Yawn.

You think New Yorkers aren't friendly try NJ for a sample. Actually I do not run into many true blue New Yorkers anymore. Chances are you are one of these three....a moron, an idiot, an asshole. You must also add your own personalized curse word to the beginning of those three words for it to be complete. I will use this in a phrase "Merge you fucking moron whatthehellisyourproblem!!".

Actually, New Yorkers tend to be polite and helpful because so many of them are foreign-born and come from countries where good manners are still valued.

As many have said, New Yorkers aren't rude or unfriendly. They're just...busy? Aggressive? Honest? I far prefer it to the phony niceties of the midwest, where everyone just pretends to be "nice" to your face and then the moment they feel any degree of anonymity (behind the wheel, on internet message boards) or feel they are in a position of power (dining out, etc.) they become the most obscene jerks I have ever met. They're also incredibly passive aggressive. I would much rather deal with a brusk but generally well meaning New Yorker. 

Oh, and whoever said that the non-natives are the rude ones is right: the rudest people I've met in NYC have all been from, you guessed it, the midwest. Native NYers have been nothing but nice in my experience, stopping and chatting me up on the train, asking me about projects I'm working on whenever I'm taking photographs, always willing to help and stand up for me. Wherever I go I always miss that.

Worst drivers ever. Rude, entitled a-holes. But we all knew that. Stopping for a Stop sign? HONK! Waiting for peds to cross at the WALK sign? HONK! Pulling into a driveway carefully so as not to murder children playing? HONK HONK HONNNNNK!!

pfft, as a Bostonian I laugh at your "bad drivers" and "traffic problems"

We are not rude.  We are efficient. 

A friend of mine who also lived in Chicago (another "rude" town) put it like this "We're not rude, we just have better things to do than to talk to you!"

New Yorkers are not rude - they just tell it like it is, and that's a good thing.  People in other places pretend to be friendly to your face, then stab you in the back. 

I have a whole rant about this. Non- New Yorkers don't understand the difference between rudeness and efficiency. 

"I'm walkin' here!"

"Rude" is subjective.  To me, being rude is walking four abreast on a sidewalk at a leisurely pace, an action that is not exclusive to tourists.  It is also creeping along while peering at a phone or a book (reading while walking: something I am noticing more and more of), oblivious to those behind you, or standing in a pack outside a bar or restaurant, hogging the entire sidewalk.  

And to those people, I am probably considered rude because I rush past them, sometimes possibly slightly grazing them, or walk between them.  You can't win.  We each think the other is rude.  It's annoying, but a tiny part of any given day.  That's overcrowding for you.

Well said. 

I've lived all over the east coast, including Philly, and on the west coast in San Francisco, spent my summers down in South Carolina where I have family and now I have family in Mississippi, and New York is a perfectly friendly place. Even in my early days of living here when I may have had to ask someone a question on the street I never got a rude response. People are way more social with each other here, which is a key consideration. If I had to boil it down I'd say that New Yorkers have a bit of a shell that's harder to crack, they're not always outgoingly friendly (at least at first), but they're great people. I'd rather be around honest, real people any day, even if they're not glowing with smiles and meaningless chit chat all the time, than the faked, two-faced niceness that you get down south, and to a large extent in SF.

fuck tourists. fuck you and you can suck on my big red c---

seriously how about stop gawking at the world trade center site and blocking the narrow roads when im trying to get to my next meeting. its not rude, its called making a living. fuckers.

Why is your c-ck red?

Because he got kicked in it for being a rude new yorker... obviously ;)

I move to Stamford CT from the Bronx and Stamford is only 20 mins from the Bronx but  can feel like a world away  in the Bronx (Morris Park area) your neighbors talk to you and are helpful in CT  I still don't know more then 3 of my neighbors and I been living in CT since 06 in a condo and folks in CT are lot more angry

I gotcha rude, right here!

I question the presumption that everyone on the sidewalk should be moving, in any particular direction at all.  I just came back from a place where there were a lot of people in very limited space, and everyone was moving in all different directions, and no one lost a beat.  If you need to get somewhere, just go around, instead of getting bent out of shape.