New York stories

New Yorkers love talking about New York. It's a fact. Anyone can write a travelogue of London, or Chicago, or Rome. But New Yorkers trust only themselves to do it for NYC. That's part of what makes this kind of navel-gazing travel lit so special: the writers who live here are more than a little in love with their surroundings, and it shows. It's not the shallow love you feel for Hawaii, or some other pretty, beachy spot; it's more of a hard-fought admiration for all the stupid, gritty things that annoy you on a daily basis--but which you'd miss if they disappeared suddenly.

For the twelfth entry in the Jacob-Katy book club, we picked a pair of such New York books: Here is New York, by E.B. White, and The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead. They're both made up of impressionistic essays about New York City--but White's gives a glimpse of 1948, while Whitehead's is current as of 2004. Read together, they're testaments to what has changed in sixty years, what hasn't changed, and what never will change.

Here is New York is almost entirely told from the E.B. White perspective, as he comes back to visit his old city from a new country life in Maine. Most of the impressions are his own, as he moves through cafes, talks to people around him, and ponders the city itself. Colossus is more of a collective work, trying to find what's at the heart of every New Yorker's experience. It bounces from one person's internal monologue to another, in chapters loosely based on a particular aspect of the city (the Brooklyn Bridge, Broadway, Port Authority, etc.) Both books are insightful--particularly White's eerie description of how vulnerable New York was and is to breaches like 9/11. And 60+ years later, White's has the advantage of describing the quaint New Yorkian touches that just don't exist anymore (bring back the pneumatic tubes, please, Mayor Bloomberg!)

White's writing is always solid and charming, but I thought the language was especially beautiful in Colossus--and that's what really cements it as just as crucial a time capsule as White's essay has become. (Maybe in 30 years, it'll be Whitehead's NYC prose in the Barnes & Noble subway ads alongside Dr. Smizmar.)

If either book had a drawback, it was that they didn't go quite far enough--there are plenty of topics that are crucial to any narrative of New York, but that just aren't present in either author's stuff. (Like sports.)

Favorite passages...

From Here is New York:
"...I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without."

"When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube--pfft--just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, gas mains, and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils."

From Colossus of New York:

On the Brooklyn Bridge: "They paste the name of the new mayor over the old mayor to save our tax dollars....Because no matter their political bent they understand the romance of bridges and have taken this walk more than once. This is non-partisan emptiness. Just yards to go. Remembering that disappointed feeling she gets each time she reaches the other side, then feeling that disappointed feeling. Check yourself for damage. Everything is where it should be. No miracle. The key to the city fell out of her pocket somewhere along the way and she's level again."

On Grand Central: "Of course the Dutch were quite shocked to find Grand Central Station under that big pile of dirt. Alas the Indians and their strict no-refund-without-receipt policy. And lo, as the earth cooled, Grand Central bubbled up through miles of magma, lodged in the crust of this island, settled here. The first immigrant. Still unassimilated. Ever indigestible. The river of skyscrapers flows around it. Travelers swim to it and cling, savoring solid handhold in roaring whitewhater. Churches fill up at regular intervals, on a schedule laid out in the business plan. like the best storms, rush hour starts out as a slight drizzle, then becomes unholy deluge."

On Times Square: "Simmer the idea of a metropolis until is reduced to a few blocks, sprinkle in a dash of hype and a tablespoon of woe. Add hubris to taste. Serving size: a lot."

[Editrix's note: when the Katy-Jacob collection of New York essays comes out, it will have both the aforementioned sports section and a lengthy discussion of the Ugg boot- and sweatpants-wearing denizens of 42nd and Broadway.]