How to Write in New York City*, or: Locals** Don’t Lunch at Lombardi’s.***
A Primer.
*DISCLAIMER: This is not even approaching a comprehensive guide to writing a story set in New York. If you want verisimilitude, you should always have your story checked over by someone who knows the area upside down and sideways. No resource is a substitute for a good beta.
**DISCLAIMER, PART TWO: “Locals,” for the purposes of this guide, are defined as “people who live and/or work in one of the five boroughs.” College students, as much as some other locals may hate us, are included. Frequent visitors are not.
***DISCLAIMER, PART THREE: Everything I say in this guide is a generalization. There are 8.5 million people in this city; I don’t presume to speak for all of them. So when I say things like, “Locals don’t actually get lunch at dirty-water-dog street carts,” what I really mean is, “Most New Yorkers wouldn’t eat one of those things if you promised them they’d shit silver nickels, but some people can’t live without them.” I’m a local. I love Lombardi’s. Make of this what you will.
Before we get started:
IT IS SPELLED M-A-N-H-A-T-T-A-N.
Not Manhatten, not Mannhattan, not Manhatan, not any bizarre permutation thereof. Moving on.
I. Location, or: “Manhattan is not the entirety of New York City.”
A. Boroughs
There are five boroughs in New York City. (Six, if you count East Jersey, but who counts Jersey?) They are: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Most of your characters will probably never have a reason to leave Manhattan, and as Lunaris1013 said, “Getting a Manhattanite to visit one of the boroughs or – god forbid, Jersey – is like pulling teeth. They do not like to leave their island.” But just for reference’s sake, here are very, very brief descriptions of the other boroughs, as provided by Linaerys:
Brooklyn: huge, hipster, dangerous
Queens: suburban, not Brooklyn
The Bronx: non-white
Staten Island: Republican, actually in New Jersey (No, it’s not really in New Jersey. We joke about it often enough. Staten Island has a bad rep, but it’s a very nice place. That is definitely a part of New York City. And definitely in the state of New York. Sorry for any confusion.)
(Linaerys adds: “Of course it entirely depends on the neighborhood you’re in, so the above, except WRT Staten Island, is crap.”)
One of the awesome things about Staten Island is the ferry. It’s free, and there is no way to beat the view of Lower Manhattan from the deck, especially at night. No need to actually visit Staten Island; it’s a nice little trip to just hang out on the boat and ride there and back. Most locals have done it at least once, for the sheer hell of it.
And there’s a relatively secluded top deck, if you’re there at the right time. I’m just saying.
Also, really quick: Manhattan is incredibly densely populated. There are always always always other people around if you’re out on the sidewalk or down in the subway or basically anywhere in the entire borough. No matter what time of day or night.
B. Neighborhoods
There are, depending on who you ask, anywhere from fifteen to fifty neighborhoods in Manhattan. (Wikipedia lists even more, but I have literally never heard of some of those places.) This is a very pretty, stylized map of the neighborhoods. The boundaries of neighborhoods are sort of vague, but there are three main borders on the island:
Lower Manhattan means everywhere below Chambers St.
Midtown Manhattan means everywhere between 34th St. and 59th St.
Upper Manhattan means everywhere above 96th St.
Slightly less clear-cut are the definitions of Downtown Manhattan, which vary from “14th St. to Chambers,” to “Houston to Chambers.” Uptown Manhattan can start anywhere from 59th St. to 66th St. and goes up to 96th St.
Avenues run north-south. Streets run east-west. There is a grid, but some parts of the city don’t follow it, like everything below Washington Square Park. Broadway runs diagonal across the city and will fuck up your sense of direction if you let it.
Also: Fifth Avenue is the divider between east and west. As soon as a numbered street crosses Fifth Ave, its designation changes (E 10th becomes W 10th etc.).
The general rule of thumb for distance is: 20 blocks (north-south) is one mile. Avenues are less evenly-spaced, but it’s about four avenues to one mile (if you don’t count Broadway and University and Amsterdam and all those as actual avenues, this does work). Manhattan’s only about twelve miles long and is just over two miles across at its widest point (14th St).
When giving directions, people tend to name cross-streets instead of specific addresses (“10th and Fifth,” instead of “35 Fifth Ave”).
This is something that I see a lot in stories and it’s one of my absolute pet peeves: while alleys do exist, your characters will not be ducking into them for a quickie. They’re mainly way downtown, secured with high gates and barbed wire, and not in any way convenient for some semi-public sexin’. (Thank you to Linaerys for reminding me to include this important fact.)
Because there are so many neighborhoods in Manhattan, it’d be impossible to try and describe them all. I’m working on individual guides for each neighborhood, but I think I might keel over before that actually happens, so if you’d like to know more about a specific place, please ask!
II. Apartment Living, or: “Gimme a sec and I’ll buzz you in.”
A. The Building
If you live in an apartment in New York City, you will never be startled by a knock on your door. It is almost impossible for someone to get into your apartment building unless you invite them in (or one of your neighbors holds open the door for them and they get into the building that way, but most people won’t do that because it can be dangerous and stupid). Some apartment buildings (read: the swankier ones) have doormen, who will call up to the apartment of the person you’re visiting and make sure that you’re welcome there before they send you up. Almost every single one of the non-doorman apartment buildings in New York City has a security door, which is unlocked by a) a key, or b) a buzzer from inside the apartment. It works like this:
DAN: [presses button next to Casey's apartment number on the intercom]
CASEY [on intercom]: Hello?
DAN: Hey, it’s me. Buzz me in?
DOOR: [unlocks]
Let me repeat this: your characters will know it if someone is coming up to their apartment. There are exceptions to the rule (like if your doorman knows whoever’s coming to see you, or if the building’s security door has a shoddy lock), but 99 times out of 100, you’re gonna know it if someone’s on their way up.
The high-rise apartment buildings have elevators, but most buildings are walk-ups. I’ve seen walk-ups go as high as seven floors, and I feel very sorry for those people on laundry day.
Hallways are generally narrow, as are stairways. Everything in an apartment building is geared toward maximizing space.
Most buildings will have fire escapes built onto the outside, which are accessed through a window. People tend to treat these like balconies, but this also means that there are locked grates over some windows — and that you will occasionally wake up to find people clambering over your fire escape on their way up to the roof.
Apartments on the first floor always have metal anti-theft grates over the windows. They don’t look pretty, but they’re safe.
Apartment buildings have varying amounts of tenants, which leads us to:
B. Neighbors
If your characters live in an apartment and don’t own, you know, the entire building, they will have neighbors. And they will, at some point, get angry at said neighbors.
Most of the characters based in New York City probably can’t afford things like apartments with soundproofed walls, which means they will hear their neighbors playing music, watching television, fighting, fucking, and generally living their lives. Most apartments in a given building will be laid out in the same general pattern, which means the room that serves as a bedroom in one apartment will serve as the bedroom in the apartments above and below it. And sound carries in apartments — through open windows (at my first apartment, due to the weird echo/amplification effect created by the buildings on either side of the very narrow street, I could hear everything in the 10th floor apartments and up when they opened their windows, even though I lived on the 15th floor), through the walls, floors, ceilings, etc.
Also, there is constant ambient noise from the street. Sirens, horns, car alarms, conversations, ice cream trucks — you name it, you can hear it. Around 4am, delivery trucks start rumbling through the streets. Police, fire, and ambulance sirens are pretty much non-stop. Car alarms are the motherfucking devil and more than once I’ve wished for a baseball bat. But it’s pretty surprising how quickly all that noise just fades into the background. New York characters could probably sleep through a five-alarm fire three blocks away.
Your characters will know their neighbors’ taste in music, how they treat their pets, when they watch movies at two in the morning, and if their girlfriend is faking it or not. Your characters will know more about their neighbors’ lives than they ever wanted to — and the neighbors will know a whole lot about your characters.
And people tend to have really good stories about their neighbors’ antics. This is a favorite topic of conversation.
C. Apartments Themselves
New York City apartments are small. Think of the smallest apartment you’ve seen, then shrink it down. This is how small the average apartment is. They are small, weirdly laid out, have absolutely no closet space, sometimes have entire rooms where there are no windows due to the aforementioned weird layout, and smell like whatever the neighbors are cooking for dinner.
One more time, for good measure: New York City apartments are really fucking small.
If you have a character who lives in a giant apartment, he is paying a premium for that amount of space. Apartments are expensive and there’s a huge housing crunch in New York. Characters are unlikely to own an apartment, and are either renting or sub-letting from someone else. People sub-let to roommates, sleep on each others’ floors, have beds that fold up into couches to save space during the day, etc. If your character is in their late 20s and still lives with roommates, they’re the norm.
Some characters might have studio apartments or lofts, which tend to be in converted warehouses out in places like Williamsburg in Brooklyn. These are spacious, but only have one room and so there’s no privacy. There’s no privacy anyway, since even if you have a door, your roommates are likely to hear whatever you’re getting up to. Because the apartments are really small. I can’t emphasize this enough.
Space is at a huge premium in the city. Some apartments are weirdly laid out because they’ve been converted — either from tenements to more “spacious” apartments, or from big warehouses to apartments. I am not lying about the lack of space and privacy. Very few apartments look like what you’d expect.
Kitchens are small. There is no counter-space, and rarely enough free space to have an actual kitchen table. Ditto for bathrooms. I have seen some crazy-weird layouts for bathrooms, including one where the tub was fused to the toilet. Bedrooms are also usually small — I’ve seen rooms barely wide enough for a twin bed. A lot of apartments lack natural light sources because there are few windows — usually one window per bedroom, and one or two in the main room.
Peter Petrelli on Heroes lives in an incredibly phenomenally amazingly huge and gorgeous apartment (it has French doors!) and yet other characters have referred to it as a ‘rat-hole.’ They are full of lies. I would kill for his apartment.
III. Transportation, or: “Do you have any idea how long it took me to get here?”
New Yorkers love to kvetch about how long it takes to get from there to here. And it takes longer to get from there to here than it ever would in the suburbs.
A good point of reference is my former commute from home to work. I lived in Bushwick, which is six stops into Brooklyn off the L train. I worked five and a half miles away, ten blocks north of Union Square. It took me anywhere from thirty to forty-five minutes to get to work: five minutes to walk to the subway, anywhere from two to fifteen minutes waiting for the subway, fifteen to twenty minutes riding the subway to the Union Square stop, and then another five minutes if I hopped on the 6 train and rode that to 23rd street, or ten minutes if I decided to walk (and New Yorkers will usually, if given the option, walk). Forty-five minutes to travel five miles. I could drive that far in ten minutes in the suburbs. But to drive to my office? Would’ve taken well over an hour. Driving in the city is unmitigated hell. See below.
How long it takes to get somewhere depends on: your method of travel, your destination’s proximity to a subway station or bus stop, your proximity to a subway station or bus stop, how fast and frequently the subways and buses are running, the time of day, what day of the week it is, the number of pedestrians on the street, the number of “don’t walk” signals you hit, the weather, phases of the moon, etc. Just know that it takes much, much longer than you’d think to get places in New York.
A. Subways
New York City has the best subway system in the world. It’s not the cleanest, or the safest, or the most reliable, but here is what makes it the best:
THE SUBWAYS DO NOT CLOSE.
They run 24/7/365. Yes, some express lines stop running or unexpectedly turn local at night or on the weekends, and there will be the occasional service change that closes down a certain stop or, god help us, an entire line, but you will never, ever, ever hear a conductor get on the intercom and announce that the subways are about to shut down for the night.
The subways are pretty complicated at first, and it’s easy to get confused about which trains go where and when they go there and how long you’re going to be standing on the platform staring down the tunnel and praying for the train to appear. They are, basically, the opposite of intuitive, but the system makes a weird sort of sense once you finally get the hang of it.
I’m not going to detail which line goes where, because you can go to the MTA’s website and check out a map for that. And you definitely should, because people will laugh at you if you write, “Mike Logan raced down the stairs at the Brooklyn Bridge stop and jumped onto the uptown 7 just as the doors were closing.” But I will share this awesome stat about the 4-5-6 line: it handles more commuters on a daily basis than the entirety of Boston’s T system and the Chicago El combined. That’s how many New Yorkers use the subway — and that’s just one line.
One other thing about the lines: they’re all assigned colors, and then numbers or letters. So the 4-5-6 is green, the A-C-E is blue, etcetera. But nobody, not nobody will ever say, “Take the green line to Grand Central.” That’s Boston lingo. The subways are numbers or letters, never colors. You will often hear tourists say things like, “I was on the NQRW from Union Square,” because that’s the grouping of the letters assigned to [*shudders*] the yellow line. Usually locals just say the letter or number of the specific train they were on.
In order to ride the subway, you have to buy a MetroCard and swipe it in the turnstile. There are three kinds of MetroCards: the single-use ones (which are white and papery), the per-ride ones (which are yellow, plasticky, and can be refilled and reused), and the “unlimited” ones (which look exactly like the per-ride cards, causing much frustration in my wallet). One swipe will run you $2. An unlimited MetroCard will cost you $78/month. It is still cheaper than gas.
The platforms are like waiting for a train behind Satan’s balls in the summer, and freezing cold wind-tunnels in the winter. Most subway cars are air-conditioned, but still smell like feet.
There are a lot of panhandlers and homeless people in the subway. People play instruments for spare change. There’s one woman I’ve seen in the Union Square and Times Square stations who plays a saw [I am not making this up]. There’s an a capella group I’ve seen frequently on the NQRW, who walk through the cars and sing do-wop songs. Other people just walk through the train clinking a cup of change at you. Some will evangelize, others will try and sell you newspapers, some will just sit there and stare at you creepily.
There are also: commuters who bang their briefcases into your knees; tourists who cling to the poles and make it impossible for anyone else to hold on; moms with giant strollers who park them right on your feet; moms who let their kids climb all over the seats and, therefore, you; school kids who slam their backpacks into your stomach; drunk people; people who are high; people who haven’t showered in weeks; and basically a lot of people who you never wanted to be particularly close to but are forced to become distressingly familiar with in a very short period of time.
The subway, like most things in New York, is not particularly dangerous unless you’re being stupid. There are certain lines nobody in their right mind would ride after a particular time of night, but for the most part, the main lines in Manhattan are well-patrolled and safe. There are a lot of plainclothes cops on the subway, many of whom will ticket you for things like putting your feet up in an empty seat.
New Yorkers love, love, love to bitch about the subway. Mention the Second Ave line or some asshole you dealt with on the train, and they’re off and running. Everyone has a story about something that happened to them on the subway and it is one of the favorite topics of conversation.
But — trust me — if you want to make sure whatever you write about the subway is accurate, ask a New Yorker to fact-check it for you.
B. Buses
I don’t know anything about the bus system other than that it’s confusing as all get-out. I take the M60 to LaGuardia Airport, and that’s it. You’ll have to ask someone else for bus info.
C. Taxis & Cars
This is how a character hails a cab on television: she saunters to the edge of the sidewalk and raises her right hand like a hesitant kid in class who’s not quite sure if she knows the answer. And then a cab magically appears, the driver speaks perfect, unaccented English, and the character doesn’t have to explain fifteen times where she’s going.
This is totally fucking bullshit.
This is how a character would actually hail a cab: she steps entirely off the sidewalk, maneuvers past the row of cars parked on the side of the street, stops just short of actually stepping into traffic, and throws her right arm up over her head. And then she swears at whatever cabs drive past her with their duty lights on. (Taxis with the lights on top on are available for fares; if they’re off, the cab has a fare already.) When the cabbie pulls over, she gets into the cab and says her destination, then repeats it approximately thirty times more for the rest of the ride until the driver finally understands.
Things I have learned about cabbies: despite being required to by law, they will not take you to places outside of Manhattan (or, frequently, anywhere north of 116th) if you say that’s where you’re going before you actually get into the taxi. They drive like they have little regard for their own lives, and therefore don’t see why they should care about the lives of pedestrians, other drivers, or you. And they will lean on their horn at every available opportunity. Also, and this is my least favorite thing about New York, they will yell at you if you don’t know how to get somewhere. And they will still expect you to tip them.
The fare is based on how far you’re going and how long it takes you to get there. There’s some formula for how frequently it goes up, like 20 cents per fifth of a mile or something, but I don’t know it.
Taxis are thick on the ground in most of Manhattan, until you get up into the Barrio or Inwood. There, and in the outer boroughs, you’re more likely to find gypsy cabs, which are cars from a car service that trawl the streets looking for fares instead of dispatching drivers when they’re called.
The more well-to-do characters probably have a car service to get them from home to work and back. Most other characters probably can’t afford to pay a car service every day, and so take the subway to work, or maybe hail a cab every now and then.
But practically nobody who lives and works in New York City owns a car. They’re totally impractical when gas and insurance and parking costs so much and it’s frequently quicker to get somewhere by subway than by driving. Most of the people I know who grew up in New York City don’t even have a license. Most New Yorkers generally can drive, but they won’t.
ETA: Okay, okay, as many people pointed out, yes, people who live in NYC, particularly in the outer boroughs, own cars. And yes, traffic is hellish, but I can promise you that it is not from native New Yorkers. The breakdown probably goes something like: 50% taxis and car service, 20% delivery vehicles and buses, 20% commuter cars, and 10% native New Yorkers. You can verify this just by standing on the street corner and counting how many New York plates you see versus out-of-state plates. I’ve watched entire blocks of cars whizz by with just Jersey and Connecticut plates. Many people who live in the suburbs of NYC and in Jersey actually do drive to work instead of taking public transportation (but, hey, maybe the congestion tax will change that. If, you know, it actually happens).
And people who live in Manhattan in places like the UWS and the UES probably do own cars because they have more opportunities to drive out of the city. But I doubt they’re driving to work. None of the people I know own cars. I have gone for months without getting into a car that’s not a taxi. I may not be the norm, but that’s my experience, and like I said in the disclaimer, your mileage may vary.
But — this is pretty much true across the board — unlike people in the suburbs, New Yorkers don’t do things like drive to the grocery store or the gym or work. That’s what subways and buses are for. Or walking places. Most apartment buildings have at least a bodega within walking distance. It takes longer to drive places than it does to ride the subway to them, and that’s an important thing to consider. /ETA
Like I said in the first section, most of the streets in Manhattan run along a grid and are named and numbered accordingly. Exceptions are: the West Village, Fort Tryon, and almost everything south of Houston St., along with a couple other pockets. The West Village is particularly tricky because the streets were “paved” (they’re not asphalt, they’re really old uneven bricks that make your kidneys hurt when you drive over them) way back in the 18th (I think) century, before the rest of the island was laid out in a grid. They criss-cross and double back on each other a lot.
Driving in Manhattan is universally a very bad idea. The streets south of about 86th St. are basically gridlocked from about 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM. A fender-bender on 32nd and 7th can snarl up traffic for thirty blocks in both directions. If your characters live in Manhattan, they’re probably not driving around. Trust me.
D. Walking
Someone said she’d been told that New Yorkers dislike the outdoors. This is untrue simply because of the requirements of living in New York. We may dislike things like, you know, hiking, but we walk everywhere. Especially when the weather’s nice. (We love being outside when the weather’s nice; at the first hint of spring, every cafe and restaurant that can throws open its doors and sets out the sidewalk seating.) And even when it’s not nice out, we walk. You have to walk, sometimes a long way, to get to a subway stop, and then again once you get off the subway nearest your destination.
Again, how much your characters walk depends on where they live. But — here’s an example. The Daily Show and Colbert Report studios are pretty far from the nearest subway stop in Hell’s Kitchen, so if, say, Joe Schmo were at work in Columbus Circle and wanted to get to Hell’s Kitchen to meet his friends to go see a Daily Show taping, but didn’t want to bother with a taxi, he’d have to walk several avenues west and six or seven blocks south. Three avenues + seven blocks = about a mile, give or take. We walk a lot.
Some people walk more than others. If they live on the Upper East Side anywhere east of Lexington Ave, they’re walking more than most solely because there’s little public transportation up there.
Most New Yorkers get nervous when there aren’t a lot of people out on the street, and don’t like walking in deserted areas. (Not that many places in Manhattan are ever deserted.) We’re comfortable in crowds — just not crowds of tourists. And it’s worth repeating that 99% of the time, there will be other people around if you’re strolling down the sidewalk in Manhattan. Or if you’re in a park. Even at 2am. No, seriously. It’s a thing.
(You shouldn’t be in a park at 2am, though, since all the public parks close at 1am.)
IV. Having Fun, or: “For a Good Time, Call …”
There is a shitload to do in New York. I’m not going to talk about things like Lincoln Center or whatever that you can read about in any tour book, and I’m not really going to talk about dance clubs because most of the characters we’re writing about are … a little old to go to clubs without looking silly. There’s a list of sites you can check out below, and CitySearch in particular is good for finding clubs and restaurants.
First, though, the big one. A New Yorker is not going to do the same things tourists do. Basically ever. I’ve never been up to the top of the Empire State Building, though my dentist’s office is there so I have been inside. We will go out of our way to avoid places like Times Square and Macy’s and Rockefeller Center. (I work in Rockefeller Center, now, and I purposefully take the Q an extra stop to 57th and walk south to 30 Rock, so that I can avoid the holiday crowds of tourists at Radio City Music Hall.)
Restaurants and bars are usually really good places to gather, though it can be tricky because, just like in apartments, space is at a premium. So restaurants are really loud, jammed with tables, and hard to hold a private conversation in. During the summer, outdoor restaurants and places with beer gardens are always packed, and in the winter, everybody crowds indoors and sheds their outer layers on each other. It is possible to have a quiet, romantic night out, but I’ve been to few places where it’s really mellow.
There are great places in every neighborhood, and there are tourist traps in every one too. It’s doubtful that characters who have lived in New York for a long time would eat dinner together at, say, Nobu. Famous restaurants don’t tend to be the locals’ cup of tea. And people have favorite spots to hit up, too, so that’s definitely worth thinking about and working into the character.
V. The Wrap Up
Basically, there is so much to do and know and learn about in NYC that if I were to keep writing about how to write about it, I’d be better off writing a tourist manual. So hit up these websites, and, as always, ask a local.
Gothamist is my favorite New York blog of all time. They have everything from theatre reviews to restaurant openings to subway service changes to “hey stay out of Alphabet City this afternoon because Law & Order is filming there and tied up the streets.” I highly recommend browsing their tags.
CitySearch is a great way to find restaurants, clubs, bars, etc. in a specific neighborhood.
OnNYTurf is a pretty cool little mash-up of the subway system and Google maps; type in an address and the map will tell you the closest subway stop. HopStop will actually tell you how to get there.
Time Out New York is a magazine/website that’s A+ for listings of events going on in the city, as well as restaurant and theatre reviews, interviews, random stuff about various neighborhoods, etc. Obviously the New York Times is also great, along with New York Magazine. Both are a little more for the highbrow crowd, while TONY is definitely more hipster. Do not believe anything the Post or the Daily News says. Ever.
newyorkers is the LiveJournal comm for, well, New Yorkers. Their tags system is brilliant. Check it out for little events happening around the city, as well as things like “where can I find the best french fries in NYC?” (Answer: Pomme Frites.)
I myself always available as a resource; I live and work in New York, I ride the subways every day and swear at tourists under my breath and explore new neighborhoods all the time. Anything I tell you is, of course, just my take on New York — as is this guide, so, you know, grain of salt etc. But remember how I kept on repeating “ask a local!” all the time? I’m a local you can definitely ask.
If you have any questions that weren’t answered by this guide — and I’m sure you do, since I raced through a lot of things — please go ahead and ask in the comments!
So ask away. Or tell me that you learned something from this guide. Or tell me that I totally screwed something up. All are valid options.
Just a quick shout out to everybody who contributed to this guide in some way, either by asking questions or offering answers. You guys win.
Please feel free to link to this, bookmark it, and generally spread it around. And hey, the more people who ask questions, the more everybody will learn.
