As a lifelong NYer now living in Toronto I beg to differ. Sure it’s smaller than NYC by almost every metric except land size, but it has hidden pockets of community and life if you look for them. Compared to NYC, Toronto is greener, friendlier, and better for artists. It has lots of third spaces, which are all but extinct in NYC. Parts of NYC truly are nothing more than dystopian concrete slabs (ever visit Midtown?)
Unfortunately, both cities are victims to festering capitalism and governments that hate us, so you are correct in your assessment of gentrifiers stripping it for parts. The same exact thing can be said about nearly every city in the US and Canada. It’s almost always done against the will of the people who actually have to live with their changes. In NYC, just last year we all banded together to narrowly defeat a proposal that threatened to demolish Coney Island and replace it with a dystopian mega casino - and that was just one of six casino proposals that year. At the same time in Toronto, Ford’s spa was a mirror of the same type of development and now Sneaky Dee’s is at risk of becoming condos. I don’t see this as a failure of each city but rather a casualty of right wing politics and the greater class war.
For what it’s worth, I do miss NYC and all my friends and loved ones out there. As they say, you can take the NYer out of NY but you can’t take NY out of the NYer. I truly do love both cities and look forward to the day I can reunite them.
It’s just NYC without any sort of character. Concrete buildings and dystopian. I just don’t like being there.
As a lifelong NYer now living in Toronto I beg to differ. Sure it’s smaller than NYC by almost every metric except land size, but it has hidden pockets of community and life if you look for them. Compared to NYC, Toronto is greener, friendlier, and better for artists. It has lots of third spaces, which are all but extinct in NYC. Parts of NYC truly are nothing more than dystopian concrete slabs (ever visit Midtown?)
Unfortunately, both cities are victims to festering capitalism and governments that hate us, so you are correct in your assessment of gentrifiers stripping it for parts. The same exact thing can be said about nearly every city in the US and Canada. It’s almost always done against the will of the people who actually have to live with their changes. In NYC, just last year we all banded together to narrowly defeat a proposal that threatened to demolish Coney Island and replace it with a dystopian mega casino - and that was just one of six casino proposals that year. At the same time in Toronto, Ford’s spa was a mirror of the same type of development and now Sneaky Dee’s is at risk of becoming condos. I don’t see this as a failure of each city but rather a casualty of right wing politics and the greater class war.
For what it’s worth, I do miss NYC and all my friends and loved ones out there. As they say, you can take the NYer out of NY but you can’t take NY out of the NYer. I truly do love both cities and look forward to the day I can reunite them.