Kips Bay, Turtle Bay, Murray Hill, Midtown East. Whatever you call that general area, there’s a decent chance you think it’s boring.
Everything seems to be either a doctor’s office, a bank branch or a parking garage. Much of the architecture is made of anodyne postwar steel. (I.M. Pei’s brutalist Kips Bay Towers is a cool exception.) If you’re into culture, there’s a big AMC with IMAX. There are frozen yogurt shops. You get it.
And yet, for 15 years now, I’ve been trekking to Murray Hill for my annual physical, and every time, I leave feeling like it has some kind of special New York City magic. Maybe it’s the giddy lightheadedness that comes from fasting all day and then getting blood drawn, or maybe I just like my doctor. (Lucky me.)
But on a recent trip back to the neighborhood, I noticed something for the first time: There didn’t appear to be any tourists.
Now, I’m pro-tourist. They’re good for the local economy, and I find it fun when a family of six in Oklahoma State fan gear blithely hops on the 1 train, especially given some of the post-pandemic doomsaying about urban decline.
But I also appreciate that New York, unlike some other famous cities I don’t need to slander, isn’t just a museum of itself. It’s a vibrant city where people actually live and work. And Murray Hill, I’d argue, is a paragon of that vibrancy.
In the literal shadow of some of the most famous skyscrapers on Earth, you have a modest, busy little neighborhood full of nurses and doctors, doormen and crossing guards, serviceable diners and better-than-serviceable Indian restaurants. Then, inexplicably, there’s a Dover Street Market.
The author trying on a Rick Owens leather ensemble at Dover Street Market
And then you have the fratty transplants. Fine! Unlike their peers south of 14th Street, there’s no goofy pretense about living somewhere with Bohemian heritage; they’re not butchering the name; they’re not spritzing on St. Mark’s Place. Junior accountants coming from elsewhere need a place to live, work, go to the gym and drink.
During my recent neighborhood tour, I was talking with a young woman from Massachusetts wearing a “New York” T-shirt who seemed really excited to go meet a friend at a nearby coffee shop. Which one? She didn’t know the name; it was a place her friend, who lives in the area, “loves.” And that’s perfect — it’ll be their place, until it becomes something else for another generation of newcomers.
The day all this ends — when Murray Hill stops employing nurses, prices out the state school transplants, closes the last remaining diners that aren’t doing a thing — there may not be the same kind of eulogy you’d see with a sexier neighborhood.
But I’d mourn. I look forward to coming back here, at least once a year, until I’m dead.
