When does one become a New Yorker?

Robert DeNiro, Taxi Driver

When does one become a New Yorker? That question doesn't have any easy answer. One thing is for sure, it's not after five years or even ten. The general rule is you're not from somewhere until you have lived in that place longer than you lived where you grew up.

Another sure bet is that you're not a New Yorker if you have a party celebrating the fact you're a New Yorker. The NY Post alerted the world to this new party fad in an article about...wait for it...the New Yorkiversary.

A real New Yorker doesn't celebrate it, they simply live it. If there is any time when being a New Yorker is celebrated, so to speak, it is when they're outside of New York. It's when they can't wait to get the hell out of wherever the hell it is they are and get back home.

In the article, TV producer Anthony Underwood is quoted as saying, "I think there are certain instances when you suddenly realize that you're a New Yorker, and not just a transplant from Texas. Like when you pretend to not notice (or care) that Brad Pitt is playing with his kids at the playground in Central Park."

Nope. That's not it. In any case, a New Yorker really doesn't care. It isn't this either:

“...it's the little things that really make you know you're a native... I decided I was a real New Yorker, when my friend Reid drove me home from dinner one night and, upon arrival, I instinctively reached into my purse to pay him. As though he were a taxi."--  Lara Naaman, quoted in the New York Post

Nope. A little thing would be watching a guy get shot outside the restaurant where you're having breakfast, giving your description of the gunman to the cops and then going back to finishing your breakfast as if nothing happened. Gotta eat, right?

Think of the first 15 years in New York as an apprenticeship. You need to get a lot of New York experience under your belt before you graduate to being a New Yorker. It's like a career. You don't start out at the top, you have to work your way up.

In the past, surviving the gritty, mean streets of New York could fast track you to being a New Yorker. But that was more of a special dispensation. It was the mere fact that you had the nerve, or stupidity, depending how you look at it, to choose to live here. It was a time when if you happened to be in violence torn Belfast, Northern Ireland and someone found out you lived in New York, they would remark, “I could never live there. It's too dangerous.” (True story.)

Part of becoming a New Yorker means becoming part of the neighborhood you live in and the city in which you live. That means adapting to the City and your neighborhood rather than insisting the neighborhood and the City adapt to you.

Native born New Yorkers will take issue with all of this. They will insist that no transplant can ever be a real New Yorker and technically they are correct. But, if you live here long enough and adapt to your environment, you will achieve the coveted title of New Yorker. The indigenous New Yorker will begrudgingly embrace you as one of their own. If you have a party to celebrate it, they will think you're an idiot.

When you are having that party, if you prepare for the event by consciously buying “a spread of locally themed foods” you are not a New Yorker. You don't consciously buy that stuff, you just do.

The positive side of all this is that there are people who want to be New Yorkers. In an age when many arrivals treat the City as nothing more than a paycheck and who retain their suburban ethos, this is a good thing.

You'll know it when it happens. It will probably happen when your local merchant or old New Yorker neighbor bitches with you about how the City isn't what it used to be.