I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, steeped in the lore of that city. Like most Chicagoans, I was aware that we were Second City, in reference to NYC, but felt no sense of deference to it.
Incollege, I fell in love with a girl who was obsessed with NYC. She loved it more than me, and it made me resent the city even more than I did already. What could possibly be so special about it?
Well, she dumped me, but somehow, I was the one who ended up building my life in NYC. I moved there for grad school, and once the city grabs you, it holds on tight.
When you move to NYC, you are forced to adapt to a completely different environment and way of life from every other place in America. You learn to endure countless indignations from a city that bends to no person's will. But your reward is the survivor's pride and the right to imbibe from one of the richest anthropological pools on the planet. It's literally intoxicating. For a time, my two siblings and I all lived in the same Brooklyn neighborhood. It was a golden age.
If you live in NYC long enough, you will have the experience of "vanishing New York", in which the places that hold your memories of the city inexorably close, and the friends you made shuffle off to other places. It's not your New York anymore. It's some new generation's place to come of age. They'll discover institutions that feel timeless, but are destined to be quite temporary.
New York is somehow never and always the same.