Why I, Outer Borough White Trash, Left New York
In the vein of Lena Dunham, but not really
As someone who’s from New York but has lived pretty much my entire adult life (what I’ve had of it) outside of the city, I learned long ago that the easiest way to explain my hometown was through movie and TV show references. The Italian high schoolers I shepherded around town during two summers of the best/worst summer job I’ve had in my life (if you ever took the downtown 1 train around 3 PM on summer weekdays, I’m sorry) mostly interacted with the city through Gossip Girl references.
But if I had to pick a TV show that characterized my experience of New York, it was probably Sesame Street. I was born in Astoria before it was a gentrifier’s paradise (the greatest tragedy of my life is that my parents moved out of Astoria before it became somewhere I wanted to be). My earliest memories are of toddling around on daily walks with my mom, getting pats on the head from the Italian deli guy, free M&Ms from the Korean greengrocer, running into Croatian ladies from church at the butcher shop that catered to Balkan people but was mostly staffed with Latino men, and then walking along Steinway Street to look at the puppies in the pet store window.
The Italian deli is now closed because the owner retired (and he was only able to stay open for so long because he owned the building he worked in). The greengrocer is long gone, and I see fewer greengrocers and fruit carts every time I go back to the city. As far as I know, the pet shop and butcher are still open.
My friends in Serbia think it’s strange that I avoid telling people where I’m from unless they ask directly. I finally told one of them that I feel as if I’m cheating every time I mention that I’m from New York because I feel like people assume I’m way cooler than I actually was.
My New York was criminally uncool. My New York was the outer edges of the outer borough, the type of place that when you mention it to other New Yorkers, they snort-laugh at you for not really being from the city. My New York was 90-minute commutes by bus in each direction to high school. My New York was the Eastern Queens of GI Bill-era apartment buildings overshadowed by nouveau riche McMansions and shifting waves of new arrivals that differ in race, ethnicity, and class.
I didn’t take the subway often because the nearest subway stop was a 45 minute bus ride from my house. I didn’t go to any punk shows or broaden my cultural horizons because at first I was not allowed to, then I was allowed to only if I was home before dark, which in the winter meant leaving whatever fun was happening by 2 P.M. My life in New York was school, the bus, home, my library job, and my dreams, which could all have taken place in Ohio.
But it wasn’t in Ohio, wasn’t it? The city was close enough to be tantalizing, to me and the other kids from my high school. On Thursdays and Fridays, friend groups would chatter excitedly about who was going into “the city” that weekend. That’s what we called it, the city, because although we were part of it, we weren’t part of its glittering core, separated from it by bridges, tunnels, the East River, several income brackets. Our home neighborhoods were the real city, propping up the TV set in the sky, but we knew that the other city was where the fun was.
Most “why I left New York” stories boil down to money. You can have everything you would get anywhere else—space, a yard, a pool—in the city as well if you have enough money, but few of us have enough of it.
Some “why I left New York” stories that get published in major media do not seem to be about money on the surface because they are published by people who do not need to think about their personal income. However, their stories about leaving New York still have to do with the money the city has, or does not have. The ramshackle public transit system, public school horror stories, streets of the unhoused, public addiction issues, are all products of the city’s lack of money—and political will—to deal with what needs to be done to make the city livable for all of its citizens. The city has made a choice, to prioritize its most wealthy, but the visible reminders of that choice drive people away anyway.
Maybe a better way to begin this essay is to explain that most of the “why I left New York” stories that I know personally are about money. The people I know are not those whose essays are likely to get published in any prestigious media outlet. They are the people I know from school whose lives I still idly follow on social media or check in with once in a while. While many still live in New York, others have left for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cheaper cities, while some plan to leave at some point for the exurbs upstate. The reasons are usually money—a job for the same salary but a lower cost of living, the possibility of home ownership, the possibility of not always being one emergency away from living with your parents at the mean end of your twenties.
My own “why I left New York” story is about money. I looked up one day towards the end of my senior year of college and realized that most of the jobs I was qualified for would not pay me enough to be able to rent my own room, let alone my own apartment. If I wanted to stay in New York it would be moving back home, moving back to the liminal outer reaches of Northeast Queens, spending three hours each day on my commute, living in the city, but once again, out of reach of what I wanted out of it.
Maybe one day I would have afforded the life I see my favorite NYC-based social media personalities leading (because of course I follow them). Maybe one day I would have done something interesting. But at 21, I decided the risk was probably not worth it. I couldn’t stand more years of feeling like I was on the outside looking in while still trapped in the fish bowl. The feeling that everyone is having fun except for you hits harder the closer you are to the center of it all.
I love New York, but I hate the neighborhood of New York where I grew up. I have no local pride for Little Neck, a corner of suburbia that seems to have wound up in New York City by accident. I have no local pride for Little Neck, billed as the perfect place to raise a family, as long as the kids are under ten and silent. I have no love lost for Little Neck, whose residents complain about the liberal city abandoning them but have a history of opposing expanded public transportation to keep the “others” out. I actually despise Little Neck, despise it so much that I chose to reverse the trajectory of my parents’ immigration and move back to the Balkans rather than face the possibility of life there as an adult.
Little Neck, with its identical co-ops, massive houses, and leafy green streets bifurcated by three highways, is where you come to find out that New York is ugly and mean.
This is not a new revelation, it is a stereotype. However, the true meanness of New York is not in the brusque responses and rapid pace of life on its streets. It is found in the paradoxical nature of the city, a melting pot that never actually melts, a parochial meanness that surfaces most often on its forgotten edges.
New York, a city proud of its diversity, but whose inhabitants, frightened of their own home’s vastness, cling to each other in ethnically demarcated enclaves. It’s an open secret that most public services, from sanitation to the MTA, run as ethnically divided fiefdoms - the remaining Irishmen look out for the Irishmen, the Jamaicans for the Jamaicans, the Dominicans for the Dominicans, and so on. Those whose accents still bear traces of other homes hate new arrivals. Those who are treated with disdain anywhere past the five boroughs turn up their noses when they go through neighborhoods whose inhabitants have skin darker than theirs.
It’s an ugly secret that although New York on the national political map looks blue as can be, when you zoom in, it has all of the nasty prejudices of any other corner of the US of A. Little Neck is that ugly side of New York laid bare. The old woman called the cops on my brother and his friends for playing basketball at six P.M. The neighbors feuding for whatever reason. The furtive whispers about the new arrivals, saying well, they don’t really fit in here, do they. The ugliest part of New York, the reality of New York, which is that living in this city does not necessarily make you better, more enlightened, or more tolerant, it just makes you more adept at navigating crowded places, is in full view in Little Neck. And if that was going to be the only slice of New York I was going to get, I said goodbye to that whole cake.
I think I’m a failure. It’s hard not to think you’re a failure when leaving much-mythologized New York, doubly so when you were born there. I never had to learn how to navigate the subway and I always have my mother’s house to return to if rent doesn’t work out.
I had a foothold in the city everybody wants to be in, and I lost it. Maybe if I had been smarter, hustled better, made better choices, worked smart internships instead of chosen aforementioned stupid summer job because it let me be in New York without living with my parents, and not been so married to my own stupid idealistic vision of the world, I would still be in New York.
Maybe I would be a less boring representative of New York had I tried harder, hustled better, been brave enough to stand up to my parents when I was 14 and desperately wanted to be in the world they were trying to shelter me from. Instead, I have to disappoint people again and again when they want interesting stories and all I have to offer up are the contents of my Tumblr dashboard from 2012 to 2015 and a few stolen moments at the slice joint near my high school.
All of these things are true, at some level. 27 is probably old enough to realize when you’ve fucked a few things up in life. Maybe if I’d made a few different choices I’d still be living in New York. Maybe if I’d made a few compromises I’d still be living in New York, but would probably not be sleeping well at night, or writing much.
Maybe if the rent was cheaper, the jobs paid a damn, and the industries I wanted to work in were not all hiring based on who your parents know, I would still be there.
Maybe if New York was not so committed to eating its own young, I would still be living in New York.
I’m not sure I can ever leave New York. All New Yorkers, however long they lived there, buy into the mythology of the city a little bit, like when my mother who is still terrified of Manhattan snaps at the guys selling tours around Central Park that she’s been a New Yorker longer than they have. I feel like an arrogant jerk every time I say I’m from New York, but I do secretly wait for people to ask about it.
I can’t look away from New York. See the NYC-based influencers, mentioned above, and all of the people I know from past iterations of myself living their own choices. I religiously follow restaurant news, my food snobbism one of the qualities I attribute to my birthplace and my restaurant-working father. I’ve been closely following the Mamdani campaign, crying with homesickness over political ads.
But it’s never enough, is it? That is what all of the “why I left New York” essays are about. Just because you’re living somebody else’s dream does not mean that it is enough. To be envied is not enough for a good life. I traded New York for a slower pace of life, which means different things to different people but to me means that not every one of my fuck-ups needs to result in catastrophic crash-out.
Yet I still miss New York. I will always miss New York. Everyone misses their hometown, but not everyone’s hometown is so wrapped up in the mythology of the world. I will miss my home, I will miss my friends, I will miss my family. I will miss the mythology I bought into of “making it,” and that if you stick everybody together in close proximity they will be forced to get along. I will miss the way a creative career maybe would have been easier living closer to the center of power in most English-language media.
I will miss New York. And then I will remember that the version of New York I miss would only have been possible with a few more zeroes in the generational bank account and heavy editing for social media. And then I will close my laptop and put down my phone and look at the life I have built in a place that is not New York but is slowly, maybe, becoming mine.
As a Balkan who grew up in Fresh Meadows (and went to elementary and middle school in Little Neck/Douglaston) this really spoke to me.