The Big Move : New York, New York: It’s a wonderful town. . . . Or is it? Ex-Californians weigh ‘craziness’ of the Big Apple, life without wheels and going elbow-to-elbow with 7 million people.
Stephen Klein, a mild-mannered librarian who moved here from Los Angeles, was not going to let New York drive him crazy.
Minutes before a lecture on publishing began at a mid-town library, he realized there were not enough seats. In a calm voice, Klein told the overflow crowd they were welcome to attend a similar event the following week.
“Whaddya mean!” screamed the people outside the hall. “Whaddya mean!”
Klein, 39, kept repeating his message, but it only made things worse. The New Yorkers shouting at him seemed more angered by his casual tone than the fact that they weren’t getting in. At one point, an exasperated woman snapped: “Hey, buddy, this isn’t Boulder, Colo.”
Looking back on the recent incident, Klein sighs, wipes his glasses and lays them next to his plate in a Greenwich Village restaurant.
“I think the secret of being a Californian in New York is deciding how much of the craziness you’re going to let into your life,” he says.
“That’s a hard decision, because this city can be insane. It can really push you to the limit, and it’s very different from what people in Los Angeles experience. If you move here, it can be pretty jarring.”
It can also catch you unprepared. One day you’re cruising along that L.A. freeway with the radio blasting and all seems right with the world. The Lakers are in first place, there’s a great new Mexican restaurant only 30 miles down the road and, as usual, it’s a warm day at the beach in December.
Then, suddenly, the bombshell: YOU’RE MOVING TO NEW YORK.
Whether it’s a new job, a new significant other or a million other reasons, good or bad, you are about to ditch that fat suburban lifestyle for the Big Apple. Like it or not, pal, there are some heavy changes on the way.
Remember physical privacy? Back home, sidewalks were like ghost towns and you enjoyed the solitude of an automobile ride to work. Now, you’re trading elbows every day with 7 million people on the streets and subways. They’re in your face and they’re in a hurry, so move it , buster.
If you have kids, get out the checkbook and face the music of public or private schools. Your children won’t be riding freeways at night, but they’re likely to be on trains or in taxis, which is hardly an improvement. They certainly won’t be playing in spacious back yards, because there aren’t any.
It’s a lot to absorb at once. To adjust, some Southern Californians accelerate their lifestyle, doing things they never used to do on the West Coast, like going to parties at 3 a.m., eating take-out Chinese food for a week and buying tickets to hockey games. A few even become Yankee fans.
“If you want to know, it’s as if your life just went from 33 r.p.m. to 78 r.p.m.,” says Dan Levy, a 32-year-old Beverly Fairfax native who is now a publishing industry whiz kid on Madison Avenue.
“Can you maintain your standards as an Angeleno, and beat New York at its own game? Sure you can. It’s a question of learning how to take it easy and living your life like it was, you know, like an Eagles song.”
Say what ? One thing you’ll learn almost immediately is that most New Yorkers do not have patience with California culture. They are deeply suspicious of hedonism, hostile to suntans and skeptical of the notion that people might actually enjoy themselves while making a living.
Californians, in turn, seem baffled by local customs and often ask poignant questions about their new home: Can my landlord evict me because someone else gave him a bigger bribe? Is that man dressed up as a clown really collecting money for the homeless? Does anyone in this town know how to make guacamole?
After a few months here, some begin to feel like salmon swimming upstream. But cheer up. Thousands of Californians have made the big move East and lived to tell about it. Although some never get the hang of the place, others fall in love with the sheer insanity of New York and are never heard from again.
It all depends on the size of your ego and, to a lesser extent, your wallet. How to survive? The best advice, naturally, comes from Californians who have taken the plunge. They offer the following handy tips:
Rule 1: Nobody will take you seriously .
Randy Schain, a 32-year-old Wall Street risk arbitrager who grew up in Westwood, hoped to blend in quietly among his colleagues when he began a new job at the Morgan-Stanley firm. But they had him pegged a mile away.
“The minute I walked in the door, everybody had me typecast as the token Californian,” he says. “They expected me to be wearing Hawaiian shirts and sandals. It didn’t help, of course, that I decorated my office as a cabana and wore floral ties every day. I became the resident hippie.”
Even worse, Schain set up a toy “hot-wheels” race track in his office. All day long, little cars zoom along elevated plastic tracks near his desk, crashing into walls and bouncing off the rug. Schain is thrilled, but his East Coast colleagues just shake their heads.
“I can’t help it,” he says, “because I really miss driving in Los Angeles. I wish I had a new convertible right now. I guess I don’t fit in.”
No kidding, Randy. But it’s more than floral ties and hot rods. New Yorkers are not impressed with the difference between Brentwood and Buena Park. They don’t know the 405 from the 101. In their eyes, you just got off a plane from Southern California and that makes you a second-class citizen.
“People in this town think of us Californians as quaint, uneducated hicks,” says attorney Stephen Meyers, who co-founded the Jacoby and Meyers law firm and moved from West Los Angeles to Manhattan four years ago.
“They think you have nothing to contribute to a conversation, and they’ll ignore you at parties once they find out where you’re from. But you can’t take it personally, because it applies to anyone living west of the Hudson River.”
How to fight back? Levy says Californians should wear their mellowness like a badge. If some joker starts haranguing you on the street, smile and turn the other cheek. If a New Yorker gets nasty, kill him with kindness.
“I try to be an ambassador of California here and it drives people nuts,” Levy adds. “But somebody’s got to do it. That’s the only way we creatures from the West Coast are ever going to prevail on the planet.”
R ule 2: Kiss your wheels goodby .
Soon after Stephen Meyers and his family moved here, they decided not to buy an automobile. Insurance is exorbitant, garages charge $400 a month or more and street vandalism--even in broad daylight--has become a way of life.
Prudently, the family leased a car and parked it in a garage near Stephen’s office. Several weeks later, their 16-year-old daughter, Elise, went looking for a garage that would be closer to their apartment. She got a quick lesson in car culture, New York-style.
“Elise found a garage that was nearby, and asked the attendant when we could bring our car in,” says her mother, Millie Harmon-Meyers. “The guy said, ‘There’s a long waiting list to get in.’ She asked how long the waiting list is. And he said: ‘$200.’ ”
Living without a car may be the single hardest transition for Californians in New York. But that doesn’t stop them from playing out repressed car fantasies. Deborah Glancy, a Russian teacher and aspiring actress from West Hollywood, confesses that she and her husband do weird things with rented automobiles on the weekends.
“This sounds stupid, I know, but we take cars and drive to big grocery stores outside the city and fill up the trunk with groceries,” she says. “We take pictures of ourselves at these stores and then we go home. Sometimes it’s the high point of our weekend.”
Stephen Klein may have found the ultimate solution: He walks to work and rents an apartment with a garage. Klein says he was initially intimidated by the huge number of people on the sidewalks here, but now considers walking and public transportation to be the most natural things in the world.
The experience, however, has made him a stranger back home. When he visits his parents in Los Angeles, Klein takes long walks through quiet, nearly deserted neighborhoods. Recently, he insisted on riding the train up to Santa Barbara instead of driving a car. He even rides buses , for crying out loud.
“God knows what they think of me out there,” Klein says. “They probably panic and call the Neighborhood Watch every time I go for a stroll. What am I, a threat to the peace?”
R ule 3: Go with the flow .
If you’ve made it this far, the rest is easy. Life in New York can be exhausting for a Californian, but that’s no excuse to get burned out. Learn to pace yourself, says Linda Goldstein-Plattner, a professional music manager.
“You can be lying in bed slothfully, reading Vanity Fair, and think about all the concerts, films, plays and lectures going on out there,” she says.
“This is the most exquisite place in the world where you can do nothing and know that the quality of what you’re not doing is of the highest order. That’s what really counts here.”
While you’re marveling at the bright lights, remember that even the dark side of New York has its creative possibilities. Dan Levy grew up in the sunshine of West Los Angeles, but has come to love the grit and grime of Manhattan.
“I really get off on the subways here, because it’s like traveling twice a day,” he says. “I love the noise, the harshness of it all. Because the challenge of living in New York is to make a garden out of a slum, to bring something beautiful out of the wreckage and make it your own.”
If all else fails, just live your life and forget about the scenery.
Millie Harmon-Meyers longs for those mornings when she’d leave her West Los Angeles home, smell the bougainvillea and meet friends for tennis. These days, she steps over homeless people in front of her townhouse, detours around piles of dog-doo and ignores car alarms going off up and down the block.
Is Meyers ready to pack it in?
“It’s a temptation, because you spend a lot of energy just trying to relax here,” she says. “But I’m not leaving right now. Are you kidding? I’ve worked much too hard to adjust.”
Other Californians are even more emphatic about their new life.
“I don’t think I could go back to Los Angeles, because back there the most interesting thing people talk about is where they had dinner the other night,” says Leslie Brenner, a 29-year-old novelist from Van Nuys who now lives in a crack-infested neighborhood on the upper Westside.
“For all of the problems, I love New York. It’s a cliche, but people read here. They have intelligent conversations. I’m more relaxed in this place, and I feel safer in my apartment than I ever did on the streets of L.A.”
That’s not to say New York won’t change you for the worse. Deborah Glancy, who moved to Greenwich Village two years ago, says her old friends from Los Angeles might not recognize her today.
“I used to be a fairly quiet person but my language has really gotten worse since I got here,” she says. “Now, I scream and yell out the window at people, which I never used to do. I’m more suspicious of people, and that’s a learned thing as well.
“My neighbors get into fights and I report them to the cops so they won’t kill each other. I walk down the street and somebody takes his pants down and urinates against a car. Los Angeles is a sleepy little town by comparison.”
It also begins to tug at your heart strings as the months go by. Despite its faults, California looms like an oasis when the snow turns to slush, or when the air conditioning breaks down in a miserable New York summer.
For Pamela Moreland, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who now writes editorials for the New York Daily News, the Southern California undertow began pulling at her soon after she begin looking for a place to live here.
“At first, I thought I was going to rent a nifty apartment just like you see in all the Woody Allen movies, with big tall bookshelves and a view of Central Park,” she says.
“What I got is a small place, where I have to make all sorts of choices. See, if I want to cook at home and open my oven door, I have to move the kitchen chair out of the way, which blocks the door. So I can either cook and I’m trapped in my kitchen, or I don’t cook and I can walk through the door.”
Is it worth it? Moreland admits the city has been a broadening, worthwhile experience. But lately she’s been having dreams about Malibu sunsets, wide-open freeways and long bike rides in January. She may be a goner.
“Hey, I have a really great life here,” Moreland insists.
Pause.
“I also have only eight more months on my lease.”