
Today is one of the 2 days each year when the sun lines up with Manhattan's grid - echair
http://haydenplanetarium.org/resources/starstruck/manhattanhenge/
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wallflower
Manhattan Solstice.

There are three from yesterday's event but this photo from earlier in the year
is visually stunning. I can't imagine the traffic slowdown driving sunwards.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/kliman/2539479392/>

[http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=manhattan+solstice&s=rec](http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=manhattan+solstice&s=rec)

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ivankirigin
The best part about flying into LaGuardia is landing parallel to Manhattan's
avenues. Seeing each street pass by is excellent.

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prakash
why is this on HN?

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alabut
I don't know why this is on HN either but I'm a sucker for anything NY. It's
the most usable and creative city on the planet and big part of it is the
perfect grid system of its streets and subways. Wayfinding and transportation
is a snap and there's an art gallery, museum, school, park or something else
inspiring on practically every corner. Heck, even the libraries are awesome -
the main branch of the ny public library is so beautiful that they film movies
and host weddings in it, and its backyard is Bryant Park, which has its own
website and been carpeted with free wifi since before it was cool.

The effect of combining a quick and easy to use public transporation system
with an amazing amount of technical and artistic talent is that it lowers the
activitation energy of participation to almost zero. You don't have a good
excuse to not check out some cool new gallery, exhibit or user group meeting,
or simply hang out with a friend on short notice, because the cost in time and
energy is as close to zero as you can get. Well, as close as you can get
without a Jetsons- or Minority Report-style personal rapid transport system
like the SkyTran:

<http://unimodal.com/>

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ojbyrne
"most usable and creative city." I think you need to travel more. "usable and
creative" is fine, but "most" I object to. I love New York, but I also love
Barcelona, Montreal, London and San Francisco. The best cities are a bit like
beautiful women - uniquely great each in their own way.

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alabut
"I think you need to travel more"

You're making false assumptions about where I've lived or travelled without
refuting my points about New York. I live in San Francisco (the
bart+muni+caltrain system here is actually quite horrible - it's inefficient,
expensive, the coverage is weak and frankly it's smelly) and it's nickname as
"the most East Coast city on the West Coast" is not well-earned at all, it's
just due to the rest of California being completely and utterly car-based and
without decent public transportation.

I've also travelled a lot, including Europe since all of my relatives are in
Turkey. Barcelona is great, it's kind of like a cross between my hometown of
San Diego (it's also 2 million people and sunny) and New York (great art
scene, up-til-dawn nightlife and a city-wide metro) but it's on a much smaller
scale.

And it's not simply a bias towards big cities - trying to find my way around
Tokyo was a nightmare. I love Japan and it was one of the most beautiful
places I've ever been, but the trains inside cities (not the bullet trains
between them) aren't even run by the same companies, there's several parallel
networks in place.

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Tokyo_sub...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Tokyo_subway_map.PNG)

I can see London being very similar, considering New York modelled its subway
system on the London Underground. Just looking at the two different subway
maps makes me think NY is a vast improvement though, considering that one is a
grid that maps directly to the streets and the other is a confusing circular
spaghetti-looking mess. Most large European cities tend to have a similar
layout of concentric circles (due to castles and moats and whatnot) and I find
that using polar coordinates to get around isn't very intuitive compared to
simple square x-y grids. If I look at a map of New York, it's easy to say "ok,
I need to go two over and 5 up to get where I want to be."

Saying that cities are "uniquely great each in their own way" is fine, I'm not
saying any other cities aren't great and that New York is better than them in
all respects. In fact, New York is a horrible place to get lonely - if you
don't already have a lot of friends, nothing's lonelier than being surrounded
by millions of people all in a rush to get somewhere else and too busy to meet
new people.

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ojbyrne
I apologize for the pejorative tone. I overreacted to the word "most."

It's entirely possible, of course, that all the cities we're talking about are
too large to be the best city, that in fact smaller cities (I'm in one right
now - Ottawa, Canada) actually function better overall.

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alabut
Apology accepted and upvoted :)

You made a very understandable mistake, the same one that a lot of my friends
do whenever I rave about how great New York is. Just because it's the best in
several aspects doesn't mean it's the best place to live.

And you could be right about the size of a city being a much larger factor in
quality of life than easy public transportation. I actually like SF very much,
despite the shitty public transportation, and a big part of that is because
it's smaller (about a tenth the size of New York) and yet still has high
population density (second highest to only New York). My friends in even
smaller places like Boulder (a tenth the size of SF) love the lifestyle and
startup scene there too.

Either way, this conversation seems better suited in person, like the kind
you'd have over a beer after a workshop in some other city.

