Take Back the City

History records many successful liberation movements. This is unlikely to become one of them. Nevertheless, every struggle begins with a declaration, and so let this be ours. We who live in the cities of the Hudson Valley have yielded enough. Not land. Not liberty. A noun.

For generations, New York City has enjoyed an uncontested monopoly on the phrase “the city.” The arrangement has become so normalized that those of us walking in city parks, paying city taxes, voting in city elections, and complaining about city parking meters routinely announce that we’re “going into the city,” as though we were country bumpkins making our annual pilgrimage to the capital. Kingston, Hudson, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Beacon, Peekskill—these places apparently count as cities only in the eyes of the Department of State.

This must end. Today I announce the founding of the movement to Take Back the City. Membership is open to anyone who has ever forgotten they already lived in one.

This is not an anti-New York City manifesto. New York City may remain New York City. We have no designs on Times Square. We do not seek custody of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We have no intention of annexing Barney Greengrass. Nor do we wish to entice the outsized percentage of the nation’s comedians who currently reside in Brooklyn to move here and form yet more improv troupes. We wish the city nothing but continued success. We merely ask that it relinquish exclusive claim to a perfectly serviceable common noun.

This is about us.

Every place tells stories about itself. Ours are good stories. They involve rivers and mountains, orchards and farm stands, winding roads and weathered barns. It is an undeniably appealing vision of the Hudson Valley, and I object to none of it. The farms are real. The mountains are real. The rivers are real. But so are sidewalks.

Somewhere along the way, we became so captivated by our scenery that we overlooked our civilization. The postcard got prettier every year, but it kept cropping the same thing out. In fairness, we’ve been doing this since the Hudson River School. Thomas Cole and his fellow painters shifted mountains, painted out hotels, and improved the composition. If Cole were alive today, I fear he would paint out the Hudson Valley Mall and leave the mountains exactly where they are.

We’ve inherited the habit. We now do it with tourism campaigns, real estate listings, and Instagram feeds. Our contemporary portrait of the Hudson Valley still leaves in the orchards, the mountains, the rivers, and the barns, but it paints out apartment houses, bus stops, bodegas, street fairs, dodgy alleyways, libraries, and the peculiar civic choreography that unfolds every day wherever people live close enough to become part of one another’s lives.

We’ve confused scenery with identity.

The result is a curious act of self-deception. We’ve convinced ourselves there are only two authentic ways to live: either you embrace the relentless metabolism of New York City or you decamp to a life of Upstate and Chill. Everything in between becomes a conceptual no-man’s-land, a hedge against committing one way or the other. 

I reject this categorically. I am not a country person. I don’t know the names of birds let alone the call of the whip-poor-will. (Okay, I know the names of a few birds. But the whip-poor-will remains at large.) I have never looked at a woodpile and thought, “That ought to get us through February.” I have never spied a meadow and wondered whether it ought to be hayed. My relationship to civilization is far more intimate than that.

I have kicked a Kingston parking meter after it stole my quarter. I have dug my car out of a city plow-made snowbank. I have interrupted an intoxicated reveler midway through relieving himself in the hydrangeas outside my house after the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I have discovered halfway through making dinner that I was out of butter, walked around the block, bought butter, and returned home before the pan got cold. These are not the experiences of a pastoral people.

People imagine city life is defined by skyscrapers. City life is not defined by height. It is defined by proximity. It is the peculiar condition of living close enough to other people that your day can no longer be considered entirely your own.

You leave the house intending to buy milk and return 45 minutes later because you ran into your barber, your council member, and a gentleman who’s incensed that the city is spending half a million dollars on some obtuse boondoggle known as “wayfinding.” You hear the neophyte bagpipers practicing in the park. You develop opinions about crosswalks. You know which corner store has the better coffee, which house harbors the dog with the mournful bark, and which block you’re least likely to cross without being delayed by conversation. You become, whether you intended to or not, entangled in other people’s lives.

Jane Jacobs understood this when she described the intricate ballet of the sidewalk. She was writing about great cities, certainly, but she was really writing about something larger: the strange miracle that occurs whenever enough people agree to live together in close quarters. The scale changes. The principle does not.

Kingston participates in that miracle. So does Hudson. So does Newburgh. So does Poughkeepsie. So does Beacon. So does Peekskill.

They are not rehearsals for somewhere else. They are not weekend accessories to a picturesque landscape. They are cities—not because they aspire to resemble Manhattan, but because they have developed their own dense web of habits, inconveniences, arguments, rituals, loyalties, and shared spaces. 

Which brings me to the Articles of Liberation.

Article I: Henceforth, “the city” shall refer to the city in which one is standing unless otherwise specified.

Article II: New York City shall henceforth be referred to as “New York City.” It has earned the extra two words.

Article III: Walking to the store shall be recognized as a civic virtue rather than an admission that one has forgotten something.

Article IV: Complaining about parking shall remain the inalienable right of every city resident, regardless of whether parking is objectively available.

Article V: Every corner store shall be regarded as a neighborhood institution worthy of affection and the occasional impulse purchase.

Article VI: Anyone who has ever retrieved keys from a sewer grate, argued with a parking meter, or defended ornamental shrubbery from public misuse shall be recognized as a citizen in good standing.

This movement has no headquarters, no dues, and almost no chance of success. It asks only that we begin describing ourselves with greater accuracy.

We have spent centuries admiring the Hudson Valley’s landscape, and rightly so. But landscapes do not hold elections. Mountains do not pass budgets. Rivers do not host St. Patrick’s Day parades. Cities do those things. Cities are where strangers become neighbors, where inconvenience becomes familiarity, where civilization is practiced in small, imperfect acts every day.

The next time someone tells you they’re “going into the city,” ask which one. Not because you don’t know what they mean. Because it’s time we remembered what we mean.

This article appears in August 2026.