Here Is New York

Content Warning: This section references terrorism and racism.

“Here Is New York” is an ode to the author’s beloved city. White uses descriptive language to evoke the inhabitants, architectural features, and numerous cultures that comprise New York City, using his past experiences and current observations to describe what sets it apart from other large cities.

The essay sets out to capture the post-World War II age in New York while situating this version of the city in a historical context. White toggles back and forth between his real-time 1948 observations, his knowledge of the city’s past, his own previous experiences in New York, and sociological musings on the city’s culture and inhabitants. This structure, made up of multiple frames of reference, offers numerous entry points and sources of information. White includes factual firsthand accounts, historical retellings, and poetic musings. As White shifts between types of information, the tone changes as well.

The tonal shift reflects White’s approach to characterizing the city. After describing his current location—in New York, on a very hot day in 1948—and mentioning his early days as a young man in New York, White transitions to describing the city from the point of view of a knowledgeable outsider. White then places himself in the narrative again, noting that he is “living not as a neighborhood man in New York but as a transient, or vagrant, in from the country for a few days” (37). He uses “transient” and “vagrant” ironically and humorously; at this time White was a respected author and not someone on the margins of society, as those words imply.

White writes that in summer, one can “lie in a loincloth, gasping and remembering things” (37). This image—of someone lying in their underwear while considering the past—is meant to evoke humor at the relentless heat of summer, which drives many New Yorkers out of the city and makes it, according to White, an ideal season for considering “the gift of privacy, the jewel of loneliness” (37). Later, White becomes somber and serious when describing how “the intimation of mortality is part of New York now” (54). This mortality alludes to the possibility of a terrorist attack on the city, a new possibility that emerged from the destruction of cities during World War II with both conventional bombs and nuclear weapons.

As White veers from humor to serious and nostalgic reflections, the mood of the piece changes. Sometimes, it shifts multiple times within a single sentence, as when White writes that the Empire State Building “has a mooring mast that no dirigible has ever tied to; it employs a man to flush toilets in slack times; it has been hit by an airplane in a fog, struck countless times by lightning, and been jumped off by so many unhappy people that pedestrians instinctively quicken their step when passing Fifth Avenue and 34th Street” (30). Throughout this meandering sentence, White moves from nostalgia when discussing dirigibles (a flying machine used in the 1920s and 1930s), to humor when mentioning the toilet-flusher, to somber when describing suicides. These rapid shifts convey an underlying sense of possibility, suggest both The Passage of Time and how luck and attitude can quickly change in New York.

White also explores the key theme of Vulnerability. For instance, he describes how New York makes the individual susceptible to loneliness despite the huge number of people living very close together. He also describes how the city’s citizens are vulnerable to terrorism, though he notes that many huge and notable events happen each day in New York, with many passing by unnoticed. By showing how seemingly opposite characteristics or experiences can be true at once, White gives a clear sense of contradiction as one of the defining forces shaping New York.

White underscores the threat of attack in the essay’s conclusion, describing a tree that he believes symbolizes the city. He writes of how when he considers “the cold shadow of the planes” (56), he desperately wants the tree to survive, because “if it were to go, it would all go” (56). White’s choice to conclude the essay by discussing the possible destruction of the city reveals his deep concern with the threat of terrorism and war. This section of “Here Is New York” can be read as particularly prescient given the terrorist attacks on the city on September 11, 2001, in which airplanes were used as a weapon just as White describes.