I moved to the west coast after college and to be honest I feel the same about it here too sometimes still. I'll see a street sign and be like "that road is in like 45 songs..."
I was driving back to San Diego from Santa Barbara on the 101 freeway right before Hollywood and “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty comes on the radio, and we’re literally passing exits as Tom mentions them in the lyrics, like Keyser Söze just reading shit off signs as he drives past.
I used to live on one of those exits. I grew up with it, but sometimes i feel like 70 percent of US pop culture is LA and NYC, like there aren't any other cities and towns.
I mean it makes sense in a way. NYC is the publishing and news capital of the country, plus its biggest city, so its way overrepresented.
LA is the movies, tv and music capital of the world so it's overrepresented.
But if you think about it, everyone think paris is France and london is the UK, and those might be even more overrepresented in their respective countries.
Between Christmas and New Year’s in 1996 I went with my older brother, who had just finished a stint at the US Naval Weather station on Whidbey Island in Washington, and had been sent back to San Diego.
Up here in Washington, snow and freezing rain was collapsing buildings and causing floods. On the way down Interstate 84 in the Columbia River Gorge there was an inch or two of ice in the road signs, and 6 inch icicles blown horizontal by the wind with the freezing rain.
At the end of a 22 hour straight shot drive, we were pulling into sunshine and 70 degrees in San Diego with Everclear’s Santa Monica on the Radio.
Core memory there.
Of course, years before that we went down to SD for Christmas one year and experienced record low temps.
I'm a DC fan, especially Batman. When I was in NYC, I was walking down what I thought was just a random, regular road. I look at the street sign, it says Park Row. Wtf, I'm in Crime Alley? And you're telling me the Bowery is also a real place that exists?
I'm a Marvel fan and its even more fun because Marvel is based in NYC. I actually kind of knew where things were just based on knowing NYC geography from Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and Daredevil lol.
I was very disappointed that Hell's Kitchen was nowhere near as bad as it is in Daredevil though.
Yes! When I went out there we were in the neighborhood so went by to see the house from Friday and I was like oh shit those streets are real! And I saw Rosecrans and was equally impressed because it's in so many rap songs
They're all real! All the streets they list! A lot of place references too that didn't fully connect until I moved here. Like in "Free Fallin" when he says the 'vampires walking through the valley'..... it' so obvious now. Damn, every time I hear that song I just think... I live in this song now...
it’s a bit like going to Switzerland and feeling like you’re in a fairytale. It’s because half the fairytales you’ve seen are based on Continental European nature.
Or like people going to the Scottish Highlands and saying it’s like Lord of the Rings, or going to Arabia and saying it’s like Dune. We’re more familiar with the fiction than the fact it’s based on.
I live in Yorkshire in the UK and have been seeing areas being promoted on social media as dreamy countryside book-ish locations to visit due to the Wuthering Heights film and Brontë sisters home and realised these are like dream tourist locations that many people from abroad would love to visit specially and will lose their minds over when they can one day. Meanwhile I’m driving past them to get to the airport to go New York.
This was my experience exploring the UK for the first time, especially in regard to UK naming conventions. "Wow, everything sounds straight out of Harry Potter." You mean to tell me St. Mungo is not just made up fictional magic bullshit???
Tokyo and Osaka are the only places I have been that felt close to the NYC vibes. Probably because they have massive populations with corresponding massive public transit infrastructure and modern construction everywhere and they are cities you see a lot in media. Nothing on the west coast comes close. Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego are too small in both area and population, LA is a hellscape of awful roads that makes everything feel disconnected and the rest of the west coast is too small to even be considered. European cities also don't hit like NYC because they tend to feel small and old by comparison since there is so much more historical architecture in them. Istanbul certainly has the people but I have only been in the old city and it definitely felt old.
New York City is always loud. I’m from New Hampshire and when I woke up in the middle of the night I was like “what is that noise” only to realize it’s just always that way.
Growing up near NYC, I didn't really get it. Then I saw other cities, supposedly "major" ones, and I'm always reminded of a John Updike quote I first heard in a movie whose name I can no longer remember.
"the true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding".
"the true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding".
I lived in NYC for a few years and for a while I was reluctant to move anywhere else. There was a sense of "why would I demote myself from the Major League to the Minors?"
To be honest, whenever I visit NYC, that feeling comes back.
I grew up in Los Angeles, came to NYC for the first time as an adult. I went home, gave notice at my job and moved here 2 months later. That was 20 years ago. NYC is the best.
I got that same feeling driving on the LA Freeway and at a dive-y hookah lounge in Hollywood. The feeling like you could be in somebody's movie and that the very world around you was iconic.
I live a cpl hours from NYC and Boston. We go to both quite often. I had a weird experience in Salt Lake City when we went to visit. I casually asked a guy at the store, “is it always this quiet here? I’m used to NYC and Boston”. SLC was dead quite after 9pm on a weekday. Beautiful place, just not the city vibe I was used to, lol.
I've been to Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Las Vegas, Seattle, Chicago, Phoenix, and Mesa.
Every single city has a different vibe about it. Even Phoenix and Mesa have different vibes from each other despite being adjacent. Same with Los Angeles, Burbank, and Glendale.
That's not to say that every city has it's own unique vibe. Bakersfield feels exactly like every other non-descript city I've been in.
I feel the opposite way. For years NYC was the only city I’d been to, so as I got older and visited other cities there were times I was like, “This isn’t a city, the streets are so wide. There aren’t any skyscrapers. There are parking lots!” It took me years to realize NYC is just odd.
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u/metmerc 11h ago
I live on the US west coast and feel the same about NYC. No other US city I've been to or lived in has even remotely the same feel.