Archives for June 2012

Understanding the “Bridge and Tunnel” Crowd, and Why There Aren’t Any Good Clubs or Lounges in the Suburbs

June 22, 2012 by

When I resigned myself to a life in the suburbs, one of my goals was to try to find nightlife opportunities that would give me some semblance of the experiences I used to get in the city.  Now, let me be clear that I was not a big nightlife guy in the first place.  In my 20s, my usual nightlife routine was a night playing pool at the lost and lamented Amsterdam Billiards or getting a beer in a neighborhood bar.  Part of that was that I was, as they say, “living in the 80s and making in the 30s”, so I didn’t quite have the bankroll to hit a club. It’s a lot more fun to go clubbing if you are (a) a rich guy, or (b) a hot girl.  I was neither of those things.

Even as I got older, though, and could afford the club scene, it was really only something I did once in a while.  Maybe if I’d been single, or liked dance music music, or liked standing, or liked tinnitis, or couldn’t do the math on the cost of buying a bottle of Grey Goose for $350, I would have been a bigger fan.  But it just wasn’t my thing.  Maybe once in a while we’d get together with a group, get a table at a club, and put a big hole in our credit cards to enjoy a night out, but it really had to be a special occasion.

Otherwise, as I got older, my main nightlife routine would be hitting a “lounge,” which is really a euphemism for “a bar that has the drink prices of clubs because it has couches.”  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate having couches in bars.  The world needs more couches.  And I guess I like lounges because they aren’t as loud, so you can have a conversation.  The world needs more conversation, too.  You can’t really talk in a club, which is actually generally a good thing because most of the people in the clubs don’t have much of anything to say beyond “hey, nice shoes.”

So when I say that I was hoping to find nightlife opportunities in the suburbs, I’m really talking about those kinds of lounges — places with couches, where you can have a conversation, maybe with a bartender who makes interesting drinks that involve something called “muddling.”  Drinks that involve “muddling” are always much more expense than the non-muddling variety, but they sort of justify the fact that you went out at all — if you’re going to just mix vodka and soda, you can do that at home.  You need a fancy bartender in some couchy lounge to make you something with 15 muddled ingredients.

Here’s the thing — they don’t exist in the suburbs.  They. Don’t. Exist.  There are no lounges.  In fact, there are no clubs, nowhere that you can, if you wanted that experience, go to dance and listen to music and become insensate from the ringing in your ears.  What you have in the suburbs is simple: bars.  Just bars. No couches. No muddled drinks. No dancing.

It’s actually a lot worse than I thought. I figured that with all the people who get exiled from the city to the suburbs every year, some entrepreneurial type would realize that there’s a market for an “urban-style” lounge or club that would appeal to people who don’t want to just sit in a bar and, moreover, don’t want to have to schlep to the city to go out.

But I was wrong, and here’s why.  People who live in the suburbs who want to get an urban nightlife experience go to the city.  Whether they are 25 year olds who want to dance and listen to music without words, or 35 year olds who want to go to drink complicated drinks and sit on couches, they all have something in common — they want to do it IN the city. That’s the whole point.  They want to escape the suburbs for a night and feed on the urban energy and excitement.

Hence — the “bridge and tunnel” crowd that everyone in the city complains about when they go to clubs and lounge.  Oh, boy, there’s nothing worse for the reputation of a club/lounge than to get tagged as a “B&T” place, because then no one who actually lives in the city wants to go.  So the urbanites stop coming, and eventually the B&T people realize that they’re schlepping 45 minutes and paying $50 for parking to hang out with people from their neighborhod, so they stop coming. And then the place shuts down, while the B&T people start chasing wherever the urbanites went to.  It’s a vicious circle.

And that’s the point.  The people in the suburbs don’t really care about the music, or the muddled drinks, or the couches — what they want is the feeling of being a part of the urban excitement for a night.  If someone actually opened a hipster club/lounge/whatever in the suburbs, it would be the absolute worst.  By definition, EVERYONE in the place would part of the B&T crowd, except that they wouldn’t actually have to cross a bridge or burrow through a tunnel to get there.  Even worse, the people most likely to end up filling the place would be the very B&T people who aren’t even urbanized enough to want that hit off the urban pipe.  They’d be like the junior varsity to the B&T crowd, people who don’t even care about getting that authentic vibe.  In other words, that suburban hipster lounge would be like the worst place on earth for an urban exile.

That’s why those places don’t exist.  And that’s why my nightlife over the past three years has narrowed down to the occasional trip into the city, or game night at the condo.  In other words, despite any ambitions I might have had to maintain any kind of urban cred, I’m a typical suburbanite.

Ouchy.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Return from Exile Tagged With: , , ,

Does Moving to the Suburbs Make You a Conservative?

June 21, 2012 by

Is moving to the suburbs a political statement?  The reason I ask is that I’ve become increasingly aware of this raging battle between the forces of sprawl and the advocates of density, one that actually polarizes along familiar political lines: suburbs = conservative, and cities = liberal.

Now, it’s not just about how the cities tend to be more politically liberal and the suburbs more politically conservative. Yes, that’s absolutely and obviously true — you don’t get a lot of tea parties on the Upper West Side, and you don’t see too many “Free Mumia” banners hanging from the windows of high ranches in New City.

But it’s more about how the suburbs versus the cities arguments tend to reflect conservative and liberal values:
  • Suburbs:  Big houses, big lots, big cars, big highways, assimilation, personal freedom, ownership society.
  • City: Dense spaces, walkable neighborhoods, community involvement, concern for the environment, diversity, public transportation, renters over owners.
For example, check out this almost comical “suburban manifesto” put out by L. Brooks Patterson, the supervisor for Michigan’s Oakland County, titled “Sprawl, Schmall…Give Me More Development”, and tell me it doesn’t read like something being shouted by a guy in a colonial hat in front of a picture of President Obama morphing into Hitler:

Sprawl is not evil. In fact, it is good. It is the inevitable result of a free people exercising their cherished, constitutionally protected rights as individuals to pursue their dreams when choosing where to live, where to work, where to educate, and where to recreate.

***

The anti-American Dreamers would have you believe that suburban growth is at the root of all problems that beset our cities, both in Michigan and across our country.  They seem to believe that citizens left thriving cities, and that it was their departure that caused high crime, high taxes, invisible public services, and failing public school systems. Anybody who believes that line of thinking is taking denial to a whole new level. Sprawl did not cause the decline of the cities. Cities declined because they squandered their assets. High crime rates, high taxes, failing schools, foul air and a lack of open green spaces forced people to move.

It will probably not shock you that Mr. Patterson is a Republican.  But my point is that the pro-suburban argument properly articulated is inherently conservative: the individual over the community, assimilation over diversity, highways over public transportation, personal freedoms over environmental protection.
Conversely, the urbanist perspective is almost inescapably liberal, stressing how dense walkable neighborhoods foster a sense of community, reduce environmental impact, promote diversity, provide for affordable housing, and reduce transportation costs.  From the urbanist view,suburbs are ridiculously wasteful and hideously (and often subtly) subsidized.
All of this puts me in a difficult position, as a liberal who actually lives in the suburbs.  Does just living here make a political statement that I don’t value diversity, or the environment, or public transportation?  Am I betraying my own sensibilities to drive an SUV?  Do I need to get fitted for my tri-corner hat?
Maybe not.  As Allison Arieff points out in a response to Patterson in the New York Times, there’s a middle way between the glorification and vilification of sprawl, a movement to bring a more community-minded sensibility to suburban environments not as an act of governmental or political will, but simply a response to basic market demand:  developers who realize that many of their clients want those smaller, walkable neighborhoods, and people living in the suburbs who are finding ways to connect and foster a real community.  As she says, living “better and smarter shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”
That makes sense to me. Like a lot of people who moved to the suburbs, I wasn’t making a political statement. I wasn’t taking sides in this battle, or foregoing my liberal sensibilities to adopt Mr. Patterson’s vision of the American Dream.
I just wanted more closet space.
Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Elisabeth Hasselbeck, That’s Who!

June 12, 2012 by

One of the regular features of the Move to Suma is our breathless reporting of celebrities who have made the move to the suburbs, in what is an obvious and thinly-veiled attempt to validate my own decision to leave the city.  I mean, am I really so uncool to live in the suburbs if people like Jonah Hill, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, Beyonce and Jay Z, and Usher are making the move with me (not, of course, really WITH me, but you get the point)?

Those are pretty cool people, amirite?  So, in the spirit of fairness, I have to report this little nugget from the Daily Mail:

For one TV co-host, changing her view was as simple as moving to Connecticut.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who serves as co-host on The View, has purchased a sprawling $4million estate with her husband Tim Hasselbeck an hour outside of New York City.

The bubbly blonde had listed her condo on the Upper West Side in March for $3.3million earlier this year. It is now in contract to sell.

Ms Hasselbeck’s rep told TMZ at the time that the family was looking for a quieter and less-hectic lifestyle, saying: ‘Tim and Elisabeth have decided to trade in city living for the suburbs.’

I have to be honest. I would have thought that Elisabeth Hasselbeck ALREADY lived in the suburbs.

This is not quite the get we had with Beyonce, but, nevertheless — welcome, Elisabeth!

Filed Under: News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: ,

The Return from Exile in Reverse: Re-Creating the Suburban Experience in New York City

June 5, 2012 by

Jesse McKinley had a great piece in the New York Times last week about trying to recreate a stereotypical suburban experience within Manhattan. A native suburban, his theory was that the city is slowly becoming “suburbanized“:

 The ’burbs seem to be everywhere, from miniature golf in the Village to batting cages on the Upper West Side. There’s table tennis off Park Avenue South, an Applebee’s in Harlem and highway-style hotels like the Comfort Inn on the Lower East Side. Multiplexes are more common than art houses, and don’t even try to avoid trivia nights. If not for all the big buildings and honking, you could easily mistake Manhattan for Mahwah on some nights.

McKinley thinks that this might be the result of changing demographics, with people from the suburbs moving into the city and providing a target market for their “cultural traditions.”  Sort of like the way that an influx of ethnic immigrants create the need for more Pakistani restaurants, but far less spicy.  I would also add that, to the extent that his thesis is accurate — and I’m not quite convinced that a couple of bars offering ping-pong is a sign of the suburbanizing apocalypse — it might be that more couples deciding to stay in the city after they have kids might create a greater need for more “family-oriented” activities.

Anyway, as part of testing his theory, McKinley wrote a funny travelogue of a weekend he spent sampling these suburban diversions throughout the city:

  • A trip to the Manhattan Mall, which he found disappointing insofar as the “mall” doesn’t have a food court. No food court!  What kind of mall is that?
  • Trivia Night at a bar on the upper west side, which is I guess representative of the average suburban night out.
  • Two nights at a cheap chain hotel.
  • Dinner at Chevys, a classic suburban chain.
  • Mini-Golf at some place down in the Village.
  • Brunch at Applebees, the great “neighborhood grill,” if you live in the worst neighborhood in the world.
  • An Imax movie.
  • A few swings at the batting cages.

Now, as much as I liked this piece, as a self-appointed champion of the suburbs, I’m a wee bit nettled by the reductionist approach to suburban living.  We will not be MOCKED!!!  Or, rather, we can mock ourselves, in the way that only, say, Italian people can properly make Italian jokes.  But it hurts to see someone practically put on “blackface” like this.  Seriously, Applebees?  Ouch!

More to the point, I’ve lived in the suburbs for almost three years now, and I don’t do most of the stuff that McKinley put in his piece.  I get the mall, and the batting cages, and I guess I can understand the trips to stereotypically suburban restaurant chains.  But why stay at an Econo Lodge? Suburbanites don’t stay in cheap hotels — we live in cheap houses!  And what about miniature golf?  I haven’t even seen a miniature golf course here in the Hudson Valley area in years — they were all closed down and turned into McMansion developments.  The only place you get mini-golf is down at the shore.  It’s really more of a vacation activity.

So I don’t know if he quite captured the true modern suburban experience. If you really want that experience, and I don’t know why you would, here’s what I’d add to the agenda:

First, you can’t rent some small little hotel room at the Econo Lodge; rather, you should get some cheap suite hotel, because you need a kitchen that you can cook in.  Here in the suburbs, we don’t go out every night to fancy places like Chevy’s and Applebees — we cook.  So pick up some groceries, cook up a meal, and eat it in front of the TV like the rest of us suburbanites.

Second, when you’re done eating, skip the miniature golf and the batting cages, and get in touch with your true suburban self:

  • Take a trip to Costco, because nothing says suburbs like picking up 400 rolls of toilet paper.
  • Rent a lawnmower and start mowing a section of Central Park.  You’ll probably end up in jail, but you can’t spend a suburban weekend without cutting some grass.
  • Buy a car seat, and try to install it in a cab. That’ll take up a good half a day. The cabbie will be thrilled!
  • Clog up a toilet, and fix it yourself.

Buying stuff, cooking a meal, mowing the lawn — now, THAT would be a suburban weekend.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, News, Return from Exile Tagged With: ,