is New York City dead?

many xps to calstars: if you think pointing out poor paving is petty, check that full article. the point is that the structure just opened and already the shoddy, non-union construction is showing serious wear and poor consideration. hudson yards was supposed to be the hermetic future and it's suffering near instantaneous mcmansion breakdown.

also xps to dan: https://www.charmin.com/en-us/about-us/sitorsquat

I think it’s annoying that it’s the final stop on the high line, because the high line is actually really cool. I love the newish whitney too

yeah the whitney is great

here's the problem with the highline in a nutshell:
http://gothamist.com/attachments/arts_jen/agora-43.jpg

Sometimes it’s like that but not always. It feels legitimately like public space though to me—not like I’m loitering in a corporate plaza

i'm prickly about public land issues and park space in particular and i'm glad that highline exists but c'est ne pas une parc

it's more like an amenity

i like the new whitney too, though i haven't had any luck catching anything good there.

There is just too many people everywhere, all the time. I thought once about going to the Queens Night Market once when it opened but then saw that it's always a mob.

it's easy for the crowding in the city to color everything and leave you jaded and cranky... though i bitch about it when it's in full swing, going to smorgasburg at the start of the season during a light rainstorm two weeks ago was great fun! not so much in mid july.

Give the night market another shot xp. It's not always a mob, especially if you wait for the excitement to die down after opening. Going early is always good too -- I think they start at 6pm. I say this as a person who hates crowds -- the ones at the night market are pretty manageable by NYC standards.

You can also try going in the fall as it's sort of under the radar that it closes and then reopens in fall for a few more weeks.

That said, I fucking HATE most of manhattan. I no longer work there and love not working there.

I just visited the Hudson Yards area because a relative won an affordable apartment lottery there -- the whole thing was a dystopian nightmare.

Smorgasburg is comically crowded in the summer

Even when it’s 195 degrees people are queuing for hot food

people pollution, incidentally, iswhy i prize greenwood cemetery so much. you can go out there in the heart of a metropolis on a June weekend at 75 degrees and walk for an hour and see maybe fifteen (live) people... that's changing too though!

i jog around prospect park and, at one point, had made the smorg grounds an irregular part of my route. there was a point last year where you literally could not jog within a football field length of the grounds; ridiculously overrun with drunk kids taking photos of their arepas

Prospect park has some semi-quiet spots

I used to have a couple of spaced out spots all over manhattan that I would hang out because I had to frequently kill an hour or two during the day during work and all those places have been completely overrun by "where did all these people come from?"

I gave up on smorgasburg pretty early on in its history. I couldn't get over spending $15 to eat streetfood while standing in a parking lot.

Astoria Park is a spot that I feel like is really beautiful and accessible and not insanely crowded IME, plus close to good food.

mods please redact that post

anyone know what's going on with the street construction in the meatpacking district? it's been going on, constantly, for maybe a year now i think, and nothing ever seems to be completed -- more and more lanes are closed and torn up all the time. (i don't care about the lanes, just tired of the honking as i walk through.)

i assume it has something to do with google buying the entire area, but i don't understand why it just keeps going

I hate smorgasburg. The Night Market feels to me like the anti-Smorgasburg. The food is much less gimmicky and more varied as well as more reasonably priced, and the crowd is also less gimmicky and more varied.

xpost every time I go to Astoria Park, I think "what a weird fucking place." I say that in a good way.

I just visited the Hudson Yards area because a relative won an affordable apartment lottery there

not gonna lie, i'm desperate enough to envy that

there's LOTS of quiet spots in Prospect! But I love the park deeply, even the batshit spots.... drummer's circle and LeFrak and the Audubon Center are routinely mobbed and that's part of the fun. Luckily it doesn't take much work to find some solace nearby.

Also, as someone who would happily move out of the city, I feel like the secret to staying sane here is just to avoid the hype. Whatever the latest restaurant to get big-upped in Eater or receive a new Michelin star or whatever is, there are dozens of equally good restaurants that maybe haven't gotten the hype since five years ago (or never) and the crowds have died down. People in this city line up to line up. They do things so they can say they did them. The city is so vast that it's always possible to find some out-of-the-way slice of goodness and peacefulness that isn't overrun. Our equivalent to prospect park -- Forest Park -- is practically empty. Almost too much so. It's a little run down but it's a very nice large urban park that even has hiking trails.

i love the Highline in the winter

Yeah, warm weather spots on a cold day are a great example. We went to Coney Island in early spring when it was windy and 55 degrees and had a great time.

Governors Island has yet to get out of control as of last year; good place to go and explore and chill on a thursday.

tbrr, you can find totally quiet spots in Central Park without much effort.

You have to go pretty high ime

But central park is incredible. Just the fact of it

yes i still enjoy chillin there all the time

i love central park altered and au naturale; going for a reason or just wandering around

re: queens night market, went the first night and it was terribly organized and a huge mess but went back later and it was fine. Totally reasonable and not at all smorgasborg'd out.

There's a little LIC Flea that has a few stands and isn't crowded and can be pleasant.

WPLJ, a pop/rock/Top 40 hits station since 1971, is going off the air at the end of May and is being replaced by a Christian contemporary station. Not a gospel or religious station, but a Christian rock station. NYC is dead if it's seen as a place that can support Christian rock radio.

i live right next to astoria park! it extremely rules!!!!

for the most part astoria has changed v slowly which is why i still live there. can feel a shift coming regardless

my place is just a tad too far to make it super convenient to go there all the time but when I do go there I love it.

kensington is being annexed slowly by park slope parents but i'm part of the problem i suppose

I hope they never Mccarren Park-condo it out but I feel like it's going to happen.

parts of NYC might not be so impressive these days, but tbh 99% of the rest of the country is the same fucking corner with a gas station + fast food restaurant + abandoned strip mall, on every other intersection, every highway ramp exit, everywhere, the fucking worst and least aesthetic combination of buildings, monotonous and interchangeable.

"This place is the worst" / "This place is better than all other places"

being a NYer is the ability to hold these two thoughts simultaneously, ime

new york sucks ass and i long to move to philly but as long as my band and job are here i'm here

but i do still love astoria for real

I must admit, having first visited NYC as a teenager and gone regularly through my 20s and 30s, I felt a palpable lack of magic when I was there a couple months ago. It didn't feel like the city had "died" so much as it felt so extremely ordinary, that there was nothing particularly anything about it. A functioning city filled with music and art and stores and so on... the equivalent of a big box of urbanity. Even as the sun set on London and Paris and Los Angeles and they became less interesting, they never lost their particular identity the way that it felt NYC was completely stripped of it. (San Francisco feels unmagical to me also, but it never ever really felt magical to me. It's just the freezing cold city where restaurants don't let you make reservations so you have to wait 45 minutes every time you want to eat.)

It doesn't help that most of my friends have left or are leaving. Even the NYC lifers are packing up and going.

I almost moved to around Sunset Park because of those finnish co-op buildings around the park that are hopefully never going anywhere.

I certainly can't afford Kensington anymore, especially while underemployed, but looking for a cheaper place than I have now is daunting. So here I sit waiting for oblivion.

if i'm ever forced to move (i've been in the same apt for 13 years) i'll probably just leave town

everyone otm except calstars. smdh at finding anything about hudson yards ambitious or exciting.