In Love with New York

Ann Shields shares her passion for the city that never sleeps.

I recently received a bundle of letters I had sent my mother after moving to New York City. I wrote to her about the quirky strangers I’d encountered in bodegas and eavesdropped on from the next coffee shop table. One letter was devoted to a summer concert I’d attended alone, perched on the far corner of a kind couple’s picnic blanket amid a sea of blankets. I mentioned daylong exploratory walks around Lower Manhattan and Central Park.

As the seasons changed and I met people, I told her about the night a new friend took me to a Korean restaurant nearly hidden on the second floor of a Midtown office building where we ordered fried chicken so spicy it made my lips tingle. And about the time I’d recommended a novel at the bookshop where I clerked and the customer revealed that she worked at Doubleday and offered me a job interview. I wrote about impulsively postponing dinner plans in Chinatown to instead trail a uniformed band as they walked, instruments in hand, to a doorway where I then waited on the sidewalk for the music to begin.

These letters home were meant to entertain my mother and reassure her that I was happy and safe. I had found my place in the world. Though, in retrospect, my romance with the city had been under her influence. NYC played a leading role in the movies she’d recommended, with Hepburn and Tracy, Astaire and Rogers, and Nick and Nora Charles. The city was the backdrop of Saturday Night Live skits, and the view out the window as I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In my teens, I loved the weird dissonance of learning about Studio 54 from the People magazines delivered to our suburban address. Moving here felt inevitable.

Decades later, I still regularly feel awed by the city. I know it’s noisy and expensive and some people find it daunting. But I’ve got my reasons.

One big factor in my enduring love is the art. Everywhere. You can, of course, head to any of New York’s fantastic big museums and quirky little ones to see unsurpassed collections of beauty in myriad forms. You can (and should) attend a live performance here if only to experience the thrilling moment when the chandeliers dim and rise up to the ceiling at the Metropolitan Opera or to hear the audible gasp from an off-Broadway audience when an actor truly hits their mark onstage.

Yet it doesn’t take a ticket to see art in the city. By simply paying attention, you’ll find art in less obvious places: an intense single-line portrait of a face paint-dribbled on a sidewalk; the sound of operatic scales floating out of an apartment window; or the sight of a Juilliard dance student casually holding second position on a rocking downtown train.

New York’s static beauty never fails to delight me, either. Some city blocks offer a tasting menu of architectural styles, each successive façade down a street repping a different mood: International, Beaux Arts, Art Deco, tenement. In Midtown, the stretch of 44th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues provides an intro to architectural history, including the unlikely juxtaposition of the ship-built-from-stone folly of the New York Yacht Club abutting the rectilinear modernity of the Harvard Club annex. In some residential neighborhoods, like the West Village, Brooklyn Heights, and Upper East Side, the rowhouses exhibit such strong character that a slow evening walk – when the interiors are revealed a bit by lights – provides a delicious form of entertainment for the real estate and design aficionado.

Of course, the best parts of New York exist because of the people who live here. The gifted, obsessive people who self-select as New Yorkers are behind all of that inspired food, music, architecture, and fashion. Those teenagers practicing a TikTok dance on the sidewalk while watching their moves in store windows; the entrepreneurs who open shops devoted entirely to pencils or pickles or brass instruments; the subway conductor locally famous for adding jokes to his station announcements – New Yorkers make the city extraordinary.

There are many preconceived notions about New Yorkers. Let me give you an insider’s take on what makes New Yorkers different. We famously don’t smile easily and avoid catching each other’s eyes. We share a wall with our next-door neighbor, we regularly navigate big crowds without a thought, and we pack onto subway cars and elevators. This intimate physical business is almost always conducted without comment, outrage, or outright apology. We coexist, literally living on top of each other, but also, inexplicably, we maintain a distance and we respect privacy. I can’t explain it, but I love it.

That sense of mental distance and privacy has led to another false impression that New Yorkers are unfriendly or cold. Not true at all. New Yorkers want to help. We pride ourselves in being experts and are generous with advice and opinions. For instance, in a crowded elevator, should one person turn to a stranger and quietly ask, “What’s the best place to get lunch around here?” that stranger will definitely have a response; in fact, several others will likely offer an opinion, too. Stop someone on the street to ask how to get to the subway and there’s a solid chance that more than one person will offer a different answer and defend it, then briskly walk off, happy to have proven their expertise. We are glad to help! We just don’t get too involved with small talk.

Another preconception about the city – the accelerated “New York minute” – is more apt than funny. The city is in constant flux. Fashions, neighborhoods, and restaurants go from Hot to Not in, well, a New York minute. This forward motion presents a problem for someone planning to step in for a visit. Given the shifting sands, how is a person to plan when whatever passes for iconic and essential one minute can be gone or overexposed the next?

One surefire way to have a great experience is to hit some classic destinations that honestly never fail and bear repeating: Central Park walks; the Monet Water Lilies room at MoMA; afternoon tea at Baccarat Hotel New York; a stroll through the Art Deco canyons of Rockefeller Center; cocktail hour at a glam hotel bar. Assume that you’ll spend plenty of time on your feet and make sure to dress for the weather.

And a final useful trick when planning a visit to New York is simply to expect new experiences. Don’t get me wrong and leave everything to chance. You should absolutely write out a list (in pencil) of what you want to do and definitely make certain restaurant reservations in advance. But please don’t schedule every meal or every minute. Leave time open for serendipity. I promise you it’s there, right around the corner, waiting for you to catch up.