NEW YORK

"On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy."

"A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: 'This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.' If it were to go, all would go -- this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death."

Opening and closing lines from Here is New York, by E.B. White

Last week I got to pretend I was E.B. White. And I learned something about him I did not know: people who knew him called him Andy. I tromped all over and up and down the island of Manhattan for five busy days. I have long been a fan of New York, as I have written here, and this was not my first visit. However, it was for me the best so far. I recently accepted a job offer from a publishing company, a real one of the old ilk, based on Fifth Avenue, and I was in the city for a week to work. Each morning I rose in my midtown hotel, got in a run, and grabbed coffee and a bagel and a Times on my way up 40th Street to the office. Joining the steady stream of moving people going about their business not once failed to energize me. I was living off too little sleep, but I was wide awake each day, especially in the mornings. There is something about being in the city that enlivens me. I savor the sounds and the smells and the heat of the place. It is something like electricity.

Of course, I ran. The first run took me toward downtown on Lexington, through Gramercy Park and a bit past 14th Street, looping over to 1st Avenue and back up past the United Nations building. The second run was in the other direction, up 5th Avenue for a ways, cutting into Central Park around 96th. I am not a big fan of running in the park early in the morning. Everyone runs in the park in the early morning. It is a bit like being in one of those crowded marathon events. People are everywhere and navigating through the foot and bike traffic is worse than dashing through New York intersections in the paths of oncoming cabs. So, I cut through the park to say I had run there and came out on Central Park West and headed back toward midtown, running around Columbus Circle and following 6th Avenue to end the loop. The third and last run of the week took me down 5th Avenue, hanging a right on 14th to follow it over to 10th Avenue where it got a little gritty as I entered the Meatpacking District. I ran under the High Line through Chelsea up 10th and got waylaid by the traffic coming into the city from the Lincoln Tunnel as I tried to head back east on 40th.

The sun rises earlier in New York than in southwest Virginia, given its eastward geography, and I took advantage of the extra time on my runs. New York, of course, seems to always be alive and humming, no matter the hour. But, there is a sense around the early dawn hours of an old man stretching and yawning himself awake. Traffic is a little thinner, storefronts are gated, and things are beginning again. There are stacks of newspapers on corners still in twine and here and there men with hoses spraying down the sidewalks and every few minutes another cluster of commuters emerging from the subway stations as if the world were being repopulated.

I was feeling quite literary all week, owing in no small part to the nature of my new job. I also made my first visit to the Algonquin Hotel and had a drink in the bar. And while the room that hosted "The Vicious Circle," a well-known group of writers and critics who luncheoned daily at a round table throughout the 1920's, is no longer there, I did feel some sort of communion with them and took pleasure in sitting back and imagining the likes of Dorothy Parker and Harold Ross and others as they held court. On every visit to New York I carve out an hour or more to jostle my way about the stacks in the Strand Book Store and many times I have ended up frustrated by my visit. There is simply an overwhelming amount of books to be seen there and, of course, a smelly and loud crowd of freaks and hipsters to wade through. I usually have no direction to my roaming, but this time I went in armed with a list and came out with quite the haul. Yes, this from a man who has previously written here that he buys few books. But, we all need to celebrate every now and again, right? I wanted New York books and I wanted them from my favorite New York bookstore. I looked specifically for the E.B. White book, which is actually a reprint of an essay he had published in a magazine in 1949. I urge you to find and read it, no matter your own feelings about the city. His lean and sparse and efficient prose is an education in itself and it is an elegantly simple and timeless homage to a place. Also in my bag were two of Marilynne Robinson's books, which I have decided I should absolutely own, Home and Gilead, Pete Hamill's own tribute to New York, Downtown: My Manhattan, a new collection of pieces about Central Park called, aptly, Central Park: An Anthology, edited by Andrew Blauner, a copy of Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic for my wife and a book for our daughter, Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman. Let us see if she actually reads it.

I was grateful to a very good friend who knows the city better than anyone else for his recommendation of my now new favorite New York bookstore, Book Culture, near Columbia University. I visited there finally on my last and only unencumbered night in the city. As soon as my meetings were over, I raced to the hotel, changed, and headed down to Grand Central where I hopped the shuttle to Times Square and caught the 1 train uptown to 110th. I browsed Book Culture for a long while and then happened upon the the stairs that lead up to the real treasure trove above, where, of course, I browsed even longer and came away with a volume I have long been on the lookout for, Writing New York, an unprecedented anthology of writing about the city that is organized chronologically. It contains hundreds of pieces, beginning with Washington Irving in the earliest days of the 19th century and ending with an excerpt from Don DeLillo's Falling Man,  published in 2007. I then strolled down Amsterdam and over to Broadway and happened on a quiet little sushi place where I sat anonymously in a corner while a storm blew through. As the downpour began to wane, I ambled a few more blocks south and hitched a ride again on the 1 train, this time headed downtown. I took the Staten Island Ferry in the rain, standing on the back and taking in the skyline as it stood aflame over the choppy waters of the harbor. Back on Manhattan, I meandered up and around Wall Street for the hell of it before finally taking the subway back to Grand Central, treating myself to a late night snack of gelato before returning to my hotel.

It was the kind of night to savor in the city, including traversing nearly the entire length of Manhattan, eating a quiet meal, browsing row after row of bookshelves, and simply watching. I feel like a different person there. While sitting in that sushi place I read from the Writing New York anthology Walt Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and was struck, as I had also been while reading the E.B. White essay, by his voicing of the same feelings that being in and among the city stirred up in my own gut. Whitman and White both, even one hundred years removed from one another, write of the connection through the long span of time of the city's existence between all the souls who have been moved by that place. That same electricity shrouded by anonymity that I feel there is something that has been felt countless times before by millions of people drawn to New York for whatever the reason may be. Whitman speaks directly to his readers, asking what distance of time may separate them and anticipating that, no matter what that distance may be, they will know exactly what he has known.

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not--distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk'd the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questions stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me . . .