Native New Yorker Quotes

The poor Indians that sold the isle of Manhattan for twenty-four bucks are the only real native New Yorkers.

Most of the streets in Manhattan go in just one direction. Some of the larger crosstown streets and some of the major north—south avenues have two-way traffic, but in general, the odd-numbered streets go west, toward the Hudson River, and the “evens go east,” as Jane, the native New Yorker, taught me.

Working behind the scenes to advance his candidacy, Hamilton seemed unfazed by the fact that virtually all other commissions were going to native New Yorkers of wealth and social position. Here was a bastard, a newcomer who had arrived as an orphaned immigrant little more than three years earlier. But he was a nova whose writing, speaking, and fighting talents had dazzled more timid men with better claims on command.

If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her? This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.

Make the race proud," the elders used to say. But by then, I knew that I wasn't so much bound by a biological race as to a group of people, and these people were not black because of any uniform color or any uniform physical feature. They were bound because they suffered under the weight of the dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they had fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the dream. ... In other words, I was part of a world. And looking out, I had friends who too were part of other worlds. The world of Jews, or New Yorkers. The world of southerners or gay men. Of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I could never myself be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then, and my eyes, my beautiful precious eyes, were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us, but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us. Intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.

I’ve noticed before that people from New York and L.A. tend to have an attitude about their cities, a kind of survivor’s confidence that says, I’m from Real Life, and if you live in this hick town, you’re not even in the game. Always before I’d found this kind of amusing; Miami natives, after all, are just as rude and aggressive as New Yorkers, and just as sun-drenched and vacuous as Angelenos, and the combination is a unique and lethal challenge every time you drive. But something about the way Jackie said it made me feel a little bit provincial, and I wanted to say something to defend the ferocity of Miami traffic.

And so each of the passersby on this corner, every scruffy, oversize, undersize, weird, fat, or bony or limping or muttering or foreign-looking, or green-haired punk-strutting, threatening, crazy, angry, inconsolable person I see . . . is a New Yorker, which is to say as native to this diaspora as I am, and part of our great sputtering experiment in a universalist society proposing a world without nations where anyone can be anything and the ID is planetary.Not that you shouldn't watch your pocketbook, lady.

Funny. Only a non–New Yorker would think of himself as a native after living here for eight whole years.

Dog ownership in NYC is an advanced-level project, something you do in your thirties or forties when you've given up on the rest of your dreams and need something else to fill the time.

There's an old saying about life in the two cities: That you should live in New York, but leave before you become hard, and live in California, but leave before you become soft. Speaking physically, this is bullshit: Humans are much better off being in shape than turning to jelly.

Science writers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have found that ethnic pride is an important element of self-esteem for other races but they draw the line at whites: “It’s horrifying to imagine kids being ‘proud to be white’. ” Many intellectuals believe whites are collectively guilty. As James Traub of The New Yorker wrote, when it comes to any discussion about race, whites must acknowledge that they are the offending party: “One’s hand is stayed by the knowledge of innumerable past hurts and misdeeds. The recognition of those wrongs, along with the acceptance of the sense of collective responsibility—guilt—that comes with recognition is a precondition to entering the discussion [about race].” Joe Klein, in New York Magazine, wrote that any conversation about race must begin with a confession: “It’s our fault; we’re racists.” “Black anger and white surrender have become a staple of contemporary racial discourse,” writes another commentator. Most blacks endorse this view. James Baldwin wrote that any real dialogue between the races requires a confession from whites that is nothing less than “a cry for help and healing.” Popular culture casually denigrates whites. Jay Blumenfield, an executive producer for the Showtime cable network, was working in 2004 on a reality program tentatively titled “Make Me Cool,” in which a group of blacks were to give “hipness makeovers” to a series of “desperately dweebie” whites. Why whites? Mr. Blumenfield explained that the purpose of the program was to correct “uncoolness,” and that “the easiest way to express that is they’ll be white.” Gary Bassell, head of an advertising agency that specializes in reaching Hispanics explained that “we’ve been shaped by an American pop culture today that increasingly proves that color is cool and white is washed out.” Miss Gallagher noted above that there are “few things more degrading than being proud to be white.” The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) agrees. In 2005, it refused to grant a trademark on the phrase “White Pride Country Wide.” It explained that “the ‘white pride’ element of the proposed mark is considered offensive and therefore scandalous.” The USPTO has nevertheless trademarked “Black Power” and “Black Supremacy,” and apparently finds nothing scandalous in “African Pride,” “Native Pride!” “Asian Pride,” “Black Pride,” “Orgullo Hispano” (Hispanic Pride), “Mexican Pride,” and “African Man Pride,” all of which have been trademarked.

Nobody opens the door for a Native New Yorker

I had friends who too were part of other worlds—the world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of Southerners or gay men, of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then. And my eyes—my beautiful, precious eyes—were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.

You can always tell a rich New York girl from a poor one. And you can tell a rich Boston girl from a poor one. After all, that’s what accents and manners are there for. But to the native New Yorker, the midwestern girls all looked and sounded the same. Sure, the

Chief Levine sensed that Curley had run his course, but loyalty dictated that he throw the weight of Ward 14 behind his old hero. Hynes, nevertheless, was elected by a narrow margin. Particularly rankling to Levine was the fact that the “Youth for Hynes” campaign was led by a Jewish Harvard Law School graduate and native New Yorker, Jerome Lyle Rappaport.

We walked home in the cold afternoon past Franklin Simon's windows, where the children of all nations revolved steadily in the light. Most of the stores were concentrating on the gift aspect of the Nativity, displaying frankincense, myrrh, and bath salts, but Franklin Simon advertised the Child Himself, along with a processional of other children of assorted races, lovely to behold. We stood and watched passers-by take in this international and interracial scene, done in terms of childhood, and we observed the gleam in the eyes of colored people as they spotted the little colored child in with the others. There hasn't been a Christmas like this one since the first Christmas--the fear, the suffering, the awe, the strange new light that nobody understands yet. All the traditional characteristics of Christmas are this year in reverse: instead of the warm grate and the happy child, in most parts of the world the cold room and the starveling. The soldiers of the triumphant armies return to their homes to find a hearty welcome but an unfamiliar air of uneasiness, uncertainty, and constraint. They find, too, that people are groping toward something which still has no name but which keeps turning up--in department-store windows and in every other sort of wistful human display. It is the theme concealed in the victory which the armies of the democracies won in the field, the yet unclaimed triumph: justice among men of all races, a world in which children (of whatever country) are warm and unafraid. It seems too bad that men are preparing to blow the earth to pieces just as they have got their hands on a really first-rate idea. Our Christmas greetings this year are directed to the men and women who will represent the people of the world at the meeting of the United Nations Organization in January. We send them best wishes and a remembrance of that first Christmas. Our hope is that they will shed the old robes which have adorned dignitaries for centuries and put on the new cloth that fits one man as well as another, no matter where he lives on this worried and all too shatterable earth.

In the wake of the Great Famine of 1847, nearly one million immigrants fled Ireland for the United States. Among them was a farmer from Wexford County, Patrick Kehoe. Leaving his wife and seven children behind until he could establish himself in the New World, he first settled in Howard County, Maryland, where he found work as a stonemason. In 1850, he sent for his oldest son, Philip, a strapping seventeen-year-old. The rest of the family followed in 1851. By then, Michigan Fever—as the great surge of settlers during the 1830s came to be known—had subsided. Still, there was plenty of cheap and attractive land to be had for pioneering immigrants from the East. In 1855, Philip Kehoe, then twenty-two, left his family in Maryland and journeyed westward, settling in Lenawee County, roughly one hundred miles southeast of Bath. For two years, he worked as a hired hand, saving enough money to purchase 80 acres of timberland. That land became the basis of what would eventually expand into a flourishing 490-acre farm.1 In late 1858, he wed his first wife, twenty-six-year-old Mary Mellon, an Irish orphan raised by her uncle, a Catholic priest, who brought her to America when she was twenty. She died just two and a half years after her marriage, leaving Philip with their two young daughters, Lydia and a newborn girl named after her mother.2 Philip married again roughly three years later, in 1864. His second wife, twenty-nine at the time of their wedding, was the former Mary McGovern, a native New Yorker who had immigrated to Michigan with her parents when she was five. By the time of her death in 1890, at the age of fifty-five, she had borne Philip nine children: six girls and three boys. From the few extant documents that shed light on Philip Kehoe’s life during the twenty-six years of his second marriage, a picture emerges of a shrewd, industrious, civic-minded family man, an epitome of the immigrant success story.

Sometimes I get letters from non-Natives who have called me racist and insensitive to Natives untl they realize that I am Native myself. Non-Natives often walk up to me and say, "I didn't get the cartoon today," and I reply, "That's ok, I don't get the cartoons in The New Yorker either.

The leader of the Drexel refugees was Leon Black, a husky, brash, Dartmouth and Harvard Business School graduate in his 30s who was running the Drexel merger group out of New York. Black was a native New Yorker born into privilege. But his world shattered in 1975 when his father, Eli Black, then the chief executive of Chiquita banana importer United Brands, leaped to his death from his office in the Pan Am building above Grand Central Terminal. In the days after his death, United Brands was discovered to have made millions in bribes to Honduran officials in order to reduce taxes on banana exports.

He twitches through Times Square, resisting the urge to gawk like a tourist, groaning in native-New-Yorker frustration when the tourists get in his way—but in an eyeblink he's at Fourteenth Street, hurrying along a sidewalk and wondering if he should stop and pick up something for dinner from the farmers market and wondering if the doctor called in his prescription, and oh is it going to rain?

Alexander Hamilton, a native West Indian, naturalized New Yorker and extreme nationalist who had no roots in any regional culture.

She wanted to go on food tours of the Lower East Side, guided history walks in Tribeca, gospel brunches in Harlem, all of those things native (or at least “established”) New Yorkers tended to turn up their noses at, preferring to maintain a smug ignorance about their city.

The New Yorker, July 25, 2022 Issue When Tribal Nations Expel Their Black Members - Clashes between sovereignty rights and civil rights reveal an uncomfortable and complicated story about race and belonging in America. By Philip Deloria In 1979, an Oklahoma woman named Johnnie Mae Austin stopped getting mail from the Muscogee Nation. There were no more announcements of meetings, notices of elections, or news of monetary settlements. The problem wasn’t postal. Austin’s Muscogee citizenship had been erased by a new Muscogee constitution in which citizenship was defined “by blood,” words that named a fraught crossroads in Native and African American histories. The Muscogee people, also referred to as Creeks, were among the tribes that once enslaved people of African descent and that were required, in the wake of the Civil War, to accept them as tribal citizens. A tribal-enrollment census around the start of the twentieth century split the Muscogee citizenry into groups that were separate but by no means equal. One roll—the “by blood” roster—listed people of Creek heritage, while a second, “freedmen,” roll named Black Creek citizens, the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Austin’s ancestors appeared on the second roll. With the new constitution, Muscogee citizenship was reserved for those on the first roll, or their lineal descendants. And so Austin, after forty-seven years of being Creek, found her tribal identity legally and politically erased.

New Yorkers,” said Jim Tile, “think they’ve cornered the market on psychopaths. They don’t know Florida.

Even if, as many historians agree, the natives weren’t selling the land outright to the Dutch, they were clearly ceding the use of Manhattan to outsiders. They would have wanted significant payment for this.

Of course, he’d long resented Rick for pinning Kaylyn to his hip. They had a certain Ohio symmetry Bill could never mimic. They were sweethearts who were born in this town and believed in it, believed they were fated to raise a family here and cheer for all the Jaguar teams as long as civilization stayed standing. Bill was a transplant, a New Yorker who accidentally grew up in this struggling shitburgh, who just happened to fall for its native daughter.

Every man on the Explorer had a job to do, and with so many of the systems still works in progress, and only a very small window for the recovery, the crew had virtually no downtime. But when they could steal even a few hours, life was comfortable. A crew of fifteen cooks worked in the mess hall, keeping it provisioned twenty-four hours a day. At any moment, a crew member could stop into the mess and get a good, hot meal—rib eye steaks, lamb chops, burgers, seafood, as well as an array of salads, desserts, and freshly baked bread and pastries. For men who had only a few minutes, lounges around the ship were stocked with fresh fruit, nuts, candy, coffee, tea, and soft drinks. There was even a soft-serve ice cream machine. Two native New Yorkers had arranged for the cooks to buy and hide a large supply of bagels, lox, and cream cheese that they managed to conceal in the depths of the walk-in freezer—for a few days, until someone found the stash and word got out.

But maybe even native New Yorkers felt like tourists in the Square, dwarfed, wanting to look up and read the electronic headlines as they marched around and around up there.