NYC wouldn't be my first choice of a place to live. This sounds stressful.
The streets all smell like piss and walking at night means seeing tons of rats.
The subways are absolutely disgusting and there's always a car that reeks of shit (you can tell because that car will have far fewer people than the surrounding cars).
I don't know if New Yorkers have never visited any other cities, or if they're just so blind from all the NYC-exceptionalism (Ayy if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere!!!) but that city is disgusting.
A subway car that’s vacated due to smells, while it happens, is extremely rare, and the average station is just as clean as any I saw in Rome or Paris. There are definitely exceptions to that, and the worst case is worse than what you’d see in the rest of the developed world, but it’s still an exceptional experience to see something or smell something terrible in the subway system.
I’m always going to new events, parks, restaurants, museums. Transportation’s extensive, cheap, and quick for the most part. There are rivers, beaches, woods, bays. Biking is becoming a real joy with all the new bike infrastructure. Love the new outdoor dining scene, the people, incredible amounts of architecture styles.
And besides, we upgraded from piss smell, to weed smell! Much better.
I have experienced pretty much everything in GP’s post (although the way they go on you’d think it’s a near constant which I don’t think is true even in the rougher neighborhoods like Brownsville that I’ve lived in) at some point or another… they’re just not the parts of NYC that I focus on I guess.
That’s what I think about when I’m in NYC, and sure I see the piles of trash… I just don’t really care. It’s a necessary part of having a gigantic megalopolis. Are there downsides? Certainly. Calling it Stockholm Syndrome when I and many others in my situation have both lived elsewhere and could leave tomorrow? That just seems like a laughable failure to see things through a different view point than you have.
It’s fine not to like a place, it’s the whole “I don’t like it so you must be deluded by ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’ and have Stockholm Syndrome” part that seems a bit like a mindset that’s not great at accepting other view points or ideas.
this is fine.
there are many other giant megalopolises in the world that somehow manage not to have giant piles of trash everywhere. london and tokyo for example. demand better from your government.
“The streets all smell like piss” genuinely sounds like a take from someone that visited midtown while on a three day conference and then left. There are some disgusting streets, no doubt. There’s too much trash on the street on trash days. On rare occasions a subway car has homeless people in it and it smells. None of this is great by any means. But the idea that all New Yorkers are walking around smelling piss 24/7 and saying “huh, guess it must be like this everywhere” doesn’t pass any kind of sanity test.
Reminds me of the Principal Skinner meme: “am I wrong? No, it is the eight million inhabitants of NYC who are all wrong”
Some streets do smell like piss at some times. The building superintendents periodically hose off the front sidewalks to wash away the dog urine, especially during the hottest parts of the summer. Especially on nice streets.
in my city we somehow contrive not to have any streets at all smell like piss, ever. in the civilized world we stopped using streets as outdoor latrines over a century ago.
Cleaning the subway cars overall is a joke - they have people with mops at the terminus stations and they get 30secs to 2 minutes to mop the first and last cars before they go out again. All the cars in the middle just accumulate debris and stains until the train is taken out of service for regular maintenance.
One side effect of the pandemic is I have to leave the apartment so infrequently that I can take Lyft everywhere and still come out ahead of what I used to spend on metrocards - I don’t miss riding the subway at all.
Then, I think we can pin-point exaggerations from objective truth. I admit, when I visited NY, it was very nice but we went around central park and such.
I just dislike this law, this is a great way to make NY city worse - pitting citizens against each other. There are other ways to solve this issue through proper law enforcement channels.
Unfortunately for New York, the closest they have is NYPD, which I don't think I've ever heard anything good about - but have heard plenty of bad.
Better than the old pollution from the 1970s.
When I first came to the US, in the late '60s, or early '70s (I think I visited before moving to the US), we came on a ship, which docked in New York.
My mother brought me out onto the deck, one night, to smell New York. We couldn't see the lights yet, but I remember that nasty, metallic stench.