the peaks and the valleys
After a long hiatus, I spent three weeks in New York. I have a love-hate relationship with the city, like many people. It’s a city of extremes. Yes, extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Apologies for stating the obvious. But also extremes in the self. Anyone who has spent some portion of their life in New York probably experienced their peak and their rock bottom in the city.
The prim office worker quietly sobbing into her headphones over a failed relationship during her evening commute is sharing space with the homeless schizophrenic pissing himself. The rock bottoms aren’t commensurate. Not at all. But the city, the great leveler, has compressed these subjective traumas into the same space, underlining a common humanity. This is the abject beauty of New York.
It’s the city that prides itself on immigrant fortitude. The place where an Ecuadorian housekeeper who braved the coyotes and cartels of the Sonoran Desert convinces her employer, a Green Card-holding Swiss heiress to help her attain the same privileges of permanent residency; the place where a small town girl from Ohio dukes it out with the hereditary nepo babies of the art world for a position as a gallery director and to everyone’s surprise wins. The city however is much less sentimental about the second scenario. New York is a city of immigrants and transplants, but it only mythologizes the former. The latter are discussed as if they are a swarm of locusts spawned somewhere in the Midwest that have descended on the city and gobbled up all the good apartments.
The peaks and valleys of individuals of wildly different backgrounds, means, and experiences all compressed on top of one another like pods in a Tokyo efficiency hotel.
Again, I’m not sure any of the thoughts here are particularly unique.
new york as meme
Maybe that’s the trouble with New York. Too many people have passed through its streets, its subways, its harbor, its airport. When people use the meme phrase "last night was like a movie", they’re only underlying that there probably was a movie filmed at whatever intersection they got blackout drunk. The story, no matter who tells it, is always the same.
"My grandfather arrived with two nickels"; "I ate ramen for the first two months I lived in the city"; different circumstances, but the story is all the same. Robert Moses wrote an op-ed in The New York Times titled, "What's the Matter With New York?" in 1943. The Dare released an album titled, "What’s Wrong with New York" in 2024, eighty years later. Our stories about the city keep rhyming. Pleasant if you regard the city as a lover, annoying if you see the city as an ex-best friend.
As a New Yorker, an Upstate New Yorker, who lived in the city for almost a decade, I find myself on the same treadmill.
Robert Moses says, "New York is accused of being parochial as well as un-American. There is something in this observation." I have said much the same. Again, apologies for stating the obvious.
escape from new york
Here is another trope. An action movie, a Joan Didion essay, a Lena Dunham essay…
Whenever I am back in the city, it strikes me that there are three endgames:
The Frank Sinatra Option: "If you make it in New York, you can make it anywhere." By this I mean you get money. Like the saying goes: some are born into wealth. That’s the easiest way to get rich, to inherit it. Crucially, this also involves not blowing it. "Never spend into the principal…", my trust funder friends darkly intone. The other way is to marry it. New York is a city for dating, a meat market in the Meatpacking District. Or you can earn it: on Wall Street, in the art market, by being a Dark Triad middle-management type at a Fortune 500 company. The thing about the people who "make it" is they never leave the city spiritually, but their corporeal form is rarely on the island of Manhattan. There are Connecticut houses and Hamptons houses and houses Upstate. There are mid-winter island getaways and ski trips to Aspen or Gstaad. There are art fairs in Miami Beach and Basel and Hong Kong; fashion weeks in Paris and London and Milan; film festivals in Toronto and Park City, Utah; summers on the Mediterranean on yachts; cleanses in Austria; wellness retreats in Santa Fe; awards season in Los Angeles and on and on and on.
The Native New Yorker Option: They say it’s only after ten years in the city that you can call yourself a "real New Yorker." Ironic for a city that gasps in horror when people use the phrase "real American", this is a term you hear used constantly in New York City. Perhaps this is because a minority of city residents were born in the city itself. Regardless, claiming you are a "real New Yorker" is always stated with pride. For those committed to the bit, money is no object. Some people grind into the upper-middle class and become the types of people who complain about how hard it is two live on an income of $400K. Others don’t and cling on for dear life to whatever real estate situation they have figured out for themselves, whether that is some sort of subsidized housing or a market rate apartment they locked in before yet another eye-watering surge in rental rates. And to be sure, as certain as the planet’s orbit around the sun, there will always be another price increase that newer arrivals will be forced to pay. Like the subway, real estate prices are the great leveler in New York. The rent will always be too damn high for almost everyone, excluding those covered by the Sinatra Option above.
The Suburban Option: There’s making it and then there’s making it. Not everyone makes it to the Elysium orbital pod. Many find private satisfaction in suburban upper-middle class life. There are ways to do this and not technically leave New York. You can move to Forest Hills in Queens or Kensington in Brooklyn though the commute distance isn’t that different than the PATH train from Northern New Jersey or the Long Island Railroad from Nassau County or Mertro-North from Connecticut or Upstate New York. Like the Sinatra Option, the suburbanites claim a spiritual connection to the city, even though unlike in the Sinatra Option, their real estate footprint in the city is nonexistent. Anyone who has gone to an elite college in the Northeast has experienced some version of this conversation during freshman orientation: "Where are you from?" "New York" "Oh me too, where in the city are you from?" "Well, I grew up in Montclair." "That’s New Jersey, not New York." Devastating. Currently, the millennial generation is setting their own children up for this ordeal. Like their boomer parents before them, they are realizing there really is something to be said about the quiet pleasures of family life in the wider Tristate region. One friend recently told me the big trend among millennials is Litchfield County, Connecticut. I know two families that have relocated there. So it may be so.
You choose one of these options. Or you leave entirely. You retire to Los Angeles. You don’t bother to renew your visa and move back to Europe. You go home, back to wherever you may have come from.
When that happens, New York becomes a life stage, some other person you used to be. You think of New York like your teenage years. And like your teenage years, these memories are extreme. They are of highs and lows, peaks and valleys. You wonder how you made it through it all. And like your teenage years, there is usually some general slant. Was it a happy time or a miserable time? Was it a crucible that forged you into the person you are today, a trauma that you are still recovering from, or some distant confusing time, when you were unformed, that you ponder, unsure of how you became the person you are today…