Small Town to Big City NYC

I grew up in a small town. What do I mean by a "small town?"


I can only speak for our own local flavor, but in our small town, we only had 2 "major" grocery stores and a K-Mart to shop for food and department store items. We use to have an Ames, but they closed up shop awhile ago. We had about as many churches as we had bars, and on a cloudless night we could see the stars twinkle bright.

You generally avoided driving late at night, if you could. If you were outside town limits you were likely to hit a deer or an escaped cow.

Folks were struck with the inspiration to work with their hands back home; you didn't buy your non-prescription drugs, you assembled your own meth lab, or concocted some new brew of bath salts just in time to make the late night police blotter in the local paper after being picked up for licking the road in the nude.

That's what I mean by a small town. You knew many of the people you walked past in the store, if not by name then by memory of the same face being passed in the same stores. Maybe it was only because you saw them in the store around the same time each time you were out, maybe it was because they went to school with you. It wasn't until the big gas drilling clusterfrack that we had an influx of "out of towners," whose arrival signaled a great opportunity for local slumlords to jack up rent as high as possible.

That was my small town.

Now I'm in the city. It's a curious place; the five boroughs, during the height of the workday, have more people in them than my entire home state. The psychological implications of this many people in one relatively small space, so crowded, so cramped, is quite fascinating.

People back home seem to think the city is enormously dangerous. It's true that I knew people back home who didn't lock their doors at night; something that in the city you'd have to be a fool to not do. The relatively low population, spaces between neighbors, and general apathy of the average American tended to protect your home through sheer luck of statistics. Here, I have three other apartments on my floor alone. Fortunately I live on a fifth floor of a building without an elevator. Most people would rather find easier apartments to rob rather than scale my stairwell for my meager belongings.

My mother still gets concerned when she sees that I'm out and about when the sky is dimming. "Be careful! I just wanted to make sure you got home safe!"

"Mom, I'm fine," I say again. The truth is that the city isn't as dangerous as we were always lead to believe. As long as you have an ounce of common sense, you should be fine.

Don't flash your money. Stay mindful of your surroundings. And stay in areas that have other people.

If you keep all those things in mind, you shouldn't have a problem when it comes to crime. Statistically speaking, with so many people around here, someone else will get robbed before you. There's never a guarantee you won't be mugged but if you keep the previous tips in mind chances are someone else will be a better target than you.

The point is that criminals aren't hiding in every shadow and alleyway as people in my hometown have been conditioned to think.

After awhile I came to believe the city is actually relatively safe. I don't have to drive. It turns out that driving a car is the number one cause of car accidents. Not a problem for me here. Back home you couldn't drive more than 15 minutes without finding a deer carcass spattered against a guardrail.

I can actually walk to most places I want to get to, or walk to a subway that will take me close to where I want to go. It's a mixed blessing. Back home we thought people in the city usually took taxi's everywhere.  Not so. Only wealthy people and tourists take taxis. You learn that really quickly when a simple jaunt across the island costs you forty bucks and change, and Manhattan isn't exactly a wide island.

There are so many things that are simply "different" than the preconceived notions I had when I first came to the city. Some things drastically different. The city has its own personality, its own rhythm. And the people...well, that's a topic unto itself.

In the end I still like going back home. But after being in the city for a few weeks, back home just feels...different. It's difficult to describe. Maybe as time goes on I can better describe what these differences are like, and how they affected me.