How New York Lost Its Accent

As Election Day drew nearer at Voter News Service’s West 34th Street offices, a temp arrived to join me in my work as a glorified data entry clerk. He was a tall, pleasant, red-headed guy. Without a complaint, he squeezed himself into the tiny office I already shared with an elderly veteran of polling grunt work.

The new temp was an Oklahoma native who had escaped to New York City to get a master’s degree in urban planning at Columbia. Since moving to “the City,” he’d lived all over Manhattan and Roosevelt Island in search of reasonable rent within a sensible commuting distance of Midtown. By the year 2000, that was awfully hard to come by. Sharing an interest in cities, we hit it off. Moving to New York from Oklahoma he had a perspective on New York that I, a native, could only envy. 

One day as we were both plugging polling data into spreadsheet files a voice came over the intercom. “Package fuh Murray. Murray comeah to the reception area and get yuh package!”

“What kind of accent is that?” asked my Okie colleague.

I chuckled, “Yeah, that‘s a thick one, isn’t it.”

As the child of a Brooklynite and an Alabamian, I never have had much of a New York accent. I always figured that America’s two strongest regional accents canceled each other out.

“No really, what kind of accent is that? I’ve never heard anything like it,” my coworker persisted.

I gave him a puzzled look and replied, “Um, that’s a New York accent.” I thought being on West 34th Street in the heart of Manhattan might have tipped him off.

“You mean a Brooklyn accent?” he inquired.

“No, that’s just a New York accent,” I corrected him.

And then it hit me. If you moved to New York City in 1998 and got a degree from its most prestigious university studying, of all things, urbanism, it is plausible that you might not be able to identify a New York accent. Surely my co-worker had come into contact with the accent before, but it takes a critical mass of accented individuals for a newcomer attribute it to the city as a whole. Had he attended Columbia in years past, it would be likely that his professor, his landlord, his grocer and his local cop would have all shared the same accent. By 1998, this was no longer the case.

I’d been away at college for most of the Giuliani revolution, when the last New Yorkers who sounded the part — life-long working-class New Yorkers who had stuck it out through the crime-ridden 1970s and 80s — abandoned Manhattan, pushed out by rising rents. By the time I came back, New York had lost its accent.

In earlier decades, Washington, D.C. was the only city in the Northeast with no discernable accent. This made sense. Washington was built to be a national capital. As a result, Washingtonians came from all over America, moving in to serve one administration and moving out when the other party took power.

Some would argue that the purpose of New York is to be that same type of city, where outsiders move in to become global movers and shakers. Politicos move to Washington; aspiring opera divas and financiers move to New York. But the older accented New York had no problem accommodating world-renowned artists and businessmen. There was always room for these people, but still a sense of place.

New York was not D.C., a city whose viability as a national capital lay in its being an inhospitable no-place, where neither Northerners nor Southerners would feel at home. New York’s purpose was quite the opposite, to be a home to those who had nowhere else to call home.

To be fair, the traditional New York, of immigrants and their children making a new neighborhood their own, still exists. But this New York has been pushed to the far-flung corners of the metropolis where few of the new un-accented New Yorkers venture. And despite the huge influx of immigrants in the past three decades, this image of New York has been blotted out of the nation’s consciousness. Just compare “Taxi” with “Sex and the City.”

While I was explaining what a New York accent sounded like to my co-worker at Voter News Service, New Yorkers were busy following the Senate race between Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, herself a Chicago native, schooled in New England, married in Arkansas who had just moved to Westchester via Washington. In an ironic twist, Giuliani — the man whose policies displaced entire neighborhoods of rooted, longtime New Yorkers to make way for prosperous newcomers — played the carpet-bagger card, mercilessly mocking Clinton’s claim that she had been a life-long Yankee fan.

Giuliani eventually dropped out of the race and Hillary won easily. Now she’s representing unaccented New York in unaccented Washington — a city where rootless Hillary, neither Northerner nor Southerner, presumably feels right at home.