Nicer New York
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Reviews on Thursday, August 26, 2010 1:00 PM
Native Washingtonians feel a smug superiority to New York City.
It may be The Big Apple, seat of finance, fashion and the arts, but we’re the true corridor of power.
And we’re prettier, more polite and our streets don’t stink.
I’m not so sure about that middle element anymore, though.
I used to spend a week or two each summer with my Great-Aunts in New York. It was great fun, but however many the delights of the city, the experience was always marred by the unbelievable and casual rudeness of many of its inhabitants.
No one of sense goes looking for manners in a subway in any city, of course. The sign here (upper right) offering a reminder it doesn’t seem civilized persons would need is from 1938. Still, the New York of my childhood was grubby and seemed to decline each year: more dirt, more crime, more XXX bars, more streets you were afraid to walk on.
To ride a bus or a subway or walk down a street in Washington, which among its native inhabitants (as opposed to the folks who come here from elsewhere to run the gub’mint) was still mostly a sleepy Southern town in character, was an altogether different and more pleasant experience than to dare those same experiences in New York—where even my proud Manhattanite aunts feared to ride the subway at all and clenched their pocketbooks extra tightly when a single man crossed their paths.
So I was amazed a week or so ago when I took my daughter up for a weekend galavant and found that no matter where we went by bus or subway, people practically fell over themselves to yield their seats to my aunt.
In fact, wherever we went, clerks, public servants and people on the street were smiling, courteous and helpful.
It was downright weird.
I know Mayor Giuliani made tremendous efforts (to mixed reviews) to improve the livability of the city by strictly enforcing laws against the petty crimes that diminish community life: graffiti-writing, panhandling, vandalism. And he used zoning laws to take back many parts of the city from the drug dealers, prostitutes and topless bars who seemed to rule it.
But Giuliani’s been out of office a long time, and subsequent mayors haven’t had the same priorities, so I surmise that the city’s decades-long efforts at “behavior modification” as the transit authority used to call it have paid off. (Though not perfectly, or people wouldn’t think this was necessary.)
The subway and bus system is notable not only for the usual ads, but for multiple public service announcements reminding people “it’s your city” and asking them to keep it clean, keep it courteous, care about it.
Washington, in the ensuing time period, has gotten worse. I think if you were a one-legged blind pregnant lady carrying a sick child you couldn’t get anyone in DC to look up long enough to think of offering you a seat on our subway. Which must be why our transit authority has recently launched a campaign to remind people of basic rules of courtesy.
I was cynical about that when it started, but now I have hope it actually might make a difference.
I suppose a weekend isn’t a statistically valid sample. But at least for 48 hours, New Yorkers were more polite than Washingtonians.
Which won’t please the natives of either city to hear, perhaps. But you have to call ‘em as you sees ‘em.
Washington still smells better, though.
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
