Soon after moving to Brooklyn from Los Angeles (by way of a brief stop in Washington Heights) almost ten years ago, I was on the #2 Train, and a mariachi trio got on and started belting out a Mexican song.

Most train lines conjure images in New Yorkers’ heads, often ethnic in nature, and we all know that the 2 in Brooklyn is mostly Black, and much of that Caribbean, with a little Hasid and Hipster mixed in – the difference between the last two getting blurrier. Fascinating to a newcomer that the mariachi guys would choose this audience to raise a little cash.

Accordions are loud, and as soon as its wind filled the car an enchanted smile covered my face, and I turned to the woman sitting next to me, who looked around 70 years old. She just frowned and said, “Not these motherfuckers again.”

Within a few years I found myself muttering such things too. That’s part of love: brutal honesty. I love my neighbors, but when I see one dropping a diaper or styrofoam food box in front of my house, I holler out the window, “You gonna pick that up?!” We all piss and moan about one another, so I find it helps to say so when we get that fuzzy feeling of brother- and sisterhood.

The Danes apparently have a specialized concept something like “deliberate coziness,” hygge, that they credit with making them extraordinarily happy people despite their sunlight-deficient environment. New Yorkers have a kindred kind of tenderness for one another that people from everywhere else are prone to mis-reading completely. It rarely expresses itself via anything more than a raised eyebrow or an exasperated hunch of the shoulders, but occasionally crosses the line into a camaraderie-building shrug while keeping eye contact with a stranger: We acknowledge the effort it takes one another to stifle the R-rated politically incorrect broadsides we compose while we’re simply inconvenienced at times by the presence of eight million other people with multiple ideas about social constructs such as personal space, vocal volume, and the pedestrian speed limit. (Denmark, by comparison, has under six million.)

I was overcome by it while waiting in line to vote on Tuesday. The Giuliani-Bloomberg era was ending with a whimper, and the line was just a few persons, but taking longer than it felt like it should. My local bartender was in front of me. He turned around with his eyebrows high, then interrupted himself with some small talk to distract us. “You’re voting No on Question 5, right?” “Yup.”

The signs were like this:

I love this city.