"New York Belongs To Me" by Montana Patrick

New York Belongs to Me

Montana Patrick New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor, Norton, 2021.

Writing a book that captures the essence of the New York of today is like trying to take a clear, focused photograph of a subject that is speeding by.

One need look no further than the scaffolding and the rerouted sidewalks that have threaded their way into the permanent fabric of the five boroughs to be imprinted with the idea that in New York City, nothing is permanent. It exists in a state of constant evolution, reinvention and reimagining, for better or worse. By Sunday, the city is not the same place it was on Monday, let alone in the span of six years that Canadian journalist and oral historian Craig Taylor spent talking to strangers and collecting their stories, verbatim, into his second attempt at portraiture of a great city.

In the decade between now and that previous effort, Londoners, which he described as “a nonfiction novel with eighty different narrators who happen to be real people,” the world has become an almost unrecognizable place. Still, it is hard not to crack New Yorkers open with the idea that it is Londoners’ darker and slightly grittier sequel.

Like Londoners, New Yorkers’ cast of “characters” range among people from all walks of life: the voices of Wall Street executives

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to MTA officials; those who have grown old in the city to those who have just arrived for the first time; the homeless to the Upper West Side-dwelling; those who are aching to get out and those who wouldn’t dream of calling any other place home— all as they navigate a city submerged in Trump-era politics, various tipping points of social unrest, a devastating hurricane and certainly not least of all, a global pandemic that shook New Yorkers with a particular magnitude.

However New Yorkers is more than just a chronicle of these turbulent times. Weaved in among the stories of disaster, disillusionment, and disappointment are the stories of resilience, awe and wonder. There are impassioned love letters to a city that is infamous for its cool reception of fond feelings, its harsh treatment of suitors. Rather than telling the story of contemporary New York himself, Taylor turns the pen, or rather the tape recorder, over to New Yorkers themselves.

Across the book’s fifteen specially-themed chapters, we get a sense of what it is like to work, live, love, build dreams and knock them down in the city that never sleeps. We are lashed by the sharp, cynical tongues of wry and rough-edged humor, then folded into an incredibly moving sense of tenderness and softness, of a specific view of humanity that only a New Yorker could have—often in the same breath.

There are questions of who, exactly, New York’s perpetual metamorphosis is intended to benefit. “I don’t want this to become the only version of New York that’s left,” one New Yorker, disoriented amid the city’s unceasing shuffling and reshuffling, tells Taylor. “I want to have one that’s vibrant and gives meaning to people in areas besides money.”

That search for meaning in the city is a time-tested adage that finds its feet in the words of nearly all of New Yorkers’ narrators in some shape or form.

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But rather than painting the city in broad strokes, Taylor’s portrait of New York resembles more of a shimmering pointillist mosaic; the impression is that there is not one New York, but rather 8 million New Yorks that exist within and around each other, every day. As Gus Powell, a street photographer, tells Taylor in the book’s opening section, “Some days there ends up being this proprietary moment when you feel like New York, it’s all for you.”