Hello

The State of the City speech, delivered each winter by the mayor, is a fine piece of political rhetoric and a time-honored policy platform.

But it’s a misnomer: It doesn’t tell you what’s really going on out there.

For that, you need to ask the people.

And what people know, in New York City, is their block, that mini-city of brick and mortar, friend and stranger, sidewalk and pothole whose every change, sudden or gradual, we note as we go about our days.

So as Bill de Blasio delivered his State of the City speech a couple of weeks ago, we asked readers to tell us the state of their blocks.

Taken together, they paint a vivid mosaic of a maddening, lovable place. Some writers echoed the same concerns the mayor raised about the vanishing of affordable housing as the city continues to gentrify at warp speed.

Others focused on annoyances that arrive weekly – the double-parking churchgoers that box in a whole block of cars on West 147th Street in Hamilton Heights -- or daily: “We have a major problem with rats on our block!” writes Caroline of East 76th Street.

Readers celebrated the joys of cooperation:

“We shoveled a neighbor's sidewalk,” wrote Mary Ann Rekuc of Ainslie Street in Williamsburg. “She brought us a thank-you gift. Another neighbor's son shoveled ours - as he passed by pushing snow he said ‘I'm on a roll - don't stop me now!’”

And they mourned the fraying of neighborly ties:

“The new tenants who are paying the new steep rents are not as friendly as the old ones, leading my son to conclude that rich people are not as friendly and nice,” wrote an anonymous correspondent on West 81st Street.

They cast a suspicious eye on local improvements:

“Of course the neighborhood is going to appear cleaner and look nicer when people are trying to profit from it,” writes Fernando Martinez of Washington Heights. “I’ve never seen my apartment building cleaner or more renovated. It is the intentions of these seemingly beneficial renovations...