Late to this party, but I'm a native NY-er displaced in New England for decades. Even bagels in NYC aren't the way they used to be - I eat them all the time - a market near me gets them driven up every day from well known bagel shops in NYC. They are softer now than they were 50+ years ago. My parents' generation used to call bagels "cement doughnuts" for a reason. They were much harder back then than now. As a kid in the 1960s I used to watch them boiling in the window of a local bagel shop in the Bronx. So there's really no "authentic" bagel left anymore. Somewhere along the line people decided they liked their bagels softer and after a few decades few people anywhere remembered what they used to be like. Except you know who.