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Dept. Of Why Is This Still A Thing We Talk About: Philly Mag Wants To Talk About New Yorkers Moving To Philly Again

Look, we get it. You lived in New York. It was awesome. And then, you couldn’t afford it anymore. So you moved here. We’ve been talking about it (and avoiding talking about it) for years, so why does it keep coming up? Philadelphia Magazine figures that if you can give people a new, cutesy, nickname (“NY-Delphians”), and make sure the author is actually originally from the area, you can still make it a story. But, while the snobby-vibe the article gives off is palpable (Look at all of the quotes I got from my daycare mom friends!), the real reading of interest is in the comments. Our favorite is the one where a woman who lives in Brooklyn says she has her eyes on Philly in the future and will, “be rooting for Philly from the sidelines and keeping an eye it.” Of course, by “favorite” we mean “least favorite,” and by “least favorite” we mean “For the love of all that is holy can we stop talking about this.” Philly Mag, we didn’t think it was even possible anymore considering how low our expectations are, but we’re disappointed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2012 at 2:01 pm.

  • Beer Summit

    Susan G Thomas’s article speaks to Philadelphia Magazine’s readership: stupendously boring, wealthy suburbanites with too much disposable income and too little imagination. It says nothing about the vast majority of us who have moved from NYC to Philly. We have lives nothing like hers. We don’t exist in her world.

    We’re not Chestnut Hill label whores eating expensive pastries and sending our children to tony private schools. Back in NYC, Thomas lived in a hopelessly bourgeois bubble in Park Slope and after that “slumming it” in Red Hook with her $860,000 mortgage. She carries on in that bubble now that she’s here, surrounding herself with kindred out-of-touch over-entitled people. She’s completely unaware that most of us who have made the move here have lives nothing like hers.

    Many of us who moved here from Brooklyn came first to visit friends. We were blown away with how great it is here, fell in love with Philly, and eventually came back with a U-Haul. Some of us still live on ramen noodle but now can at least afford our rents. We don’t think we’re any better than anyone else. We’re just trying to get by.

  • thegreengrass

    You answered your own question. This is a thing because nothing drives up pageviews like a torrent of angry comments on a “OH NO NEW YORKERS” blog post. PhillyMag’s gotta pay the bills somehow, I guess.

  • thegreengrass

    Also, jesus christ I feel internet-old. I remember reading all this “sixth borough” shit online years ago, and now the page where the archive is looks like some faded piece of paper found in a pile of historic documents. Damn. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/fashion/sundaystyles/14PHILLY.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

  • PeteQuince

    A couple of years ago, Gothamist posted a chart showing that NYC—PHL migration peaked in the mid–2000′s; meanwhile the number of Philadelphians moving to New York kept going up through the rest of the decade. Philadelphia’s net gain dropped to almost zero as of the end of 2009 (and if the trend continued, it’s actually in the red now). The headline for the post? “Sixth Borough Stealing NYC Residents.”

    Somehow, the thought that any New Yorkers would ever move to Philadelphia is fascinating to people in both cities.

  • http://twitter.com/trishylicious trishylicious

    I had to read the article out of curiosity, but stopped when I got to the 2nd page and they started a paragraph with the word “Leitmotifs” … that was a SAT class word, do the readers of Philly Mag really know what that means?