This past weekend the wife and I attended a co-ed baby
shower for my friend and spiritual advisor Rabbi Jay Levitz and his wife Sarah. We were in Oceanside, Long
Island, New York, a short drive outside the city for us, as we live in Eastern
Queens. As we talked with Jay, the conversation turned to what constitutes the
“bridge and tunnel crowd.”
We all agreed that the term was more of a cultural construct
than a geographic one, though we acknowledge that the two go hand in hand in
many ways. Where I live now in Queens is not a trendy area at all and is too
far from any of the celebrated night life to become popular among the moneyed
classes or the upwardly mobile youth any time soon. That is actually a
blessing. We happen to have decent access to public transportation, though
getting into Manhattan always involves at least one bus and one train. My
commute to work is at least one bus and two subways, and it is terrible,
subject at all times to the fickle whims of the increasingly incompetent MTA.
The “bridge and tunnel” term may have been initially meant
to denote people coming from outside of New York City—especially from New
Jersey, considered by many to be a cultural leper colony filled with only guidos and hill people. But my current
settings would qualify me as a bridge and tunnel crowd person when I venture
into Manhattan for cultural events.
Manhattan was once the undisputed epicenter of New York
City’s cultural life. Now that cultural life is much more diffuse and spread
through the outer boroughs, most prominently in Brooklyn. New movie theaters,
restaurants and music venues are more likely to be opening in Brooklyn or
Queens today than in Manhattan. Accordingly, real estate prices in the outer
boroughs are still going through the roof.
This shift has made use of the term “Bridge and Tunnel” a
bit outdated, but the cultural chasm between whose who perceive themselves as
cultured city residents and the people who travel to the city only on the
weekends to party is not gone. Someone who takes the Long Island Rail Road from
Mineola to see a concert in Brooklyn is considered part of the bridge and
tunnel crowd, though they did not use a bridge or tunnel (yes, I understand
that the LIRR in Brooklyn does use subway tunnels and uses overpasses on its
way to the city; shut up).
And these social demarcations between what is city and what
is not stretch to the outer boroughs as well. I mentioned that I drove to Long
Island to attend a baby shower this weekend, but as I live in Queens, I already
live on Long Island. When New Yorkers talk about “Long Island” they don’t mean
the Island itself but Nassau and Suffolk Counties, the parts of the Island that
lie outside of the border of New York City.
I could never justify the expense of living in a more trendy
or celebrated area of Manhattan. I had a chance to move to the Upper East Side
one time. I looked at an apartment in Yorkville and realized that I would be doubling my rent and would still not
be able to fit the modest furniture from my small studio in Ozone Park, Queens
into the new place. It wasn’t worth the money. I could have said I lived on the
Upper East Side, but I’d be living like a hobbit.
So while proximity to Manhattan is become less and less of a
cultural touchstone to judge a neighborhood, I propose a new measure of the
value of where you live: proximity to live Shakespeare.
A good measure of the value of any place to live is how far
away you are from some free Shakespeare. When I lived in Inwood in uptown Manhattan, it had yet to become a trendy place to live
and people hadn’t heard of it. But I lived across the street from Inwood Hill
Park which had free Shakespeare plays every
summer. Score.
I can’t easily walk to free Shakespeare like that, but I am
a very short trip from more than one of the venues of the free Shakespearein the Park in Queens.
Some will argue that this Shakespeare standard is an unfair
way to judge where you live, but I don’t think so. I don’t want my children to
live in a world where they can’t easily see some free Shakespeare every summer.
I’ll be dragging their soggy asses to Two Gentlemen of Verona this season; I
won’t need a bridge or tunnel to get there.
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