Absence Makes the Heart Grow Snobbish

I LOVE Manhattan.

Oh my. I can’t believe I said that!

Let me explain. The cooler than usual real estate market this summer has afforded me the luxury of spending some time outside of Manhattan and for the first time in my life I think I’m actually becoming one of those "city" snobs.

I grew up much the opposite, in a working class neighborhood outside Baltimore city (half suburban/half urban). People in that neighborhood were not snobs at all. I moved to New York City in the summer of 1989 having never even visited before.

I’m not ashamed to admit that "the city" petrified and intimidated me at first. I lived in a sublet in Hell’s Kitchen where people were shooting heroin and prostitutes were on the street in broad daylight.

Boy has the city and my feelings for it come a very long way. Today I was driving back from a business meeting in central New Jersey. The setting was aesthetically similar and equally void of culture as the place where I grew up. Did it make me long for home? Why yes it did. But not the home of my childhood.

Manhattan has been my home for the past 17+ years and will likely be my home until the day I die. You can have the suburban lifestyle and I will visit the beach or rural areas when I hunger for that, but there is no better place in the world to call home than New York City. The energy, the creativity, the sophistication, the people (who definitely get a bum rap outside of "the city"), and the everyday conveniences it provides me and my family are most appreciated when I am without them. For this and a plethora of other reasons, I can’t see why anyone would want to live anywhere else.