The Great Ganesha

Picture Source: Manhattan Elsewhere

The wife pointed me to overstated.net, a blog by a Bay Area software engineer. I realize how exciting that sounds, but there’s more. The guy has listed, for every SF neighbourhood (left), a counterpart in NYC (right). For instance:

Financial District	Midtown
North Beach	Little Italy
Union Square	Soho
Soma	Tribeca
Haight Ashbury	East Village
Castro	West Village
Mission	Williamsburg

[link]

This is just a selection, and I’m sure some of you would take issue to even some of these. Many people have left extended comments at the original post so I’m not even going to go there. You can check out all of the comments yourself.

But there was one interesting comment that I’d like to point out. An observation about the whole comparison by a “Bay Area Native”:

As a Bay Area native (exact location withheld to protect the innocent) who permanently moved to NYC 8 years ago, it always amazes me how people around the country compare/contrast their cities with NYC (and other places). But in NYC itself, no one really does that. I guess if you live in the greatest city in the world, you don?t have to define your home in terms of someplace else (e.g., ?Buenos Aires is the Paris of Latin America?). [link]

And (s)he follows that up with another comment:

Years ago, a woman was bragging to me about some special university program she was accepted into, and she described it as ?the Harvard of the South.? It just struck me that, if you have to define yourself by reference to something else, you ain?t all that. I mean, do people at Harvard run around saying ?We?re the [fill in the blank university] of the Northeast?? I doubt it. Harvard is Harvard. Period. No need to associate Harvard with anything else. It stands quite nicely on its own. [link]

An interesting observation. One that my old philosophy professor from school would find interesting to analyze, I’m sure.

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