11 Things New Yorkers Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

New York is not a state. It is a condition. A diagnosis. A personality type that gets applied to 20 million people spread across one of the most geographically and culturally diverse places in the country, most of whom have never lived in New York City and resent the assumption that they do, while New York City itself contains eight million people who have largely forgotten that the rest of the state exists and couldn’t find Buffalo on a map without assistance. The Empire State contains the financial capital of the world, the most visited tourist destination in the Western Hemisphere, the most agricultural land of any state in the Northeast, thousands of miles of wild Adirondack wilderness, and Niagara Falls — and the conversation is always, inevitably, about the city. New York City does not apologize for this. It never has. It never will. Stand clear of the closing doors.

1. Walk at a pace that constitutes a cardiovascular workout and regard anything slower as a personal inconvenience

New York City pedestrian speed is not a preference — it is a cultural expectation enforced by the collective impatience of eight million people who all have somewhere to be and have decided that the sidewalk is a transit system, not a promenade. Tourists who stop in the middle of the sidewalk to look at their phone, consult a map, take a photograph, or simply exist at a pace comfortable to them are not committing a crime. They are committing something that feels, to New Yorkers, worse than a crime. They are an obstacle. The city flows around them the way a river flows around a rock — without stopping, without acknowledging, with only the occasional audible expression of feeling.

2. Develop opinions about specific subway lines that function as neighborhood loyalty tests

New York City’s subway system has 472 stations across 27 lines, and New Yorkers develop opinions about specific trains — the reliability of the A, the crowding on the L, the inexplicable behavior of the G, the general understanding that the 7 goes to Queens and has its own cultural geography — with the specificity of people whose daily experience is organized around these distinctions. “I don’t go above 96th Street” is a thing New Yorkers say. “I’ll never live somewhere the F doesn’t go” is another. The subway line is not just transportation. It is a life organizing principle.

3. Pay rent that would purchase a house in most states and describe the apartment as “cozy”

New York City apartments are small. Not small in the way that people say small when they mean not as big as they’d like — small in the way that the bathroom is also the hallway, that the kitchen is visible from the bed, that the closet is making an effort. New Yorkers describe these spaces with a real estate vocabulary that has evolved specifically to make the situation sound better than it is: cozy, intimate, efficient, full of character, with good light. The rent is discussed with the practiced calm of people who have made peace with something they cannot change. The apartment is described to visitors who cannot fully believe it until they see it.

4. Order coffee with a specificity that constitutes a small thesis statement about identity

The New York City coffee order — precise, fast, delivered at conversational speed to a counter person who has heard it all and is already moving — communicates more about the person ordering than the beverage itself. Regular coffee in New York means coffee with cream and sugar, which is not what regular means anywhere else. The bodega coffee — poured from an urn, sweet, a dollar and change, consumed while walking — is a New York institution that no artisan coffee trend has managed to replace for people who need coffee the way New York City people need coffee, which is quickly, cheaply, and without ceremony.

5. Upstate New Yorkers seethe quietly every time someone assumes they live in New York City

Upstate New York — everything north of the suburbs, which is most of the state by area — is farms and forests and mid-sized cities and small towns and the Adirondacks and the Catskills and the Finger Lakes and the Hudson Valley, populated by people who live lives that have essentially nothing in common with lower Manhattan and who have spent their entire lives watching their state be represented by a city that does not represent them. “I’m from New York” produces the question “Oh, the city?” with such inevitability that Upstaters have developed preemptive clarifications that they insert before anyone asks. The clarification is offered with the weary specificity of people who have been having this exact conversation since they learned to talk.

6. Eat a dollar slice at two in the morning and know with certainty it is the correct decision

The New York dollar slice — a wide, thin-crust triangle of pizza, slightly floppy at the tip, sold from counter-service pizzerias that have been open since before you went out and will still be open when you come back — is the perfect late-night food, the correct city food, the food that is available when you need it and exactly what you need when it’s available. New Yorkers fold the slice in half lengthwise, a structural decision that controls the flop and directs the grease toward the crust rather than the shirt, and eat while walking, a feat that requires practice and produces a specific muscle memory. The fold is not optional. The fold is technique.

7. Defend their borough with a conviction that suggests the other boroughs are foreign countries

The five boroughs of New York City — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island — are technically parts of the same city and practically distinct civilizations with their own cultures, geographies, transit personalities, and residents who maintain a specific pride in their borough that functions as identity. Manhattan people and Brooklyn people regard each other across the East River with the mutual assessment of people who have made different choices and mean it. Queens people understand that Queens is the most ethnically diverse urban area on Earth and find the Manhattan conversation provincial. The Bronx has the Yankees. Staten Island has feelings about all of the above.

8. Navigate entirely by mental map because asking for directions is not something that happens

New Yorkers do not ask for directions. They know where they’re going, or they consult their phone privately, or they deduce the direction from the grid — avenues run north-south, streets run east-west, numbers increase in consistent directions — and arrive at their destination through a combination of spatial reasoning and practiced urban navigation. Asking a stranger for directions on a New York City street is not impossible — people will help — but it marks you immediately as someone who is not from here, and the speed and efficiency with which the answer is delivered confirms that the person giving it has a train to catch.

9. Treat the deli counter at a New York bodega as a full-service culinary institution

The New York bodega — a corner store open absurd hours, selling everything from lottery tickets to cleaning supplies, staffed by people who know the regulars and have their orders memorized — is a neighborhood institution that functions as convenience store, community center, and short-order kitchen simultaneously. The bodega cat is a fixture. The bacon egg and cheese on a roll, assembled on a flat top at six in the morning, is a culinary achievement that New Yorkers are correct to regard as one of the great American breakfast sandwiches. Other cities have convenience stores. New York has bodegas. The difference is real.

10. Complain about the city endlessly while becoming physically hostile if anyone else does

New York City complaints — the rats, the noise, the rent, the subway, the smell in summer, the tourists, the crowds, the general accumulation of too many people in too much of a hurry — are a constant conversational thread among New York residents, offered freely and with creative specificity. An outsider who agrees with these complaints, or worse, extends them, or worst of all, uses them as evidence that New York City is not worth the trouble, will encounter a response that is not logical but is deeply felt: the instant and absolute reversal of the complaint into defense. New Yorkers reserve the right to criticize their city. They have not extended this right to anyone else.

11. Never fully leave New York even after they’ve moved somewhere else entirely

The New York diaspora is one of the most identifiable populations in America — people who moved to Los Angeles or Austin or Miami or anywhere, who have now lived there for years, who have adjusted and settled and made lives that work — and who still reference New York with a weight and a loyalty that suggests it is less a place they left than a place they carry. They correct the pizza. They correct the bagels. They explain why the coffee is wrong. They have strong opinions about how cities should function that are based on one city specifically. They go back to visit and the city is different and they are different and it is still, somehow, theirs. New York does this to people. It means it.

New York will not be softening its edges for your comfort, slowing its pace for your convenience, or making the rent more reasonable in the foreseeable future. It will continue being the place that more people want to be than can afford to be, the place that takes what you have and gives you something you couldn’t have gotten anywhere else, the place where the most ordinary Tuesday can contain something that will be in the story you tell for the rest of your life — a stranger’s kindness in a moment of confusion, a view from a bridge at a specific time of light, a conversation that started at a diner counter and ended three hours later having covered everything. New York is not a city for everyone. It will tell you this directly. It will also be right. And the people who stayed anyway, and the people who left and never stopped looking back, and the eight million in the middle of it right now — they know something about what a city can be and what a life inside one feels like that no amount of description fully captures. You have to be there. You kind of always have to be there.