Recalibration

Just prior to moving to Cambridge, MA, I tried very hard to think of this as not only an opportunity, to be ripped from my firmly rooted life in Brooklyn, NY, but as a city. After all, "The true New Yorker secretly believes that anyone living anywhere else has got to be, in some sense, kidding," according to John Updike. I don't know if I think that everyone is kidding about living in other places, but as soon as I moved I came to the highly prejudiced conclusion, that perhaps Updike has a point: You have to be kidding about this being a city. You have to. Because a city is endless, with train lines that have plenty of transfers before you get to the last stop, and you could not even conceive of walking across the entire thing in an hour or so. While I have grown to like where I am, I am still not fully convinced of the city-ness of this place, which does not in any way negate the experiences of people living here.

Because in New York City, we too have a gradient along which appears different levels of city-ness, and Cambridge and Boston have a relatively similar scale: Kendall, with its office buildings and restaurants that are only open to serve workers, and then JP, with endless stretches of green.
New York, with Wall Street and the suits, and then Bay Ridge at the other end of the scale.

Although I have never had the pleasure of living there, I have been a visitor to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Bay Ridge has such a basic Brooklyn charm, with its bodegas and store windows with dusty, aging merchandise and mingling cultures and delicious falafel. Located at the very southern most tip of Brooklyn, it is severely isolated, which serves to keep the rent down and the newcomers out. You can be from Bay Ridge, but it is highly unlikely that you will be moving to Bay Ridge.

I imagine that sometime in the distant future I will live there and enjoy that insular nature. Cambridge might just be that place. Or it could be that Boston and Cambridge might have a Bay Ridge in it somewhere else, as of yet undiscovered.

I have heard that Somerville is the Brooklyn of Cambridge, making Cambridge the Manhattan of Cambridge, which seems highly unlikely. Boston is probably the Manhattan of Cambridge and Cambridge is the Brooklyn of Boston, which makes, most likely, Somerville the Queens of Cambridge, or possibly the suburbs. Which would make Somerville.... New Jersey. Which makes no sense.

This led to the improbable logic that Bay Ridge is the Brooklyn of Brooklyn, if you follow me. Brooklyn, which began as an isolated farming outpost and developed into the shipping industry's headquarters and then developed in to the family borough has changed again, turning into the cool borough, with bands and bars and hip people, but Bay Ridge -oh, Bay Ridge!- located within and outside of Brooklyn, will never be cool. It will remain, forever, the Brooklyn of Brooklyn.