We were all in. We had sold our car and picked out a small cubby in North Brooklyn to cram in what fits. Prospect Heights, just off the park. I would work out of the kitchen, and Megan would take the train to hospital. We would meet our neighbors and complain about the landlord.

We would lug our groceries past the brownstones, drink a pint at the corner bar and root for the Knicks. We would perfect our bagel order and slide down the snowy hills on kitchen pans. We would sweat on the subways and complain about the tourists. We would ride to Q train to Coney Island in the summer and see the Rockefeller tree in the winter.

We were newlyweds, and we were New Yorkers.

As I crossed the Verrazano and caught the skyline crest over the water, I was captured with same sense of wonder that every new New Yorker feels.

I'm going to live in the city.

I'm driving out of this small town.

And you're coming with me.

The right time is always now.

Spotify was on shuffle and picked the song that would define the moment. "Im a Bitch" by Meredith Brooks. I laughed and felt brand new.

Pizza, Bagel, Subway, Grocery, and History. The starting five of apartment hunting in New York City. This was my definitive list for location in New York. Any worthy apartment had to be no more than a ten minute walk from each of these.

It was a somewhat cloudy late spring day. Megan and I had taken a train up from DC to scout out potential New York apartments ahead of our big move later that year. We had heard endless horror stories of broker fees, complex financial audits and rental applications, and apartments vanishing within minutes of listing. So we were hunkered down in an artisanal donut shop across the street from StreetEasy listing that had caught our eye, a two bedroom for under $3,700. We wanted to be the first tenants in the door upon the listing going live.

I ticked through my "requirements" with Megan.

Let's start with grocery because I think New York does this better than any other city in the county. Even in the densest sections of Boston, DC, or Chicago, grocery stores are necessarily large format. Nearly always twenty plus aisles and wide too, these behemoths dominate their block, and perhaps most importantly, they require a moat of parking. Naturally, the more land is dedicated to parking the less land can be dedicated to things like produce, frozen pizzas, and toilet paper. And thus begins a vicious cycle where land is less profitable, so the store needs to bring In more customers, so of course they need more parking, and so on and so on, until an entire block is eaten up by a Food Lion.

New York is different. Here grocery stores fit into the footprint of large restaurant, yet manage to have nearly every ingredient needed for a weeknight meal. Grocery stores here compete on location as much as they do on product. I suspect that many other New Yorkers share in my ten minute rule and won't lug a week's of heavy groceries for more than three or four city blocks. And as such, New York is blessed with the most grocery stores per square mile of any city.

Our potential apartment had four such stores within a ten minute walk. It would be quicker to walk from our apartment to the Foodtown across the street than to walk to from one end of a Kroger parking lot to the entrance of the store. Matter of fact, it would be quicker to walk from our kitchen to the grocery store than it would be to walk from one end of a Walmart to the other. Clearly, this apartment checked off the grocery store requirement.

Next, Pizza and Bagels. Every great city has an everyday food elevated to a delicacy. A food, that no matter how good it is somewhere else, simply cannot compare to having it in its city of origin. Rome has pasta, Paris has the croque monsieur, Tokyo has ramen, London has, I suppose, beans on toast, and New York is blessed with two such dishes, pizza by the slice and the everything bagel.

A good New York bagel has a crunchy exterior, covered in a peppering of different seeds, salt and onion, and a soft, fluffy, yet chewy interior. The yardstick, of course, is an everything bagel with plain cream cheese, but I liked mine with lox spread, tomato, and red onion. Only a few blocks from the apartment was "Olde Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe". It would become the only place where the staff reliably knew my order.

A good New York slice is equally not up for debate. It requires bright acidic tomato sauce, a layer of melted mozzarella without too much grease, and a crunchy thin crust that, when held horizontal, does not flop. Across Flatbush, the stereotypically named Anthony's Pizzeria fit the bill. Greeted by a pink and green neon sign and a carved wood Italian chef, inside you would find cafeteria seating, signed photos of Soprano actors, and sweaty, vaguely Italian men talking about either the traffic or the mayor between tossing dough and sliding in slices into the pizza oven.

But food alone does not make a New York neighborhood. You need a subway stop, preferably two, to connect yourself with the rest of the city. We would be close to Prospect Park, right where two different lines would split apart from under Flatbush avenue, with the Q/B lines heading under the park and to the titular neighborhood, and the 2/3 line would branch east under Eastern Parkway. These were old cut and cover stations, and thus only a few steps from the surface. The Q would provide express service into the city, and 2, 3 would be our connection to the west side of town.

And finally— and most critically— is history. I'll say it plainly: don't move to Long Island City. New York rent is only worth it for the culture. If you want to live in a glass box surrounded by other glass boxes, move to Charlotte. Prospect Heights in this respect was perfect. Despite is rather diminutive status as far as New York neighborhoods go — only 237 acres compared to 961 in neighboring Park Slope — Prospect Heights somehow contains the fifth largest historic district in the city.

Block after block of ornately decorated brownstones, mostly Italianate and Neo-Greco, stretched from Flatbush to Washington Avenues. Each street, a canyon of smooth tan stone, flowered window aprons, crowned molded cornices, and stately stoops. It was like a movie set. Matter of fact, it was my dream.

This was to be our home. If only we could sign along the dotted line.

A monumental arch, an ode to victories past and times long gone by, my finish line for long runs through the park. Sometimes I would do quick sprints along the edge of Park Slope, past the brownstones and churches and brushing directly against the rough stone walls of the Prospect Park. Other times it would be long yawning runs through the park itself, down the verdant green trails or around the frost bitten lake.

Endale Arch was a portal to another world. Outside the bustling streets, honking horns and burnt smells of a dirty, gritty but still exquisite sprawl of an 19th century city and inside the rolling hills, green trees, and country quiet of a faux Adirondacks, I would begin my jog down these hills, where in the summer people sit and tan listening the impromptu music of three piece bands and where in winter snow, a block party would emerge with hundreds of people slipping down the hills on make shift sleds of cooking trays.

Down into the branching paths of the Midwood forest and out into clearing of the Boathouse on the Lullwater, I would run. Its neat classical front would greet me with a smile of white tuscan column teeth. Past the Camperdown elm with its winding, twisted branches and by the ornate, vaguely oriental roof of the Concert Grove Pavilion, I would jog, my uneven breath out of rhythm with my ceaselessly pounding stride.

Around the soft, gleaming waters of the lake and back through the woods, uphill I would climb before bursting out again from the Endale Arch into the concrete of Grand Army Plaza, I would see it there. The Sailors and Soldiers monument, topped with a charging quadriga driven by Columbia herself, beckoning me forward, and as I passed under its coffered arch, I was transported back to Rome, to the forum, passing beneath the Arch of Septimius Severus, into a time long past but intimately connected to my present.

I would finish my jog, legs feeling weak, and make the anticlimactic climb up two flights of stairs into the serene quiet of my Brooklyn apartment, just on the edge of monumental Brooklyn.

We were in a small theater about a mile or two off the NYU campus, about as far off broadway as possible. There to attend a student production that costs no more than 20 dollars a head. Drama kids have a reputation for a reason. More often than not, socially maladjusted with a giant ego, its hard to tell what exactly you are going to get when you remove the guardrails of studio notes or even the intention to create work for the enjoyment of others.

Off off broadway is where the ego shines. Art made for the artist. Whether you like it or not, this is what it's going to be, but please applaud nonetheless.

This show was to be lightly audience interactive. Everyone was given a numbered menu of "mini plays" with names like "Deviant Emojis", "Wallstreet but Bushwick", or "A Pervert in Washington". The actors would put on a little skit with the dinging of a bell to signify the end. Between each play the audience would shout out, "One!" or "Twenty Seven!!" And the cast would perform a skit based on the name that corresponded to that number.

"Sensual Fruits" was an early favorite, and sure enough, the cast began sensually eating different fruits. A woman began peeling a banana and took seductively exaggerated bites and licks. A man drove his face into a watermelon, running his tongue along the uneven ridges and bite marks.

Another man snuggled his face into a mango, slurping, licking, biting, then coughing, and choking a bit. The crowd started to laugh at this new turn in the performance. Now he was really coughing and even grabbing at his throat a bit. He was really selling the bit, his face was turning red. He put his hand on one of the other performers, and began to gag heavily.

Then he just straight up vomited on to the floor. His face turned bright red and he screamed "HELP ME I AM CHOKING" at his co-performers and stormed off the stage, leaving a little pool of mushed up mango on the stage.

It was a beautiful sight, seeing the graduating class of NYU nepo babies holding various half eaten fruits in front a stunned-into-silence audience as the sound guy frantically tried to turn off the 70s funk backing track.

Ding!

"Do 'A Marijuana Plant Grows in Brooklyn'!"

There I was. On the Number 3 train to Crown Heights off to have some sad physicians assistant blast my warted foot with liquid nitrogen. I was in deep ponderance, visualizing dragging my clubbed foot around on the subway like New York's own Quasimodo when I looked up and saw a peculiar sight.

Right across from me sat a woman with a silly little boob out on the subway.

I immediately looked down. "What a grave and unintentional error this poor woman must have made," I thought to myself. I gotta say something. Surely she will simply pop the thing back in.

But in the time it took for me to look up, she had completely undressed and was looking directly at me. She hit me with a shimmy and a "Ogha booga boo". And chuckled to herself as if I was the fool.

No arguing with that I suppose. I got up and sat on the other side of the train.

Like a flock of well-to-do migratory birds, the graduating class of NYU leaves their glamorous nests in the West and Greenwich Villages for the faux-affordability of the East Village, where they must strike out on their own. Young consultants and junior bankers to a man, they partake in pick up basketball games in the park and attend rallies for their fearless leader, Zohran Mamandi.

Here one can purchase Stone Roses vinyls, sip on Blank Street matchas, and wistfully, though entirely cluelessly, yearn for the grit and realness of 1970's New York. If a trace of that New York were to still exist in Lower Manhattan, it would be here.

Look no further than on 10th Street, just a block from the Thompkins Square Park, at the Old Russian and Turkish Baths, where feuding owners Boris Tuberman and David Shapiro famously split their business in two, each operating it as a separate entity on alternating weeks. The place is heaven for old, hairy chested Russian men and pale and sinewy young professionals, each gripping their respective towels as they waddle from steam room to room. Since 1892, vaguely slavic masseurs give platzas or therapeutic oak branches whackings in the basement of this old tenement building.

Megan and I would dip ourselves in the cold plunge, quickly dash into the "Russian Room", and feel our skin tingle as the cold water quickly evaporated. In there, three rows of hewn wood stadium seats circle a singular drain of the floor. In the center, a bucket is constantly refilled with cold water by a loose faucet. Every now and then someone will dump it on their head before sitting back down in silence.

A few blocks south is the famous Burp Castle and an unassuming bar with airbrushed walls of medieval monks, fire-breathing dragons, and topless tavern girls. Here you can imbibe on tall glasses of cold mead, but only one thing is forbidden: speaking above a whisper. That of course could drown out the sound of Gregorian chants. As you sit and whisper to each other, eventually the volume would creep up until a brave soul would start a "shhhh", which would cascade about the bar.

It was the perfect first spot for a quiet date ahead of catching a movie the East Village theater, the last of New York's old movie palaces, with crushed red velvet seats, Egyptian revival moldings, a beautiful chandelier, and the baked in smell of one hundred years of spilled popcorn and soda.

Out on the street, packs of recent grads drunkenly shuffle from bar to bar, ending the night at polish diners, greasy hamburger joints, and hole in the wall gnocchi spots.

Ah, to be young and in the East Village. Alas, I am old, chronically injured and just here for the night.

Each neighborhood in New York crystallizes a moment in the city's history. To walk through New York is not just to walk through space but to walk through time as well. At its best, Greenwich captures the spirit of the New York 60s — rebellion, anger and hope, but mostly youth.

I sat today on a bench on an unseasonably warm Sunday December afternoon in Washington Square Park. On the way, I passed through chess board matches, three piece bands, bewildering TikTok performance artists, and a dance troupe under the Washington Arch.

I imagine it was much the same in the 60's when visionaries like Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Simon and Garfunkel, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac stalked the narrow winding streets, creating new forms of music and writing.

Or when bitter civic rivals Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses spared throughout the 60s on the proper urban fabric of the neighborhood, with Moses advocating for the bulldozer and highway and Jacobs for the preservation and refurbishment of stately federal row houses. And perhaps most consequentially to prevent fifth avenue from running through Washington Square Park, which at that point was at least partially a parking lot.

Cafe Society, where Billie Holiday first sang "Strange Fruit", and Folk City, where Bob Dylan debuted "Blowing in the Wind", are now closed. The former closing in 1950 and the latter in 1987. Early Dylan haunts, Cafe Wha? and The Bitter End still hang on, but the bohemian energy has morphed into something else.

Greenwich Village simply isn't for the wandering artist anymore. You won't find an Edward Hopper living in a top floor apartment lining Washington Square Park as he once did. There is no Bob Dylan, couch surfing around the Village, more focused on writing his first album than signing his first lease. It is perhaps home to most entrenched wealth in the city. The Boomers grew up, grew wealthy, and outbid each other to return back to the Village of the 60s.

But you will still find youth.

The most consequential tenet in the neighborhood, NYU, provides that that in droves. There is perhaps no better fount of artist self expression than the rich college student who has free time, a still forming sense of self, and no experience dealing with adult problems. It's a freeing time of life — one that quickly collapses when the first rent payment comes due.

It's best to visit Greenwich in the late fall and early winter. When the wind blows and you are bundled up in a thick jacket. Go when the NYU students fill the park with their silly antics, like a Timothee Chalamet look alike contest or various short form video quiz shows, each hoping that their unique sense of humor or style will buy them a moment in the attention economy.