When I was nine years old my father devised a game to keep me entertained. It was called “Last Stop.” We lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Whenever he was free on the weekend, we walked to the local 103rd Street stop on the IND (Independent Subway System) line. From that subway we would transfer to another train and take that to the last stop on the line. Upon exiting we would explore the neighborhood on foot for a couple of hours, sometimes taking a city bus to further extend our trip. When we ran out of last stops on the various lines, we’d move the destination point to the third-to-last or some other stop. We played this game off and on for about five years until I began high school.
That’s how I learned to love and appreciate New York City. I would stand with my father, looking out on the marshes that were in Brooklyn’s Canarsie section, and reflect, “So this is where my teacher told me he’d send me if I misbehaved.” One time my father poked his head into a bar near Utica Avenue in Brooklyn and everyone scattered. I never found out why. Another time we took a bus to Throgs Neck in the Bronx, and I saw men fishing. I marveled at the sight, having never before seen anyone fish. I was a city kid. I played stickball, belonged to what passed for a gang on my block, and knew every chocolate bar in my local candy store. These experiences and the trips I took were the fertile ground where the idea for this book grew. As for my father, he continued walking well into his eighties, extolling its health benefits. He died of natural causes in 2011, three weeks shy of his 102nd birthday, so I guess he was right.
I have been teaching a graduate course on New York City at either City College of New York or the CUNY Graduate Center for forty years. It’s a great place to do so because so many of my colleagues have done outstanding work on the city. Their collective works rival that of the University of Chicago scholars of the 1920s who went out and explored their city in similar fashion.
Besides reading extensively on the subject and writing papers, as part of my course my students go out walking with me for full days to explore the different boroughs. Many are from other countries, and it’s a fascinating experience for them to see what I often refer to as the greatest outdoor museum in the world. They are invariably surprised and delighted to learn that all the boroughs are unique and interesting in their own right.
One day my chairman at CUNY Graduate Center’s sociology department, Philip Kasinitz, remarked to me almost offhandedly, “You’ve been teaching about New York for so long. Why don’t you just write a book about it?” I thought about what he said and suddenly realized that I had probably wanted to do just that my whole life. And so I decided to do it. I was also inspired by Joseph Berger’s 2007 book, The New New York. As a journalist for the New York Times, Berger has covered the city for decades, and his volume is a marvelous travelogue through many of the city’s ethnic neighborhoods, filled with information and fascinating insights about them and their people.
The fact that I’ve lived in New York for most of my life was a tremendous advantage. I’d walked much of the city many times before—by myself, with my students, for pleasure, or simply because I was going somewhere. But there was one huge difference between those walks and the journey I was about to undertake: I had never walked the city systematically, block by block, and for the purpose of writing a book. This greatly increased my focus, for now everything I did counted. It had to be apprehended, described, and analyzed. All my senses were alert and my brain was moving in high gear.
Another benefit was that not only had I grown up in New York, but I had also worked here in various capacities. In my younger days I had been a caseworker for the welfare department, a waiter and a busboy, a cabbie, and a researcher on various projects ranging from one on the homeless, to another on voting behavior, to interviews with people about food preferences, flooring, telephone use, and many other marketing studies. I have also lived in other parts of New York besides where I grew up.
Finally, there was the fact that I’ve lived in other cities too—Atlanta, St. Louis, New Haven, and elsewhere. This and brief stays in other cities around the world gave me a comparative perspective, the ability to see what made the Big Apple both unique and similar to other metropolises. Armed with this information and my personal background, I set out on what was to become a transformative journey, one in which I experienced and learned more than I could possibly ever have imagined.