My First New York

In 2010, New York Magazine published accounts by naturalized New Yorkers of their first experience of the big city.

I once made a spreadsheet comparing San Francisco, London, Budapest, and New York. I assigned different weighted scores based on different criteria: old friends, business opportunities, Hungarians, Jews, nature (that one had a fairly low weight). I was living in San Francisco, but I’ve always liked the idea of that city more than the reality of it. So I would play with the spreadsheet, and when I didn’t get the result I wanted, I adjusted the rankings. One factor that tipped things in New York’s favor was that New York had hotter guys. (San Francisco is fine if you like blond hair and fleece.)

I finally decided to come here after 9/11. The foreign press was full of love letters to New York. Writers like Martin Amis were waking up and thinking, Oh my God, we almost lost it! I know it sounds sentimental, but no one would ever write a love letter to San Francisco. I drove across the country with Christian Bailey, who would later become famous for getting all that money from the Pentagon. He had arranged for a two-bedroom apartment in the SoHo Court building, a standard building for junior analysts at Goldman Sachs. It was a wonderful summer. I wasn’t really working. We launched Gizmodo in August, and Gawker in December. Most days I would go to Cafe Gitane and sit outside eating waffles with fruit. I was early for every single lunch, because I was banking on San Francisco time — traffic, looking for parking — or London time — two train changes, a delay, time to wipe the sweat off your brown once you’re out of the tube.

It was the year of the Hungarians. I was mainly hanging out with friends I already knew, and feeling socially awkward after living in San Francisco. I remember going to a party with a bunch of Broadway and film gays, and the one-liner one-upmanship felt like a scene from Will & Grace, which at the time was my lame yardstick for what passed for New York salon conversation. My HTML skills had improved in San Francisco, but I’d lost my edge. I thought I was being really witty, but at one point on a ski trip to Tahoe, it became clear that everyone thought I was just an asshole.