is New York City dead?

Well... probably not! We have a really nice apartment to be honest. Two bathrooms, one spare bedroom, big open space, don't mind street parking in our neighborhood.

I have only spent a little time in LA, but I think it would be tough for me to live there. The constant driving, all your friends being spread out, too hot.

― ian, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 1:04 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It feels too suburban, and the parts that feel walkable seem bad. Of course I'm sure there are plenty of nice neighborhoods, I've just never spent time in them.

― ian, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 1:05 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like we live in the exact right neighborhood for us, close to good friends (or close enough) and one block from our son's elementary school. we're even in a bit of a valley, so we're not baking in the sun all day during the summer. there's even a vv good bookstore nearby, and movie theaters. you can walk! it's very comfortable right here. but a lot of the trendy hoods I don't really dig. I didn't like Silver Lake and Highland Park isn't really my "thing." I think if i was coming to town now, I'd aim to live in downtown or Little Tokyo.

My issue I guess is I've never quite felt at home here, I'm not really a big fan of the climate and eventually it'll be a city only a war boy could love. And really the real estate prices are just depressing for us, a family trying to scrape by and stick around to help out my wife's parents.

i also like to run around strange cities with paper maps in hand, which usually involves getting lost for 30 minutes here and there. I was wandering among all these nice houses in Los Feliz a few summers back with nary a human in sight, and was sure someone was gonna call the cops.

That Judd Apatow show "Love" made me think that LA could be ok. I don't think I have outright ever enjoyed being there though.

My friends in LA who hate living there say they don't want to move to NYC because everyone in NYC thinks they are too smart.

tbf we are pretty smart

i stayed in echo park when i went to LA (at a friend of a friends') it was really pretty; i love cities on hills and think i disagree with 'a city built where the land did not want a city to be'. however the spread out driving around thing totally sucks. nyc always rules, although i always wonder why so many people who move there seem disapointed

everyone i know who has lived in new york moaned a lot about their commutes. i guess it can be quotidian things like that that make or break something for you

I have enjoyed my couple visits to LA, I even walked and used transit during one of them. It’s unlike anywhere else that is for heckin sure.

A lot of women I know had a terrible time dating in NYC and had to leave to find partners.

I have had a terrible time, and stopped looking. Cheaper.

I feel like I can maybe do two years here then I’ll need to figure something else out.

A lot of women I know had a terrible time dating in NYC and had to leave to find partners.
― Yerac, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 5:07 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was an accepted truth when I lived there briefly in the late 90s. Wonder how far back it goes.

reading these responses makes me feel like i like NYC for different reasons than everyone else. i like living here because i like the density! i like that walking is part of my daily routine and that most everything i need is within a 15 minute walk of where i live, and for everything else there's amazon. subway sucks but not so bad for me because i don't take it during peak rush hours. being around people in general is good, i think, even complete strangers. it's good to know other people exist and also i'm an inveterate people-watcher. i like that when it's 70 on a summer evening i can go out an walk about an hour without any particular aim. what kills me about suburban living is how deterministic it is, you drive from your house to the supermarket and back and all in between is is a bunch of grousing at other cars, stopping at the train tracks. grocery shopping can be a pain, i acknowledge, i'm pretty close to getting a little grocery cart.

the artist communities, bars, are not something i'm really even aware of. probably the movie scene is what i'd miss most if i were to leave but even now i rarely go to any movies, as morbs knows, because most movies are longer than 89 minutes for some reason, and in DCP.

no, everyone is just moving to queens now

xp tbh all of those reasons are exactly why I loved visiting NYC and want to return soon, but the state of the subway did make me sad

i like that when it's 70 on a summer evening i can go out an walk about an hour without any particular aim

dan thank you for living my nyc flaneur fantasy <3

I would say that most people in NYC love that they walk a lot and can walk anywhere.

read that as dad xp

i love walking in every city but nyc walking that's a whole other level

I really don't know how anyone is going to be able to open any kind of new business in a commercial space without some wack monolithic investors.

dan thank you for living my nyc flaneur fantasy <3

― flopson, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 5:38 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark

<3

also +1 on the city being a lot less compelling now that caek's gone!

learn another language and leave the USA, it’s a challenge but the satisfaction is worth it. if you have kids they’ll be bilingual in like 3 months

Dublin guys Dublin

I can attest that Dan likes to walk and look at ppl

i've lived in los angeles six years now

when i first moved here everything did look suburban and 3/4 of it look like a third world country, which i've gotten used to now

and it took me a while to know where the part of the county was that feels like a proper city and then i moved there, lived there for a few years and good lord it was slightly horrifying

nyc never appealed to me though and but i never "got it"

i do miss vancouver a lot, mostly because all my pals are there and it's my base, i'm glad i'll be moving back at the end of the year if everything goes well *knock on wood*

but los angeles is a weird place. like you can find anything and everything and that's what makes it cool and horrific all at the same time. it's got these "underground" worlds (plural) that reminds me of tokyo

and if you're caught staring a little too long you'll get shot which is kinda cool because staring is not nice (something vancouver can learn from)

i'm visiting again in a week. I still love it there.

i've actually really learned to love los angeles and it has a very special place in my heart now

everyone i know basically hates it though

but i love all the different cultures and parts of the city, like it's no big deal if you need to visit compton, it's not like "oh shit COMPTON" which is what a lot of people outside of la feel

one sad thing is los angeles is so segregated by race, so for all its diversity, there might as well not be any but i guess this exists pretty much in most very diverse cities

i was in vancouver last month and everyone there was so friggin nice. ime they display the warm, welcoming attitude usually misattributed to american southerners (usually by southerners themselves)

stay a little longer and you'll change your mind

you make your own new york
for me, landing between Prospect Park and Greenwood Cemetery was such a blessing. Both are complex outdoor spaces, heavily landscaped and considered; one is absolutely jammed full of people above ground and the other is virtually empty of living people. Both are wonderful options to reset from the city's chaos. I try to get to both at least once a week and that helps keep me balanced. that and the medicine.

Seems like NYC is not dead. thanks for confirming, everyone

everyone is just moving to queens now

I have noticed this a little bit, but I'll prob notice it a lot more soon since the L tunnel shuts down next year

no chili, it's like when the electrical energy is still pulsing thru a corpse

I'm a queens booster but you still need like middle class income to live here, other than maybe Jamaica.

i don't think new york is dying as much as i am.

it is however meeting a lot of less interesting cities half way.

What’s it like in Mexico City these days

Friend's little brother has lived there for a few years, loves it. Last I heard he made enough to live playing online poker for a few hours a day but he might be doing something else with that degree in applied mathematics now.

I loved from Brooklyn to Queens in 2015. I was really hoping for Jackson Heights or Sunnyside but landed in Astoria.

i used to live out in jersey city, walking distance from man alive.... i have nostalgia for that neighborhood, though i think MA's neck of the woods was a bit rougher. didn't some guy get shot in that bar out front of your place?
anyways, i miss hangin' with you and your wife in those halcyon pre-kid days.

What’s it like in Mexico City these days

― direct to consumer online mattress brand (silby)

friend moved there a couple years ago and loves it. i'm making plans to go visit soon

I didn't read this whole thread because I missed it.

Williamsburg is a joke but greenpoint and bushwick and ridgewood and still "cool" by most people's standards.

It's still expensive but there are cheap ways and places to live and people willing to spend 75% of their salary on rent and creative trust fund kids oh so many trust fund kids.

There's cool pockets in manhattan, particularly lower east side to chinatown. Just go to Commend or 2 Bridges.

I've lived in Woodside Queens for 12 years and still pay less than 2K for a large 2 bedroom apt in a nice building, plus 175$ for parking in the garage underneath, take that.

But people still move here to make it. There's no competition in the states other than LA. We still have the best food, the most record stores and just the most everything, except for decent vietnamese food.

It's the same as it's always been, scene-wise, sure it's not a packed Max's Kansas City or empty lot show in Williamsburg but the amount of kids doing techno/electronic music type stuff through bushwick and DJing and whatnot, still is overwhelming. Still more things going on in a single night than any other american city has in a month.

But half of those things are empty and lame.

i moved out 11 years ago. two kids now. i can't fathom the school situation?? isn't it sort of apocalyptic? primary schools in london are largely excellent, even in deprived boroughs.

Is there decent indian food? I've never been able to find it.

in london??

i'm no expert but off the top of my head you've got rasa in stoke newington, tayabbs in whitechapel, chor bizarre in mayfair

I found NYC quite depressing when I was there last spring for the first time in many many years. So many empty storefronts, etc. Obv there are great things about it that will always be there, and some of those great things are things I appreciate more now that I'm older than I did when I was younger (ie: I'm there with my kid so I'm not looking for vibrant nightlife, music clubs, etc so much now) but it seemed like a categorically different city than it used to be.

London on the other hand I still adore, find vibrant and intensely enjoyable, look forward to being there every year. I'd sooner move there than anywhere else.

decent indian food exists just not at the most obvious places in jackson heights. Like some of the smaller more random places or curry hill or out in richmond hill. Indian food in jackson heights has been largely replaced by nepali food.

i stayed in greenpoint over new year's, and what surprised me was how little had actually changed? i think of new york as growing and changing too fast, favorite restaurants closing within months, but greenpoint just kinda looked like it always had, maybe a couple of new bars, a new restaurant or two, but in general it was the same old weatherbeaten vibe, everything half run-down, the same inscrutable interlocking latticework of jealously guarded private property honeycombed within networks of utterly begrimed common land

huh

greenpoint is massively overhauled to my eye

the storefronts are physically the same (weatherbeaten for sure) but the businesses are all 'owl & butterchurn' twee shit now

and driving down manhattan ave is now comically hair-raising, like walking a hippo through the eye of a needle

the winos remain as scary as before though.

i didn't walk down manhattan ave - i never took a step in the direction of bedford actually, maybe this is why