writing the city essays on new york

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Writing the City: Essays on New York Hardcover – June 7, 2022

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The eminent preservationist, author, and landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is also a committed New Yorker. Writing the City reveals the many facets of her passion as a citizen of the great metropolis and her lifelong efforts to protect and improve it. These include, most importantly, the creation of the Central Park Conservancy, the organization that transformed Central Park from one of the city's most degraded amenities into its most valuable. Many of Rogers's essays relate to this remarkable achievement, and the insight and administrative acumen that propelled it.

The first section of Writing the City, “Below and Above the Ground,” explores New York's physical make up, especially its geology, as well as the origins of another of New York's world-class landscapes, the New York Botanical Garden. “Along the Shoreline” features an insightful review of Phillip Lopate's Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan and two other essays about the city's edges, one of which focuses on Brooklyn Bridge Park.

In the last section in the collection, “In and About the Parks,” Rogers's understanding of culture, architecture, urban planning history, and landscape architecture come together in five insightful essays. Subjects range from Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park in Brooklyn to “Thirty-three New Ways You Can Help Central Park's Renaissance,” published in New York Magazine in 1983. The concluding essay, “Jane and Me,” offers new perspectives on the urban theorist and activist Jane Jacobs, whose writings catalyzed Rogers's own interest in urban planning in the 1960s.

• Print length 208 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Library Of American Landscape History
• Publication date June 7, 2022
• Dimensions 6.48 x 0.84 x 9.62 inches
• ISBN-10 1952620368
• ISBN-13 978-1952620362
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About the author.

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Hon. ASLA, is president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Rogers was named the first Central Park Administrator in 1979 and a year later became founding president of the Central Park Conservancy. She has written widely on the history of landscape design and the cultural meaning of place. Some of her books are The Forests and Wetlands of New York City; Frederick Law Olmsted's New York; The Central Park Book; Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History;Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries, a 2012 American Horticultural Society Book Award winner; and Saving Central Park: A History and a Memoir. Among her many honors and awards, she holds the Rockefeller Foundation's 2010 Jane Jacobs Medal for lifetime achievement.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Library Of American Landscape History (June 7, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1952620368
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1952620362
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.48 x 0.84 x 9.62 inches
• #30 in Brooklyn New York Travel Books
• #403 in Landscape Architecture (Books)
• #442 in Urban & Land Use Planning (Books)

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Writing the City Essays on New York

Elizabeth barlow rogers.

About the Author

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Hon. ASLA, is founding president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Rogers was named the first Central Park Administrator in 1979 and a year later became founding president of the Central Park Conservancy. She has written widely on the history of landscape design and the cultural meaning of place. Some of her books are The Forests and Wetlands of New York City; Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York; The Central Park Book; Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History; Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries, a 2012 American Horticultural Society Book Award winner; and  Saving Central Park: A History and a Memoir. Among her many honors and awards, she holds the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2010 Jane Jacobs Medal for lifetime achievement. 

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The eminent preservationist, author, and landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is also a committed New Yorker. Writing the City reveals the many facets of her passion as a citizen of the great metropolis and her lifelong efforts to protect and improve it. These include, most importantly, the creation of the Central Park Conservancy, the organization that transformed Central Park from one of the city’s most degraded amenities into its most valuable. Many of Rogers’s essays relate to this remarkable achievement and the insight and administrative acumen that propelled it.

The first section of Writing the City , “Below and Above the Ground,” explores New York’s physical makeup, especially its geology, as well as the origins of another of New York’s world-class landscapes, the New York Botanical Garden. “Along the Shoreline” features an insightful review of Phillip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan and two other essays about the city’s edges, one of which focuses on Brooklyn Bridge Park.

In the last section of the collection, “In and About the Parks,” Rogers’s understanding of culture, architecture, urban planning history, and landscape architecture come together in five insightful essays. Subjects range from Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park in Brooklyn to “Thirty-three New Ways You Can Help Central Park’s Renaissance,” published in New York Magazine in 1983. The concluding essay, “Jane and Me,” offers new perspectives on the urban theorist and activist Jane Jacobs, whose writings catalyzed Rogers’s own interest in urban planning in the 1960s.  

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Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Writing the City: Essays on New York

The eminent preservationist, author, and landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is also a committed New Yorker. Writing the City reveals the many facets of her passion as a citizen of the great metropolis and her lifelong efforts to protect and improve it. These include, most importantly, the creation of the Central Park Conservancy, the organization that transformed Central Park from one of the city's most degraded amenities into its most valuable. Many of Rogers's essays relate to this remarkable achievement, and the insight and administrative acumen that propelled it.

The first section of Writing the City, “Below and Above the Ground,” explores New York's physical make up, especially its geology, as well as the origins of another of New York's world-class landscapes, the New York Botanical Garden. “Along the Shoreline” features an insightful review of Phillip Lopate's Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan and two other essays about the city's edges, one of which focuses on Brooklyn Bridge Park.

In the last section in the collection, “In and About the Parks,” Rogers's understanding of culture, architecture, urban planning history, and landscape architecture come together in five insightful essays. Subjects range from Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park in Brooklyn to “Thirty-three New Ways You Can Help Central Park's Renaissance,” published in New York Magazine in 1983. The concluding essay, “Jane and Me,” offers new perspectives on the urban theorist and activist Jane Jacobs, whose writings catalyzed Rogers's own interest in urban planning in the 1960s.

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Hon. ASLA, is president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Rogers was named the first Central Park Administrator in 1979 and a year later became founding president of the Central Park Conservancy. She has written widely on the history of landscape design and the cultural meaning of place. Some of her books are The Forests and Wetlands of New York City; Frederick Law Olmsted's New York; The Central Park Book; Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History; Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries, a 2012 American Horticultural Society Book Award winner; and Saving Central Park: A History and a Memoir. Among her many honors and awards, she holds the Rockefeller Foundation's 2010 Jane Jacobs Medal for lifetime achievement.

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Famous Writers on New York: Timeless Private Reflections from Diaries, Letters and Personal Essays

By maria popova.

New York City has been the subject of poetic love letters , essayistic homages , emotional cartographies , and artistic tributes . But hardly anything captures the gritty, unfiltered magic of the world’s greatest city than the private recollections of beloved authors, recorded in their journals and correspondence, untainted by the prospect of an evaluating audience. Collected here are some of my favorite such impressions, culled from years of my personal marginalia in famous diaries , letters , and the occasional personal essay.

Mark Twain — in between dispensing advice to little girls and criticizing the popular press — makes a laconic note of New York’s unmanageable scale in an 1867 reflection included in the vintage anthology Mirror For Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present ( public library ):

The only trouble about this town is, that it is too large. You cannot accomplish anything in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call, without devoting a whole day to it — that is, what people call a whole day who do not get up early. Many business men only give audience from eleven to one; therefore, if you miss those hours your affair must go over till next day. Now if you make the time at one place, even though you stay only ten or fifteen minutes, you can hardly get to your next point, because so many things and people will attract your attention and your conversation and curiosity, that the other three quarters of that hour will be frittered away. You have but one hour left, and my experience is that a man cannot go anywhere in New York in an hour. The distances are too great — you must have another day to it. If you have got six things to do, you have got to take six days to do them in.

In the recently released Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985 ( public library ) — which also gave us the author’s wisdom on writing , America , and the meaning of life — Italo Calvino writes to his friend Paolo Spriano on Christmas Eve 1959, shortly after receiving a grant from the Ford Foundation to travel around America for six months alongside six other young writers:

New York has swallowed me up like a carnivorous plant swallowing a fly, I have been living a breathless life for fifty days now, here life consists of a series of appointments made a week or a fortnight in advance: lunch, cocktail party, dinner, evening party, these make up the various stages of the day which allow you constantly to meet new people, to make arrangements for other lunches, other dinners, other parties and so on ad infinitum. America (or rather New York, which is something quite separate) is not the land of the unforeseen, but it is the land of the richness of life, of the fullness of every hour in the day, the country which gives you the sense of carrying out a huge amount of activity, even though in fact you achieve very little, the country where solitude is impossible (I must have spent maybe just one evening on my own out of the fifty I have spent here, and that was because my date with the girl that I had arranged for that evening fell through: here you have to order everything in advance, they are buying theater tickets for March now, and a girl, even if she happens to be your girl at present, has to know a week in advance the evenings she is going out with you otherwise she goes out with someone else).

From the fantastic New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 ( public library ) — one of the best history books of 2012 , which you can sample here — comes this 1947 celebration of New York’s defiant diversity by Simone de Beauvoir :

I’m utterly taken with New York. It’s true that both camps tell me, “New York is not America.” V. irritates me when he declares, “If you like New York, it’s because it’s a European city that’s strayed to the edge of this continent.” It is all too clear that New York is not Europe. But I’m even more distrustful of P., another pro-American Pétain supporter, when he contrasts New York — a city of foreigners and Jews — to the idyllic villages of New England, where the inhabitants are 100 percent American and endowed with patriarchal virtues. We have often heard “the real France” praised this way in contrast to the corruption of Paris.

In another reflection from the same volume, de Beauvoir further marvels at New York’s singular character and medley of complementary contradictions:

In Paris, in Rome, history has permeated the bowels of the ground itself; Paris reaches down into the center of the earth. In New York, even the Battery doesn’t have such deep roots. Beneath the subways, sewers, and heating pipes, the rock is virgin and inhuman. Between this rock and the open sky, Wall Street and Broadway bathe in the shadows of the giant buildings; this morning they belong to nature. The little black church with its cemetery of flat paving stones is as unexpected and touching in the middle of Broadway as a crucifix on a wild ocean beach.

In a 1934 letter to her lifelong friend and then-lover Henry Miller, found in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932–1953 ( public library ), Anaïs Nin echoes de Beauvoir’s affection for the city:

I’m in love with N.Y. It matches my mood. I’m not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It is all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it’s inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I’m not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough, and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That’s my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that’s a mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears and eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel a kind of exhilaration and the tempo is like that of my blood. I’m at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.

But five years later, Nin grows diametrically disillusioned and writes in her diary — which also gave us her timeless wisdom on anxiety and love , how emotional excess fuels creativity , and embracing the unfamiliar — she contrasts New York to her native Paris:

In Paris, when entering a room, everyone pays attention, seeks to make you feel welcome, to enter into conversation, is curious, responsive. Here it seems everyone is pretending not to see, hear, or look too intently. The faces reveal no interest, no responsiveness. Overtones are missing. Relationships seem impersonal and everyone conceals his secret life, whereas in Paris it was the exciting substance of our talks, intimate revelations and sharing of experience.

In another diary entry a year later, she revisits the contrast with growing fervor:

New York is the very opposite of Paris. People’s last concern is with intimacy. No attention is given to friendship and its development. Nothing is done to soften the harshness of life itself. There is much talk about the ‘world,’ about millions, groups, but no warmth between human beings. They persecute subjectivity, which is a sense of inner life; an individual’s concern with growth and self-development is frowned upon. Subjectivity seems to be in itself a defect. No praise or compliments are given, because praise is politeness and all politeness is hypocrisy. Americans are proud of telling you only the bad. The ‘never-talk-about-yourself’ taboo is linked with the most candid, unabashed self-seeking, and selfishness.

In a September 22, 1917, letter to her mother and sister — found in the same superb out-of-print anthology that gave us the poet’s reflections on the love of music , her playfully lewd self-portrait , and the story of how she was almost banned from her own graduation — 18-year-old Edna St. Vincent Millay grumbles with her signature wry wit:

There is no air on 5th Avenue, there is nothing but oil & old gasoline & new gasoline — there is never one breath of pure air — nothing but gas, gas, gas — but people who live in New York walk there to get air. Probably they do get it — all of it — & that’s why it blows to me so scummily.

She later adds:

There is a beautiful anonymity about life in New York.

Three years later, in another letter to her mother, Millay grows exasperated with the city:

New York life is getting too congested for me — too many people; I get no time to work.

Washington Irving shares Millay’s frustration with the city’s density. How endearing and comic to consider that, in this 1847 letter to his sister who hadn’t seen her native city in over forty years, he compares New York (current population: 8.3 million) to Frankfurt (current population: 691,000) in an effort to capture its bustling expansiveness:

I often think what a strange world you would find yourself in, if you could revisit your native place, and mingle among your relatives. New York, as you knew it, was a mere corner of the present huge city ; and that corner is all changed, pulled to pieces, burnt down and rebuilt — all but our little native nest in William street, which still retains some of its old features, though those are daily altering. I can hardly realize that, within my term of life, this great crowded metropolis, so full of life, bustle, noise, show, and splendor, was a quiet little city of some fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants. It is really now one of the most racketing cities in the world, and reminds me of one of the great European cities (Frankfort, for instance) in the time of an annual fair. Here it is a fair almost all the year round. For my part, I dread the noise and turmoil of it, and visit it but now and then, preferring the quiet of my country retreat; which shows that the bustling time of life is over with me, and that I am settling down into a sober, quiet, good-for-nothing old gentleman.

Unlike Irving, E. B. White found in the city’s exuberant turmoil cause for awe rather than distress. In Here Is New York ( public library ), one of the best books about Gotham , he captures the city’s vibrant whimsy in his breathlessly beautiful prose:

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

26-year-old Susan Sontag writes in an 1959 diary entry, found in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 ( public library ), which also gave us her meditations on art , marriage , life , and the four people any great writer must be :

The ugliness of New York. But I do like it here … In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality — no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt … Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed. Adjusting to the city vs. making the city answer better to the self.

Also in New York Diaries , Randy Cohen notes Gotham’s curious customs, which take on a wholly different context than their practice anywhere else:

New York is not Mexico City, but twice a year, we parents at the 96th Street school-bus stop collect money for Mr. R., the driver. “You have to give, or he’ll drop your kid in Times Square alone,” someone jokes. And it is a joke. New York is not Lagos, Mr. R. is a responsible man, and the money is a gift.

But perhaps most poignant and timeless of all is this meta-meditation on writing about New York from The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates ( public library ). In a diary entry dated April 3, 1976, the celebrated author and literary sage reflects:

The impulse of every writer is to create a fictional world that represents the “real” world in abbreviated, heightened, poetic fashion. … Philip Roth’s New York is his own no less than Beckett’s interior landscapes are his own. Otherwise there would be little pleasure in art: it would be a mere attempt at reportage.

New York, to Oates, is the realest and most pleasurable of worlds. In another diary entry several weeks later, she rejoices in the city’s imminent promise:

Leaving tomorrow for my parents’, then to NYC… Poetry reading Monday evening. Then: freedom to explore New York. Our favorite city. The only city.

After the “totally enjoyable, many-faceted visit,” Oates captures New York’s polarizing mesmerism:

The undeniable attraction of that city: its pulse, atmosphere, people. (NYC is much maligned by the rest of the country out of resentment, one suspects. There is only one city in the United States and the others are envious.)

For more on the private joys and tribulations this “only city” has afforded some of literary history’s greatest icons, revisit the wonderful New York Diaries , then celebrate its dimensional magic with these 10 favorite books on Gotham’s glory .

— Published September 17, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/09/17/famous-writers-on-new-york/ —

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• NYC History

Revisit these 10 NYC longreads that have nothing to do with coronavirus

If you need a distraction, here’s some choice writing about New York City

The novel coronavirus , which has prompted a state-wide stay-at-home order is a modern-day phenomenon that’s disrupted New Yorkers’ lives . It has been, in a word, trying. Psychologically and physically, we are being asked to shift our lives in dramatic fashion.

Sometimes we just need a break. If you yearn to tune out the news for an hour or two (stepping away from Twitter is a good, albeit difficult, practice), here are 10 stories published on Curbed NY that will get your mind off the temporary situation saddling us all. These articles run the gamut, from the history of a modernist Manhattan apartment building to the personal stories of nine native New Yorkers.

As always, take care and thanks for reading.

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For weeks I’ve been grumbling to anyone willing to listen (and everyone who follows me on Twitter) about Gramercy Park—more specifically, about how I work three blocks away on Irving Place and am a tax-paying, law-abiding resident of New York City, a historic preservation enthusiast who never litters, and yet this space, a perfect square of green I have to walk around to get to Lexington Avenue, is inaccessible to me because I don’t have one of the 400 keys in circulation.

New York Narratives by Zoe Rosenberg

There’s something about the experience of growing up in New York City—riding the subway to school as a child, or playing tag in the street instead of a backyard—that’s unlike so many other places. Here, you’ll meet nine New Yorkers of varying ages and backgrounds, who have very different perspectives on their hometown but are united in one common theme: they care deeply about this city and its future. They love where they live.

What if you could walk to the airport? by Karrie Jacobs

On a crisp and sunny autumn day, not long ago, I walked to LaGuardia Airport. I wasn’t one of those people you’ve seen on the news who get so panicked by gridlock on the Grand Central Parkway that they abandon their taxis and drag their wheelies across eight lanes of traffic and up the exit ramps to their terminals. I wasn’t even in a hurry. I didn’t have a plane to catch. I wasn’t going anywhere except the airport.

Law & Order’s New York was never real by James Nevius

Now, 28 years later, Law & Order has become the longest-running franchise in prime-time history. The show’s most successful spin-off, Special Victims Unit ( SVU ), has just been renewed for a record-breaking 21st season , while a new iteration, Law & Order: Hate Crimes , is waiting in the wings for a possible 2020 debut. And while detectives and district attorneys have come and gone over the years, two things have remained constant about Law & Order : the legendary dun dun sound and New York City as a character in the show.

The sorority in the skyscraper by Joanna Scutts

In 1921, the New York chapter of the Panhellenic Conference, the national network of college sororities, turned its attention to an urgent local problem: the lack of affordable housing for graduates moving to the city in search of jobs. The chapter’s 3,000 members voted to take direct action to alleviate the situation by creating a unique shared living experiment, a sorority “residence and clubhouse” in the heart of the city. Given how urgent the need was, the group decided that “there was more to be lost by building too small than too large,” and proposed a 14-story building with bedrooms for 400 women, each available on a temporary or long-term basis.

Hoop dreams by Britta Lotking

The Cage is nothing more than a square of asphalt beside the West Fourth Street subway stop, but it is a place of worship and coolness and budding dreams. On a Friday in June, the excitement of Kenny Graham’s summer league is in full swing. Passersby cling to the chain-link fence. One man is camped out on the sidewalk with a beach chair. Abe Weinstein (“no relation to Harvey”) sits in his usual seat, front row center, sucking a pink lollipop and wearing the T-shirt from his 40th wedding anniversary. The announcer, who goes by Worthy, commentates each play into a megaphone: “Here’s the next NBA player versus the young one!”

The life and death of Willets Point by Nathan Kensinger

For many decades, Willets Point was one of New York City’s most unique neighborhoods. Hundreds of junkyards and auto body shops lined its ragged streets, luring in a constant parade of damaged cars. Meanwhile, thousands of local workers traversed its flooded potholes, building a colorful community of muffler artists and hubcap kings. Better known as the Iron Triangle, it was a dirty, loud, vibrant mess—exactly the kind of place that New York was once famous for.

Meet Chatham Towers, the architect aerie of Lower Manhattan by Fred A. Bernstein

On a famously gridded island, where facades of glass, brick, or stone aim straight for the sky (or, occasionally, step back in orderly layers), there isn’t much room for the kind of eccentrically shaped concrete edifices for which he was known. Yet at the southern tip of Chinatown, two very Corbusian apartment towers—a pair of concrete totem poles—have been beguiling architects (and architecture buffs) since 1965.

What the loss of longtime neighborhood bars means for NYC by Jason Diamond

The loss of places where you can grab a drink or two without putting much thought into it—the places that don’t have extensive Japanese whisky lists, or fancy glassware for expensive beer—can help to explain the recent history of certain parts of New York City. They went from being places where people from various backgrounds lived for decades, to what MIT professor of housing policy and city planning Philip Clay calls the pioneer stage of gentrification, when younger creative types move in.

Curbed Is Moving to New York Magazine

We unearthed the 68 best rent deals in nyc right now, landlords lose fight against rent protections, hotel chelsea’s latest tenant battle, and other news, share this story.

This Essay From 1949 Is Still The Greatest Love Letter To New York City

Much has been written on the city of New York. It's the eternal backdrop for rom-coms and financial thrillers, the source of Harlem Renaissance poetry and meandering web-series set in Brooklyn. An endless sea of books, films, and blogs have put forth their opinions on the city, each as contradictory and final as the next (it's overrated, lonely, overcrowded, beautiful, dirty, loud, magnificent, and the damned trains don't work). But if there is an apotheosis of writing on the apotheosis of cities, it has to be E.B. White's aptly titled essay-turned-book Here Is New York .

E.B. White is best known today for his children's books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, or for his writing style guide, The Elements of Style (he's the "White" in "Strunk & White"). He was also an essayist for The New Yorker and other publications for over fifty years, and "Here Is New York" might be his most celebrated essay. It's a straightforward stroll through the streets of Manhattan, the quintessential love letter to New York and New Yorkers. And, despite being published in 1948, it might be one of the most haunting pieces of post 9/11 literature ever written.

New York has changed since 1949, of course. America has changed. But to read "Here Is New York" today, it's impossible to shake the vague feeling that E.B. White was some kind of oracle, that he knew precisely which parts of the city would flourish, which would disappear, and how it might feel to live in New York in 2018, under the existential threat of war.

Here Is New York by E.B. White, $13, Amazon

White's essay begins by getting straight to the heart of New York's character:

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.

It's not quite that simple, of course. White understands that New York is made up of a latticework of neighborhoods, interwoven pockets of community, and that New Yorkers are not really the cold-hearted creatures that slow walking tourists might see them as.

At the same time, though, White revels in New York's ability to cram in several million people and maintain an air of perfect solitude. There is spectacle and excitement if one wants spectacle and excitement, but every event is optional (with the exception, according to White, of the St. Patrick's Day parade, which "hits every New Yorker on the head").

He also understands that there is no single New York, but rather a number of different, overlapping cities, depending on who's looking:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something...Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.

All of these conflicting New Yorks manage to meld and coexist, however, in a city that "has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow." This cramped profusion of different lives and cultures only adds to the city, in White's opinion:

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

For all his rhapsodizing on the poetry of New York, though, White admits that the city can impart "a feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness," that it can often be "uncomfortable and inconvenient." But, as he puts it, "New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience — if they did they would live elsewhere.”

After all, "the city makes up for its hazards and deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin: the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty, and unparalleled."

And then there are the last two pages of the essay.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

White was writing about New York in the aftermath of World War II, after the introduction of the atomic bomb. But his words land squarely in the gut of any New Yorker who lived through 9/11, and of any American who currently lives under a president willing to make nuclear war the subject of angry tweets.

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, new York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

White does not want to comfort his reader or assure the eternal safety of New York. He's not interested in hand-wringing or fear-mongering. He only tries to make sense of the fear. He's here to remind us of the things that must be protected in a time of political turbulence. Turning against each other is not an option for a city build on coexistence.

The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything...

Finally, White compresses his own fear, New York's fear, the world's fear, into one last paragraph:

A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long-suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: "This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree." If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.

From across the gulf of history, writing in New York of the 1940's, he manages to capture the mingled hope and terror that comes with life in any city today.

New York City: through the eyes of travel writers

A given on any best city list, nyc is the metropolis that always amazes, from its highbrow culture to sky-high views.

When did NYC first make sense to you?

Sarah Barrell: A few weeks after moving to Manhattan, I conceded that my favoured lunch on the run, a tuna sandwich and a bottle of water, was a goner. Ordered in an English accent, it’s a perfect storm of short vowels and hard ‘T’s that baffles Americans. Affecting a New York accent only made it worse. Deli staff would fix me with me with an irate ‘don’t mess with me, lady, time is money’ look. Finally, the penny dropped: this was a hard-assed island with a dollar-driven edge — not a touristy funfair ride. Time to switch to a Diet Coke and pastrami on rye.

Ben Lerwill: I ran the New York Marathon in November 2001, less than two months after 9/11, and it was as if the event had given the city a release. The entire population of Brooklyn and Queens seemed to have poured onto the streets. On Lafayette Avenue, a boy leant out of the crowd and pressed jelly beans into my hand. In Manhattan, where the route turns onto First Avenue, the energy was electric. What it underlined was that as well as the city being one of the most eulogised on the planet, for millions of people it’s home.   

If you were there now, what would you do first? 

Sarah Barrell: I’d walk my old manor: north along Lexington from Midtown, the Chrysler Building’s scalloped peaks appearing at intervals as I do so. Into the tatty Tramway Plaza thoroughfare, where cable-cars lift commuters to Roosevelt Island, and the hulking Queensboro Bridge stretches across to Queens. North, through genteel areas. West, along tree-lined streets where buildings gather ornate gargoyles and elegant awnings. At their end, Central Park: a vast clearing amid the skyscrapers. Here I’d step into the green and kick off my shoes to feel the city’s pulse under my feet. 

What do you love most about this city?

Ben Lerwill: It’s so explorable. You can walk past a hip restaurant, then seconds later be outside a hosiery store that looks stuck in the 1950s. It’s so familiar too, even for first-time visitors — from the cab drivers to the zigzagging fire escapes and the sidewalk hustlers.  

Describe an ideal day in NYC

Sarah Barrell: Start with an long brunch somewhere — just be sure it includes breakfast potatoes (a sterling North American invention). Walk off the excess along the Hudson River’s gentrifying boardwalks, onto the High Line elevated park. Drift through Chelsea’s galleries and Soho’s overpriced boutiques, and into Nolita, where bar-hoppers have a rainbow of choice. Then funnel into a gig at a Lower East Side venue, after which stumble across the wind-blasted Williamsburg Bridge to Bedford Avenue for tacos and dancing.

What’s your favourite neighbourhood? 

Ben Lerwill: Greenpoint in Brooklyn — it’s become hip but still feels authentic.

Sarah Barrell: The Lower East Side for immigration-era tenements and indie music joints. 

Take a tour of New York led by a local, covering everything from art and architecture to where to find the best pizza and Central Park hikes. Duration and prices vary: bigapplegreeter.org

Sarah Barrell is the associate editor of National Geographic Traveller

Ben Lerwill is a freelance travel writer based in the UK

Click to see the full list of our travel writers favourite cities .

Published in the April 2019 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK)

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New York as a Tourist Attraction City Essay

Introduction, my stay in new york, visits to famous places.

New York is a lively city and one that is constantly on the move. Apparently, the dynamic nature of the city has created a culture where residents are often fascinated by new things. For this reason, the business community has to keep coming up with new ways to package products and services. Products and services include accommodation facilities, clubs, food, transportation, and entertainment. When new attractions come into existence, they only excite residents for a short while.

New York is a famous city and one that is characterized by constant change. According to Carroll (2012), New Yorkers are often fascinated by the dynamic nature of the city. Whenever new attractions such as clubs, restaurants or stores come into existence, they only excite people for a short while. Drawing from a study by Nee (2012), New York is not viewed as a city of ancient monuments and statues. However, New Yorkers still respect the older structures that have been around for ages.

This paper presents a discussion about my visit to New York and highlights some attractions and moments that fascinated me.

From my childhood days, I always admired and desired to visit New York someday. The opportunity finally came when I received an invitation from an old friend to visit. From my little knowledge of New York, I knew that I would have an exciting experience.

On arrival, the first thing I became aware of was how busy the city was. It appeared to me like there was no room for idlers in New York. Surprisingly, New York seemed even busier at night. As noted by Nee (2012), New York is a city that roars to life every day and stays alive past midnight.

A notable characteristic of New York is the existence of many fast food restaurants. According to Parker (2014), one only needs a pizza to survive in New York. This explains the reason for many restaurants in the city. Various means of transport can be found in New York including taxis, trains, and buses. For shorter distances, taxi is the most preferred means of transport. However, it is important to note that taxi drivers do not talk much (Parker, 2014). Personally, I enjoyed using buses to move from one part of the city to another. Unlike other cities where places for walking while crossing a road are clearly designated, no such thing exists in New York.

My friend had organized for me to visit a few places in New York. The first place to visit was the 9/11 memorial. The memorial serves to remind Americans about the incident that caused the death of so many people. According to Owen (2015), the 9/11 memorial carries a very powerful message of loss in the United States. However, Presser (2012) argues that the memorial is a tribute to all those who lost their lives during the attack and is thus an important symbol of hope and revitalization.

After the 9/11 memorial, the next place for me to visit was the Times Square. Times Square is regarded as one of the renowned entertainment locations in the world (Nee, 2012). The visit to Times Square was at night and the place was colorful, noisy, and very busy. In addition, there were so many people, including the police, students, and excited theatre funs all involved in different activities.

I also got a chance to visit Central Park. Located in the heart of the city, Central Park is among the world’s most famous green places. According to Kifer (2013), the park is huge and contains a number of natural features. It is very easy to get lost unless one is careful.

When I set out to visit New York, I expected to see so much and at the end of my visit, I was not disappointed. I enjoyed every single moment in New York and would not hesitate to visit again.

Carroll, M. (2012). New York City for dummies . Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Kifer, C. (2013). Tips for First-Time Travel to New York City . Web.

Nee, P. (2012). Top 10 Guide to New York City Sights . Boston, MA: Internationalist Publishing Company.

Owen, P. (2015). 10 of the best ways to enjoy New York … on a budget . Web.

Parker, L. (2014). 21 Things you learn the first time you visit NYC . Web.

Presser, B. (2012). Lonely Planet Pocket New York City . Australia: Lonely Planet.

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IvyPanda. (2021, April 15). New York as a Tourist Attraction City. https://ivypanda.com/essays/new-york-as-a-tourist-attraction-city/

"New York as a Tourist Attraction City." IvyPanda , 15 Apr. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/new-york-as-a-tourist-attraction-city/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'New York as a Tourist Attraction City'. 15 April.

IvyPanda . 2021. "New York as a Tourist Attraction City." April 15, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/new-york-as-a-tourist-attraction-city/.

1. IvyPanda . "New York as a Tourist Attraction City." April 15, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/new-york-as-a-tourist-attraction-city/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "New York as a Tourist Attraction City." April 15, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/new-york-as-a-tourist-attraction-city/.

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The 17 best writing classes in NYC

Harness your inner Zadie Smith at these stellar writing workshops for every type of writer on every type of budget

Whether you want to write the next murder mystery and hope it gets picked up by Hollywood directors, or  you want to ensure that your work emails and reports are concise, grammatically correct and rhetorically sound , these writing classes in NYC will help you put those ideas onto paper. And hopefully into some of the best independent bookstores and NYC libraries (fingers crossed!). The remarkable literary institutions employ authors-cum-teachers to teach courses in everything from personal essays to poetry, so you’re sure to find a discipline that suits you. And if you need inspiration, re-reading the best books about New York should do the trick. Enjoy.

RECOMMENDED: Full guide to classes in NYC RECOMMENDED: The best BYOB painting classes in NYC

This article includes affiliate links. These links have no influence on our editorial content. For more information, see our   affiliate   guidelines .

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NYC writing classes

1.  Advanced Business Writing

Once you have your grasp on the essentials of grammar and writing (like knowing what a semicolon actually does), you’ll want to enroll in a more advanced course to ensure every word you write is chosen with precision. In this course, you’ll learn how to analyze your audience, shape your tone and message for persuasion, education or communication and you’ll work on various strategies for planning your writing and ensuring that you are utilizing rhetorical tools and informative structures properly. At the end of the course, you’ll have sample writing projects that you can add to your job portfolio and you will be ready to use your writing as a tool to further your career.

2.  Effective Business Writing

While creatives may want to learn how to write the next great American novel, there are a lot of professional reasons that one might want to improve their writing skills. Virtually every job will require some form of communication between individuals and departments and the ability to write coherent emails, proposals, memos or updates is an important skill if you want to survive in an office environment. Learning the fine art of grammar and the practical skills needed to communicate cleanly will pay dividends in the long-term.

3.  Creative Writing 101: 6 Weeks

One of the most inviting aspects of creative writing is how diverse of a field it is once you scratch the surface. Whether you are interested in writing poetry, short-fiction, long-form prose or even creative non-fiction or memoirs, you won’t need to look hard to find a vibrant community of fellow writers. In this introductory creative writing course, you can learn fundamental skills that can be applied to almost any genre of writing and you can get hands-on experience working in fictional and non-fictional styles to acclimate yourself to the variety of different styles of writing that you can learn and practice.

4.  Fiction Writing Level 1: 10 Week Workshop

If you are interested in flexing your creative muscles, you can enroll in an introductory fiction and poetry workshop to start looking for your own personal muse. In this course, students will all about the process of writing fiction and poetry. No one writes a world-changing poem on their first go and this class is about learning the art of revising, editing and expanding on your work in order to take the germ of an idea and turn it into a completed piece that expresses your own creative desires. Whether you are looking to write short form poetry or you want to write a 13-book series in your favorite brand of genre fiction, learning these basic techniques will be a vital boon to your work.

5.  Grammar Essentials

English grammar is incredibly (and often needlessly complicated). Did you know that the reason you aren’t supposed to split infinitives is because someone in the 19th century wanted English to sound more like Latin? Well, if the basics of grammar continue to give you problems, you should consider enrolling in a course like this one. Here, you’ll get practical lessons in the art of writing clean sentences that clearly communicate your intended message and ensure that your writing isn’t giving readers the wrong impressions.

6.  Just Write

One of the biggest stumbling blocks that new writers face is that they overthink the preparation work and skimp on the writing work. Like any skill, you learn to write by practicing and the best way to do that is to write. In this regularly-held three-hour seminar, writers are encouraged to do just that: sit around a table and bang out some words while enduring the silent judgment of their peers (who are also using this as a time they are forced to write). While there is time for discussion, critique (and socializing), the outline of this program is simple: Just write.

7.  Business Writing Bootcamp

If you want a complete business writing education, consider enrolling in a business writing bootcamp. This course pairs the grammar lessons and technical writing skills of an introductory course with the rhetorical and persuasive writing training of an advanced writing course. This makes it a one-stop experience for students with minimal writing experience to start to master the important aspects of business writing. Improve your career opportunities and help improve the quality of your persuasive and informative projects with one of these immersive bootcamps.

8.  Personal Essay Writing Intensive

The personal essay has become a rather popular form of writing for mass consumption in recent years, particularly as the barriers to publishing short form content have been lowered (were one truly inclined, social media platforms make it almost effortless). In this class, you’ll learn how to brainstorm ideas and plan out the structure of the personal essay and how to build both pathos and ethos in your experiences and arguments. Similar to memoir writing, personal essay writing is about leveraging your own personal experience as a rhetorical tool and it is practical whether you are trying to persuade an audience, sell yourself to a company or institution or make a profession out of Op-Ed writing.

9.  Stand-up Comedy One Day Intensive

Do you want to perform? Want to make people laugh? Want to tour the country? Well, consider learning stand-up comedy. While professional stand-up comedians make it look off-the-cuff, the process of writing a good stand-up routine involves a lot of fine-tuning and revision, particularly as you workshop jokes and tighten the set. In this intensive course, you’ll get a chance to try out some new material, get feedback and start the process of refining your jokes in front of professional comedy writers. Whether you are hoping to punch up a bit or start your first routine, this intrusive course will help you start refining your comedic voice.

10.  The Editor’s Eye Intensive

Not all aspects of writing are about being creative. Making sure that your work is properly edited, free of errors and written as tightly as you would prefer is an essential step to getting your work published. This course will help students learn the basics of editing so that they can identify things like improper grammar, incorrect word usage, clunky and awkwards sentences and overly verbose writing. This program also aims to help students develop the professional skills needed to work as an editor (since companies hire professional editors and freelance writers who don’t like editing will pay a pretty penny to have someone else handle it).

11.  Screenwriting I: 10-Week Workshop

If you have an idea that you think would be perfect for the big screen, you should consider enrolling in this immersive screenwriting workshop. Writing a screenplay isn’t like writing other forms of long-form fiction, so you’ll want to get focused training on how to write scripts that are cinematic, compelling and, most importantly, marketable. You’ll learn the art of writing dialogue, stage directions and providing actors and directors with the information they need to bring your vision to life. Whether you are interested in arthouse cinema or want to pen the next famous blockbuster, you’ll benefit from taking this course.

12.  Memoir Writing Intensive

If the personal essay aims to make an argument, then the memoir aims to tell a story. In this course, you’ll learn the art of transforming your personal experience into a compelling narrative that entices readers and helps make a broader point about how your experiences tell us something about the world. Slightly distinct from creative non-fiction, memoir writing is possibly the most personal style of writing that you can engage in. While memoirs have traditionally been associated with powerful heads of state and significant thinkers, the genre has become more welcoming to the perspective of the everyday, and in  this course, you’ll learn how your own lived experiences can become the thing of memoir greatness.

13.  Songwriting Intensive

Acclaimed songwriter Taylor Swift was recently named Time Magazine ’s Person of the Year, suggesting that writing music can have globe altering implications. If you want to learn the basics of professional songwriting and emulate your favorite music icon, consider enrolling in this songwriting course. This course will teach students how to write popular music, how to craft a perfect tune to go along with the lyrics and how to market the music to studios, producers and labels. This course covers a range of different genres, so whether you want to write R&B, pop, rockabilly, hip-hop or smooth jazz, this course will help you develop your skills and start writing the next great earworm.

14.  Playwriting Intensive

Live theater is one of the oldest forms of creative writing, dating back, at least to the early Grecians (and likely existed in some form even before the development of systematized writing). If you want to flex your inner Shakespeare, Beckett or Tennesse Williams, consider enrolling in this intensive playwriting course. You’ll learn how to transform the empty stage into a real world and you’ll learn how to write your plays to give the actors the tools they need to deliver the best performances possible. Writing for the stage is its own unique challenge and this course will give you the experience you need to start staging your own masterwork. Plus, for any aspiring Hammersteins, the course can also help you begin to write musicals.

15.  Plot 1: Mechanics 3-week Intensive

Hollywood screenplays, like all narrative, rely on structure to scaffold the story and build audience investment. Whether you are working with the traditional three-act structure most common to feature films, the five-act structures of classic stage plays or the one or two act structures common to modernist works, you’ll want to understand why narratives are structured in certain ways and how to use these structures to your advantage when writing a screenplay. This course will teach students the math that goes into writing a structured screenplay and give them hands-on practice scaffolding their story beats.

16.  Social Media Content Marketing: Blogs & Twitter at Noble Desktop

A lot of professional writing for mass audiences is now done online, with blogs and Twitter being important places to communicate and persuade your audience (like this article is doing now and in this class you’ll learn whether or not meta commentary like this helps your content marketing). In this class, you’ll get hands-on experience working with professional content writers to help you set goals, build marketing strategies and create a voice for your company or organization. You will also learn how to create a coherent brand identity for your online content and how to use platforms like Twitter to expand your reach, build a customer base and keep that base engaged with your content.

17.  Character Creation

Characters can really make or break a story. This Character creation class is a compact workshop for character creating and development, to help give you the skills to make your story work. The workshop will focus on areas like principles of characterization, consistency and effects of dialogue, plus more to help with your character-building and storytelling. It's a two-hour session with a teacher, working anywhere that suits you both and 1-2-1 to ensure you have thorough guidance and help. 

Looking for literary inspiration?

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Essay About New York City: World’s Most Breathtaking Place

Our world is full of wonders and every person should plunge into unforgettable feelings they give us. One of those wonders is New York City. It is considered to be the city of diversity, opportunities, and unbelievable beauty. This essay on New York will definitely help you find your own way in exploring it.

New York essay: Five delicious pieces of the Big Apple

Each of five boroughs is unique and characterized by specific features of living there. You can recognize Manhattan by its eminent skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, numerous universities and colleges and wonderful Central Park. It represents the financial heart of the city. You can see busy clerks and businessmen on Wall Street and hear continuous clicking and typing of office workers and programmers eager to make fortune. It is for sure, they would make money faster with the smart writing service like ours.

Brooklyn nowadays is a core of the powerful “machine” producing exclusive organic food and promoting modern art, cinema and indie music. All creativity is mostly presented by the Williamsburg neighborhood, the hot spot for the young people ready to enjoy every single breath of night. However, you can notice how the fascinating night clubs transform into calm and quiet Cobble Hill and Park Slope residences. Bushwick offers shopping for young families.

In the northern part of New York, the Bronx stretches its boundaries. Known for its agrarian past and the first settlers skilled at farming, hunting and fishing , the Bronx has parklands and gardens at its disposal now. New York Botanical Garden will amaze you with the beauty of rare flowers and plants and the Bronx Zoo is going to immerse you in the atmosphere of wildlife. Have you ever been to Italy? The Bronx is called “real Little Italy” , by the way. New York City makes it possible to fall for the charm of Bella Italia right on Arthur Avenue.

If you think about sports as the best way of entertainment or care for your body and want to keep trim, you are to visit Queens. Take your rollers and skates and be free to disclose vivid streets. Stroll by Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Root for New Your Mets at Citi Field stadium. Go to Flushing Chinatown nearby to satisfy your hunger with some special Asian dainties. But be careful with those dainties, for instance, choose a healthy Mediterranean diet and make the right choice of your dietary pattern for effective training.

Staten Island is regarded as the keeper of the city’s past. This part of NYC encompasses museums and historical attractions such as prominent Historic Richmond Town where anyone may play the role of a person of the 19th century. Moreover, this place combines sunny beaches and the biggest and coolest forest preserve of the city. If you are interested in ordering an essay concerning New York boroughs, take a look at our services. Our company will help you save your money.

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New York City in five words

It is hard sometimes to describe a beautiful place just in a few words. Only a skilled writer expresses the right thought briefly and clearly. We know that New York welcomes everyone all over the world. Despite the great number of tourist attractions, its vividness and versatility also catch an eye. Take a look at five simple words describing New York:

1. Multiplicity.

New York is a real polygonal diamond in the jewel box of America. That is why it has about one hundred different names. For example, look at how the name “The Big Apple” appeared . John Fitzgerald, a sports reporter, was the first to use such a nickname in his articles. One day, he heard the horsemen in New Orleans talking about going to “the big apple”, the venue of horseracing, which was NYC. In the 17th century, New York City also got the name New Amsterdam due to Dutch West India company.

2. Hospitality.

The city is the paradise for immigrants. It takes the first place among heavily-populated cities of America. Many foreigners from all over the world come here willing to open new possibilities and challenge themselves. This multicultural harbor is a combination of the true American lifestyle and international flavoring. Aliens can find here a place reminding their own cultural environment. For instance, Brooklyn is a borough where Ukrainian, Russian, Italian, Jamaican people etc. may encounter fellow countrymen and simply feel at home. Check our essay on American culture to get more information: https://smartwriters.org/blog/essay-on-american-culture-how-should-we-start

3. Musicality.

The Big Apple can boast its staginess of the onstage and musical life. Dozens of theaters open their doors for visitors in Broadway. Many essays on New York cover great Broadway performances including astonishing “Cats” and “Chicago”. These are the must-see performances accompanied by incredible acting and pompous dancing. You can hear music everywhere in the city. Feel its sound from the windows of huge dwellings and especially on the streets of Times Square and even underground. Lots of street musicians and dancers entertain passers-by and devote themselves entirely to the rhythm and endless passion of music.

4. Eccentricity.

By the way, famous Times Square, the place of giant shining billboards, big screens, fashionable shopping centers and glam, gathers lots of extraordinary personalities. You can meet here specific characters form the Statue of Liberty in human guise to cartoons and even daring naked cowboy with the guitar hiding the most “shocking” parts of his body in his hands. So getting amazing emotions is possible for free right in Times Square. Here, you can allow yourself being a bit of weirdo especially when it comes to putting your personal goals into life. Look here for some interesting ideas on achieving success in our essay about career goals .

Did you know how many bridges there are in New York? In total, almost 2,000 bridges and tunnels were built here. Today, the most outstanding of them comprises Brooklyn, Manhattan and Verrazzano Bridges. All they are the symbolic architectural embodiment of a connection between things, which seem utterly differ at first glance. Considering the contrast between nations, religions, sights, and territories that the city represents, the feeling of unity there is quite impressive. This contrast is based on the grounds of respect and friendship. Look at this essay to enquire the importance of friendship in our life: https://smartwriters.org/blog/what-is-friendship-essay-who-is-a-friend

Consider this descriptive essay on New York City as your guide. Now it is up to you to choose your path in the kingdom where everything is so different and similar at the same time. Keep in mind that there are plenty of options. At one moment you find yourself inside the boiling business pot like Wall Street or rejoice over bright sun of the beaches standing with your toes in the warm sand, listening to the sound of the sea at another moment. Whatever you want to do, New York has it all. If you liked this essay, you can find out more about our company and writing services.

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Reader Essay: New York Was The City Of My Dreams—Until I Moved There

This essay was reader-submitted for our Summer Essay Series on themes of growth, aging, transformation, and renewal.

I left New York City for the shore on the first warm day.

The train ride north from Penn Station hurls along the coast as if it’s perpetually trying to beat the sunset. Even in the depths of evening, the train moves with a certain hope that it can outpace the day, that it can catch the sun before it dips below the horizon. It is this sense that lends itself to the feeling of youth and the childlike inclination to believe some things last forever. Or perhaps it is just that moving along the coast makes me nostalgic. 

Growing up, I spent my summers on Cape Cod visiting my grandparents. It’s a place I associate with a certain ease which I have not found anywhere in New York, a certain happiness which I have not found anywhere in adulthood, and I welcomed the opportunity to try to reclaim these things by revisiting the sanded ground from which they sprung on that warm day in spring. 

“ I am not yet aware of all the ways my body and the person it contains do not serve me. ”

In childhood, I am floating in the ocean’s shallows on the back of an inflated alligator, wearing a light blue bathing suit patterned with bright red cherries. My hair is short and curly and gleams with red and brown hues in the sun. Hugging my knees to my chest, I avoid the seaweed drifting beneath me as my grandfather pushes me along the surface of the sea. I am aware of myself only in relation to the water, wanting to be near it, on top of it, without letting it wash over me. I am not yet aware of all the ways my body and the person it contains do not serve me. I do not wish to be anyone else, I just wish not to touch the seaweed that floats in the shallows, to dip beneath the surface of the water. 

Growing up in New England, time passed slowly in the direction of summer. Days in winter end early and abruptly, leaving themselves behind at three or four in the afternoon as if to move the season along as swiftly and efficiently as possible. Nonetheless, childhood in New England felt mostly like waiting for the arrival of a season that may or may not come, like waiting on the answer to a rhetorical question. 

“ In seasons of waiting, I dreamed of New York. ”

In seasons of waiting, I dreamed of New York. I had been planning my move to the city for the better part of a decade, ever since I first visited around my sixth birthday. In those years, I had conjured up an idea of New York, and the person I would be there, like one envisions heaven and romanticizes life after death. New York was my religion and I emptied myself out for the blind faith and pervasive cliché that I would “find myself” somewhere among its dirty, skyscraper-lined streets. 

I moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side on the cusp of winter in the months after graduating from college. Arriving on Orchard Street in the passenger seat of my father’s car, wearing baggy jeans and an old sweater that belonged to my grandmother, one covered in holes from years of wash and wear, I began moving into the city of my dreams. Whatever they say is the biggest day of your life pales in comparison to the day you move into your imagination, step into the person you think will be, and proceed forward. 

“ In the New York I imagined, I would try on versions of myself like one tries on dresses to prepare for their wedding. ”

In the New York I imagined, I would try on versions of myself like one tries on dresses to prepare for their wedding. In my dreams, my bones protrude from my skin, my body is covered in a series of small, thin-lined tattoos, my hair falls effortlessly without frizz, freckles cover the bridge of my nose. In one vision, I am in love; in another, I am a writer; in another, I have stopped drinking. In other visions, I have a group of friends and an apartment filled with eclectic furniture I thrifted somewhere in Brooklyn. Or, alternatively, I haven’t talked to anyone in weeks and bask in the comfort of my own company. In some I am tan and the background isn’t New York at all but some unidentified town on the coast of California and I can hear the sound of the ocean in the distance. 

When I opened the door to my apartment for the first time, a small three-bedroom in a pre-war walk-up building, I expected to find one of these versions waiting for me. But our apartment was empty, and I began filling it with an amalgamation of things I’ve held onto from all the places I’ve called home: the chest from our attic that belonged to my mother, the rug from my college apartment, white ribbed dishes from my grandparents’ home on Cape Cod. 

When I arrived at the coast shortly before six on that warm day in spring, the sun was inching toward the horizon slowly and subtly, as if to not draw attention to itself. It was then that I realized the source of my nostalgia. I had expected to find her there, that version I’d left floating in the shallows, just like I’d expected to find her in New York, the version of myself I’d imagined. But scanning the vacant shoreline, I knew she’d been pulled out to sea, caught in the undertows of change.

“ I am not the person I once was, nor am I the person that I thought I would be, and I will not find them anywhere but in my mind. ”

I am not the person I once was, nor am I the person that I thought I would be, and I will not find them anywhere but in my mind. In The Imaginary , Jean-Paul Sartre said, “We can conclude that the real is never beautiful. Beauty is a value applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure.” At first I resented New York for not being able to give me the version of myself I wanted to be. I thought about where else I could move, looked for jobs in Los Angeles and Paris and the coast of Maine, dreamed up selves that existed in these places. Then I turned my anger to the circumstances of reality, the bounds of skin and time, which tied me to myself. 

“ I think this point, of either acceptance or concession, is the point where innocence ends. ”

But increasingly, I’m coming to terms with the reality that things lose their beauty, either real or imagined, when we view them too closely. I’ve lingered long enough in front of the mirror that hangs by the front door of my city apartment, applying makeup, trying on outfits, looking for bone, looking for myself, to know that this is all I get. I think this point, of either acceptance or concession, is the point where innocence ends. The point at which we view our ideas of how things are supposed to be and how things might be from too close, revealing some truth we couldn’t otherwise see. It’s the distance of disillusionment, and it’s a point from which we can’t turn back.

Sara Keene is a writer and publicist living on the Lower East Side. She came to New York in fall by way Charlottesville, graduating from the University of Virginia with a Bachelors in political science and English literature. Originally from outside of Boston, her writing centers around the changing of seasons, growing up, and holding out hope we never have to.

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Mar 18, 2024

A new book captures the essence of New York in the briefest moments

Nyt editor dan satzstein discusses 'that's so new york,' his collection of the shortest, most-nyc stories.

By Brian Braiker

What makes a story a New York story? Maybe it’s seeing a drag queen emerge from a manhole cover on Canal Street in a full look at 6:30 a.m. Or it could be a woman carrying a bag with a rambunctious live eel in it onto the subway to the shock of absolutely no one. The thing is, you know a New York story when you’ve got one.

“It’s very tempting to sort of use that old Justice Potter quote about pornography: you know when you see it,” says Dan Saltzstein, a New York Times editor who has collected a whole book’s worth of little vignettes, short stories and curated tweets that perfectly distill that New York moment to a second or two. “There’s a certain aspect that applies to these York moments. I think a couple of threads run through both the tweets and the essays in the book. One of them is almost like alternate universe quality.”

“ That’s So New York: Short (and Very Short) Stories about the Greatest City on Earth ” is out now and, in its own way, its very existence is a New York story: Saltzstein recalled one of his own very New York stories (involving Kim’s Video, naturally). He posted it to Twitter before it was X and asked his followers for their own New York stories. The tweet went viral, generating hundreds upon hundreds of hilarious bite-sized anecdotes that could only have happened here.

“I haven’t had a lot of viral tweets, but this was up there, it was thousands and thousands of responses, clearly had gotten way outside of my network, including hundreds of good ones,” says Saltzstein, who is this week’s guest on “ Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast .”

The book is in part a collection of some of those tweets and also longer — but no more than a page or two — stories from New York writers and notables. Here, we discuss what makes a story a New York story , and we get a little into his 25-year tenure at the Times, a span of time that has seen unimaginable earth-shattering tectonic changes to the media landscape and to the paper itself.

The following is a transcript of our conversation, which airs as an episode of “ Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast ,” edited for clarity. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh, did he really? That’s funny. Clearly it made the rounds and had a blast sort of going through the stories and moments that people had responded with. And a whole bunch of people said, “You’ve got to put this into a book.” Well, I can’t just take people’s tweets and make a book out of it. So I thought, well, what can I do to surround those tweets with additional New York loving content? So yeah, I put together a proposal that included the best of the tweets, some essays by me and other writers, some interviews with people, New Yorkers who sort of interact with the city in interesting ways and silly little fact sheets.

The fact sheets are funny.  What was the most New York thing that’s happened to you? There’s got to be a lot of them, you’ve been at the Times for 25 years. I tweeted one and then I was like, just one more. And I tweeted one more and then it’s like I just got to stop myself because this could go on forever. But the original one was, this will date me a little bit, but if anybody remembers Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s Place, RIP.

The legendary Kim’s Video . Legendary. I was hanging out in the East Village, actually lived around the corner from there at the time, and it must’ve been late nineties I guess, and I just really had to go to the bathroom. And so I went into Kim’s and I asked if I could use their bathroom, which I knew was for employees only. The guy behind the counter who was tatted up and pierced in every possible place just looked at me, was sort of uncaring look on his face and said, “Are you going to shoot up?” And I just thought that was just a great little moment that has stuck with me all those years. And this book is, in a weird way, placed in a certain time of Twitter, pre-X, pre-Musk, and there was a character count at the time, so the stories aren’t even really stories, they’re just moments.

Yeah, they’re vignettes. So they’re like a lot of times unexplained, there’s very little context. I sort of love that. My original one was an example of that.

Even flipping through the book, I recognize some of the Twitter handles in there. In fact, one of my friends is in there. She’s the one who was at Veselka when the couple got thrown out for screwing in the bathroom at 4:00 a.m. and the woman was like, “Excuse me, we weren’t having sex. We were making love.” I love that one. That’s great. Veselka pops up a couple times actually. One of the things that I did was sort of add these little annotations to certain of the tweets for non-New Yorkers. Hopefully will be lots of readers that will never have heard of Veselka. A little one sentence explanation of what Veselka is .

Even just the tweet going viral in the way it did is almost a New York story in of itself. Even though it’s on this ethereal social media platform, there’s something very New York about the fact that everyone was like, “Oh, I got one.” It speaks a lot to the kind of city New York is. It also speaks, I think, to the fact that could you do this for any other city in America, maybe the world? And I’m not sure you could. I think you’re right, there’s something about New York that is sort of full of these little interactions that sort of come and go really quickly and some of them are funny, some of them are sad, some of them are poignant. You could probably do like an L.A. one, but I think it’d be very showbiz focused.

It’s an industry town. I grew up there and couldn’t imagine an LA one. But I could imagine one for each individual borough even, like what’s the most Staten Island thing that’s happened to you? What’s the most Bronx thing? I live in Queens and I could definitely see that. And obviously Queens and Brooklyn are very much cities unto themselves.

So what makes a New York story a New York story? You sort of got to it a little bit, but what is the key characteristic that pops up a lot in these? I say in the intro to the book it’s very tempting to sort of use that old Justice Potter quote about pornography: you know when you see it. There’s a certain aspect that applies to these York moments. I think a couple of threads run through both the tweets and the essays in the book. One of them is, I talked about this in the intro, almost like alternate universe quality. You’re living your life, but because you’re in New York, everything’s a little different than it would be elsewhere. I think that’s one aspect of it.

Another is the fact that New Yorkers have a certain sort of jaded quality, which doesn’t mean they’re unfriendly. There’s actually a chapter in the book called “New Yorkers Are Actually Nice.” And look, any big city people are in a rush. They’re on their way somewhere. There going to be sort of this veneer of gruffness, but once you get down to it, I actually think people in New York are really nice. Most New Yorkers have had this experience where something bad happens, somebody collapses on the subway platform or whatever and 10 people rush over to help and somebody’s calling 9-1-1, somebody’s putting something under the person’s head, whatever it is.

And one of those helping people might be Mandy Patinkin , who’s apparently helped so many people. Chely Wright , who’s a singer and an activist, she had a series of tweet responses. The short version is I think it was a bicyclist get hit by a car. She goes over to help out, was kneeling down in front of the person and looks up and the other person who’s helping out as Mandy Patinkin. The full circle of that story is his son asked him on his Instagram account about that experience and whether he remembered it and his answer was, “No, I help a lot of people.” A great answer. But I would say New Yorkers are friendly, but there is this sort of jaded quality. We hear this a lot from celebrities, that they can sort of walk around New York without getting bothered because New Yorkers are sort of over it. That’s a thread that runs through them as well.

When I got done reading it, I was like, well, maybe New York is a simulation after all. Exactly. There is a quality where it’s like somebody designed this, we’ll never know who.

We’re all in the Matrix. So it goes viral on Twitter. You collect all these amazing tweets. I would love to see the outtakes. I’m sure there are a lot of them. Then what, you reach out to writers? Some of them are in this book you have Josh Gondelman who’s been on this podcast. You have Molly Jong-Fast , who I’ve been a fan of for a long time. Andrew McCarthy, the actor, who probably has my favorite little story about seeing the same woman decades apart on the street. Getting people to reply to your tweet is one thing, but how do you collect the stories from some of these very established writers and public people? It’s a combination of a couple things. One is, as you mentioned, I’ve worked at The New York Times for 25 years, and so I’ve been really lucky to edit a lot of really good writers. Some of these essayists fit in that category. Andrew McCarthy actually is now a travel writer.

Oh, is he? I don’t know what his raw copy was like, but his writing was lovely. It was very well put together. He’s a good writer and he wrote for me when I was in the travel section at the Times for nine years, and he’s in there. I’ve edited him, Alexander Chee , Isaac Fitzgerald , Jason Diamond , Megan Abbott . Well, I tried to pick sort of a mix. And then there were other people who were just Hail Marys, Mahogany Browne . She’s a poet.

She’s the poet in residence at Lincoln Center? Yeah. And basically what I did was the tweets, funnily enough fell naturally into seven categories and those categories became chapters. And so I sort of had those in my head and I basically sent them around to all the writers and I said, “Pick a category,” and as people picked categories, the category would fill up and then the list would get shorter. Mahogany, for example, is the opening essay. That chapter is called “New York is Magic,” which is sort of like what we were talking before, that sort of odd, surreal, extra real quality of New York. I also wanted to make sure that there were some native New Yorkers and some New York transplants, which there are. We were talking about Chicago before. Jason’s a good example, he’s from Chicago.

You were mentioning, yeah, the chapters are divvied up thematically — subways, the unspoken rules, the criminal, the celebrities. One of my favorite things that you did here was you do little interviews with “run-of-the-mill” New Yorkers who happen to have very interesting jobs, a subway operator, a doorman, an exterminator, all jobs that are in some ways uniquely specific to the city, or attributes of it are. As I was sort of going through the chapters when it would pop into my head, the animals chapter is really, let’s be honest, rats and pigeons. I found this woman who I think she’s a second-generation owner of a pest control company and she is right out of central casting. I mean heavy New York accent, very opinionated about pests, mainly rats, as you can imagine. And what was funny about that interview was as we were talking, I was thinking, I think she loves rats.

Yeah, there’s little editorial interjections. Yeah. If not loves, then it has a begrudging respect. That was sort of what I came away with. Her thing is basically rats are really smart. They’ve learned to survive in all parts of the world and all sorts of situations. Humans and rats can’t live together. One of the questions I asked her was, well, so what do we do? How do we get rid of them? You can’t, I mean unless you shut down all of the restaurants and collect twice a day, you’re basically not going to get rid of them and there’s not much you can do. So she was fantastic.

I like the subway operator one a lot, learned what it takes to become a subway operator. I called her a conductor and she’s slightly offended, was sort of like, “I’m an operator, not a conductor.”and turns out a conductor, I didn’t know, this is the person in the middle of the train who controls the doors, and the operator is the person who actually drives the train

Another theme that comes up is the indifference of the city and the constant changing nature of the city. You have the writer, Isaac Fitzgerald, who you mentioned, in here and a piece that I liked a lot that concludes New York doesn’t care about you, which is sort of liberating. It just is. It doesn’t have an opinion about you positive or negative. Because people say all the time like, “Man, the city’s kicking my today,” but the city’s just existing. It is existing. Yeah, totally. This is true of all cities I guess on a certain level, but people understandably complain a lot about gentrification and turnover in New York, and for plenty of good reasons. But I also feel like that’s New York City. I mean it’s constantly changing and evolving. There are positive consequences and negative consequences to that. There are people who get displaced, but there also are people who get opportunities that wouldn’t have existed before. There are areas where crime goes down. It’s largely a function of the city just doing its thing. Then there are things that people in positions of authority can do to sway things one way or the other on a certain level, but on a certain level really this is just the city chugging along.

One of the things I like to say is that we were talking about L.A. before, places like L.A. or D.C., those are industry towns. New York is an industry town, but it’s an everything industry town, basically everything is here. So that gives it a very different sort of vibe, I think, than a lot of other places. Some people hate it, some people find it too fast or too confusing or overwhelming or whatever.

One thing I’ve noticed is I went to college in the rural area and it would always take me a week or so to acclimate on both ends. When I went from New York to rural area in Massachusetts, it’d be like a week before I felt myself mellowing to the level of the area. And then vice versa, I’d come back to New York and I’d be all frenzied for a week and then I’d settle in and I’d be like, I guess I’ve adjusted.

You talk about your dad. He grew up in Crown Heights, which is a very different Crown Heights from what it is today. From conversations with him or memories that he shared with you, how would you characterize the Crown Heights of his childhood versus today? So my dad’s about to turn 94.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, so we were talking about ‘30s and ’40s. And at the time Crown Heights was largely a secular Jewish neighborhood. First, second generation immigrants for the most part. He’s a second generation. My mom’s first generation, she grew up in Inwood. I’ve asked him a lot, “Do you remember going to this neighborhood or that neighborhood?” And his main thing was the city was sort of the neighborhood for him. I mean sure, he went into Manhattan occasionally, Coney Island, places like that, but for the most part, well into his teen years, his New York was Crown Heights.

Part of that was the city was obviously very, very different at the time and he wasn’t allowed to go to Park Slope because of Italian gangs. He wasn’t allowed to go to Red Hook because of Irish gangs. So as a young teenage Jewish kid, places he wasn’t welcome. Both he and my mom have said, and I’ve heard this from other people too, I mean this is still true to a degree I guess, but in some ways an apartment building was like a little town. Everybody knows each other. There’s people interacting. People would come over from my dad’s side, Poland, on my mom’s side, Hungary, and you’d have half of a building from a handful of towns in one of those countries who went where their people were. That part I don’t think exists, at least in any large scale.

What does he think of you being an editor at the New York Times? My parents specifically said to me, I guess it must have been in high school, “Don’t be a writer.” They wanted me to be a lawyer, go into political science, something like that. My dad’s a college professor, my mom is a psychologist, so to them being a professional means something very specific. The exception to that was as soon as I landed at the Times, it was like, oh, never mind. You’re good.

Speaking of the Times you’ve been there for a quarter a century now. What an amazing arc to be at the front row of the changing city landscape, the changing media landscape, the rise of digital, the demise of local news, to the transformation of the Times itself. When you think about those changes, what comes to mind? When I think about my early days, I had an unusual arc at the Times. I took sort of a back door into it. I started in the late ’90s at a very short-lived website, The Time Zone called New York Today, which was sort of a time Out-style city guide, as a copywriter and editor. And in some ways it was ahead of its time. It would’ve made a lot more sense on mobile devices, which didn’t exist at the time as far as I can remember. I think I had a Treo . I don’t know if you remember Treos?

I remember Treo. But there was almost no communication between us and the main newsroom. That site lasted for less than a year. I got lucky, they sort of pulled a few of those producers into the main website. But even then, I mean it really wasn’t until the mid to late aughts I would say when the Times went from not giving a crap about the web to freaking out about how behind we were and how we needed to catch up. And we did successfully. But nowadays, everything is digital first. I mean, I personally love print.

Me too. I very much miss the days of helping art directors and photo editors lay out pages and design a section, and I do a little bit of it here and there, but not much. There’s so much energy here devoted to the web and off platform, as we like to say, social media and events and games now obviously is a big thing.

I’m hooked on their games. They’re great. I have nothing to do with them, but they’re fantastic. It’s almost impossible to reconcile that with the way things were. Really it was 9/11. New Yorkers obviously will remember, it happened early in the morning. And back then what was on the homepage of NYTimes.com in the morning was that day’s paper. Now of course if you go to the paper of September 11th, 2001, it’s not about 9/11, it’s like the paper they closed at 1:00 a.m. the night before. We basically had to shut down the website for at least a day, maybe more, because the traffic overwhelmed the servers.

And that was the first inkling, “I think, this is something that’s going to stick around that we really have to pay attention to.” But even then it took a number of years, maybe mid- to late-aughts before they started actually putting resources to it and taking it really seriously. Just one example at the time, probably even into the early aughts, we have one videographer. We have a video team now of 40, 50, 60 people.

One of the big things is that we always say we would never make news decisions based on audience traffic, but we have the ability to assess traffic. You can’t assess traffic with a print product, you know how many people subscribe to the paper, but anything more granular than that is impossible.

You don’t know which stories are resonating, you don’t know which sections are the most popular or things like that. That’s been a big change. And the tempo, I mean the 24-hour news cycle, we were not on a 24-hour news cycle when I started and we very much are now. And we have now had this very elaborate process where the nerve center of the newsroom moves from New York to London to Seoul back to New York. It allows where the news report is driven to shift to daytime hours wherever it is.

That’s fascinating. Totally makes sense. You said you had a weird entry to the Times. What’s your beat today? You’re an editor, you’re not out there writing, reporting. You were a travel editor for nine years. What are you on these days? I’ve moved from travel to a group called Special Projects, which is now technically called Projects and Collaborations, which I don’t think is any more clear than Special Projects. But the way I describe it is we sort of do projects that either fall in between desks that might not otherwise happen or fall across desks and both coordinate but also do our own journalism. So just as example, we’re about to launch a big project about the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance. There’s no single date, but people generally date it to 1924. And we’re hoping for it to be a look back in a lot of ways, but also a look at the continuing legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, the contributions from the real estate desk and we’re talking to culture and food and other desks about it, but that’s a good example of a project that no one desk would own. We do a lot of that sort of thing.

And then we do a lot of also experimentation, different story forms using new tools that we’ve developed, incorporating video and reader interaction and all sorts of stuff like that. It’s a fun team to be on. I’ve never been a beat reporter. I’ve never been a hard news editor. I’ve always worked in features. And I’ve written plenty for the Times, but I’ve never had a beat. When I did work in travel, this is back when things were largely print driven and I would work on two, maybe three stories a week that would be in next week’s travel section. In some ways it was great. I loved it, got to work with great writers and worked with art director and photo editor on presentation layouts in print and online. The travel section every year has this big 52 Places project . I led that for five years. It’s a massive machine. It’s just like this enormous puzzle.

That’s not the project where you had one writer travel the world for a year? So that was an offshoot. The list is 52 Places to Go, and that’s existed, I’m not sure for how long, 15 years, something like that. And then for two years we had a 52 Places traveler. The first one was Jada Yuan , who’s now at the Washington Post, and the second was Sebastian Modak , he’s at The Wall Street Journal now. He’s great. The first year with Jada, god bless her, she’s a great writer. We didn’t know what we were getting into with that. As you can imagine, the logistics of sending somebody to a different place every week is just insane. I’m glad we did it, but there’s a reason why we only did it twice.

It sounded like it could have been a dream or nightmare job, or a little bit of both. I think if you asked them they would say it’s both. It’s incredibly exhausting, but also I’m sure electric and an amazing way to spend a year.

We’ve got off-topic from your book, but we can bring it back around. There’s a lovely piece in here where you interview a doorman. He has a line in there where he says, “Certain things about New York just are, there’s no point to fight it.” I guess you went into it looking for some juicy gossip about the building, but got a very lovely family feel. He’s a doorman at a fancy building on Fifth Avenue. I was expecting a lot of juicy gossip and he really talked about how he feels like he’s part of this big family and how he feels responsible for people in the building. Things like blackouts and blizzards and stuff like that where there’s older people in the building who he really watches out for. And he’s seen kids grow up. And it makes sense when you think about it, but it’s not what I expected.

It’s not as sexy. Right, it’s not as sexy. My wife and I live right on the border of Woodside and Sunnyside in Queens, and there’s four high rises right in a row in what is otherwise a pretty flat area. We’re in a co-op and there’s 220 units in each building. It’s pretty big. We’ve been in this building for 20 years. We started on the top floor and actually have a large tattoo on the inside of my forearm. It’s a sunset. We lived on the 12th floor facing west, so we got these amazing sunsets of the skyline. One interesting and sad fact is that that view basically no longer exists. We’ve moved from the 12th floor to the eighth floor for a larger place when we had a kid. The guy who bought that apartment from us saw me in the elevator one day and he said, “I’ve got to take a picture of that because my girlfriend’s never going to believe it.” And I said, “Wait, what do you mean?” He said, “All those 40, 50 high rises that have gone up in Long Island City have completely obscured that view.” I’m sure it’s still lovely, but it’s not the same view that I had.

That goes to one of the main through lines is that New York is ever-changing and it doesn’t care about your view. It really doesn’t, and I’m sure a lot of New Yorkers have had this experience, going to neighborhoods where you haven’t been in a long time. There was a period where I hadn’t been to the Lower East Side in a while and I went and I was like, “What the hell is going on? What are all of these boutiques and restaurants?” Now, I go to a lot of those restaurants, they’re great, but the vibe is just completely different. I mean, go down the list of neighborhoods that have transformed in one way or another.

I found a piece of yours in the Times, just a couple of years old, where you went into the Times Machine — anyone can search the Times Archives going back to the 1800s — and you searched your family name, because it’s a unique family name, Saltzstein. And you found a Saltzstein that may be related to you? There’s sort of an update to that, which is interesting. So one of the first things I did when I got to the Times was search the archives for my last name for the exact reasons you described, and I found a few references. My great uncle on my dad’s side was Carlo Gambino’s book maker.

Oh wow. That I knew about, but I didn’t know the specifics of it. And one little side note, when I did write that article, I mentioned that his name was Harry Saltzstein, his partner was George Schiller. I got an email one day from Amy Schiller and she’s like, “That’s my grandfather.” And I had an hour-long Zoom call with five Schillers and she and I have become friends. The article is hilarious, it says something like they both get arrested. My great uncle is described as a convicted burglar and bookmaker I think. And his partner George Schiller, about whom little is known, which I just love.

So I also found a reference to a Mike Saltzstein who ran the Coney Island carousel for 25 years. I’d never heard that name, passed it by my dad. He had never heard that name. He was born and grew up two miles from my dad, whatever the distance from Coney Island to Crown Heights. But around the same age. I talked to a whole bunch of people who knew him, he didn’t have any surviving relatives. I talked to the guy who wrote the obit. He didn’t know more information. So I sort of sat on that for many, many years. Finally, just popped back into my head and I’m like, you know what? I’m going to go down to our photo archives, which we call the morgue, which is an amazing place. It’s insane. There’s literally millions and millions of photos and many more millions of negatives. I said to the guy who runs the place, Jeff, “Give me all the Coney Island stuff.” And, you know in a movie, when somebody asks for something and they drop a massive thing in front of them?

Dossier. Exactly, and dust flies. It was like that. And I start going through it and about halfway through a contact sheet of photos of a guy who was clearly Mike Saltzstein, guy in a work suit on the carousel and all the photos in the archives have what’s called a verso, which is just the other side of the photo that has when it was published, the caption that went with it, that sort of stuff.

The metadata. The old school metadata. These photos have never been published. They were supposed to run with an Anna Quindlen column back when she was a Metro columnist. I contacted Anna Quindlen . She’s like, “I don’t remember that. I don’t ever remember us killing a column, so I don’t know why it would not have run.” But it never did. So we had them enlarged and I wrote that story, still without knowing if or how we were related. This is another Twitter connection, so I post the story on Twitter. Literally within 15 minutes, a specialist in Jewish genealogy says, “I am 95 percent sure that Mike Saltzstein and your dad or third cousins,” which makes me third cousin once removed.

The cousin math is very confusing. Very confusing. Basically a second, third, fourth cousin that has to do with how far back on the family tree you split off and this gives you a sense of generational time. Third cousin, you’re already in 19th century Poland when we were the Zaltzsteins, and so I can’t remember the relative where it branches off from, but that’s how far back you have to go to connect me with Mike Saltzstein.

I found a reference to my — I don’t know how many greats are in there — great-great-grandfather, great-great-great-grandfather? — from a copy of The Times in 1905. The opening sentence is “ A gang in East New York attacked Max Braiker , a contractor and boss bricklayer and some of his workmen last evening.” And it goes on from there. Incredible.

The Times Machine is a great toy. Anything you want to say about the book before I let you go back to your day? Available wherever you get your books. One of the thing swe haven’t mentioned is, which I’m not responsible for, is that there’s an amazing illustrator who did illustrations for the book, Emily Carpenter, who is just a genius as far as I’m concerned and went to town on some of the stories and tweets in the book and really brought them to life. So I’m indebted to her.

Check out this episode of “ Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast ” for more. Subscribe and  listen  wherever you get your  podcasts .

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Brian Braiker

Brian Braiker is the editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Magazine.

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Essay on New York City

Students are often asked to write an essay on New York City in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on New York City

Introduction to new york city.

New York City is a big, busy place in the United States. It has five parts called boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Many people from all over the world live here, making it a place with lots of different cultures.

Famous Places in New York City

The city has famous buildings like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. There’s also a huge park called Central Park. People come from everywhere to see these places.

Life in New York City

In New York City, life moves fast. Streets are filled with taxis, buses, and people walking. There are lots of shops, restaurants, and places to have fun.

New York City is known for its bright lights and tall buildings. It’s a place where you can find something new and exciting around every corner.

250 Words Essay on New York City

New York City is a big and busy place in the United States. It has five areas called boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island. Many people from all over the world live here, and you can hear many different languages.

The city is known for some very famous spots. The Statue of Liberty is a huge statue that stands for freedom. Central Park is a big green space where people can play and relax. The Empire State Building is a very tall building that lets you see the city from high up.

Life here is fast and exciting. The streets are often full of cars and the sidewalks full of people walking. There are lots of shops, restaurants, and places to see plays called theaters. The city never sleeps, which means there is always something to do, even late at night.

Transport in New York City

Getting around the city is easy with many buses and trains. The subway is a train that runs under the ground and can take you to many places quickly.

Culture and Food

New York City has food from all around the world because people from different countries live here. You can try new foods and learn about other cultures.

New York City is a special place with lots to see and do. It is full of life, with many different people and activities that make it an exciting city to visit or live in.

500 Words Essay on New York City

New York City is one of the most famous cities in the world. It is known for its tall buildings, busy streets, and many different kinds of people. Some people call it “The Big Apple” or “The City That Never Sleeps.” This city has five parts called boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island.

The Skyline and Buildings

When you think of New York City, you might picture its skyline first. The skyline is the shape made by all the tall buildings when you look at the city from far away. The tallest of these buildings is called One World Trade Center. There are many other tall buildings, too, like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. These buildings are not just offices; some have places to live, restaurants, and shops.

The People of New York

Lots of people live in New York City. In fact, over eight million people call it home. They come from all over the world, which makes New York a very special place. You can hear different languages, eat foods from many countries, and meet people with different customs and traditions.

Famous Places to Visit

New York has many famous places that people like to visit. One of these places is Times Square. It is full of bright lights and big electronic screens. Another famous place is Central Park. This big park is right in the middle of Manhattan, and it’s a place where you can play, walk, or just sit and enjoy nature.

The Statue of Liberty is also here. It was a gift from France and stands on a small island. You can take a ferry to see it up close. It is a symbol of freedom and welcome to people coming to the United States.

Transportation in the City

Getting around New York City is easy because there are many ways to travel. The subway is a train that runs under the ground and can take you to many places quickly. Buses run on the streets, and there are also yellow taxis that you can hail to get a ride.

Culture and Entertainment

New York is also a place where you can find lots of art, music, and theater. There are many museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. These museums have paintings, sculptures, and other artworks.

Broadway is where you can watch plays and musicals. It’s famous all over the world for its shows. There is also music everywhere, from big concerts in places like Madison Square Garden to street musicians playing in subway stations.

New York City is an exciting place with lots to see and do. It’s a city of tall buildings, lots of people, and fun places to visit. Whether you are interested in history, art, or just want to see the sights, New York City has something for everyone. It’s a place that shows the best of what a big city can offer, and that’s why so many people love it.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Tourism — Descriptive Essay About New York City

Descriptive Essay About New York City

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Published: Mar 13, 2024

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How to Describe New York City in a Story

By A.W. Naves

Is your novel set in the heart of New York City ? Capture the attention of your readers by vividly illustrating the city with some great words that we’ve included below. If you need guidance on how to describe New York City in a story, this post is for you.

Lively, animated ; full of energy and life.

“The vibrant streets of New York City were teeming with people, cars, and sounds.”

“The vibrant art scene in NYC attracted artists and art lovers from all over the world.”

How it Adds Description

The word “vibrant” suggests a lively, energetic, and colorful atmosphere that is characteristic of the city. This creates a sense of excitement and anticipation for the reader, setting the stage for an engaging and dynamic narrative. It shows how the city itself helps to drive a character’s motivation and paves the way for their journey toward achieving their goals.

Symbolic, emblematic ; widely recognized and well-established.

“The iconic skyline of New York City is one of the most recognizable in the world.”

“The Statue of Liberty is an iconic symbol of freedom and democracy that is synonymous with New York City.”

The word “iconic” illustrates that the city has unique and recognizable features that make it stand out from other cities. This helps to create a more vivid mental image, creating a sense of place that is firmly rooted in the reader’s mind. This can help to establish a keen sense of atmosphere and provide a backdrop against which the action of the story can take place.

Varied, assorted ; composed of various elements or types.

“New York City is one of the most diverse cities in the world, with people from all walks of life and cultures.”

“The diverse cuisine available reflects the wide range of cultural influences in New York City.”

The word “diverse” conveys the idea that the city is made up of people from a wide range of ethnicities, cultures, and backgrounds. By highlighting the diversity, the story can introduce opportunities for characters to encounter new perspectives, forge unexpected connections, and confront challenges related to issues such as identity, prejudice, and social justice.

4. Cosmopolitan

Worldly, sophisticated ; familiar with and at ease in many different countries and cultures.

“New York City is a cosmopolitan city where you can experience cultures from all over the world.”

“The cosmopolitan vibe of New York City attracts people from all walks of life.”

The word “cosmopolitan” describes the city’s global appeal as a melting pot that has made it a hub for international commerce, art, and politics. This word adds sophistication, emphasizing its global influence and cultural significance which helps to set the stage for the characters’ encounters with a diverse range of people and experiences in the city.

Tough, determined ; showing courage and resolve.

“New York City is a gritty city that has always been defined by its tenacity and determination.”

“The gritty streets of Brooklyn are a testament to the city’s enduring spirit and resilience.”

The word “gritty” shows the city’s unyielding and resilient character, adding a sense of toughness and determination that emphasizes its indomitable spirit. It implies that it is a city where one can encounter both beauty and hardship which can create a sense of tension between the city’s challenges and the protagonist’s goals.

6. Captivating

Fascinating, enchanting ; holding interest or attention.

“The captivating beauty of Central Park is a welcome oasis amid the bustling city.”

“New York City’s captivating skyline is a testament to its architectural achievements.”

The word “captivating” depicts the beauty and allure of the city. It conjures up a place setting that is both enchanting and dynamic, setting the stage for the story’s events to unfold in an environment where anything can happen as the characters are drawn into the majesty of the city around them.

7. Ambitious

Driven, motivated ; having an ardent desire and determination to succeed.

“New York City is an ambitious city that never stops striving for greatness.”

“ Ambitious entrepreneurs flock to New York City’s limitless opportunities.”

The word “ambitious” describes the city’s unyielding pursuit of success and greatness, adding a sense of determination and motivation to the city. This paints the city as a place full of people who strive for success and are driven to achieve their goals. This provides context for the actions of the characters who are influenced by such a dynamic setting.

Ever-changing, evolving ; characterized by constant change or progress.

“New York City is a dynamic city that is always evolving and adapting to new trends.”

“The dynamic culture of New York City is due to a diverse and progressive population.”

The word “dynamic” depicts the constant change, energy, and excitement of the city. It conveys the idea that the city is always evolving and full of activity, which helps create a vivid picture of the urban landscape for the reader. This establishes place as a key element of the narrative, potentially leading to further developments that are tied to the unique character of the city.

9. Electrifying

Exhilarating, exciting ; intensely thrilling.

“New York City’s electrifying nightlife lends to its reputation as the city that never sleeps.”

“The electrifying energy of Times Square is a sight to behold, with its bright lights and bustling crowds.”

The word “electrifying” adds a sense of energy and excitement to the description of the city, creating an image of a bustling metropolis filled with life and activity. This can drive the story forward by setting the tone and atmosphere for the events that take place in the city, making the reader feel more immersed in the story.

10. Resilient

Tough, durable ; able to recover quickly from difficulties.

“New York City’s resilient spirit has allowed it to overcome many challenges over the years.”

“The city’s infrastructure is resilient , with measures in place to prepare for emergencies.”

The word “resilient” illustrates the city’s ability to recover and adapt after facing challenges such as natural disasters, economic downturns, and social conflicts. This suggests that despite the city’s past struggles, it has not only survived but also thrived, creating anticipation and hope that the characters in the story may overcome their own obstacles and find similar success.

Victor Sholl To Receive 2024 Mary Hatch Marshall Essay Award

Victor Sholl, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), was selected as the 2024 winner of the prestigious Mary Hatch Marshall Essay Award for his piece titled “Writing the story of the world: the case for World Narrativism.” A&S and the Syracuse University Library Associates will host a virtual award event and author reading on Wednesday, April 10 at 1 p.m. (EDT). Anyone interested in attending can register by emailing [email protected] by April 3.

Victor Sholl

Sholl will receive a $1,000 prize. His article introduces and argues for a view he calls World Narrativism: that narrative features affect the quality of trajectories the world can take, thus becoming relevant when we decide which course of the world we should promote. Though the idea that the history of the world has narrative features has been defended before, views of this kind typically do not involve an explicit claim that individuals should promote a better story of the world. The common assumption is that whatever is the story of the world, it is something governed by factors beyond the control of individuals. He argues that World Narrativism is original in this respect.

His essay was chosen from those submitted by A&S graduate students currently enrolled in African American studies; English; art and music histories; languages, literatures and linguistics; philosophy; religion; and writing studies, rhetoric and composition.

Sholl received his master’s in philosophy from the University of São Paulo in 2022. His research interests include well-being, normative reasons, explanations, consequentialism, and artificial intelligence and art.

Professor Mary Hatch Marshall was a founding member of the Library Associates and holds a distinguished place in the history of A&S. In 1952, she became the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature—the first woman appointed a full professor in the college—after having joined the faculty four years earlier. Library Associates established the annual Mary Hatch Marshall Award to honor and help perpetuate her scholarly standards and the generous spirit that characterized her inspirational teaching career, which lasted through her retirement in 1993. Members of Library Associates, Marshall’s friends and family, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Central New York Community Foundation all contributed to the endowment, established in 2004, that funds the award.

Library Associates is a group of dedicated SU Libraries supporters who help to raise funds and accessibility for the Libraries’ special collections, rare books and manuscripts through opportunities like the Faculty Fellows program. Those wishing to join the Library Associates or make a gift to the Mary Hatch Marshall Award Endowment can contact Ron Thiele, assistant dean for advancement for the Libraries, at [email protected] or 315.560.9419.

Cristina Hatem

• Forever Orange Week Is March 21-28! Monday, March 18, 2024, By News Staff
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• Internship Funding Award Expands Student Opportunities Friday, March 15, 2024, By News Staff

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Water for Peace: official celebration of World Water Day 2024

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Under the theme “Water for Peace”, this campaign, led jointly by UNESCO and UNECE on behalf of UN-Water , showcases water's pivotal role in fostering peace, prosperity, and conflict prevention. 

Join us at UNESCO Headquarters for the official World Water Day 2024 celebration. This pivotal event promises a rich one-day programme filled with insights from distinguished speakers, including heads of UN agencies and high-level officials, alongside technical presentations that draw on field experiences. The day will also be enlivened by artistic and cultural activities that echo the theme. A highlight of the celebration will be the unveiling of the United Nations World Water Development Report 2024. 

Programme highlights

• High level Opening Ceremony  
• Launch of the United Nations World Water Development Report 2024  
• Technical Discussions on Water Cooperation and Peacebuilding 
• Cultural shows and indoor photo exhibition (Walk of Water) 

Provisional event programme: English | Français

UN World Water Development Report 2024

The UN World Water Development Report (WWDR) is published by UNESCO, on behalf of UN-Water and its production is coordinated by the UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme. Since its first edition in 2003, the series provide policy and decision-makers with factual evidence and tools to stimulate ideas and actions. This comprehensive report, funded by the Italian Government, also provides an authoritative overview of global water trends, challenges, and solutions. The 2024 Report, entitled "Water for Prosperity and Peace", underlines the interlinked complex relationships between water, prosperity and peace, describing how progress in one dimension can have positive repercussions on the others. 

Ensure your participation in the dialogue on sustainable water management and peace by exploring the findings and recommendations of the UN WWDR 2024. 

Participate in the celebration

We welcome the participation of members of governments, international organizations, NGOs, academia, the private sector, and all stakeholders interested in the sustainable management of water resources and the promotion of peace; in-person or by watching live . Registration is mandatory to participate in-person. 

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Opinion Guest Essay

Flaco Never Had a Chance

Credit... Paul Beiboer

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By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

• March 4, 2024

It’s been more than a week since I read the news and I can still hardly believe it. Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo and spent a year on the lam in Manhattan, is dead . My disbelief is of a piece with the grief I feel at news of an unexpected human death. How can a vibrant, irreplaceable creature be safely here among us one instant and irretrievably gone the next? How is that even possible ?

The truth is that Flaco never had a chance. Few apex predators fare well in the built human environment, and Flaco was an apex predator who had never been taught to hunt. Until someone freed him from the zoo last year, he had spent his entire life in a cage.

He learned to hunt anyway, as a wild owl in the urban unwild. All New York was rooting for him — and, thanks to the reach of social media , many others were too. I live in Tennessee, but I began to follow the wonderful urban wildlife photographer David Lei on Instagram just for the pure joy of seeing Flaco, day after day, in all his ill-fated magnificence. He was our outlaw , our tragic hero , our symbol of resilience , our fellow bewildered immigrant , determined to master the perplexities of life in a foreign place.

Flaco had spent his life among our kind and seemed to be as curious about us as we were about him. He perched on fire escapes and air-conditioners. He peered into windows, blinking those huge, inscrutable eyes. In his glorious wildness, he tolerated our oohs and ahs, our long lenses, our honking taxis and our double-decker buses and our wailing sirens. Somehow he found his way among our glass-clad canyons, navigated the inexplicable patterns of our traffic and our days.

Flaco knew us. He felt like a friend.

But there were things he did not know about our kind. The rats he killed and ate, to human cheers? He didn’t know they were laced with poison. The windows he peered into? He didn’t know they could, in certain light, give back the sky and the street trees. He didn’t know that reflections in glass aren’t real trees or the real sky.

A Eurasian eagle-owl far from his native habitat is not alone in failing to understand the dangers of life in an urban environment . Up to two billion birds die from window strikes every year , some quarter of a million in New York City alone.

There is no way to know how many animals die from eating prey laced with poison. Before poison kills its target, it makes them easier for predators to catch. When urban predators eat rats — or mice or chipmunks or squirrels or voles — who have been poisoned, they’re also consuming poison. It might not kill them right away, either, but it makes them weak, disoriented, vulnerable to pathogens.

Nearby residents reported that Flaco had stopped calling in the days before his death, but he was still alive when the superintendent at a Manhattan apartment building found him in the courtyard and called for help. Despite the rapid response of staff members from the Wild Bird Fund , a nonprofit wildlife rescue group, Flaco didn’t make it. Initial findings suggest that he died of “ acute traumatic injury .”

In some ways, this explanation is no explanation at all. The report found trauma mainly to the bird’s body, not to his head, as would be expected in a building strike. “This is not the story of a bird that flew into a window,” wrote Barry Petchesky for the Defector ; “this appears to be the story of a bird who fell from his perch and died from smashing into the ground.”

It will take weeks for a full necropsy by the Wildlife Conservation Society to be complete, and even then we may never know exactly why Flaco died. Did he fall from a high perch, or did he fly into the building? Was he confused by a window’s reflection? Did he bleed to death from rat poison? Was his coordination affected by the high levels of lead in New York City pigeons, which he had lately begun to hunt? Was he sick with an illness like West Nile virus or avian influenza?

In the end, though, it’s clear that we were Flaco’s undoing, just as it’s clear that we will be the undoing of all the other magnificent wild creatures who have no choice but to try to live among us. “In essence, they probably will all die from human interference, from things we’ve done,” Rita McMahon, director of the Wild Bird Fund, told Catrin Einhorn of The Times.

This is a hard truth to accept, especially when you know that these deaths are not inevitable. There are reasonable, data-supported measures that any city could adopt to reduce human-animal conflict and allow wildlife to live more safely among us. We aren’t powerless in the face of this suffering.

There are many ways to reduce bird strikes , for example. Requiring bird-safe design in building remodels and new construction, and treating windows in existing buildings to make glass more visible to birds , would prevent the majority of bird strikes during the day. Birds migrate primarily at night and can be profoundly disoriented by artificial lights; turning off nonessential lighting can make a great difference in their safety. Setting lights to turn on only when triggered by motion detectors and installing hoods that direct illumination toward the ground can also help, particularly during the fall and spring migration seasons.

In New York State, the Dark Skies Protection Act and the Bird Safe Buildings Act, two bills currently languishing in committee , would help to address both of the primary reasons for bird strikes. In a renewed push to bring attention to this issue following Flaco’s death, the Bird Safe Buildings Act has been renamed the Flaco Act .

Finding safer alternatives to rodenticides in densely urban environments is a taller order , but it’s possible. Consistently keeping garbage contained in rat-proof bins, closing off access points to human dwellings and setting traps are all elements of effective rat-management programs. Better rat traps do exist, and they kill more humanely than poison does. And the collateral damage to birds and other wildlife is much reduced.

But none of these measures will work without a fundamental shift in the way we think about animals. As human populations grow and the built environment expands — each in concert with the ravages of climate change — protecting the creatures who share our ecosystems will become more difficult and more crucial. To protect the animals we love, we’ll need to think differently about the animals we do not love. To live peaceably among them, we’ll need to work harder to do what wildness requires of us.

Wild animals are not our enemies. They are our neighbors. Every owl is Flaco. Looked at through the lens of biodiversity loss , every toad and rabbit and squirrel and fox and coyote and goldfinch and cricket and lacewing and roly-poly — they could all be Flaco. We just need to learn to love them the way we loved him.

Margaret Renkl , a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “ The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, ” “ Graceland, at Last ” and “ Late Migrations .”

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