5 ms·
I wonder if any two folks in the same city have anything like the same experience. The idea that being a "New Yorker" means anything then becomes rootless. Con
by JoeAltmaier 5y ago
I wonder if any two folks in the same city have anything like the same experience. The idea that being a "New Yorker" means anything then becomes rootless.
Consider: Yankee Stadium holds around 50,000 people. The Yankees play maybe 30 games a year there. With 8M people in New York even if every person in the stadium were different every game, some 5 or 6 years would elapse for a person to be in the stadium twice.
Of course that doesn't happen. Of course many people fill the same seat game after game. Which mean the average New Yorker doesn't ever go into Yankee Stadium at all.
Madison Square Garden is worse - less than 20,000 seats. And every other theatre, restaurant, gas station is far far worse. Essentially for every 'landmark' you can name, the vast majority of New Yorkers never visit in a lifetime.
These waxing-eloquent love poems about 'everybody is a New Yorker' are pretty thin and clueless. Sure the wealthy may have a similar situation and experience, along with all their wealthy friends. But the rank and file of New York likely do their shift in the corner bodega, buy fast food on the way home and fall asleep in a ninth-story room looking on an alley. Rinse and repeat for 20 years.
So I guess from those back-of--the-envelope statistics there may be a common New York experience. But it isn't what these poems go on about.
- selectodude 5y agoThe Yankees play closer to 90 games per year there but your point stands.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoI did a back-of-the-envelope from attendance - 11K per game, 330,000 per year. But I guess I should have just used those averages instead! And at 330,000 per year it comes to 24 years before you get to go to a game again. So theres a range of possibilities.
- selectodude 5y agoThose attendance numbers are very out of whack due to covid. The Yankees routinely have 4 million fans come to games every year. Everybody in New York could go to a game every other year if you wanted to break it down like that.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoIf they took turns. Seems likely its largely the same folks attending again and again. To the degree that happens, it approaches "nobody in New York ever sees a game".
- OldHand2018 5y agoA baseball season is 81 games at your home stadium and 81 games at other stadiums. The Yankees could play 90 games at Yankee stadium, but that would require them to be good.
- selectodude 5y agoThey're good a lot more often than not.
- paganel 5y ago> Which mean the average New Yorker I was once offered the chance to move to NYC (I live in Europe), I finally said no but one of the reasons for me to have said "yes" was the fact that the Mets were based in New York and I would have loved to go to their matches (one of those late Tuesday matches in July - early August where you can find $20 tickets up in the sky because by that time of the season the play-off chances are already gone). I only wanted to say that the Yankees are not the only baseball team in town, quite the contrary :)
- asah 5y agoActually, I'm not sure about that math... 50,000 * 30 games = 1.5M people per year. Let's say regulars/repeats/tourists are 3/4 of the people - 300K new local visitors. A lifetime is (say) ~80 years. In a lifetime, (7.7/8)^80 = 4.6% chance you don't go to YS at least once in your lifetime. If I had to guess, MSG is better than YS because it hosts a wider variety of events and it's in the center of town with easy transit access, i.e. more new local visitors per year. The better analogy might be a venue like Forest Hills, which is far from the city. Take Grand Central Station - certainly, most NYers visit once in their lives...
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoRemember that was predicated on a new butt in every seat every game. Which is quite improbable.
- asah 5y agomy analysis or OPs? mine assumed only 1/4 are new butts... maybe that's too high?
- twic 5y agoAbsolutely spot on. And this is not a New York thing, it's true of every dense, rich environment. I remember swapping notes with another denizen of uk.local.london back in the day, and finding that we both had a dozen things in the West End that we treasured, there was no commonality between them. It's almost as if there were two completely separate cities overlapping in space.
- dougmwne 5y agoThis is why basically every attempt ever to say, "People from X country/state/city are like Y" is complete bollocks. There is absolutely nothing useful you can say about how this million people compares to that million people, yet people do it constantly.
- onecommentman 5y agoDid a similar SWAG with the theatre. It seemed everyone in NYC could attend a performance on Broadway, but only one every two years. If there weren’t any tourists to compete with. Lots of people, not a lot of seats. I stand to be corrected on that number if anyone has a better analysis. An upstate professor I knew 20 years ago called it the New York City hype machine. “Love poems” is a great way of characterizing them. And love poems to a place have a great value…they create a sort of emotional architecture that operates at a different, but no less real, level than the physical and improves the emotional life for those thriving/living/stuck in those places. You don’t want to be “that guy” making the slog worse for those living there by denting their ideal that already has obvious condition issues. The problem is the “Jerusalem syndrome” that arises when newcomers, newcomers on which NYC depends like vampires depend on blood, compare their reality to the poems. Sadly, although we dream in poetry, we live in prose.