1 On any person who desires such queer prizes, New
York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of
privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence
4 within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the
population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large
extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and
7 come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some
greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious
gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an
10 individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on
luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is
willing to be lucky.
13 [...]
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the
New York of the man or woman who was born here, who
16 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
19 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. Of these three
22 trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final
destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that
accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its
25 poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its
incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its
tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but
28 the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer
arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum,
or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to
31 escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or
a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his
suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each
34 embraces New York with the intense excitement of first
love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an
adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the
37 Consolidated Edison Company.
White, E.B. (1999) Here is New York. New York:
The Little Book Room, with adaptations.