Nothing Beats New York (Except the Smell in August, Which Beats Everything)
Nothing Beats New York (Except the Smell in August, Which Beats Everything)
There are cities in the world that are beautiful, cities that are comfortable, cities that have functioning public transit and reasonable rent and restaurants where you can hear the person sitting across from you without shouting. New York City is none of those things. New York City is better than all of those things. New York is the only place on earth where a man in a full tuxedo can eat a hot dog next to a woman in pajamas reading Proust on a subway platform at 2 a.m. while a mariachi band performs in the next car, and nobody – nobody – looks up from their phone.
Why New York City Remains the Capital of Everything
New York is not the capital of the United States. This is technically Washington, D.C.’s job, and D.C. does it with great governmental seriousness and impressive monuments. New York doesn’t care about being the capital of anything official. It is the capital of finance, of fashion, of food, of culture, of argument, of the conviction that your neighborhood’s pizza is objectively the best pizza and everyone else is simply misinformed. Eight and a half million people live here, none of them willing to admit that another city might have any qualities worth considering.
This is not arrogance. This is civic pride, and it has been earned through decades of navigating potholed roads, paying $3,200 a month for 400 square feet, and waiting on a subway platform in July, breathing air that smells like decisions you regret.
The Things New York Does That No Other City Can Touch
New York invented the bagel, perfected the deli, and produced the cultural output that the rest of the world has been borrowing, reinterpreting, and claiming credit for since roughly 1920. Jazz moved through here. Abstract Expressionism was born here. Hip-hop was invented here in the Bronx in the 1970s by people with almost nothing, which is perhaps the most New York story ever told.
The city’s restaurant scene, documented obsessively by outlets like Eater New York, offers every cuisine on earth within a thirty-minute radius of wherever you’re standing, available at 3 a.m., delivered to your door by someone on an electric bike who is going considerably faster than is strictly legal. This is a feature, not a bug.
The Things New York Does That Are Genuinely Inexcusable
In the spirit of honest tourism, some disclosures. The subway system is a magnificent achievement of early 20th-century engineering that has been consistently underfunded, overcrowded, and delayed since approximately the Eisenhower administration. Summer in New York is a full sensory experience that includes heat rising from the sidewalk, garbage fermenting at curb level, and a smell that cannot be adequately described but that once encountered is never forgotten, like a traumatic event with surprisingly good dining nearby.
Apartment living in New York involves a series of philosophical compromises: no closet space, walls thin enough to know your neighbor’s entire relationship status in real time, and a kitchen the size of a generous carry-on bag. New Yorkers respond to these conditions with the same equanimity they bring to everything else – by insisting it builds character and that people in other cities simply lack it.
Why People Who Leave New York Can Never Quite Stop Talking About New York
There is a type of person – you have met them – who lived in New York for three years in their twenties and has been referencing it ever since. “When I was in New York…” they begin, and you can see it in their eyes: the longing, the energy, the memory of being genuinely alive in a city that demanded everything and gave everything back at two in the morning over a slice of pizza that cost $4 and tasted like it contained the secret to happiness.
New York does that. It gets into people. The city is loud and expensive and exhausting and occasionally smells like the concept of failure, and yet people who live there can’t imagine living anywhere else, and people who leave spend the rest of their lives explaining why they did and whether it was the right call.
It probably wasn’t. But the pizza was incredible.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!