There are books about New York’s clothes, cemeteries, slang, grid, ghosts, gangs. Its abandonment issues. Its vanishing mom-and-pops. Its unofficial mascot. Reports of its death (greatly exaggerated). Its rats and its moles. Its wet detritus. Its musicians circa 2003. And that’s just the nonfiction. Choosing books for this edition was like sipping from a tsunami.
Then I thought things over. (There’s a reason I write these only monthly—so much contemplation.) What is the city? What is its nature? Ignoring the old chestnuts about glamour, power, and cash, and mean streets, and French connections—if you dig to the apple’s core, what is found there? What do New Yorkers feel, what have they always felt, what do I still feel after leaving? And which works might help nascent New Yorkers acclimate to these qualities?
There are prerequisites, of course—things to know about the city’s shapers, its Stuyvesants and Hudsons and Olmsteds/Vauxes and Moseses/Jacobses. I’d advise consuming the 17 ½ hour Ric Burns documentary New York (1999). It’s thorough, narrated by David Ogden Stiers, and honestly? Riveting. (I watched it my first month in town, one Netflix disc at a time, while eating potatoes for dinner on a leaking air mattress.) Strap in for some pioneering Dutchmen and megalomaniacal urban developers. But there are also things you must know about the city’s current, real-life residents, like those in New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time, by the marvelous Craig Taylor (2021). You’ll meet MTA workers, elevator repairmen, moms of prisoners at Riker’s—and you’ll see that it takes all 8.4 million people to make this city what it is.
Something else you should know is what not to do, also known as the thing I did. I came to New York sight unseen for grad school, after which I planned to return to California. I landed in Washington Heights, a drab smear of upper Manhattan, knowing no one, $200 in my sock. I do recommend the moving-to-New-York-blindly-with-no-net part; it was bracing, like running nude and screaming off a cliff. I just wish I’d let the city feel permanent sooner. I stayed because I got a cool job, and I moved from the Heights to the Bronx to Times Square (oof) to the Upper West Side. Still, for years I treated the city like a temporary condition. Always homesick, eyeing jobs in California, bitching that nothing in New York could ever just be easy. It wasn’t a place I fully inhabited until my final few years, when I was wiser and richer and in a better marriage and on better meds—but by then I was older, too, and already eyeing the door. What a waste. (It was still pretty fun, though.) The point is: Be broke and depressed in New York if you must be, but know that few get to stay long. Sip heartily from this tsunami city while you can, and let it be a home to you.
If you find that your vagabond shoes are longing to stray to the concrete jungle where dreams are made of, I hope three things for you: that you come from money (kidding, kind of), that you’re the sort who really notices things (or else this city will be wasted on you), and that the fine works below will ease and aid your journey.
Anyway, New York is…
…Irreconcilable.
Once, walking to the 1 train at Columbus Circle beneath the swooping Sol LeWitt mural—arresting, drunk with color—I saw a man limp by with a gangrenous leg. Once, after a private work dinner at the Harvard Club, I had to bum the $2.50 fare home off a friend. Once, I parked my shitty old car on First Ave and 50th to alphabetize the private library of a famous heiress for whom I did odd jobs. I shelved her signed first edition of Tender Is the Night, washed my hands beneath her Chagall, then came out to find my car’s rear window smashed.
New York is an orgy of incongruity. It gives, snatches back. Puffs you up, humbles you. Presents delights and impediments in equal measure. It’s pretty and gruesome, genteel and coarse. Astoundingly rich (see: House of Outrageous Fortune [Michael Gross, 2014]) and wrenchingly poor (see: How the Other Half Lives [Jacob Riis, 1890], the masterful novel Call It Sleep [Henry Roth, 1934] or the powerhouse NYT series Invisible Child [Andrea Elliott, 2013].) It’s also full of people from somewhere else who are now, somehow, even more from here.
Which brings us to “Canal Street” (Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, 1990; included in Gone to New York [2005]), an essay about Gary, the author’s shifty, lovable landlord, an Israeli who’s lived in the city for decades. There’s so much detail in the piece you have to hack through with a machete: “House keys, safety pins, gaskets, pop-tops, bottle caps, watch gears, buckles, umbrella ribs” emboss the tarry gutters, smushed by tires; “carp,” Frazier writes, “show the red of their gills as they gasp in the milky water of a big metal tank in a seafood store.” The piece also tells the origin story of the Holland Tunnel, which extends under the Hudson River from the west end of Canal to Jersey City, and seems to have nothing to do with the piece until suddenly, movingly, it does. Gary has only been to the mainland, what he calls “America,” once or twice; to him, the Holland leads to another country. One last contradiction for you: this most cosmopolitan of cities can often feel like a small town.
…Built on aloneness.
This isn’t a place most go to find love (though you may do so incidentally), but to build something that’s yours: a career, dream, new way of living. As a result, there’s an ineffable self-focus, an interiority, to life in New York. You can be partnered, parented, a parent yourself, with an infinite roster of dinner companions—but on the subway, earbuds in; and walking to work; and lying in bed listening to tinkly, tipsy voices and sighing bus brakes, you’re alone in a way that’s particular to this city. In my thirteen New York years, I went to parties, concerts, readings, drinks, birthday bar-rent-outs, deafening dinners, work events (so underdressed, so aware of myself)—but if I think of my time there, I see me on my way somewhere, silent, just thinking.
Some excellent alone-in-New-York books include The Odd Woman and the City (Vivian Gornick, 2016), a memoir, in large part, of joyous solitude, in which she writes that in New York she can “taste in my mouth world, sheer world.” There’s also the nihilistic novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018), though I prefer Rockaway (Tara Ison, 2013). Both use a similar device—NYC woman in solitude just before 9/11, which the reader knows is coming but the protagonist doesn’t—but Ison’s book has more heart. In kids’ books about the city, children, too, are often alone—like sweet, confused Lori in the snortingly wry picture book How Little Lori Visited Times Square (Amos Vogel and Maurice Sendak, 1963); or the canny Kincaid children hiding at the Met in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (E.L. Konigsburg, 1967). Finally, if you plan to work in the city (not everyone does, you know), you’ll need Lunch Poems (Frank O’Hara, 1964). Written in Times Square during O’Hara’s solo midday meal breaks, it’s full of perfect lines like, “Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday.” In the city, going outside alone at lunch is like cutting school; back within the gamboling life force beyond the office window, you briefly, deliciously, belong to yourself again. Try not to eat at your desk.
…So much now built atop so much then.
Inside 129 Spring Street is a redbrick well shaft where, in 1799, a body was dumped. (Future duelers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr defended the main suspect—together.) Now, the well sits beside the registers of a clothing boutique. There are fist-sized scars in the limestone façade of 23 Wall Street from an anarchist’s 1920 bomb, feet from Fearless Girl and a Blue Bottle. There’s still a surveyor’s bolt in Central Park, hammered in the 1810s, during the plotting of the great grid. At Pearl and Broad, a glimpse of 17th-century Dutch masonry lies beneath plexiglass; above it is a Dunkin Donuts. This isn’t a lamentation. It’s just how the city is. History rests dustily amid the bustle, steady and still in the grand time-lapse ballet of add-ons and teardowns and rebuilds. Someday soon, you’ll gaze about your apartment and wonder at the countless stories it’s hosted. (Then you’ll go find a picture of its past life.)
To familiarize yourself with the city’s sedimentary approach to time, start with the delightful documentary The Cruise (1998), which follows an impish, poetic tour bus guide who says things over the PA like, “Midtown Manhattan is an experiment, a system of test tubes gurgling, boiling, out of control…this is ludicrousness and it cannot last.” Then, after a beat: “New Ann Taylor store on the right.” The fascinating Names of New York (2021), by the curiously named Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, explores the history of the city through the ways we’ve referred to its neighborhoods and streets and parks; how the Lenape and Dutch and everyone since have named and renamed—and thus altered our understanding of—this place. You’ll also need Forgotten New York (Kevin Walsh, 2006), a borough-specific guide to minor historical sites, each poignant points of connection to New Yorkers of yore. Speaking of New Yorkers, specifically the magazine by that name, read all you can by its legendary columnist Joseph Mitchell; his compendium Up in the Old Hotel (1993) includes “The Old House at Home,” an ode to McSorley’s, the ancient bar where Abe Lincoln and Boss Tweed and any resident with good taste have downed the minimum order of two pints. (Incidentally, the bar now abuts a salon and a karate dojo.) Finally, to grasp the IRL experience of the city’s impermanence, its marriage of new to old, watch the “How to Put Up Scaffolding” episode of How to With John Wilson (2020), an earnest, hilarious, moving HBO series that serves as covert love letter to a city where the past is never dead (or even past).
…For walking.
Much of New York can be seen only on foot. Take the cherubic doorman at 55 Central Park West (where there was no Dana, only Zuul) who, if he likes you, bows as you pass. Or the nighttime ceiling of Bethesda Terrace, where spotlights illuminate the ornate tiles you’d barely glimpse in daylight. Or the gutters of Central Park West after the Thanksgiving parade, duned with rainbow confetti. Or Sixth-and-a-Half Avenue, the north-south walkway from 51st to 57th made up of skyscraper lobbies and public atria—a sweet secret everyone knows. Or the lovely lamp posts of Central Park, which, if you examine them closely, will help you find your way.
The walking-in-New-York book is a genre unto itself. One canonical contribution is the quiet, mournful novel Open City (Teju Cole, 2012), in which a Nigerian doctor-in-training logs endless steps pondering loss, race, and identity. Nonfiction-wise, there’s Waterfront (Phillip Lopate, 2005), a contemplative combing of Manhattan’s 360-degree shoreline, deeply historical and no less brilliant for its ephemeral nature (“You’ve only to characterize some physical part of the cityscape or deliver an opinion on a current situation,” Lopate writes, “for the reality to change next week”); The New York Nobody Knows (William Helmreich, 2015), a book with ordinary prose and extraordinary breadth—the author walked every block of every borough, amassing charming intel; and Twenty Minutes in Manhattan (Michael Sorkin, 2013), an on-foot commute through downtown that inspires cerebral digressions on urban planning, engineering, and social change. (It’s also funny. Here’s Sorkin’s Tribeca: “Robert DeNiro seems to own half of it, soigné restaurants abound.”)
Of course, the best assignment here isn’t to study, but stroll. You may wish to start with a famous thoroughfare seen in some movie—Fifth Avenue, which won’t be quite as quiet as it was during Holly Golightly’s breakfast, or the Central Park Mall where Dustin Hoffman lets go of his boy in Kramer vs. Kramer. But there will be time for all that. Instead, start where you are. Find your half-avenue, your confetti dunes. Find your own walkable city, seen with your own two eyes, on your own two feet.
…A carnival of absurdity.
In cities keen on promulgating an image of “weirdness” (Austin, Portland), the eccentricity in question feels deliberate: nude bike races, kooky murals, rainbow hair. But New York’s farcicality is innate, ambient, manifest not in outré residents (though it has lots) but in absurd scenarios the city spawns without trying. Take the time my dear friend, who paid millions for her skyline view, revealed that she didn’t know the Empire State from the Chrysler; or when on the 1 train an Orthodox Jewish man took off his flip-flop and swatted an unseen cockroach from my leg with it because he couldn’t touch me to remove it (we laughed for two stops); or when my now-husband and I snuck into Gramercy Park and were trapped by the shut gate (we bribed a bellman to open it); or when I saw my psychiatrist—not to be confused with my therapist—at a Shins show in Williamsburg and hid; or the time I filed for divorce at 60 Centre Street, then less than a year later was married at the courthouse across the street (10/10 would recommend the second part—the marriage bureau is the city’s happiest place). These stories are to varying degrees preposterous, but in New York make a kind of sense.
Absurdity in New York-centric fiction typically sends up the city’s inherent nuttiness. (Reminder: “This is ludicrousness and it cannot last.”) The Puttermesser Papers (Cynthia Ozick, 1998) is the dryly unhinged tale of a recluse whose fantasies tend to come true; longing to fix New York, she winds up becoming mayor. (I mean, stranger things have happened…) In the soberer novel The Immortalists (Chloe Benjamin, 2019), a soothsayer tells four Lower East Side siblings the exact date they’ll die; in a city so overflowing with possibility, fate carries fresh meaning. The novel Mimi (Lucy Ellmann, 2013) follows a Manhattan plastic surgeon who falls, breaks his ankle, and is helped up by an intriguing woman who he then falls for in the figurative sense; witty zaniness ensues. The Brooklyn Follies (Paul Auster, 2005), also a novel, opens with a protagonist hoping to die, unfolds in uncanny twists and coincidences—the city’s specialty—and ends with unlikely redemption. Finally, the documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (2011) is a wild detective story about cryptic messages found embedded in crosswalks around town, placed, it turns out, by a guy with some interesting thoughts on Kubrick’s 2001 and mankind’s future on Jupiter. Because of course, why not.
…A joy you miss even as it’s happening.
A former resident of the Upper West Side once sang of instant karma—but the New York I knew was a land of instant nostalgia. Most every resident knows they can’t stay forever. So, when happy things happen to you in the city, it feels cinematic and tinged with longing, like it’s already gone. I’ll miss this—the thought I had during wild nights, dropping rent money on whiskey sours; while cackling at dinners with beloved people who’ve all since moved away; while working with my best friends for a lucky decade, in a way I never will again; and as my own little New Yorker morphed from newborn to toddler so fast it seemed time had sprung a leak, his babyhood and the city forever joined. In the end, it was the old story: he needed, and we wanted, more space than we could afford, and also, we were just tired. A cabbie once told me, “New York can take your time and money and you’ll be okay. But once it takes your energy, it’s time to go.” I felt the rightness of this assessment in my bones—which now reside, along with the rest of me, in suburban New Jersey.
Plenty of New York novels capture this transitory joy, a municipal euphoria that burns too bright to last long. The rollicking novel Ragtime (E.L. Doctorow, 1975) evokes two of the city’s chief natural resources, awe and grief, weaving them so tightly as to render them inextricable. Another Country (James Baldwin, 1962), also a novel, is a bittersweet tangle of lives not unlike the one you’ll soon be living in, thick with the thorny, tender, fleeting things that occur between city dwellers in love. The novel A Big Storm Knocked It Over (Laurie Colwin, 1993) evokes the mindfuck of finally getting what you want from the city (for the protagonist, a beloved job and steadying spouse) but never quite believing you’ll get to keep it. The Best of Everything (Rona Jaffe, 1958), a tale of the midcentury typing pool, follows three office girls buffeted and beguiled by this exhilarating place, each aware that this is it, the most thrilling their lives will ever be.
I’ll close with a writer, the New York writer, whose bighearted work made room for both rapturous love for New York and the deep longing it engenders (he contained multitudes, after all). Walt Whitman understood that to live in the city is to be a link in a chain, one made up of all those who call it home. In his 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he wrote:
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.
One day you will unlink from that chain, will leave the city by choice or circumstance, and someone new will take your place. However long you stay, whatever ripple you do or don’t make in the city’s vast sea, when it’s all over you will have lived in New York, an experience that leaves no one unchanged. You’ll think of everything it took from you and all it gave, how it terrified and electrified you. And, in the end, how it helped you become you.
Next time: What to read when you leave the city for the suburbs…