For those who weren’t born and raised in New York City, how long must you live in the five boroughs to qualify as an official New Yorker? What if you were born in the city but have moved away? Can you still claim citizenship? The perennially contentious question of who may claim the city as their own can now be decisively answered. By whom? The Department of New Yorker Verification, which is now accepting formal applications.
On its website, the DNYV explains that it “exists to answer — on the record, and by evidence — a question the city has argued about for 400 years. What makes a New Yorker? Residence is an address. The title is earned.”
Franz Aliquo, a Bayside-born, Roosevelt Island-raised creative director and artist who’s been organizing participatory hijinks around NYC and beyond since the late 1990s, currently runs all aspects of the department. He built the site this summer, inspired by native New Yorkers who are “dicks” and gatekeep the New Yorker identity, including current Los Angeles resident Jennifer Lopez and himself. In a viral June Subway Takes video, she declared, “You have to be born in New York to be a New Yorker” and the conversation it spurred also inspired the site’s creation…