New York Is Still Awesome

The Question is: Are You?

There’s been a ton of discussion lately about how New York isn’t what it used to be.

Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, is in stores tomorrow, and while I didn’t contribute to it (ed note: not cool enough, not a woman and also, I still live here), it features a bunch of essays about why certain writers packed up their shit and left.

I’m a native New Yorker from an outer-borough. In my 31 years here— during which time I have never lived anywhere else— the city certainly has changed. But ya’know, things change. People change. That’s life.

A lot of creative people move to New York City because it purports to offer, among other things, access to a lifestyle that doesn’t exist in say, Wisconsin. That may be true to some extent, but ultimately people’s New York experiences, like most experiences, are really a reflection of themselves.

Your experience in New York is your experience because you make it that way. For a lot of people, there’s a romantic vision of New York somehow completing them (“I just have to get to New York!”). It’s like the person who goes to India thinking all the spiritual answers are there (“I’m just trying to find myself”).

Places are what you make of them. Who are you surrounding yourself with? What are you seeing? What are you creating? What are you consuming?

Too often people complain about New York— heck, I complain about New York— and say it’s boring now or whatever. Hey, it might be. But also it could be that I’m just boring. Or the people who are complaining about it are boring. It’s not a boring city. Everything is boring if you’re just waiting around for things to happen.

New York is a city. Ultimately, it’s just a bunch of brick and concrete and inanimate shit. Man-made creations. What you do and who you are and who you’re doing it with is what makes it exciting and interesting.

People talk about a lack of culture here now. Look, I spend half my time in Chelsea and outside of the gallery scene, I can tell you right now it’s not the most exciting place in the world. There isn’t terribly much to do except buy stuff and eat stuff and drink stuff and be leisurely in a “I’m not so sure I’m comfortable being this lazy” sort of way.

But that type of thing always existed in New York. Has it gotten a tad out of hand? Yeah, sure. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t still a lot of great creative and interesting things to occupy your time with.

And still, there are other boroughs and places in New York that have been largely untapped. They’re cheap and inspiring in ways you can’t imagine. They’ve very much like the ‘old’ New York. The one you want back. But you can’t imagine these areas because they haven’t been packaged up and sold to you yet.

This is a hard city to live in. It wasn’t always this hard. I’m struggling. You’re struggling. We’re all struggling.

The romance of what New York was, what it is and what it could be is fleeting. Anywhere can be New York for you. You just need to make it happen.