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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16845 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Sunlight was worse.

This seems crazy to me. Maybe in a choice Manhattan skyrise. Most of my experience was Brooklyn on the 14th floor and sunlight was about as rare as integrity in a congressman. Being high up isn't a boon when all the surrounding buildings are even higher! Most people don't get to live on the top floors.

There was nothing to do. I hated it.

This I'll give you. For certain categories of "to do", NYC can't be beat.

But, Brooklyn and Queens have a ton of green spaces.

This I disagree with. I'm a walker; I feel claustrophobic if I can't go for a walk for a few hours every few days. The weeks I spent in Brooklyn felt cramped and dismal, cloying and choking.

Manhattan is marginally nicer. Central Park is fine. But my small town has multiple comparable parks in easy distance, and just walking down the street feels closer to a "green space" than a city. Admittedly, it helps that I'm in what is basically an old colonial suburb, not some Arizona step-and-repeat.

my small town has multiple comparable parks in easy distance

Note: The official USAian definition of "walking distance" is 1/2 mile (0.8 km). (Of course, it's possible that different jurisdictions have different definitions.)

But my small town has multiple comparable parks in easy distance

I assume that what you mean is "comparable quality-per-area", but it's amusing to imagine a little town with like 5000 people, 10% of whom are employed maintaining the 5 square miles of neighboring park/zoo/lake/forest/museum/hiking/garden/ice-skating/boating complexes.

Central Park is fine. But my small town has multiple comparable parks in easy distance

You have multiple 800 acre parks within walking distance of your house? How does that work?

I have one 2000 acre park within walking distance of my house (1.1 miles) and one 400 acre park 3.5 miles away. And another 2000 acre one about 8 miles away that I sometimes bike to and through. Fortunately I also have a car.

Not within walking distance, but there are cities with all kinds of parks around the city. Phoenix is one example, and that list doesn't include a number of parks that are on the farther edges of the metro.

Certainly there are cities near nature areas, and NY is quite bad in this sense. But multiple parks comparable to central park within walking distance beggars belief.

walking distance

People who don't live in New York often have cars!

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