How about this: keep the same behavior when you're in the city, but give a user option to hide or expand the list of neighborhoods if you're outside it.

This resolves itself when I'm in Manhattan, but it would be very useful for suburbanites trying to plan their day (going to Soho, or a meeting in Midtown, for example)

The app only shows Manhattan neighborhoods if you are actually in or around Manhattan when viewing your bookmarks list. It is the same for all cities for which we have neighborhood data. We're still researching an intuitive way to provide all the city and neighborhood subdivisions at once without making your bookmarks list unwieldy--we're open to any suggestions on how best to organize it!