The bi-coastal bug
Two and a half years ago I traded New York for Los Angeles - and from time to time I need to reflect on what proper city living is all about.
New York's grit is an antidote to LA's glam
It’s a radical transition – to palm trees from skyscrapers, foot to freeway, seansons to sunshine and non-stop, in-your-face hustle and bustle to selective human contact.
New York is an invigorating place and a great reminder of the infectious buzz the combination of frantic industry, crowds and a spectacular urban setting can create.
For me, New York is normally the geographic halfway point to London. In many ways, of course, it’s far closer to the UK capital, my former home of a decade, than LA.
Both New York and London are cultural hubs brimming with creativity and multifarious experience, oversubscribed and overpriced with signature skylines and majestic landmarks. Both have proper public transport, cold weather and permanent branches of the exclusive members club Soho House.
It’s not surprising many London-to-New York transplants find they are frequently torn between the two.
Los Angeles and New York are much more distant relatives. So much so I always find it puzzling when people declare themselves truly bicoastal, unable to choose just one, with an apartment in both cities and a life split between the two.
Manhattan is compact, a pedestrian’s paradise. Los Angeles is a sea of never-ending development and a hundred different cities, most accessible only by car. Parts of downtown LA yet to receive the developer’s makeover - the fashion district or Broadway – may feel like a movie set built to resemble 1940s New York.
But many of the wealthier enclaves, with their ostentatious mansions, desert vegetation and infinity pools, couldn’t be further from NY’s urban grey. Then there are artsy beach communities of Santa Monica and Venice where the beautiful disco dance on roller-skates or haul themselves into the surf. You don’t see much of that on Park Avenue.
LA is mainly low-rise. The car is king. You don’t think twice before driving 20 miles for dinner and people’s homes are, compared to Manhattan, vast.
In LA, you can climb a vertiginous canyon trail amid lizards and cicadas and feel miles from the city, only to turn a corner and spy shimmering sprawl stretching to the horizon. It can take an hour to travel five miles. There are so many car crashes LA has its own accident lexicon such as ‘the sig alert’: “any unplanned event that causes the closing of one lane of traffic for 30 minutes or more”.
But you can also feel a bit removed from other people. In New York there’s no escaping the density – 10,300 people per square kilometer as opposed to 3,100 – and there’s a different kind of intensity: life in close-up with never-ending shrieking sirens, blaring horns, pavements jam-packed with pedestrians.
