I grew up here in New York City and New Jersey, performing on Broadway shows, surrounded by some of my closest friends from the LGBT community. My father, a minister from New Jersey, shaped my view that love is love, that we are all equal.
New York is just New York. It's a hard city, it's a hard city to live in. It's a desperate city. It's filled with scam artists and people who are always looking for a way in and a way out and the majority of people have to really negotiate their way through that jungle to get to the other side; the other side being a place of tranquility and peace and home and safety.
New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.
I've lived in New York City all my life. I love New York City; I've never moved from New York City. Have I ever thought about moving out of New York? Yeah, sure. I need about $10 million to do it right, though.
New Jersey is very big. There are different areas of New Jersey. There is North New Jersey. There is like the center. There are a lot of actors from New Jersey that don't speak with a New Jersey accent.
New Jersey shaped who and what I am. Growing up in Jersey gave you all the advantages of New York, but you were in its shadow. Anyone who's come from here will tell you that same story.
I feel the change. I feel the relationship with New York changing. It's a personal relationship you have with the city when you move there. I definitely romanticize the early 2000s. As much as I prefer the city then as opposed to now, I'm sure if I were 23 and I moved to the New York of right now, I could have the same exact experience. I don't really hate the cleaning up of New York, even though it's not my preferred version of New York.
I guess, technically, I went to a New York City high school, but I wouldn't call myself a New York City kid. But I've played against city kids all my life. So that kind of instills something in you.
I went to high school in New York City. So, I grew up in New Jersey my whole life, and I was watching all the people and all the kids that I met there become so jaded.
Chicago seems to follow New York, and coming from New York and being in real estate, I worry about things happening in Chicago that have happened in New York. I've seen a great city like New York go downhill. It has a wonderful financial downtown, but the rest of the city is not very nice.
Ellis Island lies in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, New Jersey, and one mile from the tip of Manhattan. At the time of the first European settlement, it was mostly mud, sand, and oyster shells, which nearly disappeared at high tide.
I don't necessarily notice too much of a change in the sense of the kind of matches that I have in say a Los Angeles as opposed to a New York City. The big difference that I notice, and this is what all love as New York city and Philadelphia has treated me fantastically, but man, you cannot screw up in Philadelphia and New York.
My parents retired to New York City, and my brother and both of my sisters ended up in New York City. We are all New York City transplants from Pennsylvania.
I split my time between a small town in New Jersey and New York City.
'All In' is like the Giants motto, so I kind of took that, and I kind of used New York as the backdrop - how diehard New Yorkers are for their team. Me being a New Yorker, I just had to show my love for the city as well as my love for the New York Giants.
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.