New York
They founded this place 400 years ago this year among the Indians in the marshes, and no one’s looked back since. Some of the Dutch descendants are still around but you wouldn’t know it by reading the gossip columns or celebrity blogs. This is immigrant paradise, and the less European one looks and sounds the better. It’s the nominally post-racial New York, no longer the Noo Yawk of my youth, with its mournfully tender streets of kind-hearted Irish cops, Italian small-time hoods, black hipsters and Jewish merchants. Manhattan was George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, the heartache, fear, ambition and joy of the city pulsating in its rhythmic and soaring score. Not any more.
‘What has happened to this place where I used so happily to pound the sidewalks?’ mused John Cheever. ‘Where has my city gone, where shall I look for it?’ Drunker and drunker, Cheever never found the old place, staying mostly in Ossining where he wrote Falconer before drinking himself to death.
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