What are the best essays by New Yorkers on New York?

I grew up here, and what I dislike is people mentally playing back the 70s and 80s through the psychological equivalent of VHS videotape recording (and in many cases it's not even their own memories they are playing back) - all the good, bright stuff is prominent - however what's lost with the missing details is the dirt, petty crime, and a very low level of discontent and despair in the background of many people's lives. It was almost like the city itself was harrassing you. I don't miss express subway trains crawling along at 10mph because the MTA was too broke to perform capital maintenance, I don't miss the walkman snatchers who would get a running start, and in a single bound rip off a Sony - out of the hands of some unfortunate shmuck changing tapes near the top of a staircase - then disappear after making a perfect landing just past the bottom step. Yes, a lot of the interesting old stuff has been lost - but a lot of quality of life issues have improved in return. You say you'd take some extra crime and grime for that extra color? Sure, that'll work if you're just passing through here for a few years - but that crap gets old fast if you want to stay for good. As for what to read - perhaps some of Pete Hammill's stuff? Or Murray Kempton's.

I used to live in New York and I loved it. But I had to leave. I'm a serious introvert by nature and the constant interaction with people tapped all of my social reserves and by the time I got home to California I was exhausted, depressed, and generally used up. I slept for three months. You can never be alone in New York. Unless you have a great job you can't afford to live by yourself, so you wake up in a small apartment with someone else in it. Then you get on a bus or the subway with hundreds of people. You walk down the street, dodging other people (tourists, short people with umbrellas at eye level), you work for eight hours with other people, maybe you go out to a bar after work (Why is it always a bar? I never drank so much in my life as I did when I lived in New York) to socialise with people, you take the subway full of people home, and when you get back to your small apartment it's got someone in it. That's too much social interaction for me. Someday, if I'm rich enough, I'll move back to New York and live alone and take a car service everywhere. Actually, that's not true. I'm going to buy an island and live there all by myself.

I hate it when New Yorkers (or anyone from anywhere) think that living or having lived there is some kind of accomplishment or somehow reflects on them positively.

Fran Lebowitz's stuff from the 70s - particularly the essay about neighborhood names, and the tendency towards micro-neighborhoods, but all of it really. Collected in "Social Studies" and "Metropolitan Life." What I hate? People who stand in doorways, in subway entrances, etc - who assume that, because they have successfully entered (for instance) the subway, that the work of entering the subway is complete. People who block entrances, people who walk three abreast on sidewalks, people, in a word, who are inattentive to the existence of other people, are the very model of solipsism - they are New York's answer to driving in two lanes of traffic at once in an SUV going ten under the speed limit, and they provoke in me New York's answer to road rage. When I see people walking slowly three abreast on the sidewalk I want to walk towards them with my arms held out sideways as big as I can. But I haven't yet.

I hate how every walk in Manhattan is a journey from or to a commercial destination. A friend of mine once called this the $20 penalty for leaving your doorstep.

The feeling (exemplified by many of the posts here) that everyone in the city actively hates you for who you are. As a hipster-y dude (although not exactly in-your-face-lime-green-pants!) living in a less-than-gentrified neighborhood, every trip out of the house was like psychological warfare -- with the neighbors, strangers, the clerks at the grocery store. When I wore a tie on the L train to go to a wedding, the hipsters glared at me too. Once, while walking home, somebody yelled at me that there was a new iPod I ought to buy. (?) A couple weeks later, someone shoved me off the sidewalk and kept walking. I've been refused service at pizza places. Once a gentleman spat on me from a moving car. I left; I'm sure I'll be back.

What I hate most about NYC are those damned subway platform crowds that swarm the train doors like it's Paris circa 1775 and I've got baguettes stapled all over me LET ME OUT YOU ZOMBIEFIED VULTURES

If you can get your hands on The Complete New Yorker, you will have oodles to choose from. As a former New Yorker, I hate how when I go back, everyone seems simultaneously wired and tired, like they haven't had a good night's sleep in years and are jacked on coffee. I see a lot of people there working insane hours to be able to afford their tiny apartments, and as a result, they never have enough time to do the things you'd want to do if you were going to move to New York: museums, shows, cultural stuff. And they get so spoiled! Like, "eh, The Rolling Stones are playing a free gig--where? No, I'm not going to Brooklyn tonight, thankyouverymuch." Which sort of relates to http://nymag.com/news/features/17573/ on why New Yorkers in particular are so unhappy. Have fun and good luck with the piece!

What are the all-time best pieces of writing by New Yorkers on New York? Jimmy Breslin's entire body of work. And what do you, personally, hate the most about New York today? The hordes of young people who watched "Sex in the City" and decided to move to New York so they could live JUST LIKE THAT, and the fact that these folks tend to think that New York City means Manhattan (below 96th Street) and Brooklyn (but only the parts north and west of Prospect Park).