Lessons for Exiles: How do you get city people to the suburbs?

June 1, 2009 by

So my wife and I are looking for a new place in SUMA, and we’re telling our friends about it. Trying to get them excited, because we’d like to, you know, stay friends with them, and it would help if they were willing to, you know, visit us now and then.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re never going to see them again.

And I really don’t blame them, because I never visited my friends who left the city.  Once they left, it was like the Morlocks got them. We cast them from our minds. Chris and Kate have left 83rd and Third and they’re now in Rye, and let us not speak of them again….

So I was just as bad when I was on the cool, Manhattan side of that equation. I was never taking a weekend night to schlep out to Scarsdale or Montclair or God-Forbid-Long-Island to go visit someone who had the effrontery to leave this great city. Almost as if their choice to leave, by itself, rendered them somewhat less interesting.

I guess I deserve nothing better. I’m sure I’ll find nice, umm, replacement friends.

Anyway, I do have one idea.  When I’ve discussed the houses we’ve been looking out, I’ve detected a common thread in the questions I get.  No one seems interested in bedrooms or bathrooms or location or square footage or the type of oven we’ll have, but they seem very interested in one feature of some of the homes we’ve seen.

Whether it has a pool.

The pool is the equalizer, maybe the one thing that elevates a suburban household in the eyes of the sneering Manhattanariat.  A pool for those hot days in the summer when your Hamptons share is in an off-week, or you’re afraid to go back and face the friend-of-a-friend that you woke up next to LAST weekend.  A pool to escape Manhattan’s summer heat, a place to eat barbecue.

After all, the Hamptons are really just a suburb. I hate to tell that to all of you who just plunked down a month’s salary for four weekends in a five bedroom house on a one-acre lot in a cul-de-sac, but doesn’t that description sound kinda like a typical suburban house? So you’re spending all that income to drive out 4 or 5 hours on a Friday night to sleep in a bunk bed like a 12 year old, in a house that has as much relationship to the beach as Woody Allen, and you’re too good to come visit me a half hour north?   Did I, ummm, mention that we have a pool?

Great, see you then.

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

What I’ll miss most — room service

April 16, 2009 by

This is going to be hard.

Just got home after a loooong day. The wife is out with some friends, so I have the place to myself. Perhaps there was a time when I’d go out and play some pool, actually interact with other human beings. But, again, it was a long day with a bunch of extra “o’s”, so all I want to do is collapse on a sofa. And no way I’m going to cook anything.

Which brings me to room service. Maybe the best unsung feature of urban living. Actually better than room service in any hotel in the country. I’ve literally got a notebook full of menus (the wife is crazy like that), probably 50 restaurants in my area that deliver, just about any cuisine you want. 14 types of Chinese food. Sushi, Italian, Jewish deli, Malaysian food, French, Thai (although we’re strangely a little lean on Thai food on the upper west side the last few years, and the closing of the Vietnamese place on 81st and Amsterdam was a tragedy on par with the Watchman movie).

(Quick aside — call up Penang.  Get the roti telur, ask for an extra side of the curry sauce. It’s like $2.  Also get some coconut rice.  When you’re done eating the Roti Telur, pour the sauce over the rice. Eat the rice.  Email me and tell me how much you love me for turning you on to this.)

Tonight it was onion soup and fettucini with short ribs from Bistro Citron, which is also a dependable place for mussels provencale. $25 bucks, plus tip (you gotta tip the delivery guys well, with the life they lead), 25 minutes tops, and I’m eating. I will miss this.

I don’t know why suburban restaurants don’t focus on delivery, but my guess is that they’re bound into the idea that people in the suburbs cook their dinners. I don’t know about that. Seems a little “Leave it to Beaver” for me. I work in the suburbs in a workplace that is 85% women, and when I’m there at 6PM with a lot of them I don’t get the impression that they’re on the way home to cook up a casserole. I already have a job, but I encourage some young entrepreneur to start one of those services that connects restaurants about to go out of business with suburban families eating their fourth Chinese delivery meal of the week.

UPDATE: looked up some places online, like this one.  But my guess is that they service only selected areas.  Alas!

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

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? The Crips and Bloods, that’s who!

April 14, 2009 by

Now, this is certainly exciting news.  Who wants to live in an area bereft of some of the urban conveniences offered by gang colors, tags, hand signs, drive by shootings, and easy access to illegal drugs?  No one, that’s who!

So that’s why it’s such good news to hear about a recent FBI report that gangs are starting to expand into the suburbs.  Just like Starbucks!

Here’s what the FBI had to say:

“Gangs have long posed a threat to public safety, but as this study shows, gang activity is no longer merely a problem for urban areas. Gang members are increasingly moving to suburban America, bringing with them the potential for increased crime and violence,” said Assistant Director Kenneth W. Kaiser, FBI Criminal Investigative Division.

Talk about serious hipster credibility.  There are gangs in the suburbs.  Gangs!

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Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: ,

In the News: The Suburbs are cool — just ask Details Magazine

April 13, 2009 by

I know I’m on to something when I’m in agreement with a magazine that has pictures of hot women in it along with bodyspray ads.  As David Hochman in Details Magazine pointed out a few years ago, the suburbs can be cool, too. Here’s the money quote:

But in the past decade, the distinction between city and suburb has become blurred. “Commuter towns” in places like northern New Jersey, the eastern shore of Seattle’s Lake Washington, and Orange County, California—once considered cultural Siberia—are now filled with work-from-home hipsters who care about things like independent cinema and what Arianna Huffington has to say. Long-ignored suburban outposts are being rebuilt with cool arts facilities and retro-chic cafés. In short, the things we always thought we needed cities for—decent sesame noodles, fabulous eyewear, lesbians—are now available where once there were only Aunt Goldie and her mahjong group. . . .

“From a cultural standpoint, cities are becoming less interesting and the suburbs are increasingly where the action is,” says Joel Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History. “Partly because of the freedom the Internet gives us, but also because cities have become homogenized, inhospitable, and expensive beyond belief, people now live by the ethos of ‘everywhere a city,’ even if they’re in an outer ring, an outer-outer ring, or beyond.”

And since we’re talking about Suma, we even have an example in Dade Hayes, a writer, who moved from Manhattan to Larchmont (in Westchester):

After decades of living in New York and L.A., Dade Hayes, an editor and author, recently did the unthinkable: He bought a house in Larchmont, New York, a mile from where he grew up. “When I was a kid, Larchmont was a sleepy town where the most interesting restaurant was probably Charlie Brown’s,” he says. “Now there are late-night martini bars, a singles scene, an indie movie house a town over—and all without the glorious urine stench you get in Manhattan.”

Late night martini bars, an indie movie house, no urine stench?  Now, THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!

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Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, News, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: ,

Why people don’t move to the suburbs — Bob Saget

April 13, 2009 by

Because the networks keep putting out sitcoms with people like Bob Saget or Jim Belushi in them.  ABC just premiered another horrific sitcom starring Bob Saget as what I can only imagine is a middle-aged suburban man with a wife much better looking than him and annoying neighbors and wise-beyond-their-years smart ass kids.

From the ABC website.  This sounds great!!!

In the family-centered tradition of Roseanne and Home Improvement, Surviving Suburbia opens the curtain to follow Bob Saget (How I Met Your Mother, Full House) and Cynthia Stevenson (Men in Trees, Dead Like Me) as Steve and Anne Patterson, a seemingly normal couple who have been married for 20 years, have two children and a cookie cutter house in the idyllic suburbs. But Steve maintains a rather cynical point of view on family, friends, neighbors, society — pretty much everyone and everything — as he tries to survive suburban life.

Surviving Suburbia takes a contemporary look at family life and the reasons one might have to question the system — How does exchanging keys with a neighbor for emergencies result in house sitting? Why do kids’ classroom projects inevitably become the parents’ responsibility? When did we start needing mediators to handle disagreements between adults? – all of which goes to prove that it’s never just another sunny day in the suburbs,

Is this my future?  God help me.

UPDATE:  According to the reviews, it’s as good as you’d think:
Chicago Tribune.  Boston Herald.

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Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Amy Winehouse, That’s Who!

April 12, 2009 by

You always want to be on top of a trend, right? Well, it’s good to see I’m not alone in making the move to the suburbs: crazy person Amy Winehouse is apparently also moving to a quiet suburb of London when she gets out of her latest rehab. Sadly, her purpose is not to bring her particular brand of falling-down-drunk to the suburbs; instead, she’s moving there to avoid the temptations of the city.

This sort of goes against my Suma philosophy, the idea that you can bring a little bit of your city to the suburbs.  My point is that I’m going to try to find something in the suburbs that feeds that pretentious, pseudo-hip sides of my personality that’s so deeply important to me.  Then again, my pretentious, pseudo-hip side doesn’t include a massive heroin problem (which I guess is what you get when you’re really seriously hip, not pseudo-hip), so my baggage is a lot easier to carry, like on rollers.

And I guess Amy would be moving to “Sulo,” not “Suma”.  But it makes me happy to know that celebrities are doing what I’m doing.  I feel validated!

UPDATE: This didn’t work out so well.  RIP, Amy.

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Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, News, SUMA Lifestyle, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: ,

I Love Manhattan, but I’m leaving….

April 11, 2009 by

I love living in Manhattan.

I love watching the evening news, and seeing that someone was run over by a car or stabbed or something, and being able to say, “hey, that’s like three blocks from my apartment!”

I love getting room service any time I want from my big book of delivery menus that my wife has actually collated, three-hole-punched, and put in a binder organized by ethnicity.

I love going to Central Park on Saturday mornings for some of the pickup softball games in the Great Lawn or the uptown ball fields.

I love the fact that my little neighborhood sandwich shop, Lenny’s, is now all over the city, and that other people get to share in the joy of a Thanksgiving turkey sandwich all year round.

I love pretending that I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art because I have a membership card that says I’m a supporter, even though I never go.

I love my local restaurants Calle Ocho and Barbao, run by people I like and respect, although I liked going to brunch at Calle Ocho more before everyone else found out about the free sangria.

I love going to the meatpacking district and remembering where the transvestite hookers used to hang out, and seeing people buying $1500 handbags there.

I love walking around my neighborhood on the upper west side, playing the game of “what used to be here.”  Like, the northeast corner at 82d and Columbus is a “corner of retail death,” one of many in the city.  It’s now a Mexican restaurant called Comida.  Before that, a semi-Southern-creole-could-never-quite-figure-it-out place called Madaeline Mae’s.  Before that, a faux Irish pub called TJ O’Briens.  Before that, the estimable and lamented Kitchen 82.  And before that, Corner (run by the Lenny’s folk until they realized they could do better just making more Lennys).  And, finally, before that, a local grocery called Casanas, which I still miss because they had these cheap homemade burritos that I’ve never been able to find anywhere else.

I love the fact that you can buy a nudie mag on pretty much every street corner, not that you would when so much more effective material is available now on the internet.  But they’re still there, and basic economics says that someone must still be buying them.

I love being able to decide spontaneously to drink one night, knowing I don’t have to drive home, and that I can get back to my apartment so long as I can remember my address and be able to speak it out loud.

I love it all, and yet, and yet…..I am leaving.

I’m moving out.  Selling the apartment that I bought in 1994, renovated and combined with another unit in 2004, and getting out.  No more Upper West Side.  No more delivery food. No more Central Park.

Why would I do this? It was time.  I’ve lived here for almost 20 years, soaking up as much Manhattan as I could.  But I work outside the city, and have for about six years.  A 45 minute commute, each way, every day.  That wears on you.  And, frankly, as much as I love Manattan, I wasn’t getting a lot out of it when I’m getting home at 8PM exhausted from my drive and long day.  And as much as I love my brownstone apartment, I’m tired of climbing stairs every day.  People joke about how it keeps me in shape to climb two flights to my living room.  It doesn’t.

But here’s my problem.  I grew up in the suburbs, I work in the suburbs, and I know the suburbs.  And I’m terrified about living in the suburbs.  I don’t see why my life should change, I don’t know why I shouldn’t be able to create some semblance of my city life in the suburbs, with interesting bars and good restaurants and fun things to do.  So I’m writing this blog to document my search for that life, that search for an urbanized existence in a suburban environment.

But some of the signs are not so good. My wife and I were exiled to the suburbs in 2004 when we were renovating our apartment, six months of Cheescake Factory Fridays and bars filled with guys wearing flannel and wierd sections of the New York Times that I never saw before.  We kept saying we’d come into the city, and we did.  Three or four times.  Not a good sign.

Can I really live there? Can I live without mixology and Malaysian delivery and a short subway ride to Yankee Stadium?  Can I find new friends and new places to hang out without becoming the suburban guy that I was as a kid.

I’m going to find out.

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Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , , ,
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