Fun:New York City
“”New York's alright... if you like saxophones!
|
| —Fear[1] |
New York, New York.... the city so special they named it twice!
Oh, fuck it:
Pizza
Dirt
More dirt, but we don't look at it
Oh, and Manhattan...... sniff sniff..[2]
Contents |
[edit] Moar
New York City consists of four or five boroughs (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island) spread out over roughly three islands (all of two and the western tip of Long Island) at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York state, as well as a small sliver of the mainland between Manhattan and Long Island. Founded as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, it is blessed with an excellent natural harbor and one of the more bearable East Coast climates.
Having long ago surpassed Boston and Philadelphia as the premier city of the British American colonies and the United States, New York City is now the world's most important city in many areas, finance being the most easily notable. Parts of the city have become virtually synonymous with some fields, especially in the US.
- Wall Street is used to mean "business interests" or "the stock market."
- Broadway is the premier theater district (also known as "The Great White Way").
- Madison Avenue stands in for "advertising."
- Fifth Avenue is associated with shopping.
- Seventh Avenue is the center of the American fashion industry.
- Ellis Island, while no longer the major port of entry for immigrants in the modern day, still conjures up images of massive waves of people arriving on the New World's shores.
- Times Square is, for the rest of the world, a metonym for glitzy overblown commercialism. And New Year's Eve. For New Yorkers, it's a metonym for tourists who adorably grind foot traffic to a halt so they can take pictures of billboards.
- Harlem, for many decades, was synonymous with African-American culture, a role now associated with the South Bronx, Atlanta and South Central Los Angeles, among other places. And with Globetrotters.
[edit] Subway
If you are a first-time rider on New York's clean and efficient subway system, be sure to:
- Familiarize yourself with the smell of the subway stations gradually by walking over the metal things you see on the sidewalk which provide ventilation. This will be most effective on stations in Downtown (such as 14th Street on the B, D, F and M lines) rather than stations in more affluent (or less effluent) areas of the city, such as the Upper East Side (86th Street on the 4, 5 and 6 will not desensitize you to the smell as well as 14th Street will, although 59th Street always inexplicably smells like old piss, no matter how near Bloomingdale's it is).
- Learn how to swipe the MetroCard before you approach the turnstile, or else the locals may get angry and bust a cap. Read the MetroCard and look at the arrows! The arrows will teach you the proper etiquette of swiping the MetroCard.
- If you happen to be on the A train in Far Rockaway, beware the occasional man and his associate selling candies for "dem kids with da cancer." You will find these to be a scam; also, in typical New York fashion, the Metropolitan Transit Authority will pwn you if you sell items on trains
- From personal experience, if you take a weekend subway into the Bronx, you face a 90% chance of being confronted with someone else's bodily fluids.
- The subway system's unique failure to link with other lines when it's supposed to, and its failure to provide seemingly necessary lines (that Phase 1 of the Second Avenue line is coming in 2016!), is the result of stunningly
ineffective free-market capitalism at its best. When the lines were privately owned, the subway barons refused to let their lines intersect, to the disadvantage of everyone but the subway barons. Since the city bought the lines in the mid-20th century, minimal effort has been made to make up for a century of transit built on the "no-fair-he's-touching-me" model. In transit systems built by a single government agency, such as Baltimore's, this problem never arises.
Following these tips, combined with the plentiful space (particularly on the Lexington Avenue line) and friendly transit officers willing to assist you with accurate responses to any questions you may have (such as, "The express train most certainly does stop at 66th Street!"), will enable you to find your subway ride to be pleasant.
[edit] Service
Restaurant service varies from the perfunctory to the obsequious, passing briefly through the highly professional and excellent. However, don't believe all you hear about the city. This editor, after working very late one night, entered a 2nd Avenue restaurant that looked open. It went like this:
- "Hi, are you still serving?"
- "Nope."
- "I thought this was the city that never sleeps."
- "We're not a-fucking-sleep, we just ain't serving."
[edit] Sex
In the city. Mostly overrated. But the TV show was amusing for its first couple of seasons.
[edit] Slogans
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Fear in New York with a saxophone
- ↑ Actually, some scientists looked at the bacteria in Manhattan and mapped it. Big Data and Bacteria: Mapping the New York Subway’s DNA: Scientists in 18-Month Project Gather DNA Throughout Transit System to Identify Germs, Study Urban Microbiology (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 5, 2015)
- ↑ With this in mind, you may want to avoid the temptation to eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- ↑ New Yorkers aren't rude. You are. From HuffPo. (TL;DR -- New York City is filled with people who don't drive. Instead, they walk and take public transportation everywhere, especially to work. So when you're standing there like a fucking lump in the middle of the sidewalk so you can stare up at the tall buildings, or when you try to board a subway car before people have had a chance to exit like you're the Queen of fucking Sheba, their bumping into you and telling you to get the fuck out of the way is just their gentle way of saying that it is you who is being rude to them.)