you like rainy days we have that. If you like glorious spring days we have that (includes that smell!), If you like magical snowy evenings, we have that (but you’d better get out fast), if you like going toe to toe with a howling gale, we have that.
I agree with some of the others in that having children in the city completely changes your experience of it in contrast to being single. When I was courting my wife, we’d be all over the place - museums, concerts, the Village, all kinds of shows, 3 airports with tons of flights to anywhere, the whole NYC deal. Yesterday I was down on 5th avenue by myself and can’t remember the last time I did that. With kids I became intimately familiar with my neighborhood as opposed to it being the area I barely gave a second thought to while I hoofed my way to the bus or train. Yeah, from time to time we do something special, but with two 5 year olds it can go sour fast, so we have to be careful and not invest too much in an outing. We have two though, so one is probably more portable.
All that said, I grew up in the suburbs, spent a good amount of time in the hinterlands, always considered myself sort of an outdoorsy type but I can’t bear to leave NYC. I don’t know what we’re going to do in a couple of years.
I am going to have to disagree with this a little bit. Rachael Rage is right, of course, that you do laundry and dishes and homework and all that unpleasantness in NYC. Don’t forget about that part of it all. But you know how I spend my non-work hours? At the Opera or Broadway shows or various museums or on picnics in the park. You can do all of these things. You can do quite a lot of them, actually. So far in the month of February I’ve been to the theater twice and next weekend I am going to the museum. I have tickets to the opera in March and April already purchased and waiting to be picked up at the box office. These things are available and plentiful in NYC and you can do quite a lot of them but they will not be all you do. You still have to go to work and clean your place.
I will also point out that living here is different. Not harder, necessarily, but different. For example, you don’t do all of your weekly shopping in one trip because we really have no big box stores. You can’t get shoes, groceries, cleaning supplies, a ladder, and a digital camera all in the same place here, and even if you could you couldn’t feasibly haul it all back to your apartment because you have to carry all of that on the train or the bus. For me, that is part of why I like NYC. For you that might just be a big pain in the ass.
Yes but I don’t have to wait 2 hours to get a table at Olive Garden.
What are the ranges in cost for a broadway play, opera and museum. What’s a meal run at a good restaurant (the kind you’d order wine at).
I realize the range is wide in what I’m asking but can you give a descriptive example and a budget of what you would spend. I’d figure $60 a person for a nice meal with wine in my area but I’m not a theater goer. I’d probably spend $15-$20 for music
You acknowledged the potential thrill, but the point is you didn’t acknowledge that for many, many people the thrill is a SUFFICIENT reason for putting up with all the drawbacks you keep mentioning. I don’t know why, so it’s not for me to make a case for it – as I mentioned upthread, I don’t like New York, so I’ll leave it to the fans of the place to make the case why the “bright lights of Broadway make the panhandlers sparkle.” But for whatever reason, a lot of people go gaga over this place and are willing to put up with any number of drawbacks to live here. Who knows, maybe Alice is one of those people.
As Mayor Bloomberg is my witness, I swear I believe there are people in NYC who think they’ve died and gone to heaven.
Broadway is about $110 per ticket these days (plus another $10 or more in service charges if you order online or over the phone), but discounts - even 50% off - are pretty easy to find for the less popular shows. Off-Broadway can be fantastic for $35-$65 per ticket, and if you know where to look you can find an Off-Off Broadway or Fringe gem for $15-$18. But crap abounds at all price levels, so caveat emptor.
City-funded museums (i.e. the Met, Museum of Natural History) are pay-what-you-can. Suggested donations are around $12-$20 but you can pay a buck or nothing and it’s all fine. Other museums (The Whitney, MOMA) cost about $20, AFAIK.
Opera I don’t know but they are desperate for younger audiences as the main supporters are dying off, so youth discounts for students and people under 35 are plentiful.
Roughly I’d think $50-$60 per person is about right for dinner in a mid-range restaurant with a tablecloth. If you want a nice place it’s probably quite a bit more, and anywhere really fashionable you won’t be able to get in to pay $300 per head, but I don’t eat at those places so I don’t really know.
Live rock music in a bar usually has a cover charge of $10-$20 depending on the club, and I think most Jazz places are more. But if it’s a weeknight or the band is just starting out you might not pay anything.
Oh, and movies are about $11 or $12 now I think - we usually buy online and my BF tends to buy the tickets, so I’m not positive about that.
Yep. And more of them than you can shake a stick at, believe it or not.
Well, the title of this thread is Why Shouldn’t I move to New York?, so it seems off-topic to sing its praises.
I chose to live here, thinking I would “try it out because I always wanted to” seven years ago. I moved from the west coast with no job, no apartment, and no particular skill set. But I also had no spouse or dependents, and I had trustworthy friends with an extra room I could sublet for a couple of months, and a substantial amount of liquid cash which gave me the luxury to pay six months rent up front (the only way I managed to get my apartment over the other applicants) and live for a while until I found a decent-paying, steady job in my field four years later.
That substantial amount of cash I had when I moved here? My retirement nest-egg? Yeah, that’s all gone. But I feel more at home here than I’ve ever felt anywhere. I love not having a car. Even though I rarely take the time to do all the fun stuff that pbbth does in her spare time (usually too tired, too stressed, too anti-social or too cheap to make the effort), but I still get a thrill walking by Central Park on the way to the subway, and I still have fun gawking at the tall buildings. I also hate that my apartment is too small but we are too broke to get a bigger place and it’s messing up my relationship. I hate that we can’t get rid of the roaches. I hate that I started grinding my teeth at night, and none of the decent dentists accept insurance.
One reason not to move here is that you avoid the pain of falling in love with the place, and realizing that you can’t afford it, or that you can’t find a job, or your significant other gets transferred out of state, but you’ve been here so long you cannot imagine living somewhere else.
You can go to some relatively high end places for like $200 for two (including a reasonablly priced bottle of wine). But I always suspect there are super-fancy restaurants that really wealthy people go to that I don’t even know about.
I actually think it’s easier to make friends in NY than some other places, like Boston for example. But the nature of the city in that a lot of people are commuters or transitory makes it hard to keep them for a long time.
For the Opera I regularly pay between $15-$25 per ticket. For Broadway I pay between $25-$50. For dinner that would range between $10-$40 per person depending on where I go. Museums generally go by donation so at those places I pay $1 (they use tax money to support those museums so I am paying for it whether or not I go) and the others all have 1 free day a month or are free on Fridays after 4 or something similar. I don’t mind sitting in the back of the house for a show, eating at places that aren’t in the middle of Times Square, or working my schedule around a museum’s free hours if I have the opportunity. You can do a lot of stuff in the city for little to no cost if you keep your eyes open. There are several books I can recommend if you do end up moving here that give you some tips on how to reduce your costs of living here.
Yeah, there are lots of ways to go broke in NYC but you certainly don’t have to go broke for dining and theatre. My range for dinner was $20-$45 (I was there '00-'05), this wasn’t fine dining but the restaurants were at least as nice as what I enjoy out here in Middle America. I never went to Broadway shows but I don’t think they’re that much more in other major markets, and at least NYC has the half-price booth. And when people say “there’s always something to do” they’re serious. If you have $25 in your pocket and a copy of TimeOut then you can find something to do beside see a movie.
Apparently Alice doesn’t live here anymore. I was interested in hearing what she wanted to see and do in New York.