ALL the motor-vehicle cultural stuff, also making lots of noise in the streets with dirt bikes in the boroughs, and including the street shows on the bridges is TOTALLY NEW in NYC, STARTED WITH COVID! Cops have been fighting the culture like crazy since it started, they confiscate the dirt bikes, 100's a week, and destroy them, they have always been totally illegal here but the fight against them by the cops has been heavily covered in the local news.

It has been quite interesting to watch it develop as I am born and bred from the south side of Milwaukee, a longtime home of "greasers" from before I was born, inspiration for "American Graffiti" and "Happy Days" :Leon's Custard Stand which was used to film "American Graffiti" is not far from my childhood home.

My S.O. while I still lived there (until age 29)  was part of that scene as he was 10 years older than me, had the nickname of "Doctor of the Streets", knew all the doowop groups and loved Elvis of course, an expert at tricking out cars, and still as thirty-something had a new Cadillac convertible fitted with chrome side pipes and with candy apple red paint (later he got a Corvette painted with flames by renowned pin-stripe painter Butch Brinza who was also a close friend. ) In summer when I was not in college he'd take me on long rides visiting his favorite stops including stopping to see another friend Randi, manager of a "speed shop." My S.O. did not drag anymore but once in a while a kid with a tricked out car who thought he was hot shit would pull up alongside us at night and rev his engine and this would piss off J. enough and he would gun it, which was not my favorite thing...

Ok the point is that I was steeped in WHITE MIDWEST greaser culture since high school and certainly learned everything about it during my college years. It had NOTHING to do wth California Hispanic low rider street culture, they were two totally different things, as different as the Beach Boys were from Elvis.

Now on to NYC. I got to know the Bronx and Queens and Staten Island from 1983 on even though I worked in Manhattan. Street car culture was TOTALLY foreign to NYC. Kids here didn't own cars! They sang on the streets. Puerto Ricans had street gangs, not cars, see "West Side Story", and sang doo-wop on street corners.

Kids did a tiny little bit of it of drag racing and the like in working class Yonkers--just across the city border from the Bronx where I am--but it was always minor.

I interacted with people from my neighborhood in the Bronx about the sudden and shocking rise of car culture, drag racing and the like all night every night all of a sudden in summer 2020, that it was happening was clear as a bell, I recognized it for sure. I think it was because there was nothing going on, so little action on the streets that kids wanted to make some. They started with the dirt bikes as they were cheap, illegal, so one didn't even have to bother with the DMV or be of age. And then they graduated to car culture from there, it was an import, never before had we seen things like this video, it's all new. And a very interesting mix, therefore, of east and west coast culture, is also intertwined a bit with the rivalry between east coast and west coast rap.

The street shows are totally west coast and influenced by CA Hispanic culture, and yes, they have finally been imported here.

It's all very interesting as if CA car culture really totally infiltrates the youth of the boroughs that will make them moreso part of a culture totally foreign to Manhattan and the divide between green anti-car hipsters of Manhattan (and their wealthy parents) and the "bridge and tunnel" people will grow ever greater. The dislike of Manhattan people will definitely grow. Vicey-versa is still a question--will elite wealthy educated woke, supposed working-class friendlym be able to navigate this culture without insulting it? Remains to be seen...