Those who have never set foot on the island might assume it's overrun by Brits, but although some of the tackier areas like the West End of San Antonio are like that, cooler dancefloors embrace a cosmopolitan mix where you're as likely to find yourself dancing next to a fashionista from Berlin or a Milanese ultra as a girl or boy from Essex.
Many ended up in a tacky, crowded area called Freak Street.
You'll find plenty of that in the tacky Gastown area downtown, along with T-shirt shops and mediocre restaurants, if you're misguided enough to go there.
Place the pad of your index finger next to the tacky adhesive area.
Today's candy emporiums and theme restaurants lend their own tacky gloss to the area, but it cannot be denied that the family-friendly 42nd Street of today has been beneficial to the commercial resurgence of Broadway.
The first of a string of projects linked to the development of the High Line, a park being built on a segment of abandoned elevated rail tracks, the new building's muscular form is strong enough to stand up to both its tacky neighbors and the area's older industrial structures.
But then the "real" design of the period is not much better: if Michael Young's aluminium and vinyl Magazine sofa, which belongs in a tacky nightclub's VIP area, is the pinnacle of 1990s furniture design, the decade itself was not a high point).
To the extent that it penetrated the national consciousness at all, the area signified bland, tacky middle-class conformity: when people heard "Long Island," they thought "Levittown".
I saw BAM's donors heading to a VIP area outfitted with tacky pink couches in honor of Anna, and an old lady several rows ahead of me ogled the stage's bright pink curtain, which was adorned with gigantic paintings of body builders.
Or we can point to a tacky house in one of those outlying areas, too.
