Recently took the family to Legoland, a theme park up in Westchester that opened in 2021. We had a great time -- lots of rides, lots lego stuff to do, and it had a chill, nerdy vibe that we all enjoyed.
My favorite thing, as you might imagine, were the big outdoor Lego builds of American cities -- Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles were featured amongst others. But the really big one, the really major one, was of New York City (no suprise there). Here I will provide you a short photographic tour of Legoland NYC -- it's really amazing to see and something that I encourage all city buffs to check out:
We start out to the north in ...
Da' Bronx
We zoom down into Lego Yankee's Stadium and then visit the Lego Bronx Zoo and the Lego New York Botanical Garden ...
Then we traverse into Manhattan and breeze by ...
The Upper East Side & Upper West Side
Here we see the Lego Guggenheim, the Lego Dakota and Lego Sam Remo as well as the Lego Central Park.
Now let's hop on ...
The Subway
And go to ...
Queens
And go through Lego Long Island City and Lego Flushing Meadows Park to a Lego Mets game at Lego Citi Field.
Let's go back into Manhattan and hit ...
Midtown
We pass by the Lego AT&T Building, the Lego St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Lego Times Square, the Lego United Nations, the Lego Empire State Building, the Lego Madison Square Garden and Lego Pennsylvania Hotel, and the Lego Flatiron Building.
Now we go ...
Downtown
We head south from the Lego Washington Square Arch and Lego City Hall to the Lego Castle Clinton and Lego 9/11 Memorial to the Lego One World Trade Center, Lego Lower Manhattan and, in the midst of the Lego New York Harbor pool, the Lego Statue of Liberty.
But what, dere's more! Let's dip into ...
Brooklyn
And we finish up our visit passing by the Lego Brooklyn Museum, the Lego Grand Army Plaza Arch, and Lego Coney Island.
As for ...
Staten Island
It's not there (yet).
So that's my little tour of Legoland NYC -- but I highly, highly suggest that you go check it out, along with the whole park, yourself.
In the wild heyday of the NYC adult film scene of the 1970s and '80s, no star shone brighter than that of Vanessa Del Rio's.
She was the Judy Garland, the Barbra Streisand, the Meryl Streep of that time and place -- quite simply, the best. She was famous and iconic in her time and remains so almost 40 years since she quit the business.
Born and raised in Harlem, Vanessa was the quintessential New Yorker -- and a striking contrast to most of the adult performers of her time and after. She was Latina, curvy, tough talking, odd-looking -- and a stunning, gorgeous ball of fire. From 1974 to 1986 she made roughly 80 movies, many of her as the star. And her various co-stars -- both male and female, and including some of the biggest names of the time -- were both the most fortunate of pepole as well as her helpless prey, so insatiable were her performances. She was amazing!
In the decades since she left the business, Vanessa has popped up here and there. She appeared on NYPD Blue and also had an entire Taschen book made about her. She's on social media and appreciates her fans. Now in her 70s, she lives quietly (I believe on Staten Island) and lives a fairly quiet life. But her legacy will never be quiet -- it will rage on forever.
I didn't get to do this four years ago because life events intervened but here, tonight, marks the return of the Mr NYC Election Night Live Blog.
By the way, this is the highest turnout NYC election since 1969 -- over 2 millions voters turned out. The eyes of the world are on NYC tonight -- the future is made here.
9:03 PM - Polls closed. The memory sticks are being loaded. Let the games begin!
9:09 PM - Zohran has 51%, Cuomo has 39%, Sliwa at 8%.
9:16 PM - Democrats leading in Comptroller & Public Advocate elections and Borough President elections -- except Staten Island. Same with City Council.
9:24 PM - Zohran is a tiny bit under 50% now with 51% of the vote in -- 8% over Cuomo. Nothing interesting down-ballot.
9:32 PM - Now with 60% of the vote in, nothing's changed percentage-wise.
9:36 PM - CNN is calling the Mayor's race of Zohran -- but still more votes to count.
9:47 PM - It's official -- Zohran will be the next Mayor of NYC!
The first Muslim elected mayor, that's wild -- and that's what's great about this city and America!
Is it too early to start calling him Mayor Z?
10:01 PM - Zohran is closing in on getting almost 1 million votes. That's crazy. Koch, Giuliani, Bloomberg, De Blasio, and Adams got nowhere near that many.
Let's take a little trip. Let's travel from one end of Manhattan to the other.
Let's traverse this narrow thirteen-mile island that fascinates and captures the imaginations of peoples around the world.
And let's do it via the #1 subway line, noting the most signficant stops along the way, subway stations that are more than just various gateways into Manhttan -- they are portals into American culture, history, and power.
Now there's something important to remember: Manhattan technically extends beyond Manhattan Island. There is a small neighborhood just north of the island called Marble Hill that is legally part of the Borough of Manhattan. So as we look north from the bottom of Marble Hill, we can look north towards the Bronx.
Then we turn around and see the northern tip of Manhattan island as well as the bridge with the crosswalk and subway tracks that will take us into it.
Now we'll go upstairs to the Marble Hill 225th Street station and take a look at the subway route on the #1 that we'll be following (as well as map of the geographic route we'll be crossing).
Now the train has rattled into the station, we get on and sit down, and we're off!
After a few stops we hit 181th street street. This is where we'll find the George Washington Bridge. Dubbed "the world's busiest bridge," this northern-most expanse connects the city to the rest of America, with cars flowing in and out of NYC and the rest of the continent. It's also, apparently, a popular place for some lost souls to end their lives -- sometimes to dark, comic effect.
Few more stops and we hit 137th street and City College.
This public college in the heart of Harlem is one of the great institutions for American learning. For over a century, poor kids from all over NYC could go to City College and pursue the American dream. The students and graduates of City are extraordinary: ten Nobel Prize winners, mayors, Supreme Court justices, US Senators and Secretaries of State, Oscar-winners, Emmy-winners, Pulitzer Prize-winners, astronauts and founders of big companies, and so many more! Heck, even fictional people have gone to City College: Gordon Gekko from Wall Street and Don Draper from Mad Men most notably.
Also, it's where both of my parents worked for almost 40 years, met, fell in love, and produced Mr NYC.
One more stop and we're in Harlem, above ground, at 125th Street.
What else can I say about Harlem, the capital of the black American experience, where great black artists and pioneers lived and worked. Also, it's also one of the hearts of American culture with Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club.
One of the seven Ivy League Universities, this institution of higher learning pre-dates the United States itself, originally chartered in 1754 by King George II (hence the original name King's College). Besides being a great and famous university, Columbia has been a site for brilliance and controversy, where great minds have flowered and fought over decades.
Now we chug down past several stops on the Upper West Side to 66th street and Lincoln Center.
Home to ballet, opera, symphonies, musicals and plays, Lincoln Center is the multi-theater complex that, along with Broadway, defines NYC as the cultural capital of America. While encompassing only a few small blocks, its impact across America is massive -- including the many performances that are broadcast from there. I have personal recollections of performing at Lincoln Center and have blogged about it a lot -- including my own experience in partaking in a live broadcast.
One more stop and we're all 59th Street and Columbus Circle.
The site of the big memorial to Christopher Columbus, it is one of the crossroads of Manhattan, with different avenues intersecting and hugging the lower southwest portion of Central Park. It is also, to my knowledge, the only traffic circle in all over NYC. And these days it is now home to the massive Time Warner building that looms over it.
Two more stops and we're in the most square in all the world -- Times Square.
Dubbed the "Crossroads of the World" it is the very center of American culture, bedecked with electronic billboards, Broadway theaters, massive chain restaurants -- for many it is New York City, the heart of the heart of it all. And, obviously, it's where the world celebrates New Year's every year.
A quick one-stop and we're at Penn Station on 34th street -- or Pennsylvania Station as it's officlally known.
If the George Washington Bridge is the city's businest car-route into America, Penn is the easily the busiest railway route. Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad all go through it, a central hub that connects the outer-edges of Long Island to the West Coast of the United States.
Penn Station also has a tortured history -- the once gorgeous station was torn down in the 1960s and replaced by a dingy undeground hovel. In the last twenty-years it has been dramatically rebuilt and re-imagined, a vast improvement of what it was but a sad reminder of what we could have had if we had only preserved the original. Hey, at least the new Penn Station now has a Dunkin' Donuts!
Now we go down several stops and hit Christopher Street -- Stonewall Station.
Christopher Street is actually a quiet, beautiful area of Greenwich Village but it is now of the iconic birth place of American gay rights movement. On June 28th, 1969, right after the death of gay icon Judy Garland, the Stonewall Inn was raided by cops -- and for the first time, gay people fought back. It took decades for gay rights to be enshrined into American culture and law but it has triumphed mightly. And it all started on this small block of Manhattan.
Our journey is almost over but we have one more stop until the end -- the World Trade Center.
Of course it used to be the World Trade Centers -- until September 11, 2001 when it became Ground Zero, then, after an extensive rebuilding, One World Trade Center.
The story of this patch of Lower Manhattan is one of great triumph and tragedy in American history, where George Washington celebrated his victory in the American Revolution and where American was also brutally attacked two centuries later. It's the symbol of American financial power and dominance. Its where Manhattan and NYC began and where it grew out from. It is the complicated heart and soul of the world's greatest nation and its greatest city.
And now we come of the end of our journey. We reach the South Ferry-Whitehall Station aka. the Battery, and we pop up out of our seat and go upstairs into the very southern edge of Manhattan.
We're right across the street from the entraces to the Governor's Island and Staten Island Ferrys, and we can see (and smell) the vastness of New York Harbor, the watery gateway to city and the force that unites the five boroughs.
And then we walk down a few blocks, turning to look uptown to see where we came from ...
... and then we look down to the southern tip of Manhattan with the rest of NYC and America beyond it.
I hope you've enjoyed this trip along the #1 subway line, seeing the amazing stops and spots of Americana along the way. You can do it yourself in just under and hour. And I hope, maybe, that you learned something!
The movie director James Foley has died at the age of 71. You might not have heard of him but he made the movies At Plain Sight, Glengarry Glen Ross, as well as the last two 50 Shades movies. Born in Bayridge, raised on Staten Island, he was a New York boy who made his mark as a journeyman Hollywood director. He also directed several of Madonna's music videos at the height of her fame in the late 1980s -- including the famous, groundbreaking "Papa Don't Preach" video.
RIP.
Interesting sidenote: I was recently talking to a family friend who was in high school in the late 1980s. She liked to sneak away from school during free periods to smoke -- and one day she left school to light up and stumbled upon the production of the movie Who's That Girl? (also directed by James Foley). Long story short: my friend gave Madonna a light for her cigarette. And then, the next day, another one, and so on for a few more days. Small town.
In the wake of the 2008-2009 cultural phenomenon "Jersey Shore", guidos and guidettes become, very briefly, all the rage. Hence, more than 15 and a half years ago, yours truly paid tribute to this with this rather odd blog post about a Staten Island girl who had posted a video where she complained about not being married.
It's a hoot. Anyway, enjoy. And if you want even more Staten Island girls, including another one from the girl in the original 2009 video, see below:
You must read this article from The New Yorker where the legendary writer Ian Frazier chronicles his many walks around the only NYC borough attached to the mainland -- and intertwines it with the fascinating history of the Bronx stretching back 300 years.
Much like Staten Island, one might argue that the Bronx is a "forgotten borough", perched to the north of its four sister boroughs, and more often driven through (or just visited for Yankee games) than really lived in or appreciated. But it has a great history, starting with the discovery and birth of America, the Revolutionary War, and the evolution of NYC.
Of course, the Bronx also has a sad history -- what was once a working class "paradise", a city unto itself of middle class homes, has brutally cut up by the various highways in the 20th century that literally destroyed neighborhoods and decimated communities, creating big pockets of crime and poverty that it's never really recovered from.
That said, as Frazier makes clear in his article, the Bronx is no longer "burning" -- like the rest of the city, it has been revived, many of the destroyed neighborhoods rebuilt, and yet an air of mystery and haunting still hangs over the only borough that attaches itself to the rest of the Lower 48 -- and that will always be its distinction.
If you watched the great Netflix show The Crown, about the late British Queen Elizabeth II, it was all about how a country's monarchy survives in a world where most countries are now republics.
For most of human history, most of the world lived under monarchies -- but the last hundred-plus years has seen a reversal with monarchies falling and republics surging (see the brilliant 1974 series Fall of Eagles for more about why this happened).
As a study of history and politics, I'm fascinated by the diference between monarchies and republics. In short, a monarchy is a country ruled by one person and his or her family while a republic is a country ruled by the people. Most revolutions throughout history have been of countries overthrowing their monarchies and becoming republics -- although sometimes, like in Ancient Rome or 19th century France, it goes the other way (more than once).
Today, of course, these things are much more complicated.
In the United Kingdom and some other counties, they have the concept of constitutional monarchies where the people elect a government but the monarch remains a powerless national figurehead. In some supposed republics, however, like North Korea or Russia, there is supposed rule by the people but really these countries are ruled by strongmen and their families -- these pseudo-republics being more authoritarian and monarchical than any real monarchy.
But what exists in both monarchies and republics are dynasties -- families that build wealth and power and then exercise it over the people.
In America, a republic, we have and have had many dynasties: the Adamses, Harrisons, Roosevelts, Kennedies, Tafts, Clintons and Bushes all reaching not only the presidency but other high offices (like Congressional and Senate seats plus Governorships). First they dominate their political parties, then their states, then the country.
Closer to home, we've had multiple New York Governors named Roosevelt and Cuomo (although, in NYC, we've had never had mayors of the same family). However, in super-local politics, we've had many dynasties in the state legislature and various city offices: the Boylans in Brooklyn, the Vallones in Queens, the Diazes in the Bronx, the Molinari's in Staten Island, and others.
Dynasties in NYC politics are as powerful as ever.
That's why I was interested to read about how the former Harlem Assemblyman Keith Wright's son Jordan is running for his old seat, seeking to continue a family's power in Harlem and state government. This is how dynasties are made.
Even though NYC is a democracy existing under the framework of state and federal law, it has its own charter divvying up power between the mayor and city council as well as the borough presidents, Comptroller and Public Advocate. And even though this city has multiple dynasties, NYC is not a some kind of 16-century Medici-like Italian city-state under dictatorial rule of one person or family. However, Mayor Adams has just appointed a charter commission charter commission to try to rein in the council's power and increase the mayor's (i.e. his) power. It's a cynical move to become less accountable (where else have we seen this?).
What's interesting to me about the perennial existance of dynasties in democracies, and of power-grabbing politicians like Adams (and other aspiring American tyrants who shall not be named), is that the concept of rule by the people with divided, limited powers, is and forever shall be a boulder being shoved up hill.
By their very nature, people are greedy and family-oriented, and they want to accumulate as much wealth and power as possible for themselves and, when they age or die out, want their families to retain it. That's why great dynasties like the Plantagenets in England or the Habsburgs in Austria or the Romanovs in Russia held power for centuries and were only overthrown through violence and war.
It doesn't matter what high ideals we may claim to have, whether we've had revolutions to get rids of monarches and establish republican rule -- the hunger for power by people and their families remains and overwhelms.
The thing about New York City is that it isn't a city -- it's several.
The City of New York is basically a holding company, an archipelago of cities, a stuffed box of a municipalities, a necklace wrapped around the throat of New York Harbor -- a true urban empire.
Brooklyn was and, in many ways, remains its own city. Manhattan and the Bronx used to be the entirety of New York City before annexing Brooklyn and the county of Queens in 1898 -- a county that, by the way, had its own cities (Long Island City and Flushing) plus a bunch of towns and villages. The fifth wheel, the "Odd-Man In", was the county of Richmond, a lightly populated island of villages, that today is known as Staten Island.
And in any family, there are tensions.
While most of NYC is urban and racially diverse, Staten Island mostly suburban -- and white. While most of NYC is liberal and tolerant, Staten Island is conservative and angry. And while four of the five boroughs has a population of 1.5 to 2.5 million, Staten Island has around half-a-million. It's the black sheep of NYC.
Because it ill-fits the rest of the city, Staten Island has, over the last hundred years, made occasional noises about seceding from NYC and becoming the independent City of Staten Island. In 1993 there was a non-binding referendum about secession that passed -- and then went nowhere in the state legislature.
But now the seceders are making noise again -- they want to establish a commission to examine the legal, political, and economic feasibility of becoming its own city. This article gets into the dirty details of what this would entail.
Make no mistake -- at the heart of this secession "movement" is racism. It's about a bunch of white people who don't want to be governed by a majority-minority government. And it isn't really a movement -- no one's holding rallies or taking to the streets in support of secession -- it's mostly social media posts and the pontifications of politicians who know it'll go nowhere and don't want it to.
Like Brexit or Roe v. Wade or the Iraq War, people talk a lot of hot air about how great it would be if we just broke away/overturned/invaded this Big Bad Thing and then come to rue. Staten Island secession is just another such fever dream -- they would lose all city monies, their property taxes would explode, all the schools and police stations and firehouses and public services would vanish and have to be replaced overnight, they'd have to pay tolls to take the ferry into Manhattan -- it would be a mess.
I've blogged about this before -- and it remains as true now as then.
I just finished reading the amazing book Blue Highways, a travel memoir by Missourian William Least-Heat Moon.
A contemporary classic, the book chronicles a three-month cross-country odyssey that Moon took in 1978 after he had lost his job and wife. Armed with little more than some savings and a truck that he owned call Ghost Dancing, Moon drove a circle around the southern, western, northern, and eastern parts of the USA on the "blue highways" -- the secondary highways on the maps shown in blue that were distinct from the main highways marked in red.
Published in 1982, the book spent 42 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list. And it holds up as a deep, profound tale about this country more than 40 years later.
On his adventures, Moon encounters brutal racial segregation in the south, monks in the desert, the small towns of the west and northwest -- including several spots where Lewis and Clark once roamed -- the absolute blankness of the Plains and Prairie states, and the bustling seafaring and fishing life of New England.
And he even makes it to NYC -- briefly.
In his travels, Moon was determined to avoid going into any major cities. He wanted to visit the towns and places that were, we would say today, "off the grid", away from the cosmopolitan bustle of a metropolis. He was fascinated by people who made their lives away from the main arteries and gathering places of American life -- and, as you might imagine, he encounters some really interesting characters in these places.
Moon didn't stop for long in NYC but he did manage to capture the equivalent of the city's "blue highways", the places in the five boroughs where most of the city's residents and visitors never travel to -- or through. He writes about driving into southern Queens and Staten Island from Long Island (after having taken a ferry across the Sound from Connecticut):
"... Things raced past like the jumpy images of a nickelodeon: abandoned and stripped cars on the shoulders, two hitchhiking females that nobody could stop to pick up, a billboard EAT SAUSAGE AND BE HAPPY, low-flying jumbos into Kennedy International, the racetrack at Ozone Park, bulldozed piles of dirt to fill the marsh at Jamaica Bay, long and straight Flatbush Avenue, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, the World Trade Center like stumps in the yellow velvet sky. Then a windingly protracted ascent up the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (the Silver Gate of the East coast) with its world longest center span, and below the bay where the Great Eastern, the Monitor, the Bonhomme Richard, and the Half Moon sailed.
The low sun turned the Upper Bay orange. Freighters rode at anchor or headed to the Atlantic, and to the north, in the distance, a little glint of coppery green that was the Statue of Liberty. I slowed to gawk and got a horn; the driver passed in a gaseous cloud and held aloft a middle digit opinion.
The lanes descended and shot me across Staten Island; just before it was too late, I pulled out of the oppression of traffic and drove down Richmond Avenue to find the bridge across Arthur Kill into Perth Amboy, the city (if you follow your nose) that gets to you before you get to it. I don't know how I lost my way on a thoroughfare as big as Richmond, but I did. I could smell Perth Amboy, but I couldn't find it. Instead, I found Great Kills, Eltingville, Huguenot Park, Princess Bay, and Tottenville. I asked directions from a nervous teenager who was either turning his engine or stealing someone's distributor.
Just as darkness was complete, I reached New Jersey ..."
As you can see from this passage, Moon is a great writer and wordsmith. Even though his time on the NYC "blue highways" is brief, he brilliantly captures the "other side" of NYC, the more obscure, ignored, downtrodden parts of the five boroughs, far away from the glamour of Manhattan, the bustling hives of Brooklyn, the leafy suburbs of the Bronx and northern Queens, and the so-called "inner cities" (It's just a shame he didn't make it to Broad Channel!) He finds not "the real NYC" as some might call it but the NYC of the fringes, the other NYC that people who rather not travel to and forget.
Obviously his observation of the World Trade Centers makes you shudder a bit but it's still beautiful how it existed and is forever burnished this is beautifully captured moment in time.
Read Blue Highways and you'll encounter many other such moments -- an amazing read!
One of the most interesting parts of traveling to any city, especially capital cities, is to see the various government buildings it contains -- specifically the seats of power like city or town halls, legislative buildings, palaces or executive mansions, etc. to get a literal look at the places where these cities, states, and countries are ruled or governed from.
Think of the White House and US Capitol in Washington DC, think of Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament in London, think of Versailles (near) Paris or the Forbidden City in Beijing, think of the Vatican in Rome, think of the Kremlin in Moscow!
These great, grand structures are built to say "Here the power resides, ready to strike. Don't question it."
New York City doesn't rule a country or even a state but, as the largest municipality in the country, it certainly has its own important seats of power. City Hall where the council meets and the mayor works is the best known along with Gracie Mansion where the mayor lives and entertains VIPs.
But there are other seats of power scattered around the city as well, other points from where the city is governed: the offices of the borough presidents.
Five boroughs means five borough presidents and five borough president offices. What's interesting is that borough president offices exist in different kinds of buildings, each tethered to the history of their particular boroughs.
In Manhattan, the BP works out of the huge Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan on Centre Street along with the NYC Public Advocate, Comptroller and various city agencies like Finance, Landmarks, Veterans Services, Technology, Environmental Protection, and others. An enormous building, it's the very heart of the original, post-1898 consolidation of NYC power of which the BP was, and is, just another part.
In Staten Island, the BP is located in Staten Island Borough Hall right across from the St. George ferry terminal; it also contains city agencies like Buildings and Transportation and is right next to the county courthouse. Similarly, in Queens, the BP works out of Queens Borough Hall in Kew Gardens which also houses the county courthouse as does the Bronx County Courthouse where that BP works from too. What separates these three borough presidents' borough halls from Manhattan is that, prior to consolidation, these boroughs were something else entirely -- Queens and Staten Island where simply counties without a central authority or any links to the city, and the Bronx was part of New York County i.e. Manhattan before becoming a separate county -- and finally a borough of NYC.
Which is what makes Brooklyn Borough Hall so unique. Located in Downtown Brooklyn, it's the only borough hall that used to be a city hall -- for the City of Brooklyn until 1898. It's really the only borough hall that's only that -- it doesn't share space with any other government agencies nor is it part of a courthouse. It's the only legacy left of the former City of Brooklyn, a concession to the past.
So those are the NYC seats of power, the places where a city of nearly 9 million have their futures decided.
If you think about it, the composition of New York City is crazy -- five counties of varying sizes and shapes, a collection of forty-something islands in a political mishmash, the map of which looks like some kind of modern art masterpiece.
That's because NYC isn't really a city at all -- it's an empire, an Imperial City.
Prior to 1898, NYC was limited to Manhattan and large swaths of the Bronx (it included villages that had been incorporated). Brooklyn was its own large city. Queens and Richmond (now Staten Island) were like the counties upstate and on Long Island, a collection of towns and villages.
Consolidation, obviously, changed all that, making the political marriage of these cities and counties into one whole place called Greater New York -- but it was not a marriage of five equals. Manhattan, pre-1898 New York City, basically annexed its neighbors with political and economic pressure the same way the other powerful countries have (peacefully and violently) absorbed foreign lands, turning their solitary realms into expansive empires (think Tsarist Russia or Austria-Hungary).
Today, we take it for granted that NYC is the way it is, the biggest city (by far) in the country, one of the greatest in the entire world. But our Imperial City was not always destined to be so -- it was a long, brutal, slog, and was largely the vision of one man, Andrew Haswell Green.
I've blogged about how consolidation happened before (most recently in 2017) but what I never appreciated until now how this city really does resemble an empire -- and how comparing NYC to any other city in the country is really an exercise in futility. It's so much larger, so much more complex, than any other city in the USA that it's like comparing an calculus problem to an algebra problem -- it's in a different league of complexity.
And, in some ways, geographically, NYC is like many great empires with a core city or country (Manhattan) with territories that spread out in multiple-directions beyond its borders.
Think I'm wrong? Just think about how we talk about the "outer-boroughs" vs. Manhattan (which I guess we should call the "inner-borough"), think about the understated resentment that exists between Manhattanites and non-Manhattanites, between the "bridge-and-tunnel" crowd and those who live in, and refer to, "the city."
That's what makes empire and what makes NYC America's Imperial City, a mini-empire inside a country that, if you think about it, is an empire as well.
