Orienting yourself to life all over New York City

If you’re reading this, chances are you go to Columbia University in the City of New York. Getting oriented here seems easy enough, it’s right there in the university’s official name.

This is the town of everybody who’s somebody and anybody who’s a nobody. Frank Sinatra said if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. But it would also be fair to say that New York is a place for people who wouldn’t make it anywhere else (cue Woody Allen reference here).

At the moment, you’re navigating your way around your new home of the next four years, located in Morningside Heights. That’s sometimes known as the Upper West Side. Sometimes known as West Harlem. Sometimes Northern Manhattan. You will find that you inhabit all of these worlds, which refer to the same general geographic space but certainly not the same place.

On your tour as a prospective student, you were probably told that Columbia is in the intellectual acropolis of New York City, where students blissfully contemplate Sartre from within our iron gates—surrounded by the Manhattan School of Music, Union Theological Seminary, and St. John the Divine—a hub that self-perpetuates through the pollination of thought. But our neighbors just a few blocks north have long been told that the University is an integral part of the Harlem community, connected, grounded, invested (literally and figuratively) in the less privileged people to whom we stand adjacent.

All this is true, and false, by varying degrees. Ultimately, this is your first lesson in New York. The shadows cast by these big, tall buildings can appear different depending on the time of day and from what angle you look.

You can call yourself an Upper West Sider if you want, and stroll past the old Metro theater building (soon to be Urban Outfitters), down to Lincoln Plaza Cinemas for a Swedish film Sunday matinee. You can call yourself a Harlemite, and head up for a bite of tapas at Floridita’s and then go dancing at the Cotton Club. (Though that’s just West Harlem—head east to go deeper into historic Harlem towards the Apollo, or jazz clubs like the Lenox Lounge, or Sunday Gospel brunch at Sylvia’s.)

You can go in both directions, or you can do neither and just take the subway down to the East Village/Lower East Side on Saturday night like everybody else. Or hop in a cab and check out the Upper East Side, fictional home to the Gossip Girls and their dreamy male counterparts. Soon you’ll be spotting cast members film around the Met and sending texts to your friends in a meta re-enactment of the show itself which, I promise, will get you saying “OMFG!”

I suggest you do it all. We may not know where we stand (in more ways than one), but that’s what makes us New Yorkers, isn’t it? As long as we’re here, mixed up with everybody else, this city is everybody and anybody, all over. It is an extraordinary place, mostly because it’s a million places at once.

Oh, and if you’re coming home drunk from a warehouse party in Brooklyn at 4 a.m., invest in a cab.