Singing bicoastal blues.

What Am I Doing Here? Former Business Journal Staffer and Valley Boy Who Moved to the Big Apple Reflects on the Differences Between America's Two Biggest Cities

Before I was born, I took my first journey to Los Angeles.

My mother was four months pregnant when she and my father loaded up their white Chevy Impala convertible and left Chicago for a new life on the West Coast. It was the middle of June 1963, and speeding across the American southwest on Route 66, they managed to hit every desert at high noon.

It was no leisurely trip. They stopped in ST. Louis, Amarillo and Flagstaff, and four days after leaving the Midwest they rolled into L.A. They moved into a brand-new, two-bedroom apartment on Burbank Boulevard, and five months later I was born in Fast Hollywood.

Blame it on that prenatal road trip, but the idea that L.A. is a point of destination rather than departure has been deeply ingrained in me ever since. Growing up, I witnessed the magnetic pull of the place first-hand, watching the San Fernando Valley grow from a quiet suburb with more orange groves than houses into a sprawling concrete grid.

After attending college in San Diego, graduate school in Berkeley and working as a reporter in Los Angeles, I never considered leaving California to find my fortunes, as my father had left Chicago in search of his.

So what exactly am I doing in New York?

I moved to Manhattan in April, chasing true love, as well as a wealth of journalism opportunities that don't exist in L.A., or in any other city in the world for that matter. But those facts only scratch the surface of a question I still ask myself every day while I stand on those sweltering subway platforms.

What am I doing here?

Consider where I live now. Shortly after I was born, my family moved to a quiet cul de sac in Northridge, with a large, leafy backyard and a cool blue swimming pool. I, on the other hand, traded a quiet Craftsman-style bungalow, shrouded in eucalyptus near Dodger Stadium, for a fifth-floor walk-up in a renovated tenement on Orchard Street on the Lower Fast Side.

Following my ancestors

This is the same neighborhood where tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants landed a century ago. My own grandfather spent a year on the Lower East Side in the 1920s when he was a young boy. In fact, he also lived on Orchard Street, before his father chose to settle farther west in Chicago, and he, decades later, opted to follow his daughters to Los Angeles.

Staring out my window, I can see rows of old tenement buildings, their scarred brick facades criss-crossed with rickety black fire escapes. Little did I realize six months ago that I would be retracing my grandfather's footsteps back in time. But now that I'm wandering in the Old World, my thoughts keep drifting to the old world that I left behind in Los Angeles.

There is, of course, much truth to all the cliches: the city that never sleeps, if you can make it here... blah, blab, blah.

It's a relentless concrete maze, every bit as exciting as it is exhausting. The economy is booming - thanks in large part to Wall Street - and the town has become even hipper and more crowded than usual. That means restaurants packed at midnight, nightclubs that are open until dawn, and traffic that never stops.

It also means big bucks - $2,000-a-month basement apartments, $100 meals and $9.50 movie tickets. Cars are strictly for the well-heeled - or the foolish. In L.A., there are options to where you live, where you shop, how much you need to spend. Here, the alternatives usually come down to this: Yah want it or yah don't.

Which brings us to the subject of New Yorkers.

The people

Again, the cliches tend to ring true: loud, pushy, cerebral, cynical and neurotic - a little like All Seinfeld, All the Time. But perhaps the most striking trait is rigidity. New Yorkers can be a curiously provincial bunch - far more so than the free-wheeling types I ran across in Los Angeles. I know I'm generalizing and I know that in due course, I'll run into folks who go against the stereotype.

But not many. Laid back simply doesn't play well in the land of yada, yada, yada.

Several weeks after arriving in New York, I attended my girlfriend's cousin's wedding - a black-tie affair at the posh St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. The ceremony was held in one of the hotel's banquet rooms, a fever dream of the French Colonial style, with more fleur de lis and glided gold trim than I'd ever imagined possible. The groom's father was a prominent member of New York's Orthodox Jewish community, so the wedding was presided over by half a dozen of the city's leading rabbis, serious men with black fur hats and heavy beards.

The bride and groom, a pair of handsome, young Long Island attorneys, stood beneath an enormous chuppah, looking confused and not a little bit frightened, as the cantor from the exclusive Fifth Avenue Synagogue bellowed the shiva brochot in a booming voice, his open mouth just inches from their faces.

I was raised in a Jewish home, so religious ritual is no mystery. And having grown up in Northridge, I am no stranger to bourgeois excess. But sitting in that impossibly ornate ballroom, looking at the bewildered expressions of the bride and groom, it occurred to me that this was precisely what led my own parents to pack up their Impala and head to L.A.

They, too, were the children of observant Jews, raised in highly insular communities. And though they never abandoned the past completely, they understood that Los Angeles offered something that few other places could: the opportunity to crawl out from under the shroud of tradition, to make it up as they went along in a wide-open city beneath a brilliant blue sky.

In New York, traditions assert themselves in ways I never expected. An Ivy League education carries a lot of juice around here, and when you meet someone with a degree from Harvard or Yale, chances are you'll hear about it.

"When I was at Brown..." a young magazine editor said to me at a party, launching into memories of her college days. She waited for reciprocation. I didn't take the bait. Moments later, she offered me another opening. "I don't know if they did this at your college, but..." I assumed she was a recent graduate with little else to speak of, but later learned that she was about 30 and had worked at numerous publications around town.

Years after graduation, people still want to know, so they can assign you to the proper place in the hierarchy. The fact that I have a bachelor's in history from UC San Diego tends to register little more than blank stares.

It's a far cry from Los Angeles. Sure, a degree from UCLA is impressive enough, and graduating from USC never hurt anyone's chances. But generally people in L.A. don't really care where you're from. It's where you're headed that matters - and from where I sit now, that is one of the city's best qualities.

Complaining about the weather

That, and the weather, which I now realize is something else I've spent most of my life taking for granted. I haven't experienced a New York winter yet, but it can't possibly be worse than a New York summer.

Having grown up in the Valley, I thought I understood extreme heat. What I failed to appreciate, of course, is extreme humidity - not to mention the fact that my Lower East Side walk-up is not air conditioned.

It's easy to complain. In fact, kvetching about New York is an art form, as well as one of the pleasures of living here. But there also is a lot to love. Central Park brims with life every weekend and the city's restaurants are probably the best in the world. Four daily newspapers and half-a-dozen weeklies battle it out, making this the finest journalism town around. There is music and theater and museums, even though it seems most seldom have time to enjoy them.

Then there's the pure romance of the place. One balmy spring night, my girlfriend and I were walking uptown on Broadway when we found ourselves stranded on a traffic island. With traffic roaring by on either side and the lights of Lincoln Center twinkling in the distance, we embraced as we waited for the light to change. Could I imagine feeling this way while waiting to cross Figueroa Street or even Sunset Boulevard?

For the moment. I still feel more like a foreign correspondent than a resident. Will it ever be like home, or will I find myself making another transcontinental road trip, this time behind the wheel? It's hard to say. Six months after my father moved to L.A., he confessed that he loathed the place and asked my mother if they could return to Chicago. She told him to he patient. Thirty-six years later, he's still in L.A. And he isn't going anywhere.

Larry Kanter, a former Business Journal reporter, is now a reporter with Crain's New York Business.