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Dear friend —
To truly understand the difference between Los Angeles and New York, you have to misplace your car.
I did this, not for the purposes of research but due to a general ditziness I’ve developed in matters concerning my Civic. Last month, newly in Williamsburg, I parked my car on my block and forgot about it until street cleaning time the next week, at which point I discovered my car was no longer there.
Was it possible I’d parked it somewhere else? I doubted it but wandered the surrounding blocks nonetheless. Williamsburg is a tough place to park but a great place to walk around — residential streets are lined with cute row houses that give way to hip restaurants and boutique shops. The aroma of coffee and pastries tempted me walking by Fortunado Brothers.
Why do people even own cars in Brooklyn? I wondered, puttering around. I mean, yes, I had one here, but only because I’d driven across the country and was planning to drive back. These people actually lived here….
My car was nowhere to be found. Could it have gotten towed for some reason? Back in my Airbnb, I searched the NYC Towed Vehicle Locator — and got a message saying the city hadn’t towed it, but that I should contact my local precinct to see if it had been “relocated due to a parade, demonstration or street fair” — or stolen.
I called. “Hi! So my car is missing?” I chirped.
The officer who answered checked one database, then another — but like me, turned up nothing. “What are your cross streets?” he asked, and when I told him, said there’d been some construction in the area. “Sometimes the crews move cars around the corner without telling us,” he said, and advised I look around the neighborhood. “If you still can’t find it, call 911 and report it stolen.”
Dutifully, I took another walk around, then called 911. The operator took down my info and forwarded me to a recording that basically said the police were busy, but they’d get to me when they could.
I thought that was it, in terms of help from the authorities. Maybe one day a year from now they’d call me back if they got a hit on my license plate. Resigned, I got the claims process started through my car insurance. I was about to just start my workday — I’d recently accepted and started a new job on top of everything else — when my phone rang.
It was the cops! “Hey!” the officer said. “We’re right outside.”
Sure enough, two officers were on the sidewalk, looking friendly and chipper. They asked for my plate number, took a gander around the block to make sure it wasn’t there, then said, “Okay, let’s look for it,” already walking toward the police car.
“Really?” I asked, pattering after them. I got in the backseat and we started driving around! One officer drove while clicking furiously on my keyfob, listening for a beep. The other was on his phone, running my plate through various databases. They clearly had this routine down.
“Do you guys do this a lot?” I asked.
“We get these calls quite a bit,” the driving officer said. “But nine times out of ten, we find it. Either people have forgotten where they parked, or the car’s gotten towed, or something else.”
“So cars don’t get stolen often?”
“No, not in this neighborhood.” Then, since he knew I was from California, he told a story about visiting San Francisco. He’d gone to a restaurant then returned to find his car missing and called the cops. “I thought it would be like here, where they help you,” he said. But of course they don’t do that in California. His conclusion: “I’m never going back there.”
We circled a few times. “We’ll do one more loop then head back,” the driving officer said. The phone officer was still searching, calling various independent tow companies that, for whatever reason, weren’t part of the towed vehicles database.
Then a random tow company about a mile away said they had my car!
“Why did they tow it?” I asked.
“It was blocking a driveway.”
Said driveway totally didn’t look like a driveway, but in any case, I was relieved my car was close by. Dropping me off, the officers looked happier than I did. “It would have been 40 minutes of paperwork, reporting this,” the phone officer said. “At least,” agreed the driving officer.
I thanked them profusely. A few minutes later, my car was mine again! Getting it back only cost about $170 — a radically low price compared to L.A., where it would have cost at least several hundred to free it after a five-day stint in a towing company’s garage.
My conclusion about the main differences between New York and Los Angeles is this:
There’s a general ease to life in L.A. (no crowded subway cars or sidewalks you have to elbow your way through), but L.A. is less accommodating should things go wrong (you’re on your own if you can’t find your car). Along the same lines, Los Angeles is more surface-level friendly but with less personal-level neighborliness. This means total strangers will say hi like they want to get to know you — a fact that makes many new transplants conclude L.A. people are “fake” when they discover said strangers don’t actually want to get to know you — but your neighbors will likely forever remain strangers. The people who love L.A. like this combo: Living easy and smilingly with no obligation to get involved in the lives of the people around.
New York, on the other hand, forces you to scrabble a bit to get where you want to go or find what you need (why is there a weird patchwork of towing systems that takes a half hour to scour even with two police officers’ help?), but should you run into trouble, strangers will come to your aid. And with so many people sharing the same small spaces, you can’t help but get to know people — and feel somewhat responsible for helping them out. Case in point: When my Instacart shopper delivered my groceries to the wrong address, the neighbor who got them somehow managed to track down that they belonged to me — I don’t know how they did this when there are hundreds of people living on the block — and brought the stuff over.
I found Williamsburg beautiful, especially post-Covid. It was May and the weather was in the 70s and 80s. On every block sat an inviting restaurant with outdoor seating and prosecco on the menu. People milled about smiling in breezy sundresses and jean shorts. Three indie bookstores were in walking distance. The city was so alive!
Should I live here? I wondered.
Then it started raining — and kept raining, for days. The temperature dropped to the 40s. Cold winds froze my hands. Rumor has it, it snows here in the winter.
I started plotting my escape.
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love
East Coasters are kind but not nice, while West Coasters are nice but not kind. Get a breakdown of the difference in this snowy and thoughtful post by Haley Nahman, former features director of Man Repeller.
Do you want that — or do you only think you want that because other people want that? “Most of us go through life like mini-masochists, constantly worried that our achievements must not be achievements if we managed to achieve them.”
There are four times as many parking spaces as cars in America. “What would a city look like if it suddenly needed 90 percent less parking?” An oldie but a goodie from Mother Jones.