There Is No Escaping New York. Take It From Someone Who Escaped.
A love letter to a stricken city from a former New Yorker in L.A.
Like a lot of people in the last decade or so, I recently moved from New York to Los Angeles. I was part of a (not so) great migration. Williamsburg to Los Feliz, Queens to Tarzana, Bed Stuy to Cheviot Hills. The conventional wisdom became that New York was a vise that was squeezing the life out of us, and somewhere to the West, there was a freer, sunnier place with an open-heart chakra where you could drink turmeric lattes outside in February and still act kind of aloof and superior like you could in the city. It was like the spell was broken and everyone kind of looked around and said, “Wait, we actually don’t have to live like this.” They were making TV in Los Angeles, after all, and TV had become our national treasure. They had cool restaurants, and cool restaurants were our lingua franca. And in L.A., you could also live like an actual human being, which in New York, we figured was something only billionaires did. After we started moving to L.A., being narcissistic New Yorkers, we began talking about it, writing about it in national magazines, seeding ourselves in “trend pieces” until the rest of the country probably wanted to poke their eyes out. I didn’t really see myself as part of that whole thing. We moved mostly…
