NYC – An Insider View of the Greatest City in the World
Many singers, dancers, and actors dream of living in New York City, “the Greatest City in the World.” They see themselves acting on Broadway, or dancing at Rockefeller Center. They see their names in lights. They imagine living in a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue.
Children, of all ages, dream of coming to New York City at Christmas time. They are super excited to see the huge tree lit up and to ice skate in Rockefeller Plaza. Those who do, are amazed by the grand skyscrapers, all lit up against the starless sky. They enjoy the variety of food from street vendors or dinner with the awesome entertainment at Ellen’s Diner. They love riding the carousel in Central Park, or the rides at Coney Island’s Luna Park.
People from all over the world dream of coming to New York City, to visit all of the great landmarks, to further their education at well-known Universities, or to live the “American Dream.”
Yes, New York City is a great city, for all of the reasons I mentioned. I came here about ten years ago to visit. I loved the big, fast-moving city “that never sleeps” and all it has to offer. I was already planning to move here in a few years, and I became even more excited about that idea. I went back to Florida, worked hard, and prepared to move to the “Big Apple.”
Seven and a half years ago, we made the big move. We got here on New Year’s Day, during one of the biggest snowstorms of the century. It was a bit of an awakening. I had actually seen one really big snow in my life, so I wasn’t that surprised by it. It was the almost constant snow that Winter that took some getting used to. After being here for about six weeks, I fell on the icy sidewalk and injured my back. I learned very quickly that what you hear about how well NYC takes care of the sidewalks is not exactly true, at least not in all areas.
Yes, city workers are quick to clean up Time Square after a New Year’s Eve celebration. They are even pretty good about cleaning up the trash on a regular basis, in the affluent areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Then there are the areas like Brownsville, Crown Heights, and East New York, in Brooklyn, that always look like a trash can exploded all over the neighborhood. Yes, it’s fair to say that a lot of people in those neighborhoods don’t care, because they are the ones who are constantly throwing their trash on the grounds when they are two feet from a trash can. The thing is, if these were other areas of NYC, the trash would be cleaned up, the snow would be shoveled, and things would be taken care of a lot better, and a lot faster.
Four Summers ago, I went to Coney Island with my kids. It was midday when we got to the beach. It was full of trash. You could barely see the beach for the people and the trash. I asked a police officer who was standing nearby why the beach was so nasty. He told me that every morning the beach is nice and clean. By the end of the day the beach is full of trash. The workers clean the beach every night, and every day the people come and throw their trash all over the beach. This is how all of New York City would look if the city workers didn’t constantly clean the trash. A lot of it is due to tourists who just don’t care because they don’t live here. A lot of it is due to New Yorkers who just don’t care, even though they do live here. All of it makes NYC a very nasty city that many people don’t want to visit because of it. However, millions of tourists still come, because the areas they visit are the areas that the city cares about maintaining.
Another big shortcoming of NYC is accessibility. I was amazed to realize how great the lack of accessibility is in NYC, even in Manhattan, in the places where so many tourists go. It would not surprise me if many people with any type of disability (or less-ability) never made a second visit to NYC. So many subway stations have no elevators. Restaurants, theatres, and other venues require patrons to be able to climb stairs, if not for dinner or the show, then at least to use the restroom. That is, if there is a restroom. For such a wealthy city, with so many attractions, public restrooms are not one of them. When visiting NYC you quickly learn to plan your day around bathroom breaks. You break up your day so that you can return to your hotel a few times during the day for potty breaks, or you install an app on your smartphone and trust it to tell you where a clean public restroom might exist in the city.
In other states I have lived in, establishments that sold food were required to offer their patrons a restroom facility. That’s not the case here. One big reason that establishments don’t offer public restrooms is that they don’t want to have to allow homeless people to use them. Some are able to get around it with signage that says restrooms are for paying customers only, and not offering anything, even a glass of inexpensive tap water, that some people can afford to purchase there. This creates another huge issue in NYC, the many places like elevators in train stations, that constantly smell like urine. Many people think that homeless people urinate in elevators because they are just nasty. I guess that could be said for some homeless people, as well as some people who live in nice homes since it’s actually not just homeless people who urinate in public in NYC. I can understand being a business owner who doesn’t want a mess in their establishment, but many people are nasty in public restrooms. Even many wealthy people (even women, gross) don’t wash their hands when they use the restroom. As far as the issue of homeless people using public restrooms goes, a restroom is a basic human need. Everyone needs food and water, and everyone who eats and drinks needs to use the restroom. Even the subway station restrooms are locked at night so homeless people can’t use them. That is just inhumane. What do they expect these people to do? They have to go somewhere, so we suffer with the urine-perfumed elevators.
The city managers don’t want homeless people sleeping on benches, so tourists have very few places where they can sit for a few minutes to rest, as they walk for miles around the city trying not to trip over the people sleeping on the sidewalks.
That brings me back to a thought about New York City sidewalks. One of the wealthiest cities in the world, with ever-increasing fares for subways and busses, and outrageous tolls to drive into the city, and yet NYC has such poor sidewalks. It’s practically impossible to walk half a block in any area of the city without encountering a broken or very uneven sidewalk. This wealthy city can’t afford to repair it’s sidewalks? Of course, they can. They choose not to. Instead, they have an account set up to pay settlements to people who injure themselves on the poor sidewalks. What a terrible way for a city like this to handle business.
The thing that brought me to write this post was that I was standing on the corner, waiting to cross the street, and I smelled a really strong odor of gasoline from one of the passing cars. This isn’t really that odd, considering the large number of automobiles in the city. Politicians and city managers are always telling us we should use public transportation, although they aren’t using it for their morning commute. They say that if you’re going to drive you should buy an electric car or a hybrid. The city has spent tons of money upgrading some of the city buses to electric buses. It doesn’t make them run on time, but that’s another issue. In fact, there are so many issues with the city’s public transportation system, even though NYC has the largest subway system in the world, that a separate blog, or maybe multiple blogs, could be written on that topic alone. Back to the electric car idea. I agree it is a good idea in theory. In fact, it probably works very well for people who live in areas of the city where electric vehicle charging is accessible. That’s not the situation in much of the city though. I have seen some car owners in parts of Brooklyn who run extension cords across that already unsafe sidewalk to charge their electric or hybrid vehicles. Take a ride through any of the low-income neighborhoods in New York City, and tell me how many electric vehicle charging stations you see. I haven’t seen any, and I’m in those neighborhoods every day. What I have seen there is that there is still metered parking. If these brilliant city planners (the same ones who lay out subway stations so that you have to take a flight of stairs to get to the elevator), can manage to put parking meters that people can pay on their phone to use, in order to charge poor people to park, then they can figure out a way to put an electric vehicle charging station at these metered parking sites.
I do love New York City, and hope that the pandemic will truly be over soon, and the city can come to life again, but there are many improvements that need to be made, to make this a really great city that the residents can enjoy as much as the tourist. I will probably write again about things like the public transportation system, the lack of affordable housing, the lack of accessibility, and other things that grate on my nerves.
Feel free to comment with your perspective. Please just keep it kind, and if you read this post all the way to the end, and see at least a little truth in what I’ve said, please consider contacting your local and state politicians and ask them to make some changes in NYC.
Thank you.
Patty