In “Real New Yorkers Can Say Goodbye to All That,” Megan McArdle of Bloomberg writes a Woody Allen/Joan Didion*-esque ode to her hometown, before concluding:
That Saturday night [before moving to DC] I had three parties to go to, in three parts of the city. I was determined to pack them all in, because when would I see these people again? It took an hour and a half to get to the first one, in Cobble Hill. Inwood and Astoria clearly were not going to happen. As I made that calculation, the incipient panic I’d felt at leaving “all that” vanished, as my city already had. The bits of New York that weren’t turning into a shopping mall** were instead turning into London, where the cost of real estate pushes the merely affluent people so far to the periphery that it is only really practical to make friends along a single train line.
And they’ll all bitch about “global warming” and “income inequality,” as they continue to pull the drawbridge up ever-higher behind them.
* Not that those two necessarily always agreed with each other, of course.
** You’d rather have the ’70s Lindsay / Beam / Travis Bickle / Death Wish-era back? Be careful what you wish for, hipster New Yorkers.
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