Culture of New Yorkers
New York City, sometimes called "The City That Never Sleeps," is famously fast-paced and active, and the American idiom "in a New York minute" means "immediately." The stereotypical "hard-boiled New Yorker" has a reputation as self-centered, rude, and impatient, and takes pride in the crowds, noise, and hardships of city life. New York City residents are called "New Yorkers," although this term may also refer to suburbanites, and there is some use of borough-specific identifications, such as Manhattanites, Bronxites, Brooklynites, Queensites and Staten Islanders. Residents of the metropolitan area generally refer to New York City (or sometimes just Manhattan) as "The City," or "New York," and the acronym "NYC", as opposed to just "NY", help to avoid confusing references to the State of New York and the City. Other nicknames attributed to New York City include "the Big Apple", "Gotham", "the Naked City", and "the Capital of the World".
Immigration + International Flavor
New York absorbs a greater diversity of immigrant groups than any other American city, and it absorbs a larger number of immigrants every day than all other U.S. cities except Los Angeles, giving New York an international flavor, and making it the archetype of the American ideal of a "nation of immigrants." The city government employs translators in 180 languages.
The five boroughs are home to many distinct ethnic enclaves of Irish, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Koreans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Jamaicans, African-Americans, Iranians, Arabs, Jews, South Asians and many others, and there are also many multi-ethnic neighborhoods where people of different backgrounds coexist comfortably. Regardless of ethnic origin, all groups share a common identity as New Yorkers.
Some celebrated ethnic/racial neighborhoods include Harlem, Little Italy, Chinatown, Washington Heights, and the Lower East Side.
The Lower East Side and The East Village are where the term "The Melting Pot" came to be, referring to the droves of people from diverse European nations squeezing into this small, 100 block or so area of tenaments, learning to live together for the first time.
Commuter Culture
Because of traffic congestion and the well-designed New York Subway, six in ten residents, including many middle class professionals, commute to work via public transportation, making the everyday lifestyle and "pedestrian culture" of New Yorkers substantially different from the "car culture" that dominates most American cities. This pattern is strongest in Manhattan, where subway service is better and traffic is worse than in the outer boroughs. Even the city's billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is a "straphanger," (subway commuter), and can be encountered on the train to City Hall each morning.
The great majority of Manhattan residents live in apartments in what is usually seen as a very overpriced and difficult housing market, although there are immense neighborhoods of suburban-style homes in the outer boroughs. The median sale price of a Manhattan apartment in 2003 was $670,000, with prices in the outer boroughs lower but rising. Many residents rent apartments, and some areas are under rent control and rent stabilization laws. With space at a premium, lack of closet space is a common problem, and self-storage is a strong local industry.
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