Native New York Tourist

I was born at Mount Sinai on 59th Street, I had my first bacon, egg, and cheese at six years old, and I started taking the subway by myself in fifth grade. In all respects, I consider myself a native New Yorker who loves and knows her city, and like all New Yorkers, there is one unspoken rule that I have followed my whole life: always look down.

New York City is the greatest city in the world. Yet, truth be told, walking through the city is a bit like participating in an obstacle course: avoiding dog poop, weaving through crowds, and navigating construction sites. I have come scarily close to a sidewalk disaster too many times to count. Like generations of New Yorkers before me, I’ve learned to keep my head down and my eyes trained on the concrete. 

On the other hand are the tourists. Along with many others, I’ve always shared a baseline dislike for them. They’re loud, annoying, and somehow incapable of walking at a reasonable speed—maybe partly because they disobey the cardinal rule of watching the street. They have their heads up, gazing at the skyscrapers with open-mouthed wonder while the rest of us shuffle past. But despite my previous misgivings, as the city welcomed an explosion of them for the FIFA World Cup, my opinion of tourists completely changed.

As I watched viral videos of tourists online, I saw a new side of New York City. I watched as tourists flocked to Times Square to do an impressively synchronized “Viking Row” right through a peaceful yoga class. They joined open-air salsa circles in Washington Square Park and packed into sports bars with candid joy. Watching these spectacles from afar, I realized that despite living here my whole life, I didn’t know New York. I was just commuting through it. So, driven by a fear of missing out, I pledged to start enjoying my hometown like a tourist.

I forced myself out of the safe haven of my neighborhood to take advantage of the free summer activities I’d always ignored. I lined up for Shakespeare in the Park’s As You Like It and Othello, brought a blanket to the Bryant Park Monday movie nights, and took the train to the beach each week. I discovered Brooklyn’s Chinatown in Sunset Park and even attended a book reading at the NYU Deutsches Haus. I had absorbed the cynical rules of being a “real” New Yorker: avoid Times Square, never talk to strangers, and keep moving. Playing by a new set of rules made me realize how much culture and connection I was missing out on.

I soon found myself testing those new rules in a more uncomfortable setting. As a volunteer for a candidate running for Congress, I was given the imposing task of handing out flyers to people on the street and knocking on the doors of total strangers. I actually felt like a clueless tourist, unsure of the city around me and bracing for a scathing response from the locals. After all, I had always thought New Yorkers were unwilling to talk to strangers. True to form, most people I met were uninterested in talking, but a surprising number took the time to interact with me and ask questions. They shared what they thought of a new development being discussed in their neighborhood, how they dealt with money (or a lack of it), and how tired they were of contentious politics. In a city notorious for its cold shoulder, these brief encounters revealed a kinder and more engaged side of New York that I had never bothered to look for before.

After a few days of talking to strangers, I noticed a change in myself. I became more comfortable approaching passersby, and the timid tourist persona I had initially adopted morphed into something that felt more like myself; I could laugh with strangers and bond over shared experiences. Ironically, it was only by approaching my city like an outsider that I learned how to feel more at home within it.

At the beginning of the summer, a different sporting event had foreshadowed this possibility. The Knicks’ generational run in the 2026 playoffs gathered more than eight million people into what felt for a precious few weeks like a cohesive community. I’ve been a big basketball fan since I was a kid watching my 6’6” brother dunk on his middle school defenders. But it wasn’t the high-quality basketball played out on a big screen that was most special. What I really loved was how die-hard supporters and new fans cheered together. For a few weeks, the city seemed to have a shared language and a shared excitement. 

The Knicks showed me that New Yorkers are capable of coming together around a common passion. What I learned through my campaigning work was that they always were, and that sometimes you just need to take the first step.

Now, months later, I’m left with a single question: how can we experience that same vibrant, connected New York without depending on a sports victory to bring us together or a campaign job that forces you to reach out?

I might have found an answer a few days ago. My dad took me to a bench in Central Park where an old man comes each day to feed a group of baby raccoons, along with the squirrels and pigeons (our fellow New Yorkers). We only exchanged brief pleasantries, and I never even learned the old man’s name, but for the next hour, we fed the animals together. He didn’t just know the animals. He had a long conversation with a woman walking her dog and shared his animal feed with another of his friends who happened to walk by. I was struck by the familiarity of it all. This old man had created his own small community in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities, and somehow had made strangers like me feel welcome in it. This was what I had been searching for all summer: not to be a tourist in my city, but to become part of its beating heart.

As Stuyvesant students, our lives are dictated by a grueling, monotonous cycle: transit, school, studying, sleep, repeat. We focus so much on academics that we forget we’re in the greatest city in the world. Soon, we’ll go off to college, and it may be a long time before we’re able to return to our city. We shouldn’t wait for an international tournament or viral video to remind us why the rest of the world dreams of coming here. Why do visitors get to have all the fun when we residents spend our days stressed out and busy? What we need to do is take a beat, look up, and we might discover that there’s much more to our city than we’ve ever noticed.