Still My City

New York City used to feel like ours. Lately, it feels like it’s being rebranded in real time. Not just landmarks erased, but something harder to name. Like someone handed the city off to a marketing agency and told them to filter it for mass appeal. But you can’t rebrand what was never yours to begin with.

To grow up in New York City is to carry its rhythm in your soul. It’s not something you put on. It just lives there. A bassline. A frequency you move to without thinking.

It’s piraguas or frío fríos in August, depending on which side of your ethnicity is louder that day.

It’s knowing which bodega had the best baconeggandcheese.

It’s taking the 7 train to high school every single day. My student MetroCard might as well have been a passport. A swipe that meant freedom. The kind that gave hooky true meaning.

It’s grieving what 5Pointz was before the luxury developers came in.

It’s going to “the city” and everyone knowing you mean Manhattan.

It's remembering exactly where you were when the skyline changed.

"It’s brick” because it’s freezing.

It’s still calling it Shea Stadium.

And sometimes, when the noise settles down, you can hear it again. That familiar frequency. The one the city used to hum before it got repackaged. You notice it most during the glorious holidays, when the transplants vacate the city and, for a second, it feels like ours again.

This isn’t about gatekeeping. (Okay, maybe it is. A little.) But really, it’s about knowing who the city was built for and who built it right back. Because living here doesn’t make you a New Yorker. Time doesn’t grant you that title. The city does. It's not something you tell people, it's something they recognize. You never had to become a New Yorker. You just were.

Just a Queens girl in a Brooklyn world. © Rosie Hernández 2026