Moving From Queens to Brooklyn

So I moved to Brooklyn from Queens a while back. It seemed like a good idea. I had recently lost my job and wanted to go some place cheaper. My girlfriend had lost her lease. She was only marginally employed and also wanted to keep her expenses to a minimum. So we thought, since math tells us “a negative times a negative equals a positive,” moving in together was bound to change our luck.

Anyway, I left the apartment I'd been living in for ten years in Bayside, Queens to move to Flatbush, Brooklyn. If anyone from somewhere outside the New York, Metropolitan area is reading this, I suppose I should explain.

Queens and Brooklyn are boroughs of New York City. When most people hear the words New York City, their minds fill with visions of skyscrapers, Broadway and 9/11. They don’t fill with images of the Queens Farm Museum or the Coney Island Aquarium.

I’m not implying the people who don’t live here are wrong. Even to people who live more than 50 miles away from Manhattan, it's where about half of their town’s population commutes to for work. One of my friends, to save money on his first house, commuted everyday to work from Pennsylvania. That means he had to cross an entire state every morning and every night so he could work in Manhattan. Why? Well now he's a Vice President of a Fortune 500 company. It’s like when somebody asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks.

Manhattan is a small island. In many ways it is like Australia was in its early days. Just as people on the receiving end of the English justice system were cast out of their communities and sent to a far off island, most Manhattanites moved there to because they never quite fit in at home. Instead of working at the local Jiffy Lube, most Manhattanites wanted to be successful in any one of a number of fields: finance, the arts, fashion, journalism, publishing, even cooking. Most prisoners of Manhattan endure cramped quarters and ridiculous prices to live on an island that is radically different from where they’re from. As a result that small island has become a truly amazing place.

Still, for all it splendor, Manhattan is just one of five boroughs. The population of Queens is just under 2,300,000. Brooklyn has a little more than 2,500,000. According to this table, would make either of them the fourth largest city in the country. Of course, if you did drop either of these boroughs in the middle of most states, that state’s residents would probably consider it a terrorist attack.

I’ve said before, the prisoners are different. They are strivers. New York’s other boroughs are full of the ones who couldn’t cut it in prison. Some were born here and look across the water at the skyline casting shadows over their home and are filled with bitterness. The rest came here and hoped to make it in Manhattan only to find themselves lumped in with the bridge and tunnel crowd. The result, more bitterness. Therefore, if Brooklyn or Queens was actually dropped onto some unsuspecting state, the sudden onslaught of bitter would probably poison the local water supply.