It [NYC] smells terrible, the people are rude, and everything costs at least three times more than it should, for no discernible increase in quality. Most activities are crowded and overrated (e.g. Broadway plays such as Les Miz), food in the “best” restaurants is no better than you’ll get in any good restaurant in your home town, and walking in the streets of Manhattan is as close to a contact sport as you’ll get off a rugby field. Don’t buy into the hype; New York sucks. If you can make it there, you probably have organized crime ties (just like Sinatra did).
Kim du Toit, “Don’t Do That”, Splendid Isolation, 2019-01-28.
Could have told you that 40 years ago. Had to go through JFK airport during the ’78 garbage strike. You could smell the stink at the airport! And the crowding is like Tokyo but without any manners.
Sidenote: At least the China virus mandates go away next week!
Comment by Chris Schwehr — March 4, 2022 @ 13:39
(Originally posted this as a reply to a comment on Gab): I’ve been to NYC a few times, but never as a tourist. My visits were during my under-employed early 20s, as a voluntary co-driver for a friend who used to drive down to NYC a few times a year to collect goods for his store from unsalubrious addresses in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem.
We’d drive down from Toronto overnight, sleep in the van in a sketchy parking lot near the Hudson River, and then drive around to purchase and load his van. The streets of NYC, in places, looked very much like the grungiest police dramas showed, with burnt-out and overturned vehicles just sitting there on various streets, and all the stores with full steel shutters locked down across the storefront until 9-10am.
Until the first of those trips I didn’t know what “double parked” meant, but in Harlem, triple or quadruple parking was not only “a thing” but common. My friend looked like a hippie, so he kinda blended in, a bit, but I was a crew-cut skinny white dude who very much _didn’t_ fit in, especially quadruple-parked on the main street.
I did get a glimpse of most of the touristy places, but only in passing as we drove hither and yon around NYC before getting back on the road that evening.
Comment by Nicholas — March 4, 2022 @ 16:42