(2)

DIRECTLY AFTER EVERY baseball game at Yankee Stadium, the public address system plays Sinatra’s signature recording of Kander and Ebb’s “New York, New York.” When the Yankees defeated the Atlanta Braves in the sixth and final game of the 1996 World Series, capping an improbable comeback from a two-games-to-none deficit, it seemed as if everyone in the stadium was singing along, swelling the final chorus: “And if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere / It’s up to you, New York, New York.” The aging Sinatra—he was in his sixties when he recorded “New York, New York,” the last of his blockbuster hits—does amazing things with that initial And, twisting and turning the word as if it contained not one but three or four syllables; the voice seems to go down a valley and come back up the other side of a hill. The gesture is inimitable, though it also invites imitation, and watching a Sinatra fan trying to duplicate the effect can be very entertaining. But here the voice was the instrument of joyous release. Here you had a crowd of almost sixty thousand people getting into the act. It was a great moment of New York solidarity, and it was also, in its way, an expression of Frankophilia: the populace’s love affair with the greatest of all popular American singers.

Triumphal, assertive, and endowed with civic pride, the hymn to the city that doesn’t sleep is New York’s official song. John Kander and Fred Ebb, who had previously given us the score of Cabaret, wrote “New York, New York” for Liza Minnelli to belt out in Martin Scorsese’s 1977 movie of the same title, with Minnelli as a vocalist on the rise and Robert De Niro as the saxophone player she meets in a New York nightclub on V-J Day in 1945. Once upon a decade, the Yankees played Minnelli’s rendition of “New York, New York” after a loss and Sinatra’s after a win. Liza protested and now, win or lose, it is Frank’s version that you hear after every game at Yankee Stadium.

The song has become the city’s anthem. There was always competition for the distinction; New York is, after all, the home of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and some of the country’s most celebrated cabarets, clubs, and performance spaces. “The Sidewalks of New York” was the city’s early-century anthem, played by the band at the end of Sunrise at Campobello when a polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt makes his way to the lectern to nominate Alfred E. Smith at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. “Manhattan,” Rodgers and Hart’s breakout hit, caused a sensation when the first audience heard it at the Garrick Gaieties of 1925. Hart’s sophisticated and witty lyric—in which pleasures are praised according to their affordability—salutes not only Chinatown’s Mott Street and Central Park but the Bronx, Staten Island, Coney Island (where we’ll eat baloney sandwiches), and even Yonkers (where true love conquers all). Before Kander and Ebb, Leonard Bernstein wrote a song called “New York, New York,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, for On the Town (1944). The song kicks off the story with a madcap burst of energy: three U. S. sailors are on shore leave for twenty-four romantic hours in a “helluva” town (the original Broadway show) or a “wonderful” town (Hollywood’s rephrasing)—a place where people “ride in a hole in the ground,” though even in the subway you will see women decked out in “silk and satin” and everyone’s up for a date. There are other wonderful songs that glorify one aspect or another of the city: “Take the A Train,” “Lullaby of Broadway,” “Lullaby of Birdland,” “Manhattan Serenade.” But as a theme that doubles as a fight song, Kander and Ebb’s “New York, New York” is top of the list, king of the hill, and it is the Sinatra version that defines the way New Yorkers see themselves and their beloved, if sometimes embattled, city.

With the cast of On The Town.
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

Few men—and fewer nonathletes—know what it feels like to bring sixty thousand cheering people to their feet. Sinatra had that power. It was (and still is) his voice that thousands of men hear coming out of their mouths in the shower. At Columbia Lions basketball games, the college band plays “Roar, Lion, Roar” at regular intervals, but when the game against Harvard or Princeton has ended and the Ivy League crowd heads toward the exits, the familiar voice comes over the loudspeaker and starts spreadin’ the news. At Chicago’s United Center, where the Bulls of Michael Jordan held court, and which Sinatra officially opened with one of his last live concerts, it is “My Kind of Town” that is played—the song Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn wrote to order for their boss’s last singing picture, Robin and the Seven Hoods in 1964. In the Chicago Cubs’ venerable Wrigley Field, it is “Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town)” that you may sometimes hear between innings or after the game. In each case it is not just the song itself, but Sinatra’s rendition, that is accepted as definitive.