My parents met at The Peninsula Hotel in the late 1990s. My parents were in their late twenties or early thirties, depending on who you ask. I tend to sway younger, but my mother thinks I’m too generous with time. My mother was a front-office manager; my father was an executive chef. I don’t exactly know how they met. Nor how they became a couple. Was it jelly-bean shenanigans? Afterwork drinks? Neither of my parents had grown up in the city but eventually snagged themselves a rent-controlled townhouse in Sunnyside, Queens. My parents say they only bought a car because the hotel provided free employee parking. A rarity, they say, in the same breath as, never buy a car.
My parents commuted to work at golden hour and returned from work at blue hour. They drove over the Queensboro bridge towards a Manhattan illuminated either by daylight or nightlife. New York was wet, my mother says. New York was warm, my father says. Through bites of toasted bialys and walks across Madison Ave, I absorbed the New York of my parents. Then I was eighteen, enrolled as a college freshman. New York had become my campus, or so the flyers advertised. In subway stations, at museums, on trains, in taxicabs, outside restaurants, on street corners, I found myself asking the question: What makes a New Yorker?
What follows are my observations.
To Be A New Yorker Is To:
- Wake up to the smell of Mary Jane.
(co-worker who lives above an Empire Cannabis store)
- Turn to your local bodega guy for sustenance.
(suit-wearer eating a toasted monte cristo on LaGuardia Place)
- Ignore the hail storm and strategically jaywalk in zigzags.
(riverside park runner competing with Citi-bikers)
- Put up your impenetrable wall of “leave me the fuck alone.”
(woman on the subway reading a Harlequin Romance)
- Give the most complicated route you can think of when asked for directions.
(guy who always shows up late and keeps everyone waiting)
- Wait on line, not in line.
(security guard at the New York Public Library visitor entrance)
- Always offer your seat to a pregnant woman, unless she’s wearing a Red Sox cap.
(commuter with a Yankees cap)
- Pretend there isn’t someone hanging upside-down from the hand railing while clutching their skateboard and checking their Twitter feed.
(high-schoolers on their lunch break)
- Glower at the people who lean against the door on the subway, yet empathize with their desire to have a backrest.
(construction worker with a backpack)
- Decide to hail a cab because two drinks turned into twenty.
- Yell at the cab driver who didn’t stop for you.
- Yell at the asshole who is trying to steal your cab.
- End up just taking the subway.
(working mom on a rare night out)
- Sell your soul on Craigslist to live in a Soho apartment.
(someone you know)
- Ask “How much is your rent?” at parties.
(someone you think you know)
- Know the difference between “I’m from New York” and “I’m from New York,” as in Ithaca.
(someone from Ithaca, not a student from Cornell University)
- Advertise neighborhoods as “cool” and “edgy” despite gentrification.
(landlord listing Brooklyn apartments on Zillow)
- Accept that at least one item of furniture you own has come from the sidewalk.
(friend with a legion of U-Haul trucks)
- Shun hipsters living in Williamsburg especially if you live or once lived in Williamsburg.
(graphic designer with a closet of infinite Patagonia ‘shackets’)
- See Sebastian Stan walk into Equinox.
- Decide that you want to start working out again.
- Realize a monthly membership costs more than your yearly salary.
- Wait on a bench across the street from Equinox for a post-workout Sebastian Stan.
(stan of Sebastian Stan)
- Complain about brunch crowds incessantly, yet still wait an hour and a half for a square-foot table at Jack’s Wife Freda or Clinton St. Baking Company.
(parent who drags their kid to brunch)
- Eat street meat without fear.
(wasted dude with munchies)
- Pile trash on top of already overflowing trash.
- Savor your days-old pizza.
(novelist addicted to true crime podcasts)
- Make peace with the fact that your salary could range between two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and free underwear from Parade.
(#lifestyle #blogger)
- Talk about how you can’t wait for winter during summer in the city.
- Talk about how you can’t wait for summer during winter in the city.
(homebody)
- Have common sense, and not make this list in the first place.
(wannabe new yorker)
- Ask your parents how they met at The Peninsula Hotel in the late 1990s.
- Wait for an answer, or two.
(author)
*Alexander Woollcott, While Rome Burns (1934)