[New York will always offer you the singular opportunity of testing yourself against the best, of sharpening yourself against the city’s fabled grindstone. Hopeful people will always scrape together their savings to come here, to split a one-bedroom apartment with five other people, whether that’s in Greenwich Village (then) or Bushwick (now). But New York, for all its mythology, is no longer a frontier. Buffalo is a frontier. And when you think of the actual frontier, you’ll recall that no one ever packed up and moved West to a gold-rush town because they heard it had really good local theater. They moved looking for opportunities. They moved for the chance to build a new life for themselves.]
Ah, Sternbergh! Rock me like a hurricane. I loved this latest addition to the “Goodbye to All That” genre, with a focus on moving to Buffalo. It is hard, being from the wild west myself, to accept the fact that NYC, for the most part, has reached a point where it has stabilized (and will simply become a more expensive version of the present) until something really drastic happens and we will have no choice but to rebuild (knock on wood). There is something to be said for pioneering and creating the new and inventing wheels from scratch—in a recession that’s not going to happen in this city. Still, I think it is a good place to take the knocks that you need to take to ford new waters later on—for me, these years of living in the city have made me bold and hopeful and jittery and ready to someday go to a new place and do my part to create it in the image of the great metropolis. And I know the energy to do it will come from having lived here.
**Also, you don’t have to go to Buffalo!…homes in Albuquerque (where I grew up) are just as affordable now, and with desert sunsets and crystals and roasted hatch and air so clean it cures disease. Not that I’m going back yet.
1 note