What makes a New York Story?

By Dan Saltzstein

When I was a kid growing up in Westchester County—just forty-five minutes north of Manhattan, but a world away—I had a poster hanging on my bedroom wall of a photograph by the great Andreas Feininger, one of many he took for Life magazine in the 1940s and ’50s. It’s nighttime. Tenement buildings in the foreground are dwarfed by downtown skyscrapers, aglow like thick, gridded lamps. The whole image is hazy, as if viewed through a clouded window. No people are visible, only implied by the apartment and office lights emanating from the buildings. But they are there—a few thousand, perhaps, of the famed “eight million stories in the Naked City.”

I’d stare at that poster every day, thinking about what tales it held. Wanting to be one of them.

What makes a story a New York story? A tough question to answer. It’s tempting to default to the old Justice Potter Stewart line about pornography: “I know it when I see it.” And maybe that’s as close as we can get. In February 2022–a (relatively) gentler time on Twitter, pre-X, pre-Musk — I posted a tweet that asked the question, “New Yorkers: What’s the most New York thing that’s ever happened to you?” I gave my own answer–the time I requested to use the bathroom at Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s Place (R.I.P.) and being asked in return if I planned to shoot up–and then put down my phone for the night.

The next day, I woke up to hundreds of responses, and they just kept pouring in. Stories about stumbling onto the set of “Law & Order,” drag queens emerging from manholes, eels wriggling through subway cars . . . And rats. Lots of rats.

After reading the responses, I realized there is some sort of through line to these stories—though it’s one that is very hard to put your finger on.

It’s almost as if New York exists in a slightly alternate reality from the rest of the country, or maybe the world. Everything is amped up—yet for those who live there, moments that seem almost surreal are treated as normal. Every city has its share of characters, famous and infamous locations, bizarre and touching interactions, but try to answer a similar question about almost any other city and . . . it’s just not as interesting. “Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud,” wrote James Baldwin. Not only do New Yorkers wear this uniqueness as a badge of honor, they’ll also be the last ones to react to even the most extreme of moments.

New York City held an unparalleled grip on me as I viewed it from that suburban bedroom. It was where I wanted to end up. The museums, the restaurants, the subway, even the grit and crime: I ached for it all. But more than anything, I wanted to experience it—to have stories to tell.

Now, almost 30 years later, I have my share.

Take the time I was headed back from my then-girlfriend-now-wife’s apartment in Park Slope. It had already started snowing, and was coming down fast. I got on the R train, which I would have to take all the way through Manhattan to get home to Astoria, Queens. At 34th Street-Herald Square, the train stopped. Not unusual. But then an announcement: “Due to weather conditions, this train is going out of service. This is the last stop.” Though there’s plenty about the MTA to complain about, even most New Yorkers will acknowledge that trains rarely go entirely out of service—especially one, like the R, which runs entirely underground. It turned out the whole system had shut down. Again, an extreme rarity.

I wandered up to street level and realized that, in the time it had taken me to get to Midtown, the storm had become a full-on blizzard. And I was still about five miles from home, as the crow flies. I couldn’t walk, certainly not in these conditions. My office was about ten blocks away; could I sleep under a desk? Just then, I spotted a taxi crawling through the foot-deep snow at about five miles per hour. I probably could have outrun it. I hailed it down and asked the driver if he’d take me to Astoria. He was trying to get home himself—and, luckily, to Queens. He paused. “A hundred bucks”—probably over five times the normal price. But I was out of options. So I got in and we spent the next two hours driving very slowly to Astoria, swerving all over the (thankfully deserted) roads.

Or the time I saw the actors Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen canoodling at a Theater District restaurant and was convinced I was watching a celebrity affair in bloom. Two weeks later, I passed by a poster for a new Broadway show starring . . . Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen. Like a flashback in an M. Night Shyamalan movie that reveals the true reality of a moment, I realized they weren’t canoodling, they were going over a script, playing their parts.

Or the time in 2003 when a hot summer day caused a citywide blackout. I left my cubicle at The New York Times’ building (which had a backup generator) and, amid restaurants feeding passersby food that would otherwise go bad, I interviewed upset commuters at Port Authority, where most of the city’s buses depart from, before returning to Times headquarters. I spent the night on an assistant managing editor’s tiny couch (which a famous columnist had tried to reserve with a Post-It note that ended up crumpled in the garbage). The next day, I walked home, alongside hundreds of others across the Queensboro Bridge. “A/C for customers only,” read a sign in the window of a restaurant (which presumably also had a backup generator). The sea of New Yorkers crossing the bridge felt something like a community, even if we didn’t say a word to each other.

What connects these stories and the hundreds of others that people shared on Twitter? An exaggeration of reality? A window into the eccentricities of New York, chopped up into brief moments? Or maybe they are simply just stories about a special, unique city—and about the people in them, who each perceive the city in their own way. “Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York,” wrote Colson Whitehead in The Colossus of New York, “not one of them seeing the same thing.”

Excerpted from: “That’s So New York: Short (and Very Short) Stories about the Greatest City on Earth” by Dan Saltzstein, published by Chronicle Books.