New York City, August, 1998
20 years ago this month, I moved to NYC. I was 17 and about to start my freshman year of college. For me, there was nowhere else; I applied to 10 schools and they were all in New York. And while there’s always a place in my heart for my small, picturesque hometown in Western Massachusetts, I am, at my core, a New York City Girl. There’s truly no place I’d rather be, and there’s no place I’d rather raise my child. I love New York deeply and passionately and I am thankful every day to have the opportunity to live here, to thrive here, to be a tiny speck in the tapestry of the Greatest City in the World.
“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something… Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.”
—E.B. White, “This is New York”