Dear New Yorkers..How Do You Rate Other Urban Experiences?

[Razor]

Dear New Yorkers, in North America you are living in what can be argued as the pinnacle of urbanity. The ultimate crush of humanity in a metropolitan area.
That said, I was always curious from your perspective how you see other urban areas when you visit? If you lived in NY Your entire life, are they all just quaint places with some interesting characteristics that you may find charming, or are there some that you truly find impressive? The same question can be be posed to people from London or LA?

[CaliNative]

Originally Posted by Razor

Dear New Yorkers, in North America you are living in what can be argued as the pinnacle of urbanity. The ultimate crush of humanity in a metropolitan area.
That said, I was always curious from your perspective how you see other urban areas when you visit? If you lived in NY Your entire life, are they all just quaint places with some interesting characteristics that you may find charming, or are there some that you truly find impressive? The same question can be be posed to people from London or LA?

Having talked to a lot of New Yorkers, they tend to appreciate San Francisco. L.A., some like it sort of, but they often make fun of it like Woody Allen. But quite a few live in L.A., especially those in entertainment. Streisand has lived in Malibu for 50 years. Miami, they must like, since so many retire there. Boston, I don't think they like, because of the sports thing, but they do respect the universities, especially Harvard, and the New England vibe. They do like the Maine coast, but who doesn't? They also like Vermont. Chicago is seen as a New York wannabe, or rival, and most of the midwest is seen as flyover country on the way to the west coast. I don't think they think much about Philly. Buffalo or upstate either, except for the Hudson Valley and Adirondacks where they often vacation. Washington DC they respect, because of all the political power. The south, apart from Miami and maybe New Orleans, never think about it. That old cartoon in the New Yorker about how New Yorkers see the country is pretty much true. New York takes up maybe 50% of the map, and everywhere else is tiny.

[Gantz]

The first time people leave NYC (if they were born there) to see other cities, the first thing they'd notice is how shockingly small everything else is. My friend in college when he visited Boston thought it was a very small town/village. Most wouldn't recognize right away that the place they are visiting is this big "city" they hear about on the news. Personally, my mother is still convinced that LA is "empty", because when she visited she didn't see anyone walking on the sidewalks... On the other hand, she did like Vegas. lol
I guess its an inverse of how most people view NYC on their first visit and stay in just 5% of the city thinking "this is it" and for them even that amount of the urban area, roughly from Central park and Below, is enough to say "wow New York is big".

[Handro]

Inverse of the thread, but I remember being in awe the first time I visited NYC from Chicago. It was SO much more crowded, SO much more dense, and the street walls seemingly went on forever in every direction. When I got back to Chicago and was riding the bus from the Blue line back to my apartment, I couldn't help but notice how much "smaller" Chicago seemed to me, like I had just been to the center of Western civilization and had returned to the boonies.

[Razor]

It goes to show you that it's all relative I suppose.

On another note but keeping to my "it's all relative point", I have lived in Ottawa for the past 22 years, and it's a pretty small city, but prior to moving here from an even smaller city I have visited Toronto a number of times, and I remember feeling overwhelmed. I still consider Toronto large, but I guess moving to Ottawa primed me up a but more for Toronto, as it doesn't feel quite as overwhelming as it once did. NYC felt beastly when we visited a decade ago. New Yorkers visiting Tokyo must feel at home!

[bossabreezes]

To be honest, I don't go anywhere else looking for a 'New York Experience'.

I'm leaving NY to go somewhere else, not a carbon copy of it. New York is great, but also horrible, and when I leave the city its because I'm sick of the horrible shit that you deal with every day being there.

However, when I see wastefulness (like I see in the case of LA building short rental buildings with 1/4 the units it should have to help with the housing crisis) I get annoyed and tell myself ''Shit like this would never happen in New York.'' Surely this will trigger a handful of LA homers who think wastefulness and street tents are good, but I don't care.

Seattle and SF are nice minus their clear descent into lawlessness.

[Steely Dan]

i can't speak as a new yorker, but I can relay a story from a native new yorker.

back in college up in the twin cities, one of my good friends from new york (born and raised on the upper west side) and another east coast friend (DC area) came home to chicago (northern burbs) with me for fall break.

I drove them downtown one of the days along north LSD, and after passing 5 miles of lakefront front highrises, and then approaching the mighty JHC at the oak street beach S-curve, my new york friend, completely unprompted from me, said "man, chicago is the first city i've ever been to whose skyline isn't a complete joke".

so chicago's skyline registered a "not a complete joke". that's just about the highest praise a new yorker can give to another city.

[chris08876]

I liked Chicago when I was there. I found it to be an NYC on valium. I also liked the blue cop car lights. I remember I went to Morton's Steakhouse and there was this divine hostess there. It was at that point that I realized Chicago has beautiful woman, on par with the NY woman. The steak was quite good too!

NYC is just a unique place. If anything, its the street/urban energy that makes it unique. That's what makes the city fun. Its just a bloody jungle is what it is.

Chicago did impress me with how clean it was. And I do appreciate the open skies especially downtown. Like take the NY canyon effect and widen it. It felt more open, more air. And the lake is beautiful.

It very much felt like a diet NYC on a moderate dose of valium. Still hectic but controlled hectic.

[proghousehead]

I found Paris to be comparable urban experience in terms of "wow" factor and liveliness. London was quieter than NYC especially in the more suburban areas of outer London compared with the outer boroughs (save SI). Central London was on par with Manhattan however.

Domestically, certainly parts of SF, Chicago, DC, Boston and Philly come close to NYC, but on a much much much smaller scale.

Los Angeles is the antithesis of NYC in many ways, so not a fair apples to apples comparison. LA is a sound city, but in terms of urban experience, not comparable.

[Yuri]

As Razor opened up to explore similar experiences aside New York, here my account: I remember back in the university, in Londrina, I had three classmates from São Paulo capital. One of them always called Londrina a "small city" and to me that made no sense at all. It's 550,000 inh. city, 1 million people metro area, very urban/dense for a Brazilian city of its size and having all the amenities a big city usually offer.

As raised on the hinterlands, I've always seen a very clear gradation: a city of 5,000 was one thing, a +10,000 one another, +20,000, +50,000, +100,000, +200,000, +300,000, +500,000, +1 million, +2 million and then São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. To me each one of those marks were very distinct and it was a bit shocking/odd to hear a person call a city on top of the list "small".

And now, I'm in São Paulo and I see myself doing something similar: when visiting other cities, I avoid to make any comparison with São Paulo, otherwise all of them feel underwhelming, even Rio in some aspects.

Disclaimer: city in Brazil, would be more like city+suburbs in the US, as municipalities boundaries are much broader down here.

[Acajack]

Looking further afield, I've always found New Yorkers who have a broader view will speak very positively of Montreal and Toronto. (Not that they expect them to be like NYC of course - but they consider them respectable bona fide big cities.)

Though some of them are irked or bemused by the propensity of some Torontonians to speak about their city in New York-esque terms.

[proghousehead]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Looking further afield, I've always found New Yorkers who have a broader view will speak very positively of Montreal and Toronto. (Not that they expect them to be like NYC of course - but they consider them respectable bona fide big cities.)

Though some of them are irked or bemused by the propensity of some Torontonians to speak about their city in New York-esque terms.

Agreed. Montreal is a 6 hour drive from NYC so we used to make the trek up in the summers almost annually. Great city and vibe. Toronto was cool, the diversity was crazy impressive, and the construction boom was interesting to witness.

[iheartthed]

I'm not a native New Yorker, but I guess I've lived here long enough to answer. New Yorkers will not typically think of places as "urban" or "the city" if the dominant mode of transport is by car, or if there isn't at least a significant number of pedestrians on the street. So they wouldn't really think of places like Dallas, Atlanta, etc., as places to compare urban qualities with New York. (That's not to say New Yorkers don't move to places like Atlanta or Dallas, because they do. But they just don't go there expecting it to be comparable to NYC.)

As for places in America that New Yorkers would consider "urban", all of them feel "small", but to varying degrees. Chicago feels like the next biggest city, but it still feels significantly smaller than NYC. San Francisco feels like a smaller Chicago.

[fleonzo]

Originally Posted by Razor

Dear New Yorkers, in North America you are living in what can be argued as the pinnacle of urbanity. The ultimate crush of humanity in a metropolitan area.
That said, I was always curious from your perspective how you see other urban areas when you visit? If you lived in NY Your entire life, are they all just quaint places with some interesting characteristics that you may find charming, or are there some that you truly find impressive? The same question can be be posed to people from London or LA?

Good question: I've been living here (NYC) since 1996 and it's gone through a lot as you can imagine. Some things are not what it's cracked up to be (i.e. you're almost waiting or competing with others even on simple things like a flight or train ride back to the City)! That being said, I think that a lot (of how you view other cities/ urban areas) could depend on where you are in life. It's nice when you view newer things like certain urban/suburban developments in areas that have recently grown (over the past 20 years). NYC has a ton of new developments but it can be hard to stand out in the middle of historic and older infrastructures. For the most part the main thing is that most other areas feel "charming" (in a nice way)- places like DC, San Diego, Boston, Charolette, San Antonio, etc....They certainly feel small by comparison and that's where charm can sometimes wear off quickly when you're constantly looking for stimulation which is what happens when you live too long in NYC. My two cents worth only

[MolsonExport]

I felt extremely disappointed in my hometown of Montreal after my first trip to New York City (1985). I remember driving back across the Champlain bridge, and feeling a twinge of jealousy at how puny our skyline was compared to New York (I mean, it is not even worthy of being measured on the same scale). That was back in my teens, when "bigger was better" for nearly everything. Later, I realized just how awesome Montreal was at the ground level, as it holds its own against almost all other North American (and a few European) cities, again, save for New York which has a street level vibrancy that is unmatched in Canada/USA.

[iheartthed]

NYC compared international cities is more interesting, IMO. For cities I've visited, these are true peers that could go toe to toe with New York in an urbanity fight: Tokyo, Paris, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, and Seoul. Those cities were all the right amount of size, density, and vibrancy to go toe-to-toe with New York.

[Pedestrian]

One of my college roommates, who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn and went to Stuyvesant High School had never been outside the city limits of NY except for a couple of short family vacations in the Catskills before coming to college. He was so tied to New York that we used to drive from Baltimore to Brooklyn occasionally to eat and put in a stock of baked goods from his favorite bakery called Ebinger's.

After college in Baltimore, he went back to med school at NYU.

Imagine how shocked I was to find out he later spent his practice years in, of all places, Minneapolis. I still can't believe it.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

San Francisco feels like a smaller Chicago.

I don't know about the typical NY "man in the subway" but The NY Times seems perpetually addicted to writing about San Francisco and most of the articles don't quite get it right.

[dimondpark]

Gawd, I guess people from the west coast are just different, or maybe it's a Bay Area thing. I've never felt 'jealous' of anything in New York. I love visiting and have lived there twice(UWS and Alpine NJ) but I've never felt like wow, I wish SF had this or that---I do wish Golden Gate Park and environs were more like Central Park and environs-now that YES, otherwise, the agitation and packed sidewalks-meh SF is just fine, having lived and traveled all over the world, Im grateful for all the experiences and appreciate every city immensely, but if anything I've come to appreciate home the way it is even more so. I'm actually most jealous of Chicago's cleanliness more than anything else. What a well put together urban envirornment. Kudos Windy City.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

I don't know about the typical NY "man in the subway" but The NY Times seems perpetually addicted to writing about San Francisco and most of the articles don't quite get it right.

There has been a weird anti-urban tone in the NYT during the pandemic, even regarding NYC itself.