So glad you posted this Jason. I'd been sharing it among my friends again too. There's a brilliant recording of Alec Baldwin reading it at Symphony Space for Selected Shorts from WNYC way back when.  The podcast is lost to time, but here's a Soundcloud version which should work for most people: https://soundcloud.com/bpny/colson-whitehead-lost-and-found

I’ve been using the line, “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” about my time in San Franciso for a long time without knowing where I heard it. Thanks for sharing the Alec Baldwin reading. I’m sure I heard it on the radio cleaning up the kitchen late at night. The idea stuck with me and bears out more and more each day. 

This piece is in my personal pantheon. I read it the day it was published in an apartment that still smelled like The Pile when the wind was right. I was then still a person who "moved here a couple years ago." I reread it after I got the keys to my own place a few years later, and I listened to the Selected Shorts version while getting drunk to avoid thinking about the mess I had made of my  career 10 years after that. These days I visit it like an old friend, now that I'm probably "closer to the last time than you were to the first time."

If you loved this, and you don't know Colson Whitehead, first of all, I'm envious. Second, go read The Colossus of New York and follow it up with the just-concluded Harlem Trilogy. 

As someone who has only ever visited NYC, I've always loved it, but never really appreciated it the way I see New Yorkers do. How could I? 

Reading NK Jemisin's The City We Became, and its sequel The World We Make, gave me a brief peek into that appreciation. Personifying the boroughs and showing the endless grind of living and breathing as a city was beautiful.