> don't even hear people from LA or SF boast the way they do in New Yawk
Every borough except Staten Island is larger than San Francisco [1][2]. Manhattan together with Queens or Brooklyn is bigger than LA, the second-largest city in America. (Staten Island is about the size of Raleigh or Atlanta.)
New York solves problems at a scale no other American city comes close to imagining.
This is exactly what I mean. You guys have no idea how silly you sound everywhere else.
I also noticed your sleight of hand. "Greatest city in the world" includes Tokyo, Paris, Seoul. All far superior to NYC in almost every way, with similar issues of scale.
What does the size of the city have to do with it? When thinking about "greatest city", I don't think "solving problems at scale" is one of my criteria.
I love visiting Manhattan and Brooklyn, but frankly have a hard time imagining living there. And I live in SF, which is far from being an ideal city.
The LA municipal boundary is a small sliver of what people broadly call "Los Angeles. Here's Manhattan projected over the LA metro: https://i.imgur.com/ff7Vs1k.jpeg
Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta. Its much smaller population and area-wise, focusing on just their metro areas. Denser for sure, but not larger.
> Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta
Staten Island (~475k) has the same population as Raleigh (~470k) and is a hair smaller than Atlanta (~500k). This isn’t a density argument. It’s an illustration of New York City’s scale. The forgotten borough is larger than most of our cities.
I’ve never heard New Yorkers call New York the greatest city on earth in earnest. It’s a great city in a way no other city in America truly is. In a league with Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Paris or London. Density and cosmopolitanism bring a unique combination of economic and cultural gifts that set these cities apart, and have for similar cities across history. New Yorkers also tend to be well travelled to those cities, because that’s how cosmopolitan culture works.
> I’ve never heard New Yorkers call New York the greatest city on earth in earnest.
My Uber driver said that to me within the first ride of my landing, and I heard it again and again, from millenials, Gen X, Boomers, basically every type of person I met and from every walk of life, during the many years I lived there.
You guys play this game where you don't say what you mean, and you don't mean what you say, in any context where it's marginally convenient/inconvenient to do so. It's eat or be eaten in NYC. I would hope longtime residents like yourself are just BS'ing the HN community, and not actually delusional about the waters you swim in.
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