New York City Cultural Assumption

Residents of NewYorkCity generally consider NewYorkCity to be the center of the universe and cornerstone of civilization. Hence "TheCity" is NewYorkCity and anything else is "TheSuburbs", "Upstate", or worse "NewJersey", or just plain doesn't even count (ThePeriphery?). This is the AmericanVersion? of the LondonCulturalAssumption. Although it's worth noting that NewYorkCity was settled by TheDutch? and its first name was NewAmsterdam?. It's a good explatation for the cultural differences between NYC and, say, Boston

Don't you mean just "Jersey"?

-- No. Jersey is one of the ChannelIslands?. It's a very, very long way from New York and New Jersey, both physically and intellectually.

Not quite. NewYorkCity consists of five boroughs, Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Residents of the outer boroughs, (everything but Manhattan) think of Manhattan as being TheCity, and their own neighborhoods as being just home.

There is some resentment there. Residents of the outer boroughs often think that TheCity government doesn't care about them at all, and that the city's newspapers and media don't care about anything outside Manhattan (and anything in Manhattan north of Central Park). Every so often, a secessionist movement springs up in Staten Island, for example.

On the other hand, everything outside NewYorkCity is just NewJersey, or it really doesn't count. Most New Yorkers think that Saul Steinberg's The New Yorker cover, The View of the World from Ninth Avenue is, in fact, the correct map of the world. Well, don't forget TheHamptons?...

But to get this back to the subject of the WikiWikiWeb, I leave you with the following question to discuss. Is the BrooklynBridge? an example of ExtremeEngineering, or not? Please discuss.

See The Great Bridge, by DavidMcCullough?, ISBN 067145711X for details.

--EricJablow

There was a saying when I was in school about the New York-centric world of network journalism: "when New York sneezes, America has a cold". This is less true now, but when it's hot in AtlantaGeorgia, America swelters I used to think this was true, but then I stopped watching the CableNewsNetwork? (CNN).

everything outside NewYorkCity is just NewJersey -- except for everything in NewYorkState? that's not in NewYorkCity, which is Upstate.

You forgot LawnGuyLand?...

People in Buffalo are amused when people from the city refer to Westchester (not far from the city limits) as Upstate. People from New York City also refer to themselves as New Yorkers in a way that seems to imply that there is no one else in the whole state. Brooklyn is an interesting microcosm (if you can call 2.5 million people a microcosm) in that it was once actually a whole separate bustling city from Manhattan, and blames all of its ills (especially the loss of the Dodgers) on ever having been duped into unifying. Other than Jersey, Connecticut is also a neighboring civilization recognized by the United Boroughs of NYC. I suspect most New Yorkers have heard of Pennsylvania and Massachusets, and some people who work in NYC even live there. On the other hand, probably more New Yorkers have been to Miami, then to Staten Island (not counting a brief get off and back on at St George Ferry Terminal after cruising by lady liberty). Miami is also the only place in the south that the average New Yorker thinks they can go without falling prey to packs of angry three-toothed bare-footed rampaging rednecks.

"People from New York City also refer to themselves as New Yorkers in a way that seems to imply that there is no one else in the whole state." As a native of 'Upstate' (from Albany, the capital of New York State, if only in name), I would add that it's not only New Yorkers who make this assumption. If I tell someone I'm from New York (for instance away at college), most people assume I mean NYC. But then again, nothing exists outside the City (regarding the state) to the rest of the world, either.