New York

Four centuries of reinvention are stacked in New York's streets like geological strata. The Dutch bought Manhattan in 1626 and built New Amsterdam, a rough trading post of warehouses and taverns; the English seized it in 1664 and renamed it for the Duke of York. By the 1800s the Erie Canal made it America's commercial throat, and between 1892 and 1954 some twelve million immigrants passed through Ellis Island — Irish, Italian, Jewish, and later Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese — each wave rewriting the city's accent. The five boroughs were welded into one metropolis in 1898. The 1920s gave Harlem its Renaissance — Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club — while the Depression raised the Empire State Building in thirteen months. The city nearly went bankrupt in 1975, then reinvented itself again through art, finance, and sheer nerve. September 11, 2001 scarred Lower Manhattan; the memorial's twin voids now sit where the towers stood. What a visitor feels is that nothing here is ever finished — the past isn't preserved so much as built over, argued with, and put back to work.

New York runs on rituals performed at speed. The day starts at the bodega — coffee, light and sweet, and a baconeggandcheese ordered as one word. Commuters read on the subway with the practiced indifference of people who have seen everything; tourists are forgiven, gawking is not. Lunch might be a two-dollar pizza slice folded lengthwise, eaten walking, or hand-pulled noodles in Flushing, or a pastrami sandwich at Katz's the size of a brick. Evenings belong to stoops in summer, to gallery openings in Chelsea on Thursday nights, to the roar of Yankee Stadium or a basement jazz club in the Village. Sundays, Central Park fills with runners, saxophonists, and chess hustlers at the stone tables. What locals care about is the block — the Dominican bakery on 181st, the Ukrainian diner in the East Village, the argument over which borough has the real Chinatown. The city is expensive, loud, and occasionally rude; it is also the only place where a Senegalese taxi driver will give you restaurant advice worth crossing town for.