Playlist:
Golden Boy with Miss Kittin / Rippin Kittin (2002) / YouTube
There was a good long time where it was near-impossible to get a taxi to drive to an outer borough, especially far into one. You were far less likely to be rejected if you'd managed to get in the car and have the driver start in the right direction before "updating" the destination to something farther away. It wasn't an aversion to the long drive; the driver was not going to have someone hail a return trip from a residential neighborhood in the middle of the night so they'd just have to go back to Manhattan.