Manhattan Drone: The Lengths (of Lines) People Will Go To…

Hi there. I’m Chris, the East Village Idiot, and another new face on the neighborbee blog team. I’ll be your Manhattan correspondent, so if you’ve got any tips, drop me a line at chris [at] neighborbeeblog dot com.

There’s a stereotype that seems to permeate New York: New Yorkers are impatient people. It seems to be confirmed quite frequently. As subway passengers, we instinctively stretch their necks over the tracks to see if a train is coming, even when new electronic signs tell us the wait time until the next train. We are perfectly willing to mow down a throng of tourists on a sidewalk just to get by pedestrians that don’t keep our pace. We get cranky when our doctor makes us wait for an hour. We will not wait for anyone.

Despite all this, we will wait for some things. Mainly, New Yorkers will wait for food. And they will wait a long time.

The phoenomenon really got off the ground in 2004 with the opening of Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. Even now, the line snakes around the park on warm, sunny days. People are still going to great measures to avoid waiting in this line. Some people swear by Shake Shack, while others think it’s overrated (personally, I think their burgers are great, but their crinkle-cut fries leave much to be desired). Shake Shack was a chicken-or-egg kind of situation: did the buzz follow the line, or did the line follow the buzz?

These days, there are food lines everywhere: the Midtown lunch rush at the gut-busting Chipotle, the secretive yet popular Burger Joint in Le Parker Meridien, the tourist rush at Magnolia Bakery that regularly runs out their door and around the corner, and the seemingly unending line to get in and out of the only Trader Joe’s in Manhattan.

In my neighborhood, a new line has joined the fray: Artichoke, a seemingly unremarkable storefront in the East Village. As if this island wasn’t already overburdened with businesses with maximum buzz and minimum capacity, this pizza joint on 14th Street has added to problem. Waits often top 30 minutes just for a slice - inside a stuffy, tiny space crammed with people every night of the week.

Why do we put up with this? Because of the end result, of course. If everyone else is waiting 30 minutes for a slice of this stuff, it must be good. And if you just wasted 30 minutes of your life standing in line for a simple slice of pizza, you’re going to convince yourself it’s good, even if it’s not. The ends must justify the means.

New Yorkers are impatient people, but if you dangle food in front of us, we’ll wait for hours. And we might not even complain about it.

Photo courtesy of mattvanetten

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