The Relentless Pull of New York City

I'm of the belief that every young person should move to New York City the minute they can & give themselves a year there; they might hate it & leave after a year but I doubt it, since it's the only place I know where if you love something or wanna love something, no matter what that something is you can find someone else in New York City who shares that same passion, inspiring your love for it to even greater heights.

The New Yorker is asking why people keep coming to New York City, when of course the answer is ALWAYS The Promise of New York City:

New York had its own gravitational pull then. It still does, whatever the rent. Other cities have better infrastructure, fewer rats, cleaner streets, plentiful public toilets, more elbow room. Yet people continue to flock here. They come to make art, money, trouble, love, a name. They stay because they can imagine being nowhere else. This is the mythos of the city, the Frank Sinatra version that plays at the stadium after the ninth-­inning walk-off home run. But, because it’s true—because New York’s “essential fever,” as E. B. White called it, burns on, through bankruptcies, terrorist attacks, epidemics and pandemics, boom times and busts—it endures.

And of course anybody who's read me for more than 5 seconds has heard me bitch & moan about all my old haunts throughout Williamsburg disappearing since I've left, so personally this stings since I do it all the fucking time:

Remember What Used to Be Here? is the New Yorker’s favorite game. We hate to see our private maps overwritten. Shed a tear for the lost favorite bar, the all-night bagel shop that became a cellphone store. Stasis is not in the character of the place.

There is a flow to the city that ebbs in & out within mini-generations; I will always think of my time in New York City as a kind of Golden Age that will never be seen or touched again in this Universe...even if I know that the city itself doesn't see it that way, as evidenced the day before I moved away:

Like anybody I guess, I assumed New York City began the second I walked in, and would disappear the moment I left. Just now I walked by my freight elevator, where a kid in his early 20's wearing a Yeah Yeah Yeahs t-shirt was excitedly loading in boxes from what looked like his parents' minivan.

As long as there are young people excited for something else, there will always be New York City.