New York City has become an epicenter for almost everything, which has resulted in millions of unlike people trying to coexist. People who, as little sweaty high school teens, would have sat at tables on opposite ends of the lunch room. It’s a city of contrast, hosting the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. Growing trees and lakes exist in a central park that is completely man made. The city displays some of the most beautiful people while also being notorious for the greasiest of pizza. Reasons to live here are as varied as the population that inhabits its five boroughs.
My personal journey to this city revolves around a decision I made in fifth grade, out of peer pressure, and that was to play the trumpet. At the time, I just figured I would do it for the boost in social status (which we all know corresponds with being in band so directly), and then eventually would leave my rented brass instrument on the steps of the Prairie Village Toon Shop. What instead happened, was a complete obsession and before I knew it, I was 18 and headed to New York City to play trumpet for all of the stars of Broadway! Squashed in small below-ground, dark, pits, playing overtures and interludes is where I met some of the most interesting, talented and disciplined musicians and people. Musicians who had come from all over the world to sit here, dressed up as trees, and play an immersive production of “Into the Woods.”
Because so many talented people flock to this mecca, there is an unavoidable competitive nature to New York. There simply isn’t room for every person to do whatever it is they came to do. One of my favorite examples of this, sticking to the performing arts, was presented to me at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. Which in itself epitomizes my point, because it is a minor league baseball team, full of players who want to “go to the show,” I think is what they call it, but they instead play baseball in the shadow of roller coasters and in a stadium that has themes like a frat party. The particular game I attended was Pirates and Princess Day at the park, so all the small children were decked out to the nines in eye patches and scratchy gowns. A grown woman, dressed as Elsa the Ice Queen, was the designated emcee of the day, floating from family to family, encouraging singing from the little kids to popular Disney songs. This woman was not singing though, she was belting, riffing, cranking on these songs. I am certain she moved to New York to be Christine in “Phantom of the Opera,” but yet here she was, in the minor leagues, a 76-minute train ride away from Times Square, making her own stage for her talents. On second thought, reflecting on her belt, maybe she moved to New York with hopes of being Fanny Brice in the most recent, “Funny Girl Revival.”
This competitiveness that exists creates what I like to call the Big Apple Hustle. I have never actually called it that, but now feels like a good time to start. This hustle applies to all people who arrive in New York City from somewhere else, which if you think about it for less than half a second, is most of the people who live in New York City. This includes of course the aforementioned Broadway and baseball wannabes but also to those who came through Ellis Island on the better side of famine or religious discrimination. It’s something that kicks in the moment you arrive on land and is reflected in the pace everyone walks on the sidewalks.
You better keep up or turn around.
I have had the pleasure of befriending a, what I would guess to be, 75 year-old woman named Roberta. She moved to New York City from Dayton, Ohio, arriving in the Big Apple somewhere in the early 1970s. Since then, she has completed law school, served on the New York Board of Education, and married and divorced two men. She recently stepped down from the DOE and now spends her days volunteering at Lincoln Center and the Met Museum. Roberta always has three kinds of Tic Tacs in her purse and is one of the fastest walking people I have ever met have, and there is nothing else to blame it on but the Big Apple Hustle.
New York City has been the ultimate destination for millions of people. It has a pull like a magnetic attraction that is inexplicable and obvious. Though the people who make up the population of New York City come from far and wide and on paper have nothing in common, they have one thing incredibly in common and that is the drive, the hustle, the bravery to not only come to the city but stay. If I were to revisit the first, cheesy metaphor I made at the top of this article, I would say something like, “those lunch tables that were so separate in high school, combine to make one big, amazing lunch table in New York City,” but I wouldn’t be cheesy enough to do that.
