No angry response from this New Yorker. I lost my (Western) manners within
six months of moving to the East Coast. As a Westerner, I was tolerably
polite in the South but as an Eastern I was pretty clunky. We call in
"sincerity" or "straight talk" but it seems pretty rude to the rest of the
USA. I apologize for my adopted section.
Granting that, New York City is an immense place with more people than live
in all of Virginia in an incredibly constricted space. Yes, it is
provincial. Manhattan below 96th Street is downtown for an expansive area
which includes neighborhoods in northern Manhattan, the Bronx (the only
mainland area of the City) and on Long Island and Staten Island. People
live within these neighborhoods, generally knowing only their neighborhood
and the region where their job is located. Spike Lee once noted that if you
lived in Brooklyn you never needed to go to the Bronx. I asked a lot of
Brooklyn folks I know whether this was true and they all said yes.
This is like a Richmonder saying they would never ever go to Ashland or
Petersburg.
Finally, New Yorkers do not resent mourners from out of town going to Ground
Zero.
That is the nation and the world sharing our grief. Besides, generally we
never go near Ground Zero unless we have to. It is like the crossroads in
southern mythology; little good comes from trespassing on that territory.
New Yorkers generally do resent tourists because they clog up Midtown and
make it difficult for us to get to our destinations efficiently. Our motto
is "come to NY, spend your money rapidly, and leave."
New Yorkers are remarkably self centered. I am not surprised that someone
would claim the primacy of New York over Jamestown even though it is
nonsense. The fact is that St. Petersburg, FL, Cuidad Mexico, Santo
Domingo, DR, and Santa Fe, NM all pre-date Jamestown and New Amsterdam. New
Yorkers couldn't care less, unless those cities brought some exotic cuisine
for New Yorkers to eat.
Harold S. Forsythe
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sunshine49" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 9:53 AM
Subject: Re: Jamestown vs Plymouth Rock
> Having been to NYC myself several times on business, I have a few
> thoughts of my own about the place. The idea that "all New Yorkers are
> rude", well, to me they're not, NYC is an awfully big place with only so
> many pieces of the pie to go around, so in order to make a go of it, my
> suspicion is that New Yorkers have to bend rules, break rules and push
> and dig harder than most people elsewhere, just to get their little
> piece. And it comes across as being rude, pushy, etc. They're not bad
> people, tho, most of them are just doing what they have to do. But that
> said, I also see NYC as a very provincial place, in the sense that they
> know [or care to know] so little other than their own little corner of
> the world. Is that any different that the good people of East Podunk, who
> only know or care to know about East Podunk? NYC is the best, the
> biggest, the toughest, the most resilient, New Yorkers can pull through
> anything, as if the people of New Orleans or Peoria or Portland couldn't?
> Oh, please. As I recall, that NY Times article made it sound as if
> Jamestown was nothing more than the hovel we saw in the movie "The New
> World" [and one of their sneers was that the replica of Hudson's ship was
> used in the filming as one of the Jamestown ships, tsk tsk], and not that
> it existed for 90 years, had brick buildings [at one point the largest
> brick official public building in any of the colonies] and became the
> basis for a productive colony that laid the groundwork for our present
> system of government. As I recall, the Dutch colony didn't actually come
> till some years after Henry Hudson's explorations, he didn't actually
> "found" anything... for much of his voyage up the Hudson he seems to have
> been running his ship aground, pulling it out, running it aground, didn't
> he take depth readings or anything? He didn't seem to have been an
> outstanding mariner to me.
>
> I think a NYC schizophrenia came out after the events of 9/11. The whole
> world wanted to sympathize with this horrifying tragedy that had befallen
> the city that promotes itself as the financial and cultural and
> publishing [etc] center of America, if not the world. The people who died
> there that day had roots all over the globe. And yet NYC suddenly wanted
> the whole world to go away and let the city grieve alone, all the
> "outsiders" then became obnoxious nuisances they resented, not genuinely
> caring citizens who shared in the grief of the city that has imposed
> itself on our collective conscience. When you promote yourself
> [continuously] as Number One, you can't then flip and shove people away
> when you feel the need.
>
> Now I'm sure we'll hear from some irate New Yorkers...
>
> Nancy
>
> -------
> I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
>
> --Daniel Boone
>
>
>
> On Feb 1, 2007, at 6:53 AM, David Kiracofe wrote:
>
>> I remember that article: in my recollection it was more about holding up
>> a romanticized view of New Amsterdam/New York as a bustling, tolerant
>> multi-cultural center than about Jamestown per se (although they did
>> ride down the Virginians pretty hard). They were claiming that in
>> light of what America became later, New Amsterdam/New York was more like
>> that than Jamestown. The problem with that view of New York's origins
>> is that it ignores all the bad parts of the Dutch colonial experiment:
>> treatment of Indians, slavery, etc. The Dutch were rapacious
>> capitalists after all, exploitative and harsh in their pursuit of profit
>> (which also fits in with modern New Yorkers like Trump).
>>
>> David Kiracofe
>>
>> David Kiracofe
>> History
>> Tidewater Community College
>> Chesapeake Campus
>> 1428 Cedar Road
>> Chesapeake, Virginia 23322
>> 757-822-5136
>>>>> Sunshine49 <[log in to unmask]> 01/31/07 10:32 PM >>>
>> Late last year there was an article on the NY Times website, maybe
>> you all discussed it here. Talk about hooey- a few NY "historians"
>> claiming Jamestown had no hold on the national development at all, it
>> was a bunch of wood and mud hovels that soon fell into the mud, the
>> real beginning that should get the credit was... Henry Hudson! Boy I
>> wrote them a pointed letter, and my guess is I was not the only one.
>> By the time the day was half gone, they had pulled the prominently
>> placed article from the website. The arguments by those "historians"
>> were the most biased, ignorance-based loads of baloney I have ever read.
>>
>> Nancy
>>
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