Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: The Pressure is Off!

October 3, 2012 by

One of the great things about living in the suburbs is that the pressure is off.  What pressure?  That unrelentingly guilty feeling that you’re always missing out on something, that you should be going to more concerts and theater and museums and clubs, and bars, and hot new restaurants.  That nagging voice in your head saying that if you’re living in the city you should be taking advantage of living in the city:

What?  You’re going to stay home and watch The Voice? What’s wrong with you?  Artcat just posted that a series of Sara Swaty portraits exploring gender identity and the body is opening this weekend at the Leslie-Lohman Museum!  The 37th Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival is in previews on Theater Row!  And you’re going to watch TV?  What a plebian! What a vulgarian!

Sometimes, living in Manhattan can be mentally exhausting.  There’s just TOO MUCH to do, too many choices, too many decisions to make, and you’ll never get to everything.  Even if you go out every night, you’ll never even scrape the surface of all the shows you should be seeing, art you should be appreciating, food you should be trying.  Think of it this way — New York City has 24,000 restaurants.  Even if you eliminate the half of them that are the various warring Ray’s Pizza chains, that’s still 12,000 places to eat.  365 days a year, 3 meals a day, it would take you almost 12 years to try them all.  That’s a lot of miso-glazed cod.

Another example: right now, at this moment, there are about 25 shows playing on Broadway, and almost 60 off-broadway.  That’s 85 shows.  Go see one a day, and you might get through them in three months, at which time about a third of those shows will have closed and been replaced.  And that’s not even counting off-off-broadway.

It’s a cultural treadmill, and the guilt trip never ends.  Just pick up a copy of the Times, and you’ll see pictures of society events you never have the time to go to, reviews of restaurants you’ll never try, profiles of bands you’ll never hear.  And, even worse, it seems like EVERYONE ELSE is somehow finding the time to get more out of the city than you ever will.  You finally get out to a club, only to be told that you REALLY should go there on Tuesday nights.  Tuesday nights?  People go out Tuesday nights?  Seriously?  What do they do all day?

That’s what’s nice about the suburbs.  Yes, like everyone says, there’s not a lot to do.  But in a lot of ways, that’s a blessing.  Fewer choices, fewer decisions, easier to focus.  Rather than trying to stay afloat in an unrelenting cultural stream, you have to actually seek out opportunities for interesting theater, art openings, new restaurants.  They’re out there – even in the suburbs, there are some good restaurants and galleries and concert halls. Not as many, of course, but that’s the point.  Because the choices are fewer and further between, you don’t have that pressure to ALWAYS BE DOING SOMETHING.

So you get to give yourself a break.  It’s not your fault.  You’re living in the boring old suburbs!  So what else are you going to do but sit on your couch, put your feet up, and guiltlessly watch some lowbrow reality tv?

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Love Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , ,

Reasons You’ll Hate Living in the Suburbs: Property Taxes

September 13, 2012 by

No one who’s trying to get you to move to the suburbs tells you about the property taxes.  Oh, it’s so great living out here in the suburbs!  Look at the trees!  Look at my big house! Look at my closet!  Look at how my kid isn’t sleeping in that closet!  ALL THIS SPACE!

And all that’s true.  Pound for pound, living in the suburbs is a lot cheaper than living in the city.  Food is cheaper.  Clothes are cheaper. The dry cleaning is cheaper.  In particular, the housing is cheaper – generally running about $300-$400 a square foot, when pricing in the city is more like $1,200 a square foot.  So from a raw pricing perspective, housing in the suburbs is way cheaper than the city.

Except for the property taxes.  Property taxes in the suburbs are MURDER.  And the problem is that you don’t really pay attention to that when you’re looking for a new home in the suburbs. You’re looking at houses online, and all you see are these high-res pictures of giant houses with big lawns and actual foyeurs and humongous kitchens and OMIGOD LOOK AT THAT WALK IN CLOSET!  And then you realize that for the same price as your tiny 1,000 square foot two bedroom in the city, you could get a 4,000 square foot colonial in some tony Westchester suburb.  You figure out the down payment, you figure out your monthly mortgage payment, and you’re ready to go make an offer.

Not so fast.  Check out the taxes.  They’re on that listing somewhere, not all that prominent, buried deep in the fine print, and sometimes the real estate agent doesn’t even list them.  So keep looking…..looking……and….

WHAT THE EFF!  FIFTY EFFING THOUSAND DOLLARS IN TAXES!!!!  CAN THAT BE RIGHT????

It’s right.  Lucky you, if you’re looking to move to the New York City suburbs, you’re going to be paying the highest property taxes anywhere in the country.  Indeed, the local suburbs make up like three of the top ten highest-taxed counties in the nation.

Here’s the weird thing about property taxes in the suburbs. It’s not that they’re so high, it’s that property taxes in the city are ridiculously cheap.  I don’t actually know why, but it’s probably based on the density – there are so many people living vertically on every square plot of Manhattan soil that the property taxes don’t need to be high in order to fund what is, after all, a pretty expensive local government.

Put it this way – I used to live in a two-bedroom brownstone apartment on the upper west side, in a building that had four total apartments totaling probably about 6,000 total square feet of living space. All four apartments together are probably worth about $7 million today.  And the taxes on the building?  About $30,000.  Now, I live in a condo, about 4,500 square feet, worth probably about $1 million in today’s market, and I’m paying that same $30,000 in taxes.  It’s crazy.

In fact, I’d argue that housing prices in Manhattan are so ridiculously high precisely because the taxes are so low.  Think of it this way.  At today’s rates, you can borrow $100,000 for about $400 per month, or $4,800 per year.  If we round that up to $5,000, you can figure that for every $5,000 in taxes, you lose about $100,000 in property value.  So if you have a Manhattan apartment that costs $1.5 million, and has $25,000 in yearly property taxes, and on the other side you have a Westchester home that costs $1,000,000, but has $50,000 in property taxes, the yearly cost of owning those homes is roughly comparable.

That said, before you decide that your kid is fine sleeping in a doggie bed in your hall closet, let’s remember a few things.

First, even with the property taxes, you still get a lot more space for the money.  That apartment in the city costing $1.5 million?  It’s got about 1,200 square feet.  The house in the suburbs? More like 3,000 square feet. So you’re getting about three times the living space for the price.

Second, property taxes are deductible, so about a third of those taxes are coming back to you in tax savings.  That evens the playing field a little.

Third, you have to THINK OF THE CHILDREN!  Don’t forget that one of the reasons you’re probably moving to the suburbs is that you have kids, and you want them to go to good schools, and those good schools, with all the fancy computers and well-paid teachers and massive educational bureaucracy – all that costs money.  So maybe if you have school-age kids you can take comfort in knowing that your property taxes are going toward their fancy Ivy-League baiting education.

That said, when you’re like me, and you don’t have kids in school yet, it does make you wonder.  Like, can’t those little snots can get by with whatever text books they’ve been using all those year?   I mean, seriously, have there been so many advances in the arts and sciences that ten- or twenty-year old textbooks aren’t good enough for these kids?  What, has Nathanial Hawthorne come out with some new books recently?

Take history, for example.  History hasn’t changed much, and you never get to modern history anyway.  Ten year old history books are just fine.  When I was a kid, we’d start American History every year with about a month on the explorers – “Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth” is among the useless facts that I can never forget.  Then we’d idle along so that we’d get to the colonial era around November, so we could have a reenactment of the First Thanksgiving and wear funny hats. But if you spend three months on the explorers and Pilgrims, you end up compacting about 300 years of history into five months – by the end of the year, we’d be lucky to get to World War I, much less the modern era. To this day, I feel much more comfortable with my knowledge about Pocahontas then I do about Harry Truman.  So I don’t see why these kids need new history books so long as the books they have get them through, say, the Korean War.

Of course, when my kids are old enough to go to school, it’s entirely possible I might be singing a different tune.  WE NEED NEW MACS!  That does sound like me.

Until that point, though, I’m going to continue hating that tax bill I get every year.

And so will you.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Hate Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Memories of 9/11

September 11, 2012 by

Screen Shot 2018-09-11 at 5.35.32 AM

A few years ago, I wrote a piece memorializing my memories of that day, back when I still lived on the upper west side of Manhattan.  I thought it was a good day to republish it

Everyone has memories of that day. Here are three of mine:

1.  Sending Tom Off on the Plane

Early on that Tuesday morning in September, I sent one of my best friends off in a cab to JFK to send him back to LA.  Tom had come to visit for a college reunion we were having up in Maine, so he’d come in about a week earlier so that we could drive up together.  While we were there, he broke his wrist badly diving for a softball, and spent most of Monday seeing doctors while I traveled around trying to get him some medication for the pain.  His intention had been to stay for the week for a job interview, but the doctors recommended he have surgery as soon as possible, and he wanted to do the surgery back in LA.

So that Tuesday morning, he got in a cab bound for JFK.  About two hours later, I watched as the second of two planes hit the World Trade Center, and heard of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t until early afternoon that I found out that he wasn’t on any of them. His flight was diverted to St. Louis, where he sat with that broken wrist for most of the next week while the air traffic was shut down.  But for most of that day, I assumed he was gone.

2.  Walking the Streets

Once the enormity of the tragedy became clear, a mass exodus started out of the city.  The streets were closed to traffic, so people just simply walked. My wife, then my girlfriend, worked in midtown, but we got in touch with each other through AOL Instant Messenger and worked out that we’d meet in Columbus Circle and I’d walk her to my place.

So I left my apartment and started walking south, mostly against a massing crowd of people who were all going north, away from Ground Zero.  Some of them were Manhattanites, on what would be a two or three mile hike, and some of them were from points even further north — the Bronx, even Westchester.  What else could they do?  Some of them had no place to stay, many of them just wanted to get as far away as they could, and there were no cars, no cabs, no transit.  So they walked, all of them quiet, some of them crying, some of them covered in the ashes of the fallen buildings.

As I walked south, getting on 11AM or so, two hours after the first tower fell, I could see stores shutting down for the day, maybe the week.  The local Starbucks was closed, a hand-drawn “sad face” making the announcement.  The open stores were mostly empty, because who would be shopping?  The only people doing any business were the grocery stores, bulging with people stocking up on supplies for what they expected might be a near siege of the city.

But as I walked, I came across the peculiar sight of one retail store doing a booming business, with people lined up out the door.  It was a shoe store, and I was momentarily puzzled wondering why people would be buying shoes at a time like this.  Then I realized that all the people on line were women.  Women who had already walked miles on their high heels, and were desperate to get some comfortable shoes for the long road ahead.

3.  The Friday Vigil

I remember that first week after in kind of a blur.  Looking back, it’s almost like it happened in a dream. I remember getting back to work on Thursday, following the mayor’s encouragement that we should all get back to our lives.  It was ridiculously too early to be back at work. At the time, I was teaching at Fordham Law School, and I got maybe 10 minutes into the class before I simply stopped, seeing the looks on the faces of students who were simply not prepared to discuss property law.  So we just talked about how everyone was feeling, how we were holding up.

That Friday, I remember that people started a spontaneous movement to hold a candlelight vigil at sunset throughout the country in memory of the lost.  My now-wife and I joined the vigil, going down to the front steps of our brownstone and then walking the two blocks, holding our candles, to the fire station on 83rd street, which had lost one of its firemen.

When we arrived, there was already a crowd up front. It was an electic crowd, a mix of the Upper West Side residents of the area and what seemed like a group of friends and family of the fallen firefighter, most of whom probably lived outside Manhattan.  As we got there, a man with a guitar was playing a folk tune, many in the crowd singing along. But not the whole crowd. What he was singing was “If I had a Hammer,” a Pete Seeger progressive anthem about the “hammer of justice” and the “bell of freedom,” first sung in support of political protestors. And the people singing along were a group of residents, reconstructed lefties, stereotypically former hippies, seemingly oblivious to the glaringly inappropriate gesture of singing a 60s protest song at the vigil for a firefighter killed in a terrorist attack.

The rest of the people, there because of a personal loss, not because they read something on the internet about walking around with a candle, seemed puzzled, not because they knew the historic implications of the song, but more just a reaction to its cheery tempo.  But they clearly felt something was amiss, so when the song ended, up started a very different type of anthem started ringing out — chants of “USA, USA, USA” started by a little boy, maybe eight or nine.  So now it was the residents’ turn to feel a little uncomfortable, as the sound of what seemed like a martial chant, perhaps equally as inappropriate as a 60s protest song, filled the streets.

I remember thinking in that moment about how people could have such remarkably divergent reactions to the same tragedy.  And I thought about that moment many times in the years that followed, as we saw those two perspectives become increasingly polarized in the governmental response to what happened that day.

 

Filed Under: Living in Manhattan Tagged With: ,

Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: Cuter Vermin

August 13, 2012 by

One of the nicest things about living in the suburbs is that you get a better class of vermin.  In the city, you got your three basic types of vermin: rats, mice, and cockroaches.  They’re all horrible.  And no matter where you live, or how nice your place, you end up dealing with them at some point.

Rats, of course, are the worst, but unless you’re living in a hovel, you probably don’t have them in your home.  It’s just that they’re everywhere else, hiding out and just waiting until you’re staggering your way home after a long day at work or a long night of drinking, just biding their time until they JUMP OUT FROM BEHIND THE GARBAGE CANS GAHHHHHHHH.  Just the worst.  I’ve seen rats the size of cats, bigger than most dogs people have in the city, pacing around on the subway tracks, in alleys — they’re everywhere in the city.  Now, I guess we must have rats in the suburbs, too, but I just don’t see them as much.  I think rats like the city better.  They’re very sophisticated, those rats.

I had mice in my apartment, of course, pretty much every apartment I ever had in Manhattan. The only good thing about having mice was that I could pretend that I was their MOUSE GOD.  Like a real God, I had the power of life or death over them.  I could be a beneficent God, getting lazy and leaving food on a dirty plate in the sink, creating a bountiful harvest.  Or I could be a vengeful God, smiting them with the Plague of the Trays of Glue.  When you’re 25, living alone in the city, no money, working for The Man, you take your opportunities to be ALL-POWERFUL where you can get them.

But I wasn’t really cut out to be Mouse God.  I’m too much of a softie, definitely more of a New Testament Mouse God.  Mouse traps are horrible things.  Have you ever heard a mouse scream when he realizes that he’s stuck in a glue trap.  It’s a horrible sound.  And then what are you supposed to do with a glue trap that has a mouse stuck to it, the poor mouse terrified, struggling to get away, looking at his Mouse God and begging for mercy?  Horrible.  I never knew what to do — the kind thing would be to kill it quickly, but I don’t quite have it in me to take a hammer and beat a mouse to death with it.  And if you throw it away, you’re consigning that mouse to a miserable starvation death in the garbage.  No good option.

Now, cockroaches are a different story.  When I’m retired, I’ll happily take a part-time job hammering cockroaches to death, if someone was willing to pay me to do it.  DIE COCKROACH DIE.  No problems there. Very satisfying work.  I’d hammer away all day long.  So would you.  Nothing worse than coming home, turning on the light, and seeing a bunch of cockroaches scurrying away from your kitchen sink.  And then you also have those “water bugs,” which are giant mutant cockroaches that sneak into bathrooms.  Every time they did construction on our block, we’d get an infusion of those water bugs everywhere we had a faucet.

So if you were to ask me what I love about the suburbs, I’d have to say that I love the better class of vermin we have out here. Three years, I’ve yet to see a mouse, a rat, or a cockroach.  Instead, we have really cute vermin, like deer.  Seriously.  Deer.  That’s our biggest problem.  Because, you know, they eat stuff from the gardens.  Isn’t that awful!  And instead of rats, we have squirrels.  Cute little squirrels, big bushy tails, scampering joyfully from tree to tree, saving up those nuts for winter.  Awwwwwww.

Of course, once in a while, a bear comes down from the local state park and tries to eat us or our dogs.  That’s not good.  And one more reason why I live in a condo, because most bears have trouble navigating elevators.

But that’s unusual.  And, anyway, what’s worse — dealing with rats and mice and cockroaches in the city every single day, or taking a very small chance of someday getting eaten by a bear in the suburbs?

I thought so.

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Love Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Message to People in the Hamptons: You Do Realize You’re Spending Thousands of Dollars for a Weekend in the Suburbs, Right?

July 19, 2012 by

The Hamptons are the worst.

I mean, seriously.  What an amazing marketing job they’ve done out there to convince Manhattanites to spend thousands of dollars and a five-hour schlep in traffic to visit what is essentially — and I hate to break this to you — JUST ANOTHER SUBURB.

Because that’s all it is.  The Hamptons are just the east end of Long Island, the original Manhattan suburb.  Think about it:

  • Five bedroom colonials and high-ranches?  Check.
  • One acre lots?  Check.
  • You have to drive everywhere?  Check.

That, my friends, is a suburb.  S-U-B-U-R-B.  The Hamptons are a beautiful place to live, probably one of the nicest suburbs in the region, but they are still a suburb.

And it amazes me that the same people who will sneer at me for my suburban exile in Nyack will happily spend half my yearly mortgage payment for a half-share so they can spend a few weekends in a five-bedroom high-ranch in Water Mill. Yes, okay, there’s a beach.  You claim that you pay all that money so you can be “at the beach.”  But are you really?  I did Hamptons shares a few times when I was living in the city, and I can remember going to the beach maybe three times. So don’t tell me about the beach.

Now, I’m not talking about the Hamptons experience that the uber-rich have, the Billy Joels and Alec Baldwins and Howard Sterns and David Kochs or whoever.  That’s a whole different world of ridiculous houses and star-studded parties and caviar and champagne and feasting on the flesh of sacrificial virgins in secret underground temples to Mammon. But you’re probably not having that kind of Hamptons experience.

No, here’s the experience you’re having.  You have a friend-of-a-friend, some sort of hyper-organized Tracy Flick type, who sent you an email blast six months ago inviting you to grab a summer share of some amazing “beach house” she found in Sag Harbor or wherever. So in the middle of some dreary January day, you plunked down a few thousand dollars for a quarter-share.

And now it’s one of your weekends, so you pack a bag and start on the great Hamptons Weekend Forced Death March. Maybe you took the train, fervently hoping that you get one of those three-seat benches and that you don’t have to sit next to someone else.  Or maybe you hop on the Jitney, so you’re stuffed into a bus — because who doesn’t love the luxury of riding in a BUS — for what would be a three hour trip if you’re in some glorious parallel universe in which there isn’t any traffic, but in your universe will end up taking like five hours.  Or maybe you splurge and rent a car for the weekend, because nothing says “relaxing” like sitting behind the wheel in traffic on a Friday night for a couple of hours.

But now you’ve arrived, and you find out that you’re sharing five bedrooms with about a dozen people, none of whom are your friends because you all screwed up and took different weekends for your share.  Hopefully, there’s at least a pool, because you now find out that the “beach house,” isn’t actually on the beach. Or near the beach.  It’s maybe in the same zip code as the beach — a fifteen minute drive, which would be manageable except that there’s no place to park your car without a permit, and although Tracy Flick got hers three months ago, you didn’t.

But the fun doesn’t end there. Not only have you shelled out thousands of dollars for your share, but now you arrive to find that you owe another hundred bucks or so for your contribution to the food and drink that Tracy picked up for the weekend. Except that you got there too late for Friday night’s dinner, and half the beer is already gone, so you’re basically paying for everyone else to eat and drink.

It gets better the next morning, which is spent in a three-hour group conversation about whether you should all try to go to the beach.  Chances are, of course, that if it’s not raining, it’s really, really hot, so everyone agrees it’s not a good idea to pile ten people into the one parking-permitted car to go to the beach where you’re not legally allowed to drink anyway.  So you all end up by the pool, which would be fine, except that the whole day is spent with people texting their “real friends” in a desperate search for the “good house parties” to go to that night.  And the women that you thought might be good hook-up possibilities back when you scanned Tracy’s “signed up!” list in January are totally not interested, instead passing back-and-forth their dog-eared copy of the Hamptons Magazine’s Annual 50 Hottest Bachelors list, a list that you’re almost certainly not on.

Even if you actually do find something to do that night, it’s probably a schlep from one part of the Hamptons to the other, so someone has to stay sober to drive. That would be you.  Then you get there, and it’s a sausage fest, so you all pile back into the car to go to some crappy bar that  — I hate to break it to you — is basically a suburban hangout for nine months of the year.

You wake up Sunday morning, and there’s nothing left to eat, because the people who stayed behind when your group went bar- and party- hopping ended up inviting some friends over and they ate all your food.  So you hang out for about a few hours, listlessly watching some Wimbledon on the teevee machine, before heading back for the five-hour trip home.

That, my friend, is your weekend in the Hamptons suburbs!  You spent it in a nice big suburban house with a suburban yard and a suburban pool where you needed a suburban car to get around, and the only thing that differentiated your “Hamptons Beach House” from those stultifying high-ranches you would never live in over in Westbury or Pleasantville or Park Ridge is that you were a fifteen minute drive from a beach that you never visited. And it only cost you a month’s pay so you can spend four more weekends there. Well-done!

And not only that, it’s a BAD suburb, an unholy alchemy of suburb and city that perfectly synthesizes:

  1. all the inconveniences of living in the city (expensive and crowded living space, annoying strivers, $15 sandwiches) with
  2. all the irritations of living in the suburbs (the need for a car, sprawl, lousy bars), and then adds
  3. the final secret ingredient of a glorious five-hour trip to get there.

That emperor?  He’s naked, my friends. He’s buck naked!

Maybe you disagree. Maybe that’s not been your experience. Maybe I’m just a bitter middle-aged man with hazy recollections of uniquely awful Hamptons weekends.  Fine.  But if you’re having a good time out there, and not because you’re some total desperate striver who likes to send his weekends trying to find the perfect party where THERE MIGHT BE MODELS, it’s probably because you’ve actually managed to put together a group of people you actually like, and you’re just basically hanging out with them. But if that’s the case, then it’s not the Hamptons you like, but your friends.  And you could be having a good time with them ANYWHERE, and save yourself a lot of trouble and money.

That’s really the bottom line.  The more I think about the differences between living in the city and living in the suburbs, the more I realize that the only real distinction is the people, the fact that urban environments uniquely attract interesting, bright, and challenging people who choose to live there primarily during the most sociable and vibrant time of their lives — when they’re young, single, and childless, looking for other young, single, and childless  people to hook up with and befriend.  The city doesn’t make them that way.  Theres nothing inherently interesting or special about the city, other than the people who live there.

The Hamptons are the proof of that.  There’s nothing inherently “hip” or trendy or even distinctive about the Hamptons, other than the people who choose to relocate there for part of their summers. Take away the people, and you have just another suburb, one that’s as close to Manhattan as Albany, and just about as interesting.

So, as the self-appointed driver of the Suburban Welcome Wagon, I have a message for all of you Hamptons-goers that you might not want to hear, but I think it’s for your own good — “Welcome to the Suburbs!”

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

Understanding the “Bridge and Tunnel” Crowd, and Why There Aren’t Any Good Clubs or Lounges in the Suburbs

June 22, 2012 by

When I resigned myself to a life in the suburbs, one of my goals was to try to find nightlife opportunities that would give me some semblance of the experiences I used to get in the city.  Now, let me be clear that I was not a big nightlife guy in the first place.  In my 20s, my usual nightlife routine was a night playing pool at the lost and lamented Amsterdam Billiards or getting a beer in a neighborhood bar.  Part of that was that I was, as they say, “living in the 80s and making in the 30s”, so I didn’t quite have the bankroll to hit a club. It’s a lot more fun to go clubbing if you are (a) a rich guy, or (b) a hot girl.  I was neither of those things.

Even as I got older, though, and could afford the club scene, it was really only something I did once in a while.  Maybe if I’d been single, or liked dance music music, or liked standing, or liked tinnitis, or couldn’t do the math on the cost of buying a bottle of Grey Goose for $350, I would have been a bigger fan.  But it just wasn’t my thing.  Maybe once in a while we’d get together with a group, get a table at a club, and put a big hole in our credit cards to enjoy a night out, but it really had to be a special occasion.

Otherwise, as I got older, my main nightlife routine would be hitting a “lounge,” which is really a euphemism for “a bar that has the drink prices of clubs because it has couches.”  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate having couches in bars.  The world needs more couches.  And I guess I like lounges because they aren’t as loud, so you can have a conversation.  The world needs more conversation, too.  You can’t really talk in a club, which is actually generally a good thing because most of the people in the clubs don’t have much of anything to say beyond “hey, nice shoes.”

So when I say that I was hoping to find nightlife opportunities in the suburbs, I’m really talking about those kinds of lounges — places with couches, where you can have a conversation, maybe with a bartender who makes interesting drinks that involve something called “muddling.”  Drinks that involve “muddling” are always much more expense than the non-muddling variety, but they sort of justify the fact that you went out at all — if you’re going to just mix vodka and soda, you can do that at home.  You need a fancy bartender in some couchy lounge to make you something with 15 muddled ingredients.

Here’s the thing — they don’t exist in the suburbs.  They. Don’t. Exist.  There are no lounges.  In fact, there are no clubs, nowhere that you can, if you wanted that experience, go to dance and listen to music and become insensate from the ringing in your ears.  What you have in the suburbs is simple: bars.  Just bars. No couches. No muddled drinks. No dancing.

It’s actually a lot worse than I thought. I figured that with all the people who get exiled from the city to the suburbs every year, some entrepreneurial type would realize that there’s a market for an “urban-style” lounge or club that would appeal to people who don’t want to just sit in a bar and, moreover, don’t want to have to schlep to the city to go out.

But I was wrong, and here’s why.  People who live in the suburbs who want to get an urban nightlife experience go to the city.  Whether they are 25 year olds who want to dance and listen to music without words, or 35 year olds who want to go to drink complicated drinks and sit on couches, they all have something in common — they want to do it IN the city. That’s the whole point.  They want to escape the suburbs for a night and feed on the urban energy and excitement.

Hence — the “bridge and tunnel” crowd that everyone in the city complains about when they go to clubs and lounge.  Oh, boy, there’s nothing worse for the reputation of a club/lounge than to get tagged as a “B&T” place, because then no one who actually lives in the city wants to go.  So the urbanites stop coming, and eventually the B&T people realize that they’re schlepping 45 minutes and paying $50 for parking to hang out with people from their neighborhod, so they stop coming. And then the place shuts down, while the B&T people start chasing wherever the urbanites went to.  It’s a vicious circle.

And that’s the point.  The people in the suburbs don’t really care about the music, or the muddled drinks, or the couches — what they want is the feeling of being a part of the urban excitement for a night.  If someone actually opened a hipster club/lounge/whatever in the suburbs, it would be the absolute worst.  By definition, EVERYONE in the place would part of the B&T crowd, except that they wouldn’t actually have to cross a bridge or burrow through a tunnel to get there.  Even worse, the people most likely to end up filling the place would be the very B&T people who aren’t even urbanized enough to want that hit off the urban pipe.  They’d be like the junior varsity to the B&T crowd, people who don’t even care about getting that authentic vibe.  In other words, that suburban hipster lounge would be like the worst place on earth for an urban exile.

That’s why those places don’t exist.  And that’s why my nightlife over the past three years has narrowed down to the occasional trip into the city, or game night at the condo.  In other words, despite any ambitions I might have had to maintain any kind of urban cred, I’m a typical suburbanite.

Ouchy.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Return from Exile Tagged With: , , ,

The Grass is Always Greener: Why People Who Live in the Suburbs Want to Live in the City, and People Who Live in the City (Surprisingly) Want to Live in the Suburbs

October 28, 2011 by

Greg Hanscom put up an interesting take on Grist.org on the discrepancy between where people say they want to live (dense cities) and where they actually seem to be ending up living (sprawling suburbs).  He points to polling data that came from the real estate advising firm RCLCO showing that 88% of Millenials and even their Baby Boomer parents express a desire to live in denser and less car-dependent settings, which is in conflict with census data showing population growth in the suburbs and declines in the cities.

His take:

  • Lots of Millenials would LOVE to move to the cities, but to do that they need of them jobs that no one seems to be able to get these days. So they’re camping out at their parents’ place in the suburbs, “watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia reruns and dreaming of big city living.”
  • Although crime is down in the big cities, but not enough to diminish frightening images of the city as violent places.
  • And although young people like to live in the cities, they pack up for the suburbs as soon as they have kids.

Finally, he makes a brilliant point that maybe this is all about something deep in the American psyche that makes us consistently pine for that which we don’t have, almost a “grass is always greener” perspective that affects all of us.  He points out that according to a 2009 Pew poll, 46% of the public “would rather live in a different type of community from the one they’re living in now — a sentiment that is most prevalent among city dwellers.”

It’s a brilliant post, and I think he’s right on all counts.  Without question young people want to live in the cities — why wouldn’t someone who is 25 prefer to live in a place with abundant nightlife opportunities, ethnic diversity, culture, and public transportation that allows you to drink your face off and still get home safely?  And, conversely, it’s also abundantly clear that people tend to gravitate toward the larger living spaces afforded in the suburbs once they start filling up their 600 square foot apartment with a bunch of screaming children.

Moreover, I think there’s something to the “grass is greener” affect.  Most people who live in the city tend to settle down into a torpid state where they take all that great city stuff for granted.  Like me, they stop going out so much, particularly as they get older, and spend more time in their home and surrounding neighborhood.  And then they increasingly realize that, boy, it really sucks to spend 90% of your time in a two-room apartment, so they pine away for the larger, greener pastures of the suburbs.  Then, of course, you have people like me who move to the suburbs for a lot of good reasons, but look around one night at the Cheescake Factory and think that they’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.  Essentially, we all want what we don’t have, particularly if we used to have it.  It must be something deeply wired into our brains to keep us constantly on the move, always looking for something better, that helped us get through the caveman days.  But it really does make it difficult to appreciate what you have.

So I have no problem admitting that I’m one of those people: I moved to the suburbs, but I really do miss living in the city, and I’m certainly happy that I got my 17 years of urban living in before I exiled myself.

I’ll also say this: if you’re reading this, and you live in the city, go do something. Go to the park, or a club, or a great restaurant, or stare at paintings.  That’s why you’re living in the city, why you’re sacrificing all that money and comfort.  So go do it.  Before it’s too late.

Filed Under: Advice, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , , , ,

Memories of 9/11, Ten Years Later

September 11, 2011 by

It’s just impossible to believe that it’s been ten years, that a kid could be a young teenager and not remember what life was like before.

Everyone has memories of that day. Here are three of mine:

1.  Sending Tom Off on the Plane

Early on that Tuesday morning in September, I sent one of my best friends off in a cab to JFK to send him back to LA.  Tom had come to visit for a college reunion we were having up in Maine, so he’d come in about a week earlier so that we could drive up together.  While we were there, he broke his wrist badly diving for a softball, and spent most of Monday seeing doctors while I traveled around trying to get him some medication for the pain.  His intention had been to stay for the week for a job interview, but the doctors recommended he have surgery as soon as possible, and he wanted to do the surgery back in LA.

So that Tuesday morning, he got in a cab bound for JFK.  About two hours later, I watched as the second of two planes hit the World Trade Center, and heard of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t until early afternoon that I found out that he wasn’t on any of them. His flight was diverted to St. Louis, where he sat with that broken wrist for most of the next week while the air traffic was shut down.  But for most of that day, I assumed he was gone.

2.  Walking the Streets

Once the enormity of the tragedy became clear, a mass exodus started out of the city.  The streets were closed to traffic, so people just simply walked. My wife, then my girlfriend, worked in midtown, but we got in touch with each other through AOL Instant Messenger and worked out that we’d meet in Columbus Circle and I’d walk her to my place.

So I left my apartment and started walking south, mostly against a massing crowd of people who were all going north, away from Ground Zero.  Some of them were Manhattanites, on what would be a two or three mile hike, and some of them were from points even further north — the Bronx, even Westchester.  What else could they do?  Some of them had no place to stay, many of them just wanted to get as far away as they could, and there were no cars, no cabs, no transit.  So they walked, all of them quiet, some of them crying, some of them covered in the ashes of the fallen buildings.

As I walked south, getting on 11AM or so, two hours after the first tower fell, I could see stores shutting down for the day, maybe the week.  The local Starbucks was closed, a hand-drawn “sad face” making the announcement.  The open stores were mostly empty, because who would be shopping?  The only people doing any business were the grocery stores, bulging with people stocking up on supplies for what they expected might be a near siege of the city.

But as I walked, I came across the peculiar sight of one retail store doing a booming business, with people lined up out the door.  It was a shoe store, and I was momentarily puzzled wondering why people would be buying shoes at a time like this.  Then I realized that all the people on line were women.  Women who had already walked miles on their high heels, and were desperate to get some comfortable shoes for the long road ahead.

3.  The Friday Vigil

I remember that first week after in kind of a blur.  Looking back, it’s almost like it happened in a dream. I remember getting back to work on Thursday, following the mayor’s encouragement that we should all get back to our lives.  It was ridiculously too early to be back at work. At the time, I was teaching at Fordham Law School, and I got maybe 10 minutes into the class before I simply stopped, seeing the looks on the faces of students who were simply not prepared to discuss property law.  So we just talked about how everyone was feeling, how we were holding up.

That Friday, I remember that people started a spontaneous movement to hold a candlelight vigil at sunset throughout the country in memory of the lost.  My now-wife and I joined the vigil, going down to the front steps of our brownstone and then walking the two blocks, holding our candles, to the fire station on 83rd street, which had lost one of its firemen.

When we arrived, there was already a crowd up front. It was an electic crowd, a mix of the Upper West Side residents of the area and what seemed like a group of friends and family of the fallen firefighter.  As we got there, a man with a guitar was playing a folk tune, many in the crowd singing along. But not the whole crowd. What he was singing was “If I had a Hammer,” a Pete Seeger progressive anthem about the “hammer of justice” and the “bell of freedom,” first sung in support of men prosecuted for advocating the overthrow of the country. And the people singing along were a group of residents, reconstructed lefties, stereotypically former hippies, seemingly oblivious to the monstrously inappropriate gesture of singing a 60s protest song at the vigil for a firefighter killed in a terrorist attack.

The rest of the people, there because of a personal loss, not because they read something on the internet about walking around with a candle, seemed puzzled, not because they knew the historic implications of the song, but more just a reaction to its cheery tempo.  But they clearly felt something was amiss, so when the song ended, up started a very different type of anthem started ringing out — chants of “USA, USA, USA” started by a little boy, maybe eight or nine.  So now it was the residents’ turn to feel a little uncomfortable, as the sound of the martial chant, equally as inappropriate as a 60s protest song, filled the streets.

I remember thinking in that moment about how people could have such remarkably divergent reactions to the same tragedy.  And I thought about that moment many times in the years that followed, as we saw those two perspectives become increasingly polarized in the governmental response to what happened that day.

Filed Under: Best of, Living in Manhattan Tagged With:

Thoughts on Yesterday’s Earthquake, and Why New Yorkers are Tougher Than Everyone Else

August 23, 2011 by

I don’t know about you, but I felt the earth move.  Har!

How about that? An earthquake.  In New York. That’s something new for all of us.

Now, I have another reason to be glad that I moved to the suburbs — namely, if we’re going to start having earthquakes in a big, dense city made up of buildings that were never built to withstand earthquakes, then I certainly feel that I made a pretty good trade.  Being able to get good ethnic food is wonderful and all, but not when the walls start trembling.

That said, I’m not particularly safe here in my condo in Nyack, on the eight floor of a building that I’m pretty sure what constructed on landfall.  A couple of good shakes, and I’ll be sleeping with the fishies.  That’s why I was a little freaked out yesterday, and encouraged my wife to get the heck out of the condo and take a walk or something.  I don’t even know that my insurance coverage protects me from earthquakes.  Probably something I should check.

It’s really monstrously unfair to subject New Yorkers to earthquakes, on top of everything else that they (sadly, that used to be “we”) have to deal with. I’ve always thought that New Yorkers are simply tougher than everyone else, by the sheer necessity of dealing with all the daily outrages and irritations that you have to put up with when you live in crowded, noisy city.

New Yorkers just deal.  Summers are too hot.  Winters are too cold.  You take a cab, you sit in traffic, you take the subway, you stand packed together next to someone who could easily be a serial killer. You live in a jail cell. Crazy people everywhere. Everyone in a rush, bumping into each other.  Snow, hail, sleet, hurricanes, blackouts — we get it all, and we just keep going to work.  Assholes dropped two fucking PLANES on our city, and we were all back at our desks two days later.  We DEAL.

No one else has to deal with all that stuff.  People who live in LA, for example, are like veal, sensitive and temperamental.  It’s so beautiful every day, they get freaked out with any change in their routine.  I’ve been in LA on rainy days, it’s like everyone’s afraid to be outside. They can’t drive.

So the fact that people in LA were sneering at our response to the earthquake was a little irritating. Yes, the idea of the buildings gave us a little pause.  Something new and surprising.  So people hurried out of the buildings, and some people got the rest of the day off.  But today?  Back to work.  Like always.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Why Everyone Should Own a Dog, Including and Especially Single Men

January 22, 2011 by

We’ve had the Kozy dog for a little over a year now, and I will say without reservation that it is the best decision that I have every made, other than marrying my wife, a clarification I feel obligated to make because I do enjoy the occasional sexy time that I would almost certainly never have again if I said that buying a dog was a better decision than getting married. Not to mention that, with the real estate market struggling like it has, I don’t quite have the wherewithal to give up half my money.  So the wife is the best decision, no question.  But the dog was a pretty good one, too.

Here’s why: no one has ever been as happy to see me, at any point in my life, as that dog is every single time I come home.  I’ve never seen such joy. It’s at a level of Times Square at the end of World War II, but EVERY SINGLE DAY.  I come home, and he’s practically quivering with joy, shaking his tail so vigorously that he basically is shaking his whole body.  My wife? She might rouse herself from the couch to give me a kiss hello.  But my dog loses his mind.

So far, that’s really the best part about living in the suburbs. I never wanted a dog in the city, because I could not bear the thought of having to climb up and down those stupid stairs every day to walk him all the time.  But in retrospect, I was wrong.  I should have gotten a dog years ago, although that would mean I wouldn’t have THIS dog, and I honestly can’t imagine having any dog than Kozy.  Yes, I know that if I’d gotten a dog five years ago, before Kozy was ever born, I’d love that dog too and be unable to imagine owning any other dog.  But that hypothetical imaginary version of me is simple wrong: THIS dog is the best.

So I should have gotten a dog back when I lived in the city.  Frankly, everyone should have a dog: urbanist, suburbanite, people living on the moon.  Get a dog.

In fact, I’d particularly recommend my single male friends looking for female companionship to get a dog.  First of all, having a dog is a signal to women that you have at least some basic nurturing skills, which women find sexy.  Nothing turns a woman off more than to come back to your apartment and find some long-dead plant festering in the corner, a sign that you’re so incapable of taking care of anything that you couldn’t even manage to WATER A PLANT.  You bring that young lady back up to your place, and show her that you’ve actually managed to keep a dog alive, and you’re well on your way to Sexy Time.

Second, having a dog is a pretty well-known way to meet women. You don’t realize how many other people have dogs until you have one yourself.  It’s like how when you buy a car, you start to notice all the other people who have the same car.  So now that I have a dog, I’ve started to notice all the people walking their dogs when I’m in the city, something to which I was completely oblivious back in my ignorant dog-free days.  And a lot of those people are young, attractive women who have clearly recognized the value of unqualified adoration, something they apparently aren’t getting so much of from the likes of you.  They’re out there, walking their dogs, waiting for you.  Not to mention how cute dogs, and my dog is awfully cute are like catnip (okay, mixing animal metaphors a bit here) to women.  Walk a dog, meet a woman. It’s that simple, and a lot easier than trolling bars.

Third, dogs are great for screening out women that you probably shouldn’t be dating or marrying.  If you’re dating a woman who doesn’t like dogs, that’s a really bad sign.  If she likes cats, that’s even worse, because cats are terrible, awful, evil things.  A woman who loves dogs has an appreciation for mindless, stupid creatures who give unbounded affection but make a lot of messes, which is exactly what men are. A woman who hates dogs is probably not going to like living with you, especially you, because you’re a pig.

Of course, all that wisdom comes too late for me, already happily married.  But it’s not too late for you.  You married people?  Get a dog.  Single people.  Get a dog.  Everyone should get a dog.

Filed Under: Advice, Best of, Having a Dog in the Suburbs, Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »