Suburbs and Big City Face Off

In third grade, my class visited the Bronx Zoo; in fourth grade, we moved on to Ellis Island; freshman year of high school, we were cultured enough for the Met; and senior year, mature enough for the Holocaust Museum in New York. For a long time, New York City was just the end-point of many long school bus rides. I assumed every building was a museum or a monument, forgetting that eight million New Yorkers had to live somewhere. New Haven was the center of my universe, and New York was two hours off my radar.

Ironically, though I’ve now moved two hundred miles farther away, the city now seems closer than ever. Far from New York, I found myself surrounded on all fronts by the city. Freshman week was a perpetual exchange of the bizarre social currency of a New York address: “I live on 78th and Amsterdam” for “I’m just across town on 5th.” My offering, “I’m from Hamden, Conn., just outside New Haven,” isn’t worth much on the New York social exchange. This emphasis continues beyond those first weeks of freshman year. Regardless of their professional aspirations, grads flock to the city’s bright lights and high energy. Undergrads flee there during summers to boost their résumés, in hopes of becoming the New York graduate.

It’s strange that a city 200 miles away has more of a presence on campus than one merely four T stops away, but it makes sense in some strange way. Boston’s colonial appeal takes a back seat to New York’s modern-day sophistication for the very reason that the fast paced life in the Big Apple mimics the constant onslaught of homework and extracurricular meetings. Nevertheless, too often, students descend on New York without considering the alternatives.

My town of Hamden, Conn. has little, if any, of the hustle and bustle of 5th Avenue. A far cry from the East Side, Hamden is a quiet suburb, easing the transition from urban New Haven to rural Chesire. Most of Hamden was originally a farm whose vestiges still linger on as stone walls in backyards and undeveloped fields. At its outskirts, Hamden is a liquor store and a gas station with barely paved roads and population densities approaching zero. Near New Haven, Hamden is schools, large colonials, and parks interspersed with restaurants and bars. But most of Hamden lies between these two: a suburban paradise.

Maybe paradise is an exaggeration, but I love Hamden for how it defies New York. Unlike Manhattan, Hamden can not offer Ethiopian-Mexican restaurants, inexpensive public transportation, and a Starbucks on every corner—all available 24/7. But where New Yorkers might find it limiting, I find it liberating. My neighborhood may not be as diverse as a New York subway car, but at least I’m friends with the 20 families on my block. I might not be able to find public transportation at 3 a.m., but I never hit traffic driving up my street. I cannot eat at the latest ethnic fusion restaurant, but I can go apple picking. Suburbia has reduced the choices I have to make in life, and in effect, simplified things. Of course, it would be foolish to say that Hamden has more going on than New York (it doesn’t) or is more diverse (it isn’t) or can provide me with more opportunities (it can’t), but a simplicity pervades it that will never appear in New York. New York doesn’t know how to be simple. The city makes life as easy as possible, offering cabs at every corner and open bars at every hour. It never just stops and examines itself, instead continually barreling forward.

So naturally, when people criticize my suburb for its defining simplicity, it stings a little. When New York friends tell me they have “suburban day” at their high school when they dress the same, unfashionable way or when people criticize Boston as a diet city, it makes me question whether I want to live in New York and adopt that perspective.

Honestly, I probably will follow my friends to New York after graduation. I am just as seduced by the nightlife and cosmopolitanism as anyone else here. But even if my next field trip to New York lasts longer than a few days, Hamden will still be just a train ride away.

Steven A. McDonald ’08 is a biology concentrator in Currier House. He is not the king of New York—he lives in Connecticut.