[rquantz]

If nothing else, in many NYC neighborhoods it would be simply impossible to greet every person you see.

Still, there are plenty of residential neighborhoods where no one acknowledges each other on the street, and there is no sense of neighborliness. Paradoxically, given this article, I find that the more wealthy a neighborhood, the less likely you are to be greeted by a stranger. The poorer the neighborhood (I would imagine down to a lower bound – I seldom go to the truly poor neighborhoods simply because they are so far from the city center in New York) the more likely that greeting is, especially in a black neighborhood like Bed Stuy or (when I first moved here) Harlem.

[partisan]

When I was in Harlem the last time, there were a lot of greetings thrown around. Mostly, it was the older guys. The younger guys didn't seem to expect a greeting. I grew up in NYC and in my neighborhood, you saw people greeting each other through the 80's, but when the 90's rolled around, it changed and people stopped trying to know each other in any meaningful way.