New York, New York? The city so questionable in its ‘coolness’ and credibility right now, we had to name it twice

By creammagazine, October 26, 2025

Of all the cities in the world, none has been gifted with as much brilliant branding as New York (New York). Coming back with a souvenir t-shirt from any big city in the world would seem a risque move for the more stylish among us, but for some forgiveable reason we’ve probably all looked pretty good in an I ❤️ NY t-shirt at some point in our lives.

But it seems there’s a slight crack starting to appear in the 💔. Since being locked up over the Covid pandemic and with the rise in TikTok telling the world how things really are, the big city that once shone bright like a statue’s beacon even on a cloudy evening is starting, to, well, rot somewhat.

Sure, many capitals of the world are going through some sort of economic crisis right now – or at least an imbalance in wealth across the greater communities, but history books will show the contrasts seem much starker – and darker – in New York City, circa 2025.

There are concerns about the city’s decline, citing issues like the destruction of public amenities, rising apartment-living costs, an increase in crime, a subsequent increase in surveillance, a crumbling infrastructure, tumbling democracy, and a decline in the quality of goods and services. Soon, customers in crumby diners are going to wonder whether or not to tip.

Some sources link these problems to gentrification, economic changes, and a government that is seen by some as not adequately addressing the challenges. And while all this is happening, you can bet Hollywood and stream-TV are going to try to amp up the old coolness and cred New York once had, begging for us to believe it’s still got it.

Taylor Swift’s New York penthouse apartment is worth an astonishing $50 million. God knows how young, working class ‘Swifties’ relate to the woman.

Blame Donald Trump for his blatantly obnoxious attitude and behaviour toward the rest of the world (and any state outside of Florida in the US). Blame Silicon Valley for its excess hunger for data and invasion of people’s privacy. Blame Hollywood for not having its sexist shit together decades ago instead of having to feel shitty right now about pretty much everyone having taken part in the abuse in some way, shape or form. Whatever we might choose to blame, as a whole the abovementioned actions haven’t done anything to help save New York’s reputation – let alone that of any other well-known American city. The truth is the trust in American Cool has kind of waned, and not even Taylor Swift or Bruce Springsteen‘s latest overhyped releases can do much to fix things.

I’ve been to New York on a few occasions. And by occasions, I mean pretty big ones. In just 48 hours during New York Fashion Week I sipped drinks and swapped jokes with Fran Drescher at her Cancer Schmancer charity party, expressed worry about Britney Spears in conversation with Transvision Vamp’s Wendy James over a salad lunch (only toast for Wendy which I found quite kooky), went to an exhibition opening for Victor Demarchelier’s photographic collection and discussed potential fashion stories for Cream with him, snuggled up to Gossip Girl starlet Jessica Szohr, photo-bombed a social photo helmed by Alessandria Ambrosio, talked Italian over Camparis with Madonna’s one-time stylist Maripol, and was squished between Anna Wintour and Stephanie Seymour’s children (“Mommy couldn’t make it so she gave us her invitation”) at a Zac Posen fashion show, and have forgotten what went on at the underground gay bar I visited with my party pal Mauricio. My sister Melina had retired to the hotel by that late stage. She’d lived in NYC for two years and pretty much saw it all back then. The city that never sleeps certainly had this writer on a couple of up-all-night binges.

But despite the decadent partying (when it can be afforded), there’s an ugly side to New York that really needs to be written about.

I remember my first visit to New York with my cousin Annette, and we received a pretty grand level of hospitality. It was only months after 911 and everybody seemed so… nice. We stayed at the Tribeca Grand Hotel (it’s now called The Roxy). We were even hosted by generous friend Jude, at her lovely house in the Hamptons and also paid visit to upstate where hospitable friends hosted us in heritage surround. Saw a Broadway show of Chicago with a photographer colleague Mike Ruiz – the show itself starring Dexter himself Michael C. Hall in the lead. It all seemed quite a magical place then. Surreal even.

Today, there appears to be less hospitality and more a fending-for-ourselves attitude, kind of mirroring the US-First philosophy of Donald Trump. Whether they like it or not, New York citizens appear to have been influenced by their country’s leader – at least in the mind-state of desperately being forced to hold onto what’s left that is there’s.

More recently, though, I’ve had conversations with friends there about how hard it is just getting by in NYC, be in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or anywhere by the Hudson River. And I’ve seen YouTube and TikTok clips about the real street scenes we don’t get to see much on spruced-up episodes of NCIS. Still, the media would try and have you believe all is still laidback and hip-like rather than the fact the very foundation of ‘freedom’ is becoming more a distant memory than something that big beautiful statue with torch in hand once tried to tell the rest of the world (and Lady Liberty’s own citizens).

You’ll notice that about American culture. As soon as the world starts to have its attention deterred elsewhere (Korean pop, Japanese manga, Italian tourism), it suddenly starts to dish out movies and TV shows and merchandise to push its own pop/art/tourism agendas.

Americana as a whole is a beautiful thing. I personally love the design of the typical diner. I think Hollywood has made some amazing and inspiring films. I’ve liked a lot of American pop music. And I’m even partial to the occasional Reese’s pieces. But there’s a certain, unspoken, underhanded transaction between all of these things and the outsider tourist to the US of A.

A whimsical artwork by Australian pop artist Ben Frost titled ‘Crunchy Shell’.

New York is now apparently planting some of the remnance of its one-time coolness in different parts of the world. Daring to step out of its big city centre of gravity to go where no New Yorkers dare or rarely get to go to – outside their own city. It’s a celebrity tour of sorts that expresses the old traits of NYC’s quirkiness and even eccentricity but with the freshly added, “Wow, is that how you guys have been doing it on that side of the world?” faux naivite.

I’ve recently been seeing the odd New York actor appearing in advertising down under. Real estate company Domain, for example, is running ads starring NYC stalwart Bobby Cannavale alongside our own Rose Byrne as a couple desperately trying to get the low-down on the best properties to invest in across Australia.

The ads are funny because their true. People with big money are making big investments in our country. Many of our cities tick a lot of important boxes. Taxpayer money going less to war and more to quality infrastructure. Governments just as scallywag as the others in other countries but less greedy and I’m sure less corrupt than anything sinister meanderings we hear are going in places like Russia, China, heck even the USA.

So many wonderful indie celebrities have also grown sour in my palette. Rock musician Ryan Adams has recently been criticised for being an A-hole to Australians. Adams once went out with one of my favourite indie actresses, Parker Posey.

Posey, forever considered the ‘It’ gal of New York (to me, anyway) and always an artist I’ve admired from afar, now has me seeing her as a mean and entitled, attitude-laden industry climber – not far removed from the ice-bitch character she once played on Will & Grace.

In recent interviews, Posey has seen her wokeness overdrive interupt otherwise pleasant conversations between interviewer/interviewee. Once, a journalist was interviewing Posey and her co-star Blake Lively in promotion of a film they both starred in, congratulating Lively on her “little bump” (she was soon to have her baby) and Lively responded less with grace and more with cockiness. Parker went further with the bad taste. While Lively insulted the journalist by saying “and congratulations on your little bump” (the journo actually could not conceive), Posey expressed an attitude that womanly interview openers like that were just not tough enough for her hardworking indie kind. Now, that shit might have flown over drinks at The Bowery on the Lower East Side on a hangover Sunday in 2016, but it won’t exactly work on camera today – when everyone has a camera in their hands, ready to capture your unrehearsed rudeness at the push of a button.

Speaking of films and video-ing, you’re about to see trailers for a whole lot of movies, set in New York, about New York, about how New York is still cool, and about how if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Hollywood and the entertainment machine will try to sell you the notion that New York is the world’s greatest city, sell it till the cows come home (except no cows would find satisfaction there – or in LA, for that matter – since you don’t get much greenery.

The Big Apple is starting to rot and while its tenants battle cockroaches and rodents the size of dachshunds, while bumping their heads on attic ceilings in shoebox flats, they’ll still think that ‘hip’ is where they’re at without worrying about what’s in their hip pocket. Or what’s not. Money was never the issue in New York – so far as our old TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends made us believe. So long as they’re in New York, and can afford a bagel and cream cheese every other night for dinner, everything’s alright here, right?

But the movie-going public – if they’re still going to the movies – aren’t buying it. Not being seduced by the grit and street-crime-is-so-funny basis of films like Caught Stealing and Highest 2 Lowest. Not too keen to buy into token cross-cultural rom-com ensembles like Karate Kid: Legends or Materialists. Not even finding animated sports-driven comedy Sneaks very funny as it desperately tries to shove pairs of American-branded basketball sneakers down our throats.

The Columbus Circle globe stands short outside of Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, New York City.

Indeed, New York is in a dissident state – and a lot of that has to do with the city/state’s country being led by a non-caring ex-patriot of the once-was-cool city. If the Trump Tower and Trump himself are so despised by the majority of the people of New York, what must it feel like to look up at, right next to a dwarfed golden globe of faux internationality centred mid-town? The divide of rich versus the poor has only gotten greater since the closure of small businesses post-Covid and the implosion of the economy since, not to mention the mad world relations – from crazy Ukraine business handshakes (so that’s what the war was all about!) to the current Gaza debates constantly being screamed about (with nothing being done about, really).

If you thought the cost of living was high in your home city, think again. You’d probably get half of what you pay for here for the same price (converted to US dollars) in New York, New York. You’d certainly get that much less in real estate.

Even the price of a pastrami on rye, or a hotdog, or a tacquito from a truck stand is more than what you’d expect from the city that advertises them every chance they get in episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and on Saturday Night Live.

Let’s be real about this. New York City is electric and it’s buzzing and it’s got a history of hipness that’s seen it survive generations, but does it have the authentic liveability of a real city where there’s a sense of genuine community and healthy sport and space like, say, Copenhagen, Denmark or even Perth, Western Australia? Cities with better stability, fairer education, and more sensible infrastructure such as Zurich, Switzerland; Osaka, Japan; or Melbourne, Victoria.

Sure, all these places have their share of crime, corruption and poverty, but the most part they make life a pretty good blend of work and play, commerce and art, cultures and classes, and the odd bit of exciting chaos.

It’s the very newness of these cities’ fresher ‘hip’ factors that is beginning to attract travellers from all around the globe to them. And with newness comes opportunity. New ideas – not remnants of an old Woody Allen film about neurotic characters all running around trying to cope with their neurotic lives.

Yes, property prices are getting quite high here like everywhere else on the planet, as are our mortgages, but when you add up all the good things we have – big green parks, a good variety of sports and leisure activities, the great outdoors, community charity drives, investment in new small businesses with better eco practices than the big wigs, multicultural celebration including a quality, welcome appreciation of our Indiginous brothers and sisters, healthy business, and better tranparency (well, maybe not some of our MPs and their private portfolios). It seems the people of, say, Perth or Melbourne, Zurich or Tokyo, are having a better time of it watching the world around them grow – and without the need to sell it to Hollywood for the sake of greater GDP.

Economics is important – and a little healthy competition across all markets is good. But that get-to-the-top attitude of the past greed-is-good eras, that got to be the most credible kid on the block with my rocks and my rep and my rap all on the TV and radio. That you’re nobody unless you’re somebody ethos that once gushed out of the streets and TV networks of New York City – like water pipes bursting and gushing out across grimy taxi-packed streets lined with grey, dystopian looking buildings. That shit’s just not pretty anymore.

There’s enough mess online that we have to cope with. We don’t want to walk out on our front porch stoop and see it for real. And there’s enough chaos, confusion, drama and noise coming from our Netflix binging and Spotify-trawling. We don’t want it when we just want to go for a lovely walk in the park. And that one big park posited in the centre of a busy city that takes three crazy train rides to get to just so you can visit John Lennon’s Imagine memorial on a lovely Autumn (sorry, Fall) day – that’s not quite the same as not having to imagine the good life and actually living a life of sanity and serenity (for the most part), space to move freely, clean buildings to frequent, and cool new ideas to be exchanged.

On my last trip to New York I found myself huddled in a cat-hair covered flat in Harlem with a lazy ex-lover who was stoned all day and so we stayed in every night like I was in some Machiavellian Manhattan nightmare. It was claustrophobic. It was all getting a bit hand-to-mouth with the amount of money my wallet was bleeding. It was all 99 cent shops just down the street from an over-decorated Bloomingdales. It was the old hip Apollo club now currently closed for an insane $65 million renovation. It was gentrification gone greedy and lots of boarded up shops thanks to bad sales, violence and looting. It was all lines around the corner of Radio City Hall for the Tonight Show or tonight costing USD200 for even the most humble night out. It was congested and overheated and concreted all over (although the Chrysler Building is a remarkable feat in architecture, I must say). It was fleeting acquaintances who lived there looking over my shoulder to see if I’d tipped right so that they could get to the front of the line the next time they visited the venue (I got us to the front of the line with a mention of this here lovely magazine – they might not be too kind to me now). It was bar tenders giving you big dazzling smiles and wide eyes wondering how big the tip is going to be. It was fine entertainment from bums on crammed trains with no coin to give the guys after I spent my last USD24 on a packet of English Breakfast Tea from Dean & Deluca (do our American friends seriously think the UK is that exotic?).

One of New York’s greatest exports is a sense of just getting by – despite all the city’s stresses and anxiety. And why not? At the end of the day, stress and angst sell more headache tablets and Acid Reflux.

To some folks, it might be a fun challenge – a reminder that they’re actually living – fighting to cope and simply feel human in a city of 8.5 million lost souls. But I don’t have the time or inclination to ever want to do that. I once was offered a few hundred thousand in potential investment to move my magazine to New York headquarters – back when magazines were a big thing, that is. I didn’t take the offer up. Even with all the long lunches, fun launches, free drinks and fab after-parties, I think I’d end up a sweaty, tired mess by the end of it.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back to New York. Mind you, I will miss the good laughs and shop talk with Fran Drescher.

As I was writing this piece, I found I had to walk away from the computer a few times, to potter around my house, get my mind of thinking I might be being a bit cruel to a one-time great city… Get in a bit of rough-and-tumble play with my pet Chihuahua and the toys he loves most that are twice his size. Make a Jarlesburg cheese toasted sandwich without worrying too much about the cost of Jarlesburg right now. I did all that – back and forth to the computer, round the house, the occasional peek outside my windows at spunky cars whizzing by, neighbourhood locals getting in their exercise and sport, the weathe changing from a pleasant 24 degrees C to the occasional cool breeze that gets up my nose and reminds me of what a nice clean city I live in. A slow dance in the kitchen with my beautiful partner Ben, eventually moving to the living room for a bit of a disco dance. I’d never have had that space in New York. And I’d probably not want to live there if I did have the space (good luck, Taylor).

Not even a modernised version of King Kong starring Margot Robbie as the fated femme would sway me that this big, overpopulated, overrated city is the one I’d want to call home. Home is where the heart is. And I probably would never be able to hear my heart in a noisy, nosy, Parker Posey city that is New York.

I once bought the coolness, but not anymore. There’s way too much beautiful space to venture through elsewhere on this great planet. And by all means, keep it in your top five lists to want to go to in your next international travels. Just don’t go crying to us when you get home and the bank statement has got more Manhattan Chase surcharges on it than inexplicable tarrifs spouted by Donald Trump.

Antonino Tati with additional text by Michael Mastess