I was reading on the 2 train back to Brooklyn last night. It was truly the ideal essay to peruse for someone like me who has just relocated to New York. I have a great affection for White's note regarding how one aspect of the allure of New York is the "nearness to giants" in the "settler's" particular field. This essay was recommended to me by two such remarkable giants in the publishing industry.

"Whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to establish a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to flee the indignity of being watched by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it doesn't matter: each welcomes New York with the intense excitement of first love, each perceives New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light that makes the Consolidated Edison Company seem insignificant."

An insightful and still highly relevant essay on New York City exists, with a heavy emphasis on Manhattan. There are only scant references to the other boroughs, and Staten Island is not mentioned at all. White's essay is a masterpiece of poetic prose of the highest caliber, flowing like beautiful verse. It is an astute work, and in some ways, it is almost prophetic regarding how the City could potentially be shattered by racial strife or "airplanes." Of course, this essay was penned in 1949, many years prior to the unrest of the 1960s or the fateful morning of September 11, 2001.

What remains timeless about this essay is the fundamental truth that on numerous occasions, the prophets of doom have proclaimed the end of NYC, yet those prophecies have been defied by the tenacious grittiness of the City's residents. They have shown an unwavering spirit in the face of adversity.

However, the shortcoming of this book might lie in the author's perspective as a member of the cultural elite. White divides the City into three camps: permanent residents who do the work, commuters who return to the suburbs or NJ in the evening, and newcomers, be they young people, immigrants, artists, or professionals, who seek to make their mark. He gives short shrift to the first class, holds the commuter in disdain, and believes that the vitality of the City is held by this diverse and somewhat undifferentiated third class of individuals looking to leave their mark. The cultural elite's blindness to a middle class that would come to be neglected and ultimately flee the City is evident in White's failure to see these lives or to expand his view beyond New York County, also known as "the Borough of Manhattan." This oversight perhaps limits the comprehensiveness of his analysis.

For an essay penned in a hotel room during the sweltering summer of 1948, this concise book truly encapsulates a post-WWII New York. Indeed, it is the work of the same author who gave us 'Stuart Little' and 'Charlotte's Web'. Now, turning to the essay itself, it is a love letter to the city. It offers a perspective that is sometimes filled with nostalgia, as the writer recalls his own days there years earlier, when he was still new to the place and not yet living in Maine. At other times, he notices the changes, and yet at others, he celebrates the present greatness within it. Readers can add their own thoughts and experiences to it and see what endures and what truly matters.

Some of the places and things mentioned in the essay are no longer there. The author mainly focuses on the area of Manhattan but does mention a few others. The introduction writer, Roger Angell, remarks that White would doubtless loathe how New York is in 1999 in many respects, but that he could also be introduced to many of the positive aspects, and some things have improved significantly.

The very first sentence evokes Olivia Laing’s “The Lonely City”: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

I adore how the author描绘s the vibes and moods of the city and its neighborhoods. How easily one could maintain a distance from events occurring elsewhere in the city back then. How there are three cities: those who live in it, those who commute daily to work in it, and the newcomers or tourists. He observes the buildings rising upwards and wonders how the city can function in terms of electricity and pipes. He notices the construction of the UN headquarters (where slaughterhouses once stood), which is largely completed in 1952.

Towards the end of the essay, he sometimes seems prophetic. He perceives the escalating tension (perhaps thinking about crimes in the coming decades, which rise until the end of the 1980s). He mentions the housing projects being built in the slums (which began just after the war). And the chilling part is his talk of the planes: he does refer to the one that crashed into the Empire State Building, but then there is the mention of ‘the cold shadow of planes’ and ‘the destroying planes’, with the latter being repeated several times… He is probably referring to their noise, but it still sends shivers down my spine as I think about 9/11.

However, he brings things to a peaceful conclusion with an image of an old willow tree in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of eastern Midtown Manhattan (where the UN building is also located). I did a bit of research on the tree and discovered this: “…in 2009, the tree had been rotted through from the inside and was chopped down. There was a small ceremony held at sunset. Fortunately, several clippings were taken from the tree by Bill Logan of Urban Arborists in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Today, the children of E.B. White’s willow have grown over 30 feet tall and will eventually be planted in parks across New York City.” What a wonderful additional ending for this essay!

A tour-de-force travelogue

If you're a writer, editor, teacher, or parent, you're likely familiar with E.B. White, whether it's through "The Elements of Style" or his beloved children's books like "Stuart Little" and "Charlotte's Web." I've been delving into the world of the U.S. Armed Forces Services Editions books published during and just after World War II and the significant role this program played in American literacy. Intriguingly, four lesser-known White books were distributed to GIs worldwide in that series, mainly centered around humor, including the droll classic "Is Sex Necessary?," which he co-authored with James Thurber and others.

There's no doubt: E.B. White was a man of countless talents.

I hadn't read his "Here Is New York" until this week. It's actually a small-book reprint of a travel piece he wrote for the now-legendary Holiday magazine. The magazine was launched in 1946 to encourage Americans to travel by offering high freelance rates to famous writers to pen about America. It really took off when Ted Patrick took the helm. I'm mentioning Ted's name because I'm now the editor of a publishing house, and such editors are usually anonymous figures whose calling is to serve our authors. Ted had a remarkable and creative career at Holiday, which included the publication of this now-classic piece about New York City by White in 1949. In fact, it was Holiday staffer Roger Angell, better known for his baseball writing and later work at The New Yorker (and who was White's stepson), who connected White with New York City, Patrick, and Holiday.

This piece had a life of its own on a national scale back then, as it was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection. And many years later, after the 9/11 attacks, it was republished to showcase New York City's resilience to the world.

What astonishes me about this diverse range of journalistic impacts is how well it serves as an alternative to White's "Elements of Style" in demonstrating to students and even other writers in "writers' groups" how a combination of such techniques can create a timeless portrait.

What am I referring to here?

There are numerous techniques that could be enumerated in these pages, but I won't detail them all. They include描绘 the city's soundscape and observing corners of the city through the lens of time.

One of the most memorable examples is White's ingenious use of the "listing" technique taught in Writing 101 and Journalism 101. There are several brilliantly drawn-up lists in this book, but the best is a technique that I know I'll be borrowing. In that particular passage, he starts with a list of famous events in New York City, then unfolds a street map and counts the city blocks from where he's sitting to the site of each event. The result is a full page of these events listed with a verbal visual reference to how far each one is from his location as a writer. It's vivid and unforgettable.

Another example turns geography on its head and instead switches to describing New York City as what Bill Joel called "a state of mind" in the '70s. Thirty years before Joel's expression, White did the same and described New York City not as an arrangement of neighborhoods, streets, and waterways, but as three fundamental states of mind.

Want to know what three he chose? Read the book. You'll enjoy it. I know I'll keep this book within easy reach on my library shelf, and it'll be enjoyable to use in future seminars, workshops, and retreats with writers.

I lived in New York City, specifically in Astoria, Queens, from January 2000 to July 2004.

I experienced the events of September 11 and the blackout during my time there. I revisited last summer. New York is an incredibly special place. It's interesting to note that since America is a relatively young country, many of the world's truly treasured cities are located elsewhere.

I am a long-time admirer of E.B. White and have a penchant for essays, so I was eagerly anticipating this book. However, I was surprised by its brevity. It's not even a long essay. I believe they could have done more to enhance it, perhaps by adding a few more essays to make it more comprehensive. I finished reading it in less than an hour. Nevertheless, it is a small gem. Although it should perhaps be titled "Here is Manhattan" as Brooklyn and Queens are only mentioned once each, and the other two boroughs are forgotten. It's interesting that this was written as part of a travel series, considering that at this stage of his life, the furthest anyone could persuade White to travel was to NYC (from Maine). I do think that a former city resident is the ideal person to offer a fresh perspective, as they are familiar with the hidden corners and nooks where the real essence of the city lies, not just the well-known tourist areas.

This edition was published in 1999, and it contains a remarkably prescient moment at the end, where White imagines the potential destruction that a pane could cause to the city. This wasn't intended to have the same shock value or deeply affect readers as it does today, so I don't consider it a spoiler. In fact, I believe it's my responsibility to warn readers about this, as White did not anticipate the current emotional response that his words would elicit. For those of us who lived through September 11 in New York City, it's beneficial to be prepared for references to it.

It's mildly amusing that White himself wrote a short foreword for the book's publication, just a year after the article was written, and already one of the businesses he mentioned had closed down. But that's all part of the New York experience. Yes, you can visit Delmonico's and dine at a restaurant that has been around for over 100 years, but your favorite eatery can (and often does) vanish overnight. The city is in a constant state of flux, and the essay provides a now-nostalgic look at a New York that no longer exists, where the Third Avenue El has recently been shut down and one could still enjoy a meal at Schrafft's. Every resident of New York should own a copy of this book.

New York is truly a remarkable city, and it's part of the phenomenon where every person living there seems to have an overly high opinion of it.

Still, it's a great pleasure to listen to someone speak passionately about the Capital of the World and to read about the transformations that were taking place in 1949, especially around the Bowery and the Lower East Side. This essay could indeed be longer to explore more of the city's魅力.

New York is a concentrate of art, commerce, sport, religion, entertainment, and finance, bringing together in a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader, and the merchant. It carries the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that wherever you sit in New York, you can feel the vibrations of great times and deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation. Better than most dense communities, it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he desires it, and almost everyone does) against all the enormous, violent, and wonderful events that are happening every minute. Since I've been sitting in this miasmic air shaft, many rather splashy events have occurred in town. For example, a man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. However, it caused no stir outside his block and received only a small mention in the papers. I didn't attend. Also, since my arrival, the greatest air show ever staged in the world took place in town. But I didn't go, and neither did most of the other eight million inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd.

New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along, whether it's a thousand-foot liner from the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention from the West, without imposing the event on its inhabitants. So, in a sense, every event is optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and conserve his soul.

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 undoubtedly the greatest human concentrate on earth, a poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

Every facility in the city is inadequate. The hospitals, schools, and playgrounds are overcrowded, the express highways are feverish, the unimproved highways and bridges are bottlenecks. There is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and deficiencies by supplying its citizens with a large dose of a supplementary vitamin – the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty, and unparalleled.

On the West Side Highway, as the motorist approaches the city, he is swept along in a trance, a sort of fever of inescapable motion, goaded from behind, hemmed in on either side, like a mere chip in a millrace. The city has never been so uncomfortable, so crowded, and so tense. Money has been plentiful, and New York has responded. Restaurants are difficult to get into; businessmen stand in line for a Schrafft's luncheon as meekly as idle men used to stand in soup lines. (Prosperity creates its own bread lines, just like depression.)

I learned about this essay from reading my GR friend Bonnie’s excellent review.

Although this essay was written 74 years ago, so much of the feelings about NYC still exist, if many of the places no longer do. “Here is New York” is E. B. White’s love letter to New York City, in which he describes how to best experience everything it has to offer.

He explains that there are the “three New York’s.” Firstly, those born in New York, who take the city for granted and accept its size and turbulence as natural and inevitable. Secondly, there is the New York of the commuter - the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Finally, the third New York, according to E.B.White is the “person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last - the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.”

He continues discussing the many and quite distinctive neighborhoods in New York. He points out that even “shopkeepers are particularly conscious of neighborhood boundary lines.” He provides the example of a friend of his who moved to another apartment three blocks away but still went grocery shopping at the same store. The shopkeeper was thrilled she still shopped there even though she moved out of the neighborhood, which was actually only three short blocks away.

Finally, he discusses the pulse or heartbeat of NYC as a living thing. “To a New Yorker, the city is both changeless and changing.” He notes all the changes to buildings, places, and neighborhoods in his lifetime. I wonder what he would think of New York today? I am certain he would continue to marvel at New York City, as most who live and visit do, every day.

Side note: He describes the public library’s book elevator “like an old water wheel, spewing out books onto the trays.” Fascinating detail of something I wish I had seen.

Now I am off to read Charlotte’s Web, one of my favorite childhood stories.

New York City might seem like a less-than-perfect place at times. It has its flaws and challenges. But despite that, I have this strange feeling that I will probably grow old and die here.

There's something about this city that keeps pulling me back, even when it gets tough. Maybe it's the energy, the diversity, or the countless opportunities it offers.

And then there's this really interesting thought that EB White might have lowkey predicted 9/11. It's a bit of a mind-boggler when you think about it. His words seem to have a strange prescience.

Whether it's just a coincidence or something more profound, it makes me look at both the city and his work in a whole new light.

So, here I am, in this crazy city, wondering what the future holds and how I'll fit into it all.

White weaves his masterful talent into a wide-eyed Manhattan love story. "Here is New York," a classic from the 1940s, is thoughtfully conceived and beautifully written. What was essentially true about New York City yesterday remains true today and will likely hold true again in 2040 when this little novella turns 100. Since any town is really a reflection of its people, White describes NY as three towns composed of three distinct groups.

The first circle is the establishment, consisting of those select families that safeguard the famous (and infamous) institutions of New York City. The second set represents the public hordes of daily commuters; without this massive mobile workforce, the city would grind to a halt. Finally, there is the magical third group, the recent immigrants, both domestic and foreign. Men and women arrive with nothing more than their robust hearts and minds. White romantically and justifiably concludes that without this third infusion of new blood, new ideas, and new dreams, New York City would never be as colorful and successful as it is.

He concludes his charming tale by dividing New York City in another way. He describes the hundreds of small micro-towns within a town. Each two-block area is truly a self-contained neighborhood, as distinct and self-contained as the smallest country hamlet. I live in downtown Chicago, and this rang very true to me. This nostalgic classic short piece from EB White should be cherished for its turn of phrase and its timeless insight.

Gosh darn it!

If I didn't already love NYC, this book would have tossed me right over the moon.

It romanticizes so many parts of the city that I now feel honored to know so well.

However, it also acknowledges its pitfalls and turnoffs.

The author bundles all of that up in every sentence to express just how special this place is.

And it proves that New Yorkers and people who love the city truly love it for exactly what it is and what it has to offer - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This book is SO HECKIN GOOD! It makes you see the city in a whole new light and appreciate all of its unique qualities.

Whether you're a native or just a visitor, this book is a must-read for anyone who has a passion for New York City.

It will make you fall in love with the city all over again, or perhaps even for the first time.

So go ahead and pick up this book, and get ready to be transported to the magical world of NYC.

You won't be disappointed!

Anyone who is currently living in or is seriously considering living in New York should regard this as essential reading. It is truly just so beautiful. The city of New York has a unique charm and allure that attracts people from all over the world. From its iconic skyline to its diverse culture and vibrant nightlife, there is something for everyone in this great city. Whether you are looking for a career opportunity, a place to pursue your dreams, or simply a new adventure, New York has it all. I really do have a deep love for NY. It is a place that constantly surprises and inspires me. Every time I walk down the street, I discover something new and exciting. The energy and vitality of the city are contagious, and I can't imagine living anywhere else.

[1949] Notes to self…A love letter to New York.

The saying, “the more things change, the more they remain the same,” couldn’t be more apt when it comes to this piece. It is more of a long essay than a traditional book. You can breeze through it in a quick hour and a half, including the intro and foreword. The writing is truly beautiful, simple and straightforward, yet also beautifully evocative. It covers all the bases, delving into New York and exploring why we love it, with all its flaws and imperfections.

It takes you on a journey through the city, highlighting its unique charm and character. From the bustling streets to the iconic landmarks, it captures the essence of New York. Whether you are a native or a visitor, this love letter will make you fall in love with the city all over again.

It is a celebration of New York, warts and all, and a reminder of why it holds such a special place in our hearts.