12 Questions About New York City That Make Residents Roll Their Eyes

A hopeful tourist leans over the counter at a Midtown bodega and asks the guy at the register the question every New Yorker has heard a thousand times: “Do you know anyone famous?”

He rings up her coffee without looking up.

He heard it yesterday, and the day before, from somebody who’d just gotten off the train from the airport.

These are the questions about New York City that make residents roll their eyes.

1. Scared of the Subway?

New York City’s subway is the thing outsiders warn you about before you’ve even unpacked.

They picture it the way a movie villain would.

The reality is a network of 472 stations that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, one of the few systems on earth that never closes.

Millions of rides happen on it every weekday, and most of them are boring.

People read, nap, and eat a bacon, egg, and cheese on the way to work.

It’s a commute.

Ask a New Yorker if the subway terrifies them, and you’ll get a shrug because they ride it more times in a week than most visitors will in a lifetime.

2. Ever Go to Times Square?

Times Square pulls in close to 50 million visitors a year, and almost none of them are New Yorkers.

Residents route around it on purpose.

The flashing signs, the costumed characters, the crowd moving at the pace of a parade float, all of it turns those blocks into a place locals treat like a pothole.

You avoid it.

A New Yorker will walk three extra blocks in the cold to skip those sidewalks, and count it as time saved.

3. Just Like the Show?

Everyone who grew up on Friends or Sex and the City wants to know if New York City looks like that.

It doesn’t.

Monica’s huge apartment sat at 90 Bedford Street in the West Village, and the show explained the square footage away as a rent-controlled place she inherited from her grandmother.

That was the writers covering for the math.

An apartment that size in that building would cost thousands of dollars a month now, well past what a chef and a waitress could swing.

New Yorkers love their apartments, and most of them would fit inside Monica’s living room.

4. Do You Know Anyone Famous?

Somewhere in the small talk, an outsider asks a New Yorker if they know somebody famous.

More than 8.8 million people live in New York City.

Your odds of sharing an elevator with a movie star are tiny.

The math is brutal.

New Yorkers do spot celebrities now and then, on a subway platform or in line for a bagel, and the polite move is to leave them be.

Nobody wants to be the tourist who caused a scene over a sitcom actor buying paper towels.

5. Where Do You Park?

People from car country can’t picture parking in New York City.

Here’s what stuns them: More than half of NYC households don’t own a car, and in Manhattan, it’s more than three in four.

They don’t need a car.

New Yorkers who do have a car play a twice-weekly game called alternate-side parking, shifting it across the street so the street sweeper can pass.

Then they wait for the sign to let them park again.

A driveway in New York City is a fantasy most people gave up on.

6. How’s the Rent?

Rent is the follow-up question a New Yorker can see coming from a block away.

The median asking rent in Manhattan sits around $5,000 a month, the highest on record.

That’s just the median.

New Yorkers afford it the way everyone does, with roommates, a smaller apartment, a longer train ride from a cheaper neighborhood, and a budget with no wiggle room.

Some have held a rent-stabilized apartment for years and will never let it go.

Ask how they pull it off, and you’ll hear a laugh before you hear an answer.

7. Been up the Empire State Building?

Tourists assume every New Yorker has stood on top of the Empire State Building.

Most never have.

The tower has stood over Midtown since 1931, reaching 1,454 feet to the tip, with an observation deck on the 102nd floor.

It draws around 2.5 million visitors a year, and a New Yorker will tell you most of those visitors came from somewhere else.

Locals see it from the street, from a rooftop, from a train window, and that’s plenty.

The view up top costs money and a long wait.

The skyline is free from the sidewalk.

8. What About the Rats?

Outsiders bring up the rats like New Yorkers haven’t met them.

Oh, they’ve met.

The rats are a fact of life in New York City, and in 2023, the mayor’s office got serious enough to hire the city’s first-ever rat czar to lead the fight.

That’s an official title.

New Yorkers have watched a rat drag a slice of pizza down the subway stairs and given it a nod of respect.

You learn to coexist.

Bringing the rats up to a resident like it’s breaking news just marks you as someone who’s never lived there.

9. You Know My Cousin?

Right behind the celebrity question comes a request to look up somebody’s cousin in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn alone is home to about 2.7 million people.

If it broke off from New York City tomorrow, it would be the fourth-largest city in the country.

It would outrank Houston.

So no, a New Yorker probably doesn’t know your cousin, even the cousin who’s lived off the L train for a decade.

The five boroughs hold more people than most states, and every last resident is a stranger until proven otherwise.

10. Do You Walk Everywhere?

New Yorkers walk everywhere, and they walk fast.

Walking is transportation in New York City, not exercise that you pencil into a calendar.

With most households skipping car ownership, feet and the subway do the work a car does anywhere else.

A New Yorker thinks nothing of covering a mile to dodge a subway transfer.

A mile is nothing.

They have the pace down cold, weaving around slow tourists without breaking stride.

Stop short on the sidewalk to check your map, and the people behind you stack up in a hurry.

Keep moving.

11. Better Pizza and Bagels?

Every visitor wants to know if New York City pizza and bagels beat what they get back home.

New Yorkers say yes, and they'll point to the water.

NYC tap water flows down from the Catskill and Delaware watersheds upstate. It's soft and low in minerals.

Bakers and pizza makers credit that water for the chewy crust and the snap of a good bagel.

Food scientists say it's no miracle.

Other cities can copy the mineral levels if they try, and that won't stop a New Yorker from calling the pizza back home a sad imitation.

Some arguments you don't win.

12. How Do You Sleep?

The last thing NYC tourists can't get over is the noise, and how anyone in the city sleeps through it.

Sirens, garbage trucks, honking, and a neighbor's party two floors up are all common sounds in a single night.

Noise is the number one thing New Yorkers phone in to NYC's 311 line.

That tracks.

Yet many residents sleep fine because the sound fades into background hum after a while.