NEW YORK—The personalities of Charlottesville and the Big Apple seem about as similar as Thomas Jefferson and Rudy Giuliani. One slumbers as a beer-soaked Southern college town, while the other pulses as a power-mad finance hub.

The similarities, say some of the young Cavalier Daily alumni who live here, come through finding a niche in a larger world. Going to work or school each day. Looking for something fun to do on the weekend.

In New York City, however, you’re more likely to see Howard Stern, Ben Stiller or Bjork on the street rather than on stage or screen. You’re likely to pay too much for a too-small apartment. And perhaps the biggest difference, CD alums say, is the change of pace.

"Everything happens so much faster," said Jena Bridges, a 1994 graduate who wrote news stories and music reviews. "The traffic is faster, people talk fast, business happens faster. Now that I’ve lived here, I can spot a tourist a mile away. They’re slower."

At Home in the City
An Atlanta native, Bridges spent seven years in Charlottesville, living on a farm during law school. After graduating again in 1997, she said she felt brave enough to "leave the mother ship" and become an associate at a top New York law firm.

"I just thought it would be cool to live in the city," she said. "New York is just like no other place in the world."

For some CD alums, such as former photographer Tierney O’Dea, coming to New York is coming home. She got a leg up from her parents, who vacated a rent-controlled apartment.

"I’m like Monica from ‘Friends’ with a ridiculously large apartment," said O’Dea, who graduated in 1998 and works as an associate producer on NBC Nightly News.

"New York is a hard place to come and to just start out in, unless you want to live in a shoebox or in somewhere random," she said. "I don’t know how people just come to the city and do it on their own. I’m a lucky kid."

For Heidi Waters Thorsen, CD graphics editor in 1990-91, moving to New York meant trading a three-bedroom house and a yard for a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village—for triple the mortgage on the house.

"The adjustment moving to New York has been horrendous," she said. There’s no washer-dryer in the building—she has to haul her laundry down the street. The grocery store is right around the corner, but she buys only what she can carry. And then there are the things she took for granted in Virginia.

"There are no stars in the sky. The air is not fresh," Thorsen said. "The quality of life is much lower than in Charlottesville, although the theater here rocks."

Fitting In
New Yorkers are supposed to be rude, Thorsen said, but they’re just "not particularly polite." If she dropped a glove, for example, somebody would shout, "Hey lady, you dropped your glove." In Charlottesville, however, someone more likely would say, "Excuse me, ma’am, you dropped a glove" and hand it to her.

"They’re not—what’s the word?—genteel," she said.

When she moved to New York after 11 years in Charlottesville, Thorsen often wore her "Charlottesville outfit," shopping in comfortable clothes and Birkenstocks.

"The proprietors would either say ‘guten Tag’ or ‘bonjour’ because I looked like a tourist," she said. "I decided I had to dress like a New Yorker."

She put away the Laura Ashley and got a personal shopper to clothe her in knee-high boots and a black leather jacket. Tourists started asking her for directions, but she eventually reverted to wearing flowy florals and comfortable shoes, marveling at how well painfully put-together many New York women appear.

"My goodness, they just look so hot and uncomfortable," she said. "They were all going around in strappy heels, sweating."

Entertaining in Manhattan is another challenge, Thorsen said. Gone are the days of showing up at Newcomb Hall Theater five minutes before show time. In Manhattan, even mediocre movies sell out on the weekends. And going to a nice restaurant usually means making a reservation a month in advance, she said. Calling the day you want a table often finds nothing available until nearly 11 p.m.

"Unless you want to stand at a counter and eat a slice of pizza, you need a reservation," she said.

Star Gazing, and Other Hobbies
Wherever you eat in New York, or buy your books or get your hair cut, you’re a lot more likely to bump into a celebrity, CD alums say. Thorsen passed Ben Stiller talking on his cell phone. Brian Bissonette, an associate opinion editor in 1995-96, saw Woody Allen and his wife, Seon-Yi, walking down his street and Rod Stewart one night in a bar. Uma Thurman was in a store when Bissonette was buying a tie. And former CD’er Bruce Greenbaum saw Howard Stern on a crosswalk.

"You certainly take those things in stride, or your break your neck swiveling it around looking for all those beautiful people you see on television," said Greenbaum, CD business manager in 1990-91.

Dominic Perella, who served as assistant managing editor in 1995-96, sat next to Julia Roberts at a screening of "Being John Malkovich." Perella, now an editor at The Associated Press, took celebrity-watching one step further when he actually bought a drink for Icelandic singer Bjork. In search of live music one night, he ended up at the Knitting Factory, where he heard Bjork hangs out. He and a friend admired her for two hours, downing drinks and working up the nerve to ask the bartender what she prefers. Finally, they approached her and spoke.

"Hi, Bjork, we’re big fans, and we heard you’re drinking Irish coffee," Perella remembers saying. She smiled, took the coffee and set it down. "She just looked at us like we were crazy."

Bridges finds plenty to do in a city of 8 million people besides star-watching, whether it’s attending sporting events or engaging in her new hobby: road biking up the Palisades in New Jersey or out to Coney Island. "There are a lot of cabs that want to hit you. Taxis aim for you.

"Whatever you want to do in the city, no matter how weird or twisted, there are other people who want to do it with you," she said.

In Charlottesville, Greenbaum spent his leisure time playing badly at Birdwood. Now the only way to play golf is "very expensively," sometimes to the tune of hundreds of dollars for a rental car to get out of the city. It also means enduring traffic to get there, instead of enjoying no classes on Fridays and $12 greens fees.

"There are no such bargains here for such a nice course," Greenbaum said. "You get spoiled as a student."

Getting Around
After U.Va., Greenbaum went on to earn an MBA at the University of Michigan, and moved from Ann Arbor to Manhattan in 1996. Charlottesville was very car driven, Greenbaum and other alums said, though many locations were accessible by foot.

"One of the bigger adjustments was giving up my car and learning to live in the world of public transportation," said Greenbaum, who works at Ernst & Young Corporate Finance.

Mitch Frank, who served as executive editor in 1995-96, finds transportation in New York a lot like Charlottesville, but different from Miami, where he grew up.

"Living in Charlottesville, you could walk almost anywhere on Grounds," said Frank, a political reporter for Time magazine who covered some of the 2000 presidential campaign. "In New York, I can walk anywhere I want."

And if you didn’t want to walk, driving anywhere in Charlottesville was easy, unlike in Miami, where everything was 30 minutes away.

"I drove around all the time in Charlottesville, and now I have to take the subway every day," Frank said.

Not All Play
While New York drew some former CDers with its culture and energy, others just came looking for a job. Bissonette, a Buffalo, N.Y., native, came to New York for a job in investment banking with Banc of America Securities.

"I was never one of those people who was that gung-ho about living in the Big Apple," said Bissonette, who served as opinion editor in 1995-96. "It was purely a professional decision."

While television and movies show New Yorkers spending lots of time at cocktail parties, Bissonette said that’s not what he found.

"The reality is that people here work a lot," he said. "It’s just an economic reality that to make a decent living here, you have to spend a lot of your waking hours at the office."

New York State of Mind
Working for national news outlets, O’Dea and Perella both said they notice an unwarranted tendency toward too much New York coverage. The self-important mentality seeps into the rest of the city, too, they said.

"Everyone who comes to New York works under the impression that New York is the center of all cultural life and that everyone outside of New York is some bizarre hick," Perella said.

O’Dea said NBC has worked against such a mindset, trying to keep a national scope in its coverage and not dwell on the East and West coasts.