is New York City dead?

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.

"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

Morbs, I feel you. I assume you're on ninety lists and trying to find any program that works.this is maybe a good thread to discuss what you're finding in that process and for anyone who knows the inner workings of the city housing world to chime in?

remains fun to visit, wouldn't particularly care to live there.

ulysses, apparently I've never told you I'm lazy? I saw a couple eligibility criteria and threw in the towel.

I've never been to the High Line and I feel like it's too late now--I regret not having gone like 15 years ago. But I'm low-key obsessed with the head garden designer, Piet Oudolf, in the sense that I'm loosely basing my gardening plans for this year on his hallmark style.

I've only been once. It was fine. It was fine for walking higher up than you normally would? I remember it seeming dark.

the high line on particularly empty days is a fun diversion. sometimes i get ice cream and chill out

i don't exactly love it but it's WAY better-designed than it could have been - lot of subtle variety built in so that it feels different at block 15 than at block 10 and block 5.

also appreciate all of diller & scofidio's little arty things trying to remind you of the artificiality of 'city views' and even of the 'nature' being put on display. there's ideas there. any other city you're just going to get a bunch of pavers, some plants and novelty benches.

I like the high line but I find it more frustrating when crowded than other city walks just because nobody's really "doing anything"...if the whole point s a cool place to stroll—and not shopping or going A to B or whatever—then being hemmed in w/ tourists is especially :-/

wow i'm surprised at the hate for the Oculus! I mean, I hate Westfield, and they chose terrible shops to go inside it - upscale fast-casual but completely anonymous - but the space itself, and the elaboration of it back inside the mall - i was completely blown away. it's both alien and totally familiar. the latter in that it's explicitly retro on two levels: the slanting ribs of the Oculus which pretty much have to be a direct quote of the famous shafts of light that used to fall in Grand Central before the buildings on either side blocked it out; and a globular 70s Kubrickian modernism. the alienness in just the sleek, slightly non-human vibe going on - those weird benches in the center that look like they might not be designed for people's actual asses to sit in; the Giger-esqueness of the "ribs". i felt like i might have to become something other than human to feel welcomed by it - which is a feeling i kinda like?!

I have no gripe w the design, independent of context it's super cool! I just don't get the logic relative to the surrounding buildings

oh yeah. well, all those buildings down there look like they were just sort of pushed around a chess board and left there.

i don't hate the interior space, but yeah the exterior is completely out of context. you have to go too far to make various transit connections, but there's not a lot they could have done about that. mostly i resent that it's just a nice mall that you *have* to walk through and that it cost $4 billion

tbf it's not as bad as penn station

morbs, you gotta fight for life up in this dumb motherfucking city! keep hunting!

also mookie otm

the slanting ribs of the Oculus which pretty much have to be a direct quote of the famous shafts of light that used to fall in Grand Central before the buildings on either side blocked it out

I like that idea but I don’t think it was intentional, given the architect.

Also for some reason Manhattan doesn’t feel like the right environment to encounter an “alien” or Kubrickian structure. I have to meditate on why I feel that way.

mostly because i gotta get to fucking work!

it'd be cool if the atrium was either not a mall or was a totally functionless space adjacent to the mall, for just going and breathing and looking at the light. a secular church, idk. as it is, it feels so much like the mall that it is that the things that are special/fancy or potentially-breathatking fall into the background (for me) - just feels like i'm in a mall.

the High Line is really nice early in the morning before it fills up with tourists

agreed w Treeship, I really do like the building but it's a square peg, it flirts with overreach the conservative abeyance of which for better or worse made the city look and feel like the city

it doesn't feel like "new york" but whatever that's a lost cause I guess