Outlying towns and the endemic sense that culture happens somewhere else.
I live in a region that outsiders routinely fall in love with, but many of the natives look to the horizon to find where they belong.
I was born and raised in a place that sees itself as the center of the universe, but I've lived for over 30 years in a city with a really bad case of low self-esteem.
I left New York City about three months shy of my 18th birthday, traveling about 400 miles north and west across my home state and landing in the vastly smaller-scaled city of Rochester to begin my freshman year of college. I’ve never left. In all the time I’ve been here — living in my adoptive home almost twice as long as I lived in my hometown — I haven’t felt much of a burning sense that I need to be somewhere else in order to create my life on my own terms. And I certainly haven’t felt pulled back into the Big Apple’s orbit, as if it’s a no-brainer that I’d need to return there to maximize opportunities.
Admittedly, one does find more opportunities in larger urban centers, but one also encounters more competition in those places, and that can have a de-valuing effect. If employers know that there are a thousand other people willing to take the same job as you, it’s much harder to negotiate from a position of leverage. And sure, in my experience, there is something about the pace and mentality of a small-sized city that lacks the competitive spark required for people to push themselves. In certain respects, I would say that the city I live in now is too comfortable.
But I’m not just talking about career prospects. I’m talking about a more profound feeling that leaves one with a sense of being excluded from the flow of life. I’ve never experienced that feeling myself, but I would say it's rampant in the place I now call home. I would go so far as to call it a regional affliction — an unmistakable perception of culture as something that people here feel they have no stake in shaping unless they uproot themselves and go towards it.
I would ask you to take a moment to let it sink in just how serious it would be to look at life as something you’re on the outside of. The effects of this go much further than my usual gripes against musical trends and whatever’s fashionable lately. What I’m addressing is far more serious, with much broader ramifications. I mean, think about what it feels like to not have a sense of place…
Located in the western part of New York State between Buffalo and Syracuse and diagonally across Lake Ontario from Toronto (about a two and a half hour drive around the lake), Rochester is situated sort of in the rust belt and sort of (but not exactly) at the threshold of the Midwest. It’s also a tech hub in a way that’s both a relic of the 20th (and 19th) century and also at the cutting-edge of modernity and corporate commerce. Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch + Lomb were all founded here, and they all maintain a pivotal presence to this day. Without question, there’s a prominent research / science element that the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the state-of-the-art Strong Memorial Hospital all play a major role in as well. (Trivia: part of the plutonium experimentation on human subjects for The Manhattan Project was conducted here.)
Still, even as those institutions continue to confer a sense of distinction and prosperity, there's an undercurrent of stagnation that's hard to avoid. I once saw a black and white photo of Rochester's Main Street in the early 1900s and was shocked to see throngs of people packed so densely that I would have believed it was a photo of Manhattan. When that photo was taken, Rochester was considered a boomtown, but that self-image has most certainly not endured. By the time I arrived here in 1990, I could very clearly see that I was in a de-industrialized city that had cratered both economically and psychically. And within days of being here, I was struck by the way certain local business proprietors treated their customers with unrestrained dismissiveness. It’s by no means a regular feature of retail around here, but I did notice that two of the most celebrated businesses in this city didn't even try to hide the fact that they treated their customers as an imposition. It's almost as if they were gleeful about it. Clearly there was nothing to check them or incentivize them to do otherwise.
I won’t name those businesses, partly because I went to one of them recently after vowing, ages ago, never to set foot in there again. I was quite pleasantly surprised. Back when I first got here, though, it would have been generous to say that the staff there were frosty. It’s telling that this is one of the businesses that locals brag about the most. This business attracts a great deal of outside attention and serves as a kind of standalone tourist attraction. The esteem with which this business is regarded locally is indicative of a default reflex: This business is (was) so shambolic that it would never fly elsewhere but it’s being >noticed< in the ‘real’ world, so therefore it must be a good thing and we should let them keep treating us like dirt.
By contrast, Big Apple residents certainly aren’t the friendliest or most accommodating bunch when it comes to customer service, but there’s a key difference: at least during the years that I was growing up there, New Yorkers walking in off the street wouldn’t typically expect someone in a store or a greasy spoon to greet them warmly, but they would expect to be treated with a minimum level of respect. To me, the difference was so glaring it was like a splash of cold water to the face. I remember thinking “People back home would never put up with this. This place would be burned to the ground.” My sense of this fundamental difference in attitude — a difference in self-worth — only got more pronounced the more I settled into the flow of life up here and got to know people.
I couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that people in this town suffer from collective low self-esteem. And it’s odd, because if you survey people who’ve come to this area from other iconic, highly cosmopolitan cities, sure you’ll get the folks who complain about the modest size and pace — people who would rush to say “this place is boring!” because they haven’t removed their big-city lenses and tuned their vision to properly detect charms and amenities that aren’t necessarily right up in your face. Nevertheless, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of Rochester transplants rave about how much they love it here. And, much to my surprise, many non-locals I know who came here for school but then left for chic destinations like Denver, DC, Honolulu, San Francisco, Seattle, etc have said they would move back here in a heartbeat.
I myself have mixed feelings, but those feelings tilt most heavily towards appreciation and even abiding love. I’ve always said that if this town were a person, it would be a very attractive person who always wears frumpy clothes and thus sees themselves as frumpy — not just frumpy in appearance, but frumpy to the bone, a frump that hangs over the person’s entire bearing. And yet, as inaccurate and unfair as this assessment may be, it remains unshakeable. Even when people around here try to show civic pride, it tends to center around a sense of “Hey, we belong too.” Pride is measured here in terms of our potential to catch up to other places where culture and being comfortable in one’s own skin is taken for granted.
It's too bad, because while Rochester lacks the swagger, combustive energy, and surface cosmopolitanism of larger urban centers, it does have many big-city benefits without many of the hassles. As a friend of mine once put it after I took a trip back home, when you live in New York, it’s not like you can just run home to freshen up. On that trip, I found myself lugging a backpack around Manhattan all day long because it was way too impractical to go back and forth from midtown Manhattan to the north Bronx four times in the same day. Indeed, the widespread perception that you can get anything anytime in New York is something of an illusion. Anything you do there requires an enormous expenditure of energy. And that’s just not the case here.
You don’t get as much of an energetic charge from Rochester’s urban landscape, but the environment overall doesn’t demand as much of your energy either. For a city of well under a million people, Rochester affords access to culture way out of proportion to its size. Pre-pandemic, it was just a fact of life that I’d have to skip a good half-dozen to a dozen interesting events per week. So we have more than enough access to culture. Access isn’t the issue. The problem is that people here don’t feel like they define culture. And there’s a pervasive sense that culture happens elsewhere. I would say that that really gnaws at people.
In my view, not only does this outlook render the locals impressionable — way too easily awed by the self-important bluster that surrounds industries like music journalism — but it fosters an existential dissatisfaction that I find deeply unhealthy, emotionally corrosive, tragic and, worst of all, totally unnecessary. It’s not just that people feel dazzled by music, films, fashion, books and the entire edifice built around those things — they feel like they’re missing out on life. And this sparks a desire to go chasing after the horizon, a feeling that one can’t actually exist unless they go somewhere else to invent themselves.
I say “chasing after the horizon” because, by definition the horizon is something that can’t be caught. Technically, the analogy doesn’t fit: many people leave here and go on to thrive in their careers. But when I say “horizon,” I’m referring to something internal, the type of craving that can never be satisfied by external changes. Because most often, people don’t leave here simply to advance their careers, but to feel like they’ve finally become someone. I wonder if they feel the way kids do when, on turning a year older on their birthday, they realize with some deflation that they don’t actually feel any different.
This is all easy for me to say. As a native New Yorker, after all, I was born with a silver spoon of sorts: I grew up with an inherent sense that culture was mine — not only to observe, but to participate in. Of course, this feeling has followed me up here. I don’t have to go anywhere for it, and can only shrug away my concern whenever people seem out-of-joint with their own geo-civic lot in life.
To be fair, Rochester is hardly the only place in the world that people yearn to get away from. In fact, we should all nurse a craving to try something different than what we grew up immersed in. You might be surprised, in fact, to find that even some NYC natives feel stifled, trapped, and limited in their surroundings, much as someone who lives in a one-stoplight town off the Thruway might feel.
New York, naturally, has the opposite problem as smaller, out-of-the-way places that see themselves as provincial backwaters: it has too much self-esteem. It always irritated me to no end that so much of the art made in New York focused on — what else? — New York as its primary topic. There are exceptions — I’ve always adored, for example, the way The Ramones imbued some of the city’s landmarks with a glow of romance.
But spend any time in NYC and you’ll soon discover that you can’t get people to shut up about the fact that they’re in NYC and how great it is that they have everything they would ever need and want right there at their disposal and blah-blah-blah. This insistence on narrowing one’s horizons — on constantly telling oneself that there’s no horizon to even acknowledge, much less chase — never worked for me.
Don’t get me wrong: New York is most definitely an exciting place, but it’s not the center of the universe, and to lack the basic curiosity to experience new things under the premise that “Well, I’m already in the place to be” always looked to me like a form of spiritual atrophy. I mean, New York very clearly has its limits. For one, it’s an extremely provincial place, believe it or not. A sizeable chunk of the people who live there rarely ever venture beyond the neighborhoods they live and work in. Not unlike European peasants in the Middle Ages, they exist within a closed circuit, a million tiny fish ponds stacked into a giant megalopolis.
The truth is that it’s often the people who migrate to New York that import much of the culture and energy, though that obviously wasn’t the case with, say, the birth of hip hop. But when filmmakers like Martin Scorcese, Woody Allen, and Spike Lee are content with confining their entire creative universe to New York, it not only irritates me, but it makes me question why. I find it odd that such relentlessly creative people would allow their work to express a renunciation of curiosity. And I could probably rattle off two dozen musical examples of the same phenomenon.
I don’t know, maybe those artists needed to convey that kind of New York-centric message because they needed to convince themselves that they were in rarefied air, that their lives wouldn't be validated or meaningful unless their surroundings lived up to all the hype. Like when, as a middle-schooler or high-schooler, you finally get invited to a party where the “cool kids” are holding court and you’re sitting there going “So this is what all the fuss was about?”
I don’t mean to diminish the actual substance and activity that New York offers. (I mean, duh.) I’m talking about the overhanging attitude that all of that substance and activity should automatically be viewed as the epicenter of human culture and existence. Very few native New Yorkers actually take advantage of all that culture, it’s just the hubris that rubs off on them by osmosis. That said, one benefit to breathing-in that ever-present sense of “this is where it all happens” is that you mostly don’t bat an eyelash at the idea that famous people have walked the same steps as you. There are just too many famous people and legendary places for any single one to matter all that much.
I mean, I could see it causing a stir if a really well-known public figure like, say, Kanye West or Tom Brady stepped into a crowded subway car, but even then half the people would either not recognize the person or be too aloof to act like they cared. And a bunch of them might genuinely not care. So I have to shake my head at how big a deal it is to Rochestarians that David Bowie was arrested here for drug possession in 1976. It seems exceedingly thirsty for relevance that this incident from five decades ago is still talked about with such reverence. And it brings to mind the painful truth that two people can have an interaction that one person views as life-changing while the other person barely remembers it.
Bowie’s arrest certainly has a folksy charm to (as does this almost wholesome sidebar), but I think we’re better off looking at it as an odd curiosity than something to cling to, as if a deity had descended from Mt. Olympus and left a smear of Olympian particles where his ass touched the wood of the bench in the holding cell. There’s a kind of “Jesus walked here” vibe that I don’t think is good for anyone, a fascination with being touched — ever so briefly — by the glow of CELEBRITY, as if for one fleeting moments the gods of fame and fashioned deemed us worthy.
Sure, the mugshot photo is impressive, and you can see why trivia-minded Bowie fans from around the world would gravitate to it for novelty value, but if you’re from here and you put a poster of that mugshot up on your wall, you’re basically signalling that you’re happy with whatever pop-culture breadcrumbs fall from the table. It reminds me of when people from this area root for the New York Yankees — a team whose stadium I grew up three blocks away from. “You know,” I’m fond of telling these people, “that most New Yorkers can’t even find Rochester on a map, right? If they’ve even heard of it at all…”
I always say this with the intention of pouring cold water on their attachment to the team. I say it with the intention to shatter the magic for them. Why? Doesn’t that seem cruel? Well, I do it because I think it’s unnecessary — and kind of sad — to try so hard to own a stake in something that looks down on you and considers you trivial if it even knows you exist at all. Is that cruel? No — it’s a form of encouragement to take a sober inventory of what’s actually yours, and of what you have right in front of you.
Another benefit to growing up in “the city that never sleeps” is that it’s considered highly virtuous down there to not behave in an overtly sycophantic manner. Sure, New Yorkers get caught up in a lot of artifice and nonsense — and they have to export that artifice to the rest of the world to convince themselves that it had value to begin with. To say the least, New Yorkers are very susceptible to getting high off their own fumes…
But let’s say you’re a famous billionaire NBA owner and you happen to cross paths with a 9 year-old Dominican kid on that kid’s home turf in Washington Heights. The kid might ask for a selfie and might pick your brain about the team. He might even call out to his friends and family to come and witness his interaction with you. But he’s also going to have a more grounded sense of where his domain is. And in his domain, your billionaire status and fame are way less likely to cow him. In other words, people raised that way know where they stand and tend to stand in their own strength no matter who they're around.
Just yesterday, I was made aware that if you look really closely, you can spot an inscription on one of the lightsabers in a scene from The Empire Strikes Back. The inscription reads “ROCHESTER NEW YORK,” because the lightsaber handle was made out of a re-purposed old camera part (a flashbulb holder) that was made here at the company that eventually became Kodak. Again, it’s an interesting story, but as far as I know, since this bit of trivia first came to light in 2019, it hasn’t taken-on the same sacred aura as Bowie’s arrest — really odd considering how massive the Star Wars phenomenon is and how fanatical it's fans can be.
I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t have civic pride — even, for example, as someone who doesn’t care much about the Oscars and isn’t the biggest Philip Seymour Hoffman fan, I definitely found myself welling up with pride the night he won Best Actor for his once-in-a-lifetime performance in Capote. But when you’re truly proud of your town, you know that its value isn’t contingent solely on its being recognized from on high.
Growing up in the never-ending thrum of one of the world’s foremost engines of culture, I’ve never felt comfortable with the way so many people there had no interest in giving the rest of the country so much as a second thought.
The people in America’s “flyover” regions need to understand that there are trade-offs inherent to living in bigger cities, which tends to dehumanize their inhabitants. By all means, go live in one of them if you feel the need to, but do so with the understanding that you’re bringing something to those places as well. You didn’t exist nowhere — you came from a place, a place with its own character, attributes, and legacy. And it’s not like your life doesn’t begin until you arrive somewhere else.
Because with that mindset, you’re almost guaranteeing that you’ll never get to what you’re looking for.
<3 SRK