Found this article while researching for my annual report. I don't think I mentioned, but the company I am designing my annual report for is Sturm, Ruger and Co. which is a producer and seller of firearms.  Hence, why I was reading Garden and Gun magazine online. Thought this article was interesting. Would love to move to NYC when I am finished at PC!

BY JESSICA MISCHNER | APRIL/MAY 10 | CITY PORTRAIT

The Southern Invasion of NYC

Southern culture is hot in the Big Apple. Here's how and where to find it

Famous Southern story: In the spring of 1963, a young Mississippian named Willie Morris hops a Greyhound bus bound for New York City. In short order, he goes on to become the youngest editor in chief ever to preside over Harper’s magazine, a star of Manhattan’s literary scene, and close personal friends with the likes of William Styron and Frank Sinatra. But for all his success, and much as he loves New York, Morris never feels comfortable in the place he refers to as the “Big Cave.” He longs for his hometown of Yazoo City and the “lush hills” of his boyhood. Describing this internal struggle in his best-selling 1967 memoir, North Toward Home, he says, “The massive office buildings where people worked, the jostling for position in the elevators…, the windows opening out onto other office buildings equally massive and impersonal—all this was part of a way of living unknown to me, uprooted from the earth and its sources.”

Poor Willie. If only he’d moved to New York City a few decades later, he would have felt much more at home.

Our Kind of Town 
Southerners have been moving to Manhattan—and then pining for their childhood towns—for as long as they’ve had the means to travel north. James Buchanan Duke expanded his tobacco business from North Carolina to Manhattan in 1884 and became the toast of the town. More recently, Newsweek editor in chief and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham (Tennessee), fashion pioneer Geoffrey Beene (Louisiana), and interior designer Charlotte Moss (Virginia) have all made their names—and their homes—in New York City. The list of successes is long, and it inspires even more of us. My own journey to the Big Apple involved a fourteen-hour road trip from my hometown, Camden, South Carolina, to a tiny first-floor apartment in SoHo. My dad drove me up, unpacked my meager belongings, took me to dinner, and left—all in the same day. He figured I’d be starved for Southern culture, but in no time I’d made a network of friends from across the SEC and found a few great soul food restaurants. 

In the last few years, the influx of Southerners has reached a tipping point, and what was once a fringe migration has blossomed into a full-fledged cultural movement. “In the same way that there are more Jews in New York than any other place except Israel, there are now more Southerners in New York than anywhere except the South,” jokes restaurateur (and St. Louis native) Danny Meyer, whose pioneering ventures—Gramercy Tavern, Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, Union Square Café—made farm-fresh ingredients cool again. “You can feel the influence of that across every category of life.”

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