My First New York (12 page)

model
arrived: 2006

T
he only people I knew when I arrived were the band the Five O'Clock Heroes. They took me under their wing and got me a room with one of their mates. It was an office on West Tenth Street. I don't know what they did there; I would come in and they were all at computers, on the phone. I just would run in and sleep.

When I first got here, I would wake up, grab my
iPod, and just walk around. Then I got a bike, and I would ride everywhere—uptown, downtown, exploring. I loved how fresh New York was. I felt like I was the star of my own Woody Allen film. At nights I'd go out on my own to bars like Black and White, and parties like Misshapes. It was nerve-racking. But usually I'd get a drink, have a walk around, talk to someone at the bar, and then meet some of that person's friends and maybe go on to a loft party in Williamsburg.

One day, I came across Trash and Vaudeville and tried on some jeans. I was gutted that I had just missed CBGB down the street, where I had read that the Ramones and Blondie had played. The guy at the checkout counter, Jimmy, looked like Iggy Pop, all rock and roll in his leather pants and long scraggly blond hair. He looked at me and went, “No, no, no,” and got me the smallest-size jeans in the store. “The tighter the better, darling.” After that, I would go into Trash and Vaudeville whenever I was at a loose end or feeling lonely. I'd sit there and chat with Jimmy, and he'd tell me old stories of New York.

actor and student
arrived: 2008

I
moved at the end of August. I had just come from summer school in Paris and promoting
Pineapple Express
in Europe, so I was only able to get here the day before orientation. I found a West Village apartment that I was told the B-52s used to own. It's close enough to NYU, where I'm enrolled in film school at Tisch,
and also the subway to Columbia, where I'm in the creative writing program.

I'd never really taken the subway before. I love it! The one thing is, I used to listen to a lot of audio books in my car in L.A., and now I don't have that. It's almost a shame. Now I'll go on long walks and listen to them.

I go to the Columbia library all the time. Everybody used to come up to me in the library. Then I realized I was in the one room people are free to talk in. Now I go to the quiet room.

political analyst
arrived: 2009

I
've been here six months and change, I guess. I'd been living in Chicago since 1996, when I started at the University of Chicago. Back then Barack Obama was my state senator, so I'd known about him long before the speech at the 2004 convention. When he ran for president it was like having one of your neighbors run. That was one of the reasons I got heavily
involved in politics. I'd mostly been writing about baseball, but you start thinking, Hey do I want to be writing about baseball for my whole life? So I started writing as a diarist on Daily Kos and migrated off to start my own website, FiveThirtyEight.com. So much political coverage is ideologically driven; I wanted to gather the evidence, to be scientific about it. Mostly I wanted to decode the polls for people. By the time we got to Labor Day 2008, we had twenty-five to thirty polls coming out. How do you synthesize them to just one number: who's going to win?

Those last few months in Chicago got so busy with the success of FiveThirtyEight, I barely even remember them. I was sleeping four or five hours a day, bouncing back and forth between writing on the website, going to the political conventions, and flying to New York every three weeks to do a media hit or take a meeting or to visit friends. If you're in the political world overlapping with media and tech worlds, New York is the nexus of people and ideas. At one point I noticed I had more New York cell phone numbers in my BlackBerry than Chicago numbers.

In Chicago you might look for an apartment two months in advance; in New York it's more like the week
before. I didn't know where I wanted to live. I almost moved to the West Village but at the grocery across the street it was $15 for a six-pack of beer. I finally found a place in Brooklyn Heights through a broker. I had assumed I'd be paying twice as much as in Chicago, which was $1,250—so double that, and that was my budget. Then I kept going up from there.

The promise that attracted me to move is the idea that you can come to New York and be surrounded by the people who are the best at what they do in many different fields. On that front, I think it delivers. Working your way around the city you really do run into a disproportionate number of really interesting people. That's almost what you pay your taxes for, even if you think it's a little crazy to pay that much to live here. People in New York are a lot busier than those in Chicago, more direct and more social. Chicago isn't cliquish exactly but a little more inwardly focused, a bit more comfy, and you're probably more satisfied with your station in life. People in Chicago get into their thirties and have a family and stay in, whereas in New York you have people of all ages going out. You'll see a fifty- or sixty-year-old couple out on a date.

There are things I miss, of course. There's not re
ally that much good Mexican food in New York; your rent check is two to three times more than you had to pay before; the airports are really awful and the baseball stadiums are far away. In Chicago, I could catch a cab and be at Wrigley Field in ten minutes. And Wrigley still caters to the common fan—unintentionally, because it's older. They haven't yet innovated ways to maximize profit, like having luxury boxes. Madison Square Garden is like that a bit, too—you don't have a whole tier of luxury suites that move the proletariat up thirty feet and make their view worse. The first time I went to Yankee Stadium, a guy ordered a hot dog and Merlot. Then he sent the Merlot back. You're just not allowed to order a glass of Merlot at a baseball game! And if you do, you're sure as hell not allowed to send it back.

Chicago is also a bit more compact—you can go from A to B in ten or fifteen minutes, it seems. My first week in New York, I was running late for a panel at Columbia and I was in Park Slope; I was like, Oh, I'll just take a cab. Big mistake time-wise and financially. You wind up spending a lot of money here without even meaning to.

But I look at it from an economist's point of view:
you pay a premium to live here for access to food and culture. And New York tends to attract people who want to participate in the life of the city, which I think by and large are people who are outgoing and interested, networking and working hard but having fun. Here you're always trying to reach for something—maybe you don't even know what, exactly.

aspiring actress
arrived: 2009

T
he
New York Times
took my picture the first day I was here. A feature on Koreatown; it was incredibly unflattering and I was eating yogurt. But I knew it was some sort of omen, a sign that I belonged. I had just graduated from Texas State University and had come to New York to perform in an acting showcase. About ten people showed up.

I was half certain I would be employed with an acting job within the week, and half scared out of my mind. My first three days, I ate CarrotTop Chicken Caesar salads on my bed while searching the trade papers for auditions and Craigslist for a server job. My roommate, Curt, hadn't furnished the apartment, so we shopped the streets for furniture, yelling “Curb alert!” and checking for bedbugs. (If it didn't have a red “X”, it was fine.)

After about a week, I had my first New York breakdown at an interview for a server position in the Financial District. (They gave me a timed math test; I couldn't remember any equations and began to sob.) I rode the A train to open calls for original plays, arriving hours ahead of time because I was terrified of being late. Listening to the other actors talk made me feel like a foreigner. In fact, the
auditioning
part of auditions became much less horrifying than this new social anxiety I had developed. Auditions were proving fruitless. I spent a few days in bed wondering who was this cowardly sloth-girl whose hands would start shaking at an audition and who couldn't afford a Wendy's cheeseburger? Curt finally took me to a nearby bar and we drank a pitcher of Sangria.
I asked if they were hiring. That's the day I became a bartender.

Things have changed. I've started to embrace the heightened insanity that is New York reality, and to welcome daily bits of crazed wisdom. When an older gentleman in driving gloves pulled over his Lexus on Prince Street to tell me I looked like Rita Hayworth, I agreed to a glass of wine across the street. He told me stories about the city, and about restaurants I can't afford to eat in. One night bar-hopping in the West Village, Curt and I met a cute boy in the street who invited us to Alan Cumming's CD release party at The Box. I found myself standing next to Julie Taymor, practicing nonchalance and hoping the safety-pinned rip in my thrift store dress wasn't showing. I left my phone in a cab that night only to have it deposited at the desk of a hotel. The next morning I walked through Times Square to retrieve it and marveled at my luck.

This book originated as a cover feature in the April 20, 2009, issue of
New York
magazine, and as such it relied on the talents of a small army of editors, writers, reporters, photography editors, and designers.

All of the pieces that first ran in the magazine—and many of the ones that were gathered since—began as interviews with a reporter, and were edited and condensed by the magazine. We are grateful to all of the reporters who contributed to this project, including: Molly Bennet, Rebecca Bengal, Fiona Byrne, Katie Charles, Brian Thomas Gallagher, Darrell Hartman, Helin Jung, Ben Leventhal, Nina Mandell, Rebecca Milzoff, Emma Pearse, Meg Prossnitz, Diana Scholl, Joshua David Stein, and Ross Kenneth Urken. Jada Yuan and Jared Hohlt deserve particular
thanks for their help in gathering and editing the material.

The expansion of this feature into a book would not have been possible without Matt Weiland, who proposed a collaboration with Ecco/HarperCollins hours after the issue hit the newsstands. Matt knew exactly what this book could be and proved masterful at helping us realize it. This is his book as much as it is ours. We are grateful to everyone else at Ecco, too, for their warm enthusiasm and strong support for the book, especially Daniel Halpern, Rachel Bressler, Ginny Smith, and Michael McKenzie.

The following people also deserve special thanks: David McCormick of McCormick & Williams, for his care and calm representing the magazine as our agent, as well as Ann Clarke, Kit Taylor, and Lauren Starke at
New York
for helping, in different ways, to shepherd the project through to completion. Serena Torrey was indispensable, especially in the book's crucial early stages. Richard Morgan and Tim Murphy, two gifted journalists who conducted the vast majority of the additional interviews, played a critical role in shaping the book's content. Ira Boudway and Eric Benson fact-checked and provided research assis
tance. Michael Idov helped craft the book's preface. And finally, Chris Dixon; Ecco's art director, Allison Saltzman; and the illustrator Klas Fahlén all had their hands in designing the lovely cover of this volume.

Most profoundly, we would like to thank the fifty-six individuals who shared with us their first memories of New York. They spoke with candor and eloquence (and awesome powers of recollection), and helped us see our city with fresh eyes, again and again.

Jacket design by Allison Saltzman

Jacket illustrations by Klas Fahlén