Whitespaces are not considered operators, this means that new york city will be passed "as is" to the analyzer configured for the field. If the field is a keyword field the analyzer will create a single term new york city and the query builder will use this term in the query. If you want to query each term separately you need to add explicit operators around the terms (e.g. new AND york AND city).
If the field is a keyword field
Does it mean that for text fields it works as earlier (splits on whitespaces and uses default_operator?)