SecondAvenueSagas offers the unique perspective of a New York native to an NY Times story on those skyline-gazing new adults arriving in our city these days and clogging our sidewalks and subways: the college freshman.

Sagas writes:

A resident of New York — a new one, recently arrived from somewhere else in the vast America that we all view with a wary eye — feels most like a New Yorker when he or she finally masters the city’s complex subway systems. I bet you didn’t see that one coming.

“Learning the transportation is sort of what I’m working on right now. I’m pretty good with the subways now, but at night it’s a little weird, and I don’t really know how that works,” Boris Chen said to [Times reporter] Buckley. Chen wasn’t the only one bemoaning our complex subway sytem.

And that’s where it begins and ends. If someone living in the city can navigate the hot spots — the so-called Central Business District of Manhattan — without the aid of a subway map (except during the weekends), then a New Yorker that person shall be. If someone can, by and large, get from his or her local subway stop to just about anywhere else in the city, if that person would even be so bold as to offer lost tourists subway directions, then a New Yorker you will be.