New York City
New York City | |
---|---|
Motto: "EH IM WALKING HERE! up there." | |
Civic anthem: "New York, New York" by Frank Sinatra | |
State | New York |
Official nickname | The Big Crabapple, Noo Yawk, Headquarter City |
Official language(s) | English, Italian, Hebrew, Yiddish |
Mayor | Rudy Giuliani |
Established | 1624 |
Re-Established | 1725 |
Re-Re-Established | aaaa |
Currency | Hot dog |
New York, New York.... the city so nice they named it twice! The Bronx is up, but the Battery's down. Come and meet those dancing feet, grab a slice of authentic NY-style pizza, root for shitty sports teams, and get yelled at by angry locals. Quintessentially American, NYC is the perfect balance of real and fake.
NYC has been known by many quasi-official nicknames, most famously "The Big Apple", coined in the late 1940s when 75% of its infrastructure was composed of dried fruit and tin. The city's all-night pornography kiosks and zealously maintained 24-hour subway system have also earned it the title "The City That Never Sleeps".
NYC undergoes many transmutations. Like the human body, it can be said that you have an entirely new city every seven years. Of late, the city has become astronomically expensive as yuppies flood into the former meat packing districts and slums, while the rest move to someplace cheaper, like Brooklyn Queens the Bronx you know, I hear good things about Connecticut.
New York often brags that it's the largest city in the United States, but 5 counties lie within the city limits. Counties, by definition, are bigger than cities. Therefore, New York City does not exist, or at the very least, is actually like, a lot of smaller cities. Thus, Los Angeles is bigger and better.
New York City is home to the headquarters of ALL American corporations, including those of the Carson City, Olympia, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Portland, Sacramento, Salem, Sarasota and Seattle Police Departments, SoFi, SpaceX, America's 5 largest banks, major search engine and technology companies like Alphabet Inc., Amazon, Apple, Ask.com, Flickr, Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo!, coffeehouse chains like Starbucks, and other American television networks like Hallmark Channel.
Boroughs[edit | edit source]
NYC 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:
- Manhattan – Hipster mecca. Dirty and overpriced.
- Brooklyn – "Creeping gentrification" that has long since come into actualization.
- Bronx – Relatively unchanged overall, pockets of growth along Jerome and near Yankee Stadium[1]. Significant change will only occur with improved transit.
- Staten Island – So the MTA's looking to raise our tolls again? Must be Tuesday.
- Queens – Lotsa Asians. Proximity to Manhattan is all it's got going for it; the government isn't doing anything for this borough.
Lawn GuylandLong Island - Not a borough but large enough to be one. Proud home to Pamela Geller, Michael Savage, Peter King, Anthony Cumia, etc. "Long Island will reject the KKK not because its members are racists but because they're clumsy amateurs at racism compared to many Long Islanders."[2]
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.
Culture[edit | edit source]
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 the
ChicagoGlobetrotters.
Subway[edit | edit source]
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
- If you stupidly jump onto the tracks to fetch something, roll into the gap beneath the platform as the added shoulder space will definitely help you a lot.
- 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
- If you have to get between 125th and 59th St on weekends, boo hoo, there are no stops heading southbound. Guess you’ll just have to walk for 3 miles
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.
Service[edit | edit source]
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."
Restrooms can be difficult to find in New York City. This has resulted in many New Yorkers being full of shit. The reason that it's hard to find public restrooms is that public restrooms often attract homeless people, and businesses in New York City, as in other cities, don't like it when there are many homeless people in their establishments. As a result, most businesses will require you to provide two forms of identification and a recent paystub, in order to prove that you're not homeless, before letting you use their restrooms.
Abominations[edit | edit source]
Eating pizza with a fork and knife.
...Oh, and the Statue of Liberty is in New York (and the Supreme Court agrees, even if it did say that the water around the Statue of Liberty belongs to New Jersey).[3] It is an abomination unto the LORD. The Bible says, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (Exodus 20:9)
Most of the larger cities in Upstate New York can be considered abominations as well. They really aren't all that great (Ithaca is clearly exempt). Still less corrupt than Florida.
Slogans[edit | edit source]
- "Our rats are bigger than your rats."[4]
- "Get the fuck out of the way!"[5]
- Bloomberg? I hardly know berg!
In popular culture[edit | edit source]
In many disaster and apocalyptic films literally EVERYTHING bad happens to New York City (Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Tsunamis, Zombies, Asteroids and so on), this is no exaggeration at all. Some theories state that they already have 3D digital models for all of New York City's major landmarks exploding, and so it's cheaper to just keep reusing them, as opposed to making new ones for other cities. Like in Avengers, the entire earth is literally the city. It's like the aliens and super villians don't have any other proper cities to invade.Like Los Angeles or something. To be frank, DC isn't any different. They just create their own versions of New York, like Gotham.
Footnotes[edit | edit source]
- ↑ " Yankee Stadium in Concourse, New York", 6.1.23.
- ↑ Filler, Lane, " Long Island's different style of racism", Newsday 8.26.14.
- ↑ We aren't kidding.
- ↑ 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.)
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