Prior to this week, I hadn’t been in New York City in a very long time. I don’t want to say that an ice age had passed, but let’s just say that the last time I passed by Calvary Cemetery in the rain on my way from JFK, the Twin Towers still rose in the distance and I was still too young to buy alcohol in any state, even the ones with the most freewheeling of blue laws.
So I was a little bit excited about visiting the City and actually staying there for a few days. Not only was I getting a chance to adventure in New York, but I was getting the ultimate experience: I was temporarily working in Chelsea, heart of publishing. So I got a taste of the daily grind commuting from my hotel in Brooklyn to the office, just a few blocks away from the famous Flatiron building, and then got to probe the city by night and foment classwar at as many opportunities as possible.
Along the way, I got to bust some television myths about New York, a place that looms large in the pop culture mythos because it’s so iconic among the minds of creators. It’s not just that half the people making television seem to come from here and a number of shows are filmed here: New York is also a place people think of as a cultural and social gathering place, a touchstone for the United States.
Wisecracking policemen litter the streets and patrol the subway stations making wry comments
I did see a lot of police officers in New York, particularly in the subway stations. Sadly, none of them were wisecracking, and the one I did interact with was in fact quite apathetic. He wasn’t surly, as I might have expected from another New York myth that I’ll get to in a moment, he was just astoundingly disinterested in everything and everyone. That, and a little surprised that I required direction for something so basic as to how to get to 23rd Street.
In my defense, 14th Street/Union Square is a big station with a lot of levels, all of which appear to be filled with extremely loud trains on the verge of a breakdown, judging from the amount of horrifying rattling noises emanating from them as they screech in and out.
People spontaneously break into song, just because they can
Not a single impromptu musical occurred during my entire time in New York, and I looked for one. In fact, to my surprise, I didn’t even see any street musicians on my first day. That might have been because it was dumping rain (about which also more in a moment), which was enough to discourage all but the most determined or foolhardy from gallivanting in the street with guitars.
While I could in theory have attended a musical, this would not have met the requirement of being a truly spontaneous event. I actually wandered through Broadway by accident (see: confusing subway stations, above) at one point, and everyone there seemed remarkably contained, except for the enthusiastic bongo drummer deep in the bowels of the 49th Street station.
It’s insufferably hot in New York in August
This myth is both busted and not, actually. Yes, it was hot. Really, really hot, although apparently not as hot this week as it had been the week before. For me, it was intolerable, but I am a delicate flower from the wilds of Northern California, where it does not regularly climb into the 80s.
The problem was that it was also raining, so I spent much of my trip both hot and drenched, despite the fact that I bravely carried an umbrella. When I arrived at the office in the morning, I would be red as a tomato and dripping in sweat, apparently looking so alarming that one of the senior people actually inquired after my welfare, concerned that the city might have done me in.
You’ll stand out like a sore thumb if you aren’t fashionable
New York is a city of many neighbourhoods, and obviously there’s no way I hit all of them in just a few days. But I stayed in a very hipster part of Brooklyn, worked in a busy downtown district, and visited a few other places besides. What I noticed was that I really didn’t stand out from the crowds around me, despite the fact that I am pretty much the polar opposite of a fashion plate. My dresses fit right in on the train, as did my artfully-draped scarf.
I had been expecting to feel deeply uncomfortable, and instead, I felt mostly anonymous in a city full of all kinds of people wearing all kinds of things. I definitely wasn’t the most fashionable, but I stood out because I was rimed with sweat and bright red, not because I was wearing a polka-dot summer dress.
New Yorkers are rude
This one I thought would be a gimme for sure. Everyone knows New Yorkers are rude! It’s practically a cultural institution! I fully prepared to be drenched in profanity, elbowed aside while attempting to board trains, glared at while walking down the street, and given deep eyerolls left and right.
I was astounded to find that most New Yorkers I encountered were actually…pretty polite, even in regions of the city that tend to be infested by tourists, where one might think that the residents would be really tired of horrible people like me asking directions to obvious places. No one cursed at me, and the only profanity I heard other than my own was a woman expressing a muted and understated “shit” on the platform at Union Square when she saw the huge number of people waiting to board the train she wanted. I think profanity was entirely appropriate, given the circumstances, and I would have joined her had I realized that was also the train I wanted to board.
Illustrative: A very polite baker went to the trouble of personally fetching a fresh Black Forest cakelet for me when she noted that the one in the case might have been from the day before. She totally didn’t have to do that, but she did, because she wanted to hook me up with the ultimate cake experience.
New York illustrates our postracial society
Long-known as the melting pot of the US, New York is highly racially diverse. But it’s by no means a racial utopia. I watched two white hipsters cross the street and cross back again to avoid a group of young Black men, saw white women in elevators edging away from East Asian women in saris, and had a long conversation with a conservative Jewish woman about white women who tell her how oppressed she is on a regular basis.
New York, like other parts of the US, illustrates instead our fractured and conflicted relationship with race. At the same time I saw newspapers demanding a frisk fix, targeting the racist and disgusting stop-and-frisk policy, and saw national news informing me that the Justice Department was abandoning mandatory minimum sentences for certain types of nonviolent offenses, I also saw casual racism on a regular basis throughout my stay, just as I do everywhere else in the United States.
Even as I saw ads for the latest New York City cop show on the sides of buses, I was experiencing an abbreviated version of the real New York—the one that never seems to come up in pop culture, maybe because it’s so prosaic. In a lot of ways, after all, the Big Apple is just a city, filled with people who work, live, and love here just like they do everywhere else.
Photo by vagueonthehow, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
East Asia is technically considered China, Japan, Mongolia, North and South Korea, and Taiwan… None of these countries have women that traditionally wear saris. I think you’re probably thinking of Central Asia (that the area that covers Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) or South Asia (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) instead.
How old are you? Could possibly be as naive and gullible as you sound? Where did you come up with these cliches? They aren’t even the ones you see on NYC-based sitcoms that are actually filmed in Burbank. It’s sounds like you overdosed on episodes of Fame. People bursting out in song? Seriously?
I’d hate to hear what you think about New Jersey which is where I live. Hint: The cast members from Jersey Shore were NOT from New Jersey, they just lived at the Shore for a few summers.