![]() Before you know it, you have your own personal skyline. Your favorite newsstands, restaurants, movie theaters, subway stations and barbershops are replaced by your next neighborhood’s favorites. Over a lifetime, that adds up to a lot of neighborhoods, the motley construction material of your jerry-built metropolis. The New York City you live in is not my New York City how could it be? This place multiplies when you’re not looking. There are eight million naked cities in this naked city–they dispute and disagree. Except for that bit about the Dutch buying Manhattan for 24 bucks–there are and always will be braggarts who “got in at the right time.” Never listen to what people tell you about old New York, because if you didn’t witness it, it is not a part of your New York and might as well be Jersey. I’ve been to Canal Street, and the only time I ever saw a river flow through it was during the last water-main explosion. History books and public television documentaries are always trying to tell you all sorts of “facts” about New York. She is wrong, of course–when I look up there, I clearly see the gigantic letters spelling out Pan Am, don’t I? And of course I am wrong, in the eyes of the old-timers who maintain the myth that there was a time before Pan Am. For that new transplant from Des Moines, who is starting her first week of work at a Park Avenue South insurance firm, that titan squatting over Grand Central is the Met Life Building, and for her it always will be. I still call it the Pan Am Building, not out of affectation, but because that’s what it is. Which means everything is still filthy, because that is my city and I’m sticking to it. It’s the early 70’s, so everything is filthy. ![]() My first city memory is of looking out a subway window as the train erupted from the tunnel on the way to 125th Street and palsied up onto the elevated tracks. ![]() I started building my New York on the uptown No. Freeze it there: that instant is the first brick in your city. You stepped out of Penn Station into the dizzying hustle of Eighth Avenue and fainted. Maybe you came to visit your old buddy, the one who moved here last summer, and there was some mix-up as to where you were supposed to meet. The only skyscrapers visible from your stroller were the legs of adults, but you got to know the ground pretty well and started to wonder why some sidewalks sparkle at certain angles, and others don’t. Maybe your parents dragged you here for a vacation when you were a kid and towed you up and down the gigantic avenues to shop for Christmas gifts. Somewhere in that fantastic, glorious mess was the address on the piece of paper, your first home here. Look: there’s the Empire State Building, over there are the Twin Towers. All your worldly possessions were in the trunk, and in your hand you held an address on a piece of paper. Maybe you were in a cab leaving the airport when the skyline first roused itself into view. You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now. That before the internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. The city also puts a lot of effort into making your hometown look really drab and tiny, just in case you were wondering why it’s such a drag to go back sometimes. The city has spent a considerable amount of time and money putting the brochure together, what with all the movies, TV shows and songs–the whole If You Can Make It There business. Or maybe you moved here a couple years ago for a job. Maybe you’re from here, too, and sooner or later it will come out that we used to live a block away from each other and didn’t even know it. I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you. Related: ‘Science fiction and fantasy made me want to be a writer’: Colson Whitehead wins the Arthur C Clarke Award for The Underground Railroad. ![]() Ambitious in scope, gemlike in its details, it is at once an unparalleled tribute to New York and the ideal introduction to one of the most exciting writers working today. The Colossus of New York is a remarkable portrait of life in the big city. Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize, the Arthur C Clarke Award, an Andrew Carnegie Medal and the National Book Award for The Underground Railroad. Read an excerpt from The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead, out now from Jonathan Ball Publishers.
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