And some guy from New England.
14 Likes
He was so good at it that he somehow managed to make crime rates drop all across the US at the same time.
Amazing.
25 Likes
It’s the three-word-name rule.
“New York” seems friendly enough.
“New York City”, mind you, now we’re in different territory.
John Wilkes Booth, John Wayne Gacy, Lee Harvey Oswald, etc.
(All the serials have three names, WTF)
Stick to two words, guys.
4 Likes
If superheroes would spread out, it wouldn’t be such a target. I blame Tony Stark.
18 Likes
Well various reasons, I think.
-
It used to be a lot grungier and run down looking. But it has been a while since it was like that.
-
Media. Lots of cop shows and movies that take place in NYC. (Including old media that shows it like it was.)
-
If it bleeds, it leads news reporting puts crime in the forefront of peoples’ minds.
-
Even if statistically there is less murders or other crime due to per capita, that doesn’t necessarily translate to feeling safer. For example, take a large apartment building in NYC compared to a suburban cul de sac in a small town. Let’s say someone was violently assaulted at random at both locations. Do you FEEL any safer in the apartment complex because there are 20x more people in it, and thus you are statistically less likely to be a victim? Probably not.
This perception has been this way for a long time. I remember on Dennis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer CD, he complained about NYC always getting a bad rap, when there were much worse cities out there - and this was in the 90s when the crime rate WAS way higher. (Funny how time also plays a factor in perception. Who feels safer now than in the 90s?)
10 Likes
It was significantly more violent previously.
But like people thinking of Philadelphia sports and “throwing batteries at Santa” over 50 years ago - things stick in people’s mind even though most people weren’t alive then.
Philly has had much more recent and interesting violence since then. Fuck you, Hitchbot!
21 Likes
It was in California’s San Fernando Valley that I and three others – all fresh from NYC and working in SFV with the same employer and rooming together – returned from our first Xmas back east to find our two Woodland Hills apartments burglarized. We learned first-hand how something like that feels… but in safe Woodland Hills, and not in Brooklyn or Queens. Life’s a coin-flip.
7 Likes
And with their small-town local sports teams being their “all”, maybe that’s how they took to accepting cheating as being okay, as long as they weren’t on the short end. 
Note the winky eye!
Only when he takes a break… then he’s back at it again.
5 Likes
I had to keep reminding myself that Fox is the essay’s author’s last name, not, you know, Fox.
8 Likes
I mean, watching the documentary, “Men in Black” and its sequels… its CRAWLING with Extraterrestrials armed to the teeth. And we wouldn’t know otherwise, but for that leaked footage.
10 Likes
Ah, yes. The City of Brotherly Shove.
6 Likes
That explains why all the natives just call it “The City.” They just know better.
6 Likes
To my recollection, everyone planted on Long Island, i.e., B’klyn, Queens, etc., (and perhaps Staten Island) calls Manhattan “the city”. We never said, “Hey, let’s go to Manhattan.” We’d say, “Hey, let’s go to the city.”
8 Likes
My wife is from the Lower East Side (don’t you dare say East Village…) and I like to tease her by pointing out that her world map consists of "The City, and *waves hands* The Surrounding Countryside…
9 Likes
Brotherly love and sisterly affection. It’s a bit rough around the edges and very real; but actually warmer, and less unkind and judgmental than New York or Boston.
12 Likes
For completeness’ sake it should be remembered that the Big City in general, and New York City in particular, have been moral panic targets for at least a century and a half. In the mid-late 1800s there was a booming industry producing “Sins of New York” style literature detailing the evils (mostly connected to sex) to be found there. These stories were of course created with the noble intent to forewarn the unwary. I’m sure they were never used for vicarious thrills or one-handed reading.
12 Likes
I don’t know much about Philly, but, even though sometimes too quick to defend NYC, I can attest to some of the hostility ingrained in some there. In SoCal, I eventually became conditioned to, for example, automatically smiling at a stranger as we pass in opposite directions through a doorway, or when you pass a fellow jogger on the street. Several years back in Manhattan, I made the mistake of smiling at a couple of strangers as described above. The “Who the fuck is he smiling at?” from one of them really hit me hard. I had lost my instinct for non-engagement – a way of safely getting by. The flipside is that friends I’ve made there since childhood are friends for life.
8 Likes
I’ve lived in and loved all three cities. But Philly treated this trans gal much better than the other two.
16 Likes
Being away for so long, I would have thought that NYC would be higher up on the acceptance curve by now. Shit.
7 Likes
You should read The Ballad of Black Tom, which is a response to the Horror of Red Hook.
12 Likes
