[careersuicide]

I was actually just about to post this, almost word for word, before I read your reply.

I often see lamentations about people not being friendly to strangers in big cities. I've never quite understood it. It's one thing to not greet or acknowledge a person if you're already having some sort of interaction with them, i.e. holding the door for someone as you leave a store. Of course you should say something or at least smile and node politely, perhaps making brief eye contact, in that case. But, outside of situations similar in nature to that I actually think it's pretty rude to accost strangers in a crowded public place. People are going about their business and you're attempting to force them to give you attention, even if that's not your intent.

Experience has taught me that above a certain threshold of crowdedness the only people who are greeting me want something from me in at least one of the ways you mentioned. Everyone else is out and about because they have something to do. When I go to the middle of nowhere Kansas from time to time things are different. There you wave to passing cars and say "hi" to everyone even if you've never seen them before. The odds that some random person is going to try and sell you a watch at the intersection of Main St. and State Highway Whatever is pretty much zero. And, there aren't a hundred other things attempting to distract people so demanding a brief bit of their attention isn't rude at all.

[chrisseaton]

This is my problem with strangers saying hello out of the blue - they think I should stop everything and give them my attention. And in their head they think they're doing something selfless!

[tunap]

Yep. A nod will suffice for greetings in almost all public spaces. When I recognize the tell-tale signs I've been 'marked', I am always prepared to respond with the unusually effective "negative" response and leave it at that.

[rquantz]

If nothing else, in many NYC neighborhoods it would be simply impossible to greet every person you see.

Still, there are plenty of residential neighborhoods where no one acknowledges each other on the street, and there is no sense of neighborliness. Paradoxically, given this article, I find that the more wealthy a neighborhood, the less likely you are to be greeted by a stranger. The poorer the neighborhood (I would imagine down to a lower bound – I seldom go to the truly poor neighborhoods simply because they are so far from the city center in New York) the more likely that greeting is, especially in a black neighborhood like Bed Stuy or (when I first moved here) Harlem.

[partisan]

When I was in Harlem the last time, there were a lot of greetings thrown around. Mostly, it was the older guys. The younger guys didn't seem to expect a greeting. I grew up in NYC and in my neighborhood, you saw people greeting each other through the 80's, but when the 90's rolled around, it changed and people stopped trying to know each other in any meaningful way.