Alivia

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

Joan Didion

https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/humanities101/chapter/goodbye-to-all-that/

It took me years to understand that most people accept New York’s mayhem as some kind of toll, a small price to pay for the panoply of delights available to them at a moment’s notice—whoever said “Nothing good ever happens after midnight” has never lived in New York. But anyone who has ever fallen in love with the city knows that they will accept

While it’s tough to reach consensus on the question of size, there’s far less disagreement on the subject of small-town spirit.

Whether a community’s population tops out around 650, like Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee, or swells to almost 19,000, like Thomasville, Georgia, the standouts tend to share a handful of qualities: an embrace of local traditions