is New York City dead?

mustang is my spot for nepali

baby isn't much of a problem for us, but it takes me 40 minutes to an hour to get from queens to flatiron for work and that's some MTA subway bullshit.

mustang is great. Have you been to Woodside Cafe on bway and 65th? They have this thing called Chatamari which I've never seen anywhere else that I'm obsessed with. Some kind of rice crepe with ground chicken and black-eyed peas cooked into it and an egg broken on top usually cooked hard and then a goat curry covering it all.

Ive been a non-car-owning adult in Seattle for over 5 years now! And we barely have any trains at all.

I also didn't own a car when I last lived in Northampton MA tbh but I was unemployed

You don't need a car if there's nowhere you want to go, is the thing.

(nearly) all my Indian meals come from Kinara in Pk Slope

Re: Los Angeles, the big difference is there are things you really *want* to do, reasons people move to LA for in the first place, like the ocean (or yeah, Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu, etc.), the mountains and the desert, that take a long time to get to, and only by car, and typically in traffic. Vs. something like Fort Tryon, which I just had to google (looks neat!).

Amazingly, I know an increasing number of people in NY (mostly Brooklyn and Queens) with kids. I have no idea how they do it. Kids without a car seems really hard to me.

I have a car shhhhhh

when i see 2 to 3 family members teaming up to hump a military grade stroller sideways down the subway stairs, as a queue of blocked impatient randos accumulates upstream of them, I just think no X 1000

lived in NYC for 28 years: '89 to 2012 in the EV, and since then in Ditmas park/ Kensington (Morbius said at some point that he lives nearby). While living there in the 2000s, I began to hate Manhattan so much that going to visit girlfriends and most of my friends in Slope area was incredibly refreshing, And now living past the Slope and on the bleeding edge after which beards and warby Parkers are unheard of is so different from my life in the EV that it seems like I have moved very far away.

I never thought I wanted to have a baby here and would move before then. But my wife's job is good, so we stayed when my daughter was born last december. We had a car because I thought we would need it and from this part of brooklyn to coney island, everyone has a car and can easily deal with it.

Then this past October, said car caught fire with me and the baby inside on the BQE right before the Kiucsyncki (however the fuck you spell it) Bridge and soon totally immolated. a subaru, safest car on the market. It's really something to walk around on the breakdown lane of the BQE, cradling your infant daughter while other motorists scream curses at you. Well before that, I had long thought that an area where NYC still has a so-called edge of dickishness is with drivers and driving.

Xpost: men with beards in Borough park and Midwood are of a different stripe than what I refer to above

veronica, i'm kensington; where at?

oh wait, we've done this i think

Man I am sorry about that automotive ordeal that sounds fucking awful and scary

fwiw the oceans (or the beach towns) are not something i particularly want to go to. they're certainly not why i moved to LA they're just not a part of life for me in LA (or most of my acquaintances), in the same way that the beach (or tbh, manhattan) wasn't for me in new york. i go to them when i have visitors, in the same way i went to midtown when i had visitors in new york. if you've moved to LA for the ocean (or a job in santa monica or whatever), you live near the ocean.

The internet does have the weird effect of letting you just parachute into any scene you want with no prior knowledge. Pre-internet I never would have found BNSC and been able to show up on a random saturday night as probably the oldest person there by 5-10 years. I still suspect people largely do stuff in the immediate neighborhoods around them though, bc cabs are expensive and the subway takes forever

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Thursday, February 8, 2018 3:33 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw the new trend in cool parties is to have 0 social media presence and spread only by word of mouth. in part a response to police busting afterhours spots & underground venues, in part response to this

People constantly looking for something else to do as soon as they get to the first thing because they know there is something else going on and it's easy enough to get there. Vs. Los Angeles, which requires a certain commitment, due to travel times.

i think this happens everywhere. or at least, it did in montreal. which is p dense so i guess yeah. a friend in my early twenties was infamous for a zeligish ability to be at every part in the city every night, pronouncing each of them 'dead' within minutes of arrival

oh god I both understand that because the ability to hop around until you find something that is great is justifiable when you can do it

but some people just do that every time, like a night out means just rotating to a new location every X minutes until bar close

And now living past the Slope and on the bleeding edge after which beards and warby Parkers are unheard of is so different from my life in the EV that it seems like I have moved very far away.

This very much describes where I live. The only vintage clothing I see in my neighborhood is worn by central asian jews without any fashion intent.

I mean not literally, but there is maybe like 1 remotely hipstery or trendy person for every 50 of those.

kensington is newly hipster infiltrated and i'm aware i'm part of the problem but it's mostly families of the type that can't afford park slope or who have been here for a long time or (more commonly) folks who own. living across the street from a school, between a graveyard and park, just far enough away from the main drags where nobody much drives through and on a block where all the businesses close at ten is a tremendous blessing.

Since this is the most active New York thread I'll just ask here...

A bit hard to describe what I'm looking for. Recommendations for calm-ish bars or venues playing good music at non-deafening levels. The kinds of places where you could sit and drink and read or write at the end of a day of traipsing around the city. Places playing ambient, drones, minimal techno, minimal anything really.

I know about Nowadays in Queens which looks promising.

seattle was quite walkable but not as much as NYC. NYC not a patch on basically any european/UK city tho obv

I can't with Nowadays. It's outdoors, right? You pay money to get inside the fence and then sit outside and then you pay money for the food and drinks? Edited to add: I guess they have an indoors now.

Anyway. Biking is so great in New York if you're not spread out over the entire city! Like between the LES and North Brooklyn, or getting around within a few miles' span. Not as much when you're in, say, Gowanus, and talking about going to the city at 1am, like some fashionable people I overheard last weekend on the sidewalk. I have so many great memories of riding between Crown Heights and Wburg over the years, mostly to meet ilxors tbh.

Then I got a scooter and basically stopped biking. I miss it sometimes but the scooter life is so amazing. You can get places not-sweaty!

i wanna get an e-bike except dickhead de blasio is intent on outlawing them for some reason

Nowadays has an indoors and a full soundsystem and kitchen and everything.

(of course I haven't been though)

There was no cover when I was there.

e-bikes are being subsidized this year by my city, up to 600 euros! but the new docked bikeshare bikes (as opposed to all the new non-docked bikeshare bikes all over the place like gobee & ofo, which interest me too) are e-bikes so that might suffice for me. at least for side-ish streets, I'm not gonna bike on well-trafficked streets here, because they're pretty narrow yet people find ways to fit multiple lanes of traffic.

ofo needs its own thread. I think they might be the locusts the bible refers to in revelation

Nowadays is very nice imo and feels hip without being vibey or exclusionary at all. I haven’t been since they added the indoors though, apparently.

You don't need a car if there's nowhere you want to go, is the thing.

^^^ gets it

Relevant to this thread.

Also relevant, I hope:
Redd's Roster of Restaurants of the Old Weird New York

No blight is as depressing as rent blight :(

belatedly: the subways may be hell but so far the buses are not, at least not in my area

visiting nyc last year I was able to walk or hit up the subways for everything I wanted to do, mostly work in midtown manhattan but stayed in the east village for a bit and travelled to brooklyn for a show. the subway system routes were ok but the state of them made me sad, as if the system was there for what I wanted but my needs were scorned

the bus system is not in freefall but it is in real trouble - ridership is in decline despite population growth, and mostly people seem to be chalking it up to the unreliability of service, which in turn is largely due to the difficulty of implementing any major changes which would actually fix things, like truly dedicated bus lanes and signal prioritization. anecdotally I've had a ton of issues in the last six months to a year with late and bunched buses.

to compare again, the extent to which London public transport is great is basically the extent to which its buses are great. dedicated bus/bike/taxi lanes on most big roads, the congestion charge obv. relatively nice vehicles. you rarely need to wait more than 6 or 7 minutes. it doesn't feel low-rent to take a bus, it feels normal

The Paris bus system is also very good, matching what you said about London’s. I take it as often as I can over the metro because I’m lazy about stairs; this is why its ridership leans older than the metro’s.

I mean, I've never taken the bus during morning rush hour because it already takes long enough to get to work via the subway, but I take the M4 and M5 all the time coming home and compared to the 1 they're both absolutely delightful

Xpost that is the other thing for us. K cannot drive so moving to any other city equals in her mind, perhaps correctly, isolation and loss of independence.

― Winter. Dickens. Yes. (Jon not Jon), Thursday, February 8, 2018 4:37 AM (four days ago)

Jon I don't know how long you've been with your partner or where she's lived but you used to be in Seattle! you can walk almost anywhere, or catch a bus to where you can walk to the other bits. the tram has opened up a few neighbourhoods but will take another decade and drivers aging out of the population (so that funding can go back to transit) to be as transformative as it should be already.

I doubt any city in the world could beat NYC for film.

We’ve been together 14 years, so no, not stretching back to my Seattle days. But you make a good point. Manageable size, good transit, car not needed, pre-built friend pool due to comics scene. Is it much cheaper than nyc/sf these days though?

Rent has been climbing like wild for years but the trend may be finally leveling off. Unlike San Francisco there are actually new apartment buildings being built, though we still haven’t got the political will to start bulldozing single family homes.

Doesn’t Seattle have more working cranes on high rise construction sites than any city in the us?

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-has-most-cranes-in-the-country-for-2nd-year-in-a-row-and-lead-is-growing/

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Sarus_Crane_%28Grus_antigone%29_at_Sultanpur_I_Picture_151.jpg

*Flintstones voice* eh, it's a living

When a man is tired of London etc.