You can go bar to bar to bar to bar until 4am in nyc and then find $2 pizza by the slice that is actual pizza and not 7/11 pizza. You can’t really do that anywhere else what with how the busybodies regulate their liqour licenses and the lack of density justifying many 24hr food establishments. You can do all of this entirely on foot too within a few blocks. Nowhere else in the US is like that with such glaringly obvious economies of scale going on in your favor.
I feel like on the surface this may seem like kind of a facile comment, but this really gets at what makes NYC a special place. There’s a whole day-to-day experience that may be technically replicable in other large cities in the course of a day, but there’s like 100 things to do in New York every 200 feet. It’s just a different experience.
