A few days ago, my sister called me up to resolve a dispute between her and her fiancé. “Can you say that you’re a real New Yorker if you didn’t grow up in New York?” she asked. We were both born and raised in Manhattan; her fiancé, a military brat, grew up in California, Hawaii, and elsewhere. The debate had started, as these subjects often do, with linguistics: she says “on line”; he says “in line.” I told her about the oft-invoked ten-year rule, which would make her fiancé an official New Yorker this September. Still, she thought, he seemed intractably Pacific: sandy-haired, serene, works in tech. “You don’t get to claim the throne if you’re not really from here,” she insisted. Of course you can, I said. Lots of people move here and become New Yorkers—including our parents. As consolation, I assured her, she would always be a New Yorker, even if she moved away. Not that she has any plans to.
Every place has its own form of nativism, its own smell test. Sara Gideon lost her Senate run in Maine against Susan Collins in part because she was deemed “from away,” having moved to the state in 2004. The Internet spent much of the holidays dissecting Hilaria Baldwin’s claim to Spanish identity—she had spent time in Spain during her childhood but was born in Boston, a city with its own sky-high bar to entry. (A Facebook friend from Massachusetts recently railed against the “horrible” Boston accents in the film “Pieces of a Woman,” to which a commenter replied, “No film should take place in Boston because no film has EVER gotten the accent right.”) But New York’s regional snobberies are particular, and particularly onerous. You have to make it at least ten years, the thinking goes, to prove that you won’t wimp out. To be a New Yorker is to have suffered and stayed anyway. Complaining—about apartment size, about the subway—is our compensation, and our I.D. badge. Even then, the goalposts move: Can an “in line” person really be a New Yorker?
Lately, the question of New York authenticity has clung to two of our prominent denizens, Andrew Yang and Fran Lebowitz. Last week, Yang, the entrepreneur and former Presidential candidate, announced his run for mayor with a video directed by Darren Aronofsky (Brooklyn boy). Yang, who was born in Schenectady and grew up in Westchester, explains that he “moved to Morningside Heights” in 1996, meaning that he went to Columbia Law School. He strolls through Coney Island, grabs a slice of pizza, ribs the Knicks, and debates the superiority of Gray’s Papaya versus Papaya King with his wife, Evelyn. (“Gray’s Papaya,” he answers, confidently.) But Yang’s rollout immediately tripped over a series of authenticity tests. A Times piece pointed out that he has never voted in a New York mayoral election, and that he has spent most of the pandemic not at his Hell’s Kitchen apartment but at his weekend house, in New Paltz, or (horrors!) campaigning for Democrats in Pennsylvania and Georgia. “Is he a New Yorker? I don’t even know,” one business leader said.
Eyebrows were raised. Then, last Friday, Yang posted a video of himself shopping at what he described as a bodega. “Can you imagine a New York City without bodegas?” he said, after buying green tea and bananas and elbow-bumping a passerby. But the store, a Yemeni-owned establishment in midtown, looked suspiciously sleek and spacious, prompting an outraged discourse over what counts as a bodega, a deli, or a grocery store. Stung by Bodegagate, Yang spent the rest of the weekend on a social-media authenticity blitz: sampling pickles on the Lower East Side, riding down a bike lane (“this is my commute”), visiting a food pantry in Flushing. “I’m learning a lot about my city,” he tweeted on Saturday.
Yang is precisely the kind of New Yorker—happy-go-lucky, tech savvy, and intermittent—whom Fran Lebowitz would loathe. “I feel that I am like the designated New Yorker,” she told me in April, vowing that not even a shutdown would tear her from her Zip Code. In the Netflix docuseries “Pretend It’s a City,” directed by Martin Scorsese (Queens boy), she burnishes her image as the quintessential New Yorker. “I really can’t imagine they’d let me live anywhere else,” she says. Scorsese films her roaming the streets with a glower—the opposite of Yang’s cheerful stride—or towering, Gulliver-like, above the miniature city constructed for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In longevity and attitude, Lebowitz epitomizes a certain mold of old-school New Yorker: kvetchy, cigarette stained, technology averse. She grew up in New Jersey and moved to Manhattan around 1970, and she recalls the dirty old days when artist types gathered at Max’s Kansas City and the Daily News ran the headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” “I didn’t come here because it was clean,” she proclaims. “I came from a clean place.” If she were a bodega, she’d be a ratty, unrenovated one, dodging eviction.
In Lebowitz’s telling, she’s not only a model New Yorker but the only one doing it right. She gripes about people who ask her for directions while she’s trying to smoke (“Do I look welcoming to you?”) or who ram into her on the street while engrossed in their phones (“New Yorkers have forgotten how to walk”). It’s not hard to imagine the scene: Yang is furiously tweeting on Eighth Avenue, and Lebowitz glares as he brushes against her Anderson & Sheppard jacket. They even have opposing takes on “The Phantom of the Opera.” “My first Broadway show was Phantom of the Opera—my parents brought us to see it for the holidays when I was about 13,” Yang tweeted last week, pivoting to the importance of the arts sector. In “Pretend It’s a City,” Lebowitz recalls going to opening night. “I must have been the only person in New York who had not been reading about this, you know, because it was such a big deal,” she tells Scorsese. When the chandelier fell, “I thought the chandelier was falling on us, and I screamed.” The show, she adds, was “unbelievably horrible.”
The contrast between Lebowitz and Yang—grouch versus tech bro, lifer versus poser—recalls that of the two main characters of the Netflix series “Russian Doll”—the raspy East Villager, played by Natasha Lyonne, and the mild-mannered yuppie, played by Charlie Barnett. Trapped in a time loop together, they form a tenuous symbiosis. But, as much as Yang and Lebowitz seem like opposites, there is overlap. Like many a New York aspirant, both grew up in small towns a bus ride from the city. Both are vocal about poverty. Yang’s signature policy, universal basic income, would find an enthusiastic recipient in Lebowitz, who is famously unproductive. On his campaign site, Yang proposes attracting “content creator collectives, such as TikTok Hype Houses,” where influencers document their every brainstorm. Lebowitz would surely regard the concept with baffled disdain, though it isn’t so far from Andy Warhol’s Factory, where the young Lebowitz knocked on the door and got her breakthrough writing job, for Interview.
This past year, the “true New Yorker” test has become even more fraught, as shutdowns drain the city of its perks and some residents flee to second homes or their parents’ guest rooms. Every few months, a “why I’m leaving New York” salvo, most recently in the Post, draws jeers of “Good riddance!” But both Yang and Lebowitz have hitched themselves to the city in its dark hour, one promising to turn things around and the other acting as its ornery mascot. In “Pretend It’s a City,” Lebowitz tells Scorsese that she would like to be mayor (“the second-hardest job in the country”) were it not for the early-morning start time. “So it should be split in two, and I would be the night mayor,” she proposes. Maybe she and Yang could share the job: Twitter and green tea in the morning, a novel and a Marlboro Light in the evening. The handoff would be marked by a falling chandelier at Gracie Mansion, where they’d bump into each other twice a day. Lebowitz says that, as mayor, she would change the subway system. That’s on Yang’s platform, too.
