Dave Barry: A warm Miami welcome for our New York friends relocating to the Sunshine State
On a recent evening my wife and I went to Coconut Grove to have dinner, and as we were walking to the restaurant we came across a woman in distress. She was trying to get her car out of a parking space, but it had been blocked in by a car that had been parked by — and here I shall choose my words carefully — a complete jerkwad.
The woman, with directions from her friend, had been trying for some time to maneuver the car out of there, but the other car was parked so inconsiderately that it looked impossible.
My wife, a “can do” kind of person who does not mind getting involved, immediately swung into action.
“My husband can get you out,” she said. “He’s an excellent parker.”
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So with my wife having put my manhood on the line, I got into the driver’s seat and, after making 17 million maneuvers, each one moving the car roughly the length of a standard amoeba, I managed to get the woman’s car out of there. If there had been another coat of paint on that car, it would not have made it.
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I’m telling you this because of something everybody noticed about the car that had been parked so thoughtlessly.
It had New York license plates.
We all commented on this.
“Huh,” we commented, while giving each other Significant Looks.
I do not mean to suggest here that all New Yorkers are thoughtless jerkwads...Plenty of New Yorkers are nice. Loud, but nice. I myself was once a New Yorker. I was even, briefly, a Jets fan, although I have petitioned the courts to have that expunged from my record.
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No, my point is not about driving. My point — and the reason we went “Huh” when we saw the license plate — is that lately there is a growing resentment among Miamians toward New Yorkers.
There has always been some friction, of course. For many years New Yorkers have been coming to Miami to vacation and inform us, loudly, about the many ways in which our city is inferior to New York. You know: Our bagels suck, our pizza sucks, our Chinese food sucks, our airport sucks, our newspapers suck, we have no culture, our politicians are idiots, everybody down here is talking in Spanish, you can’t get those delicious New York street-vendor hotdogs that have been cooking in the same water since Ed Koch was mayor, etc.
This whining was annoying, but it was also temporary, because the New Yorkers went home after their vacations. Now, however, many of them are staying. That’s right: They have decided, for some crazy reason, to leave the earthly paradise that is New York and move here permanently, despite our many defects. They are snapping up Miami real estate the way the “Jaws” shark snapped up teenaged swimmers. This is good if you want to sell your house, but bad if you want to buy a house and you find yourself bidding against a New Yorker, because they can be aggressive:
SELLER: Our asking price is $450,000.
YOU: I think I can swing that.
NEW YORKER: I’ll give you three million dollars.
SELLER: Sold!
NEW YORKER: What the heck, make it five million.
So we’re seeing more and more New Yorkers in our neighborhoods, restaurants, stores and parking spaces, and they’re upsetting the delicate social balance of Miami, where people from many different places of origin have traditionally coexisted in peace and harmony.
I am of course joking. We Miamians have traditionally coexisted the way the Sharks and Jets coexist in “West Side Story,” except we possess a wider range of weapons.
So it was already tense down here, and I’m concerned that with all these incoming New Yorkers, it’s going to get even tenser.
