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A scheme thus classified was launched some years ago by the then mayor, Edward Koch, who had come back from China smitten with the idea of bicycle transportation. He had protective strips of concrete installed to create a bicycle lane up Sixth Avenue. As someone who schlepps around (as we say here) on an old Raleigh three-speed, I was pathetically grateful for the bike lane myself; I suppose that shows that no matter how long I live in New York, I am, at heart, an out-of-towner. The cabdrivers, of course, hated it ("He likes China so much, he shoulda stood in China"). Some storekeepers hated it. But who complained most bitterly about the bike lanes? The bicyclers. The true New York bicyclers complained that the bike lane was full of pedestrians and garment-center pushcarts and people who schlepped around on Raleigh three- speeds. And slush. "It's October," I said to the bicycler who made that complaint; "there's no slush in October." "When there's slush," he said, "the bike lane will have slush."
The bike-lane episode reminds me that you'd better put "contentious" near the top of that list, right under "funny looking." (Not just "funny looking," come to think of it, but also "funny": New York is the only city I've ever been in where almost everyone you meet on the street considers himself a comedian -- a fact brought home to me a couple of years ago when a panhandler near my subway stop said to me, "Can you spare some change? I'd like to buy a few junk bonds.") In the matter of contentiousness, I once tried to indicate the difference between New York and the Midwest, where I grew up, by saying that in the Midwest if you approach someone who is operating a retail business and ask him if he has change for a quarter, he is not likely to call you a fascist. He is certainly not going to say, "G'wan -- get lost." He would never say, "Ya jerky bastard, ya."
New Yorkers are not polite. If you asked a New York cabdriver why he wasn't more polite, he might say something like, "Polite! Where do you think you are -- Iowa or Indiana or one of them?" New York cabdrivers do not usually bother to distinguish among states that begin with I.
Earlier this year, some booster organization in New York got the idea of launching a campaign to make New Yorkers more polite. Talk about cockamamie ideas! What are they -- crazy? Do they think this is Illinois or Idaho or someplace? In the first place, the whole idea of a booster organization is as foreign to New York as Girl Scout cookies. (Yes, I know that thousands of Girl Scout cookies are sold every year in places like Queens and Staten Island. You think I'm a farmer or something?) I have never heard of a New York Chamber of Commerce. If it exists, I suspect it spends most of its time putting out press releases about aggravations. Also, telling New Yorkers not to be rude is the equivalent of telling Neapolitans not to talk with their hands: it could render us speechless.