(Question 1)

New York -- it's probably the most written-about city in the United States. It is the most populous city in the country and most important in many areas, such as fashion and finance, but New York is nevertheless the setting for more than its fair share of movies, novels, and memoirs. New York is simply a great place to set a story because it is unique in so many ways. It's got the kind of flare that even other great metropoli don't have: a huge number of immigrants from a unparalleled number of countries, legendary art and literary communities, the financial capital of the country, Harlem, and more than can be listed here. Its many subcommunities are very distinct -- often polar opposites -- and yet are inexorably bound to each other and to the city itself. The list of stories set in New York could go on and on, but it takes more than just being set in New York to make a work a "New York Story."

A New York story has got to contain something more, it's got to embody the true spirit of New York. It's got to attempt to describe that intangible quality that only New York has, to illuminate the unique features of the city. This is hard for a story to do; a story that does is very valuable indeed. If candidates for the coveted spot display any of the five elements that follow, at least they can have a shot at being called a "New York Story."

1. The crowds. It is virtually impossible to escape other people in New York. As Kenneth T. Jackson shows in his article "100 Years of Being Really Big," the city has the highest population and the highest population density in the country. The omnipresent, seething, suffocating, masses of humanity that populate the city also should populate quintessential "New York Story." The Clock exemplifies this tendency perfectly. There are people everywhere in this film. Literally, every time either of the two main characters in this movie step outside they are onfronted with crowds: when they want to meet under the clock at the Astoria, when they are in Penn Station, when they are taking a romantic stroll through Central Park. The crowd is so pervasive that it serves as a major device to move the plot forward. The crowd comes into play when the lovers are separated by it in the subway and again when they must fight it while they are mired in the city bureaucracy as well, but the crowd in a broader sense also come into play when a kindly man driving a milk truck rescues them. The jacket of the movie is correct when it states that, "Director Vincente Minnelli ... turn[s] New York into a third major character that sometimes helps, sometimes hinders the lovers in their frantic quest to marry." The crowds of New York are so pervasive they become a character themselves.

2. A City of Ethnicities. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Blacks, the Puerto Ricans -- these are just a few of the more prominent groups of people that live in New York. "In the 1920s in New York City everyone was ethnic -- it was the first thing we noticed. It was as natural to us as our names. We accepted our ethnicity as a role and even parodied it."¹ It is hard to overemphasize the differences between various ethnic groups in New York, and most authors of "New York Stories" mention these differences as being important to one's identity. As the most cosmopolitan city in the country, and probably the world, New York has the distinctive characteristic of being filled with different people who are different from each other. "The metropolitan region has more Brazilians than any similar area outside South America, more Greeks than any city outside Greece, more Chinese than any city outside Asia, and more Jews, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans than any city anywhere[!]"² Los Angeles is known for its Asian and Mexican populations, and Chicago is known for it's Polish population, but New York is known for just about everything. As the headquarters of the U.N., New York is required to have representatives from just about every culture -- a fact that is comically demonstrated in the movie The Out-of-Towners.

An optimist, like me, would note that of the great successes of the democratic experiment of New York (and indeed human nature itself) is that all these people are able to coexist in relative tranquility, even if it is occasionally marred by violence. A realist, like E.L. Doctorow, might think otherwise. He writes in his novel, World's Fair, that in the wrong neighborhood one could be knifed for being Jewish,³ and that there were gangs of Nazi-sympathizers who invade his main character's neighborhood to harass the Jews.⁴ A harmonious "tossed salad" or a hotbed of racial tension, either way New York is the only place where so many people of different races coexist.

3. Tolerance. It's easy to forget sometimes but, New York is one of the most tolerant places in America. Large size and said diversity are both important reasons for this, but I would argue another factor is cultural: in this capital of capitalism, people are so busy just trying to make a buck they don't have enough time to hate others. Furthermore, capitalists people don't want to alienate their customers or the market for their products by being racist, anti-gay, or misogynist. When Tocqueville wrote that "The first thing that strikes one in the United States is the innumerable crowd of those striving to escape from their original social condition ... . All are constantly bent on gaining property, reputation, and power,"⁵ he must have been thinking about New York. Even from its very beginnings, New York has been a commercial town, and for the most part, New Yorkers are too firmly entrenched in their own affairs to worry about suppressing other people's life styles or political viewpoints. Perhaps New Yorkers don't care about other people's private lives or their life styles partly because they don't care about other people, but it's mainly because there is just too much important stuff to be done and too much going on for them to care.

All kinds of social movements began, and retain their greatest strength, in New York, like the Harlem Renaissance, the Women's movement, the Gay rights movements, the Puerto Rican nationalist movement. There is also a vibrant artistic and bohemian community in Manhattan that is unsurpassed by other cities. A man like Joe Gould would be considered a social outcast in many places, but he is honored as a "bohemian" in New York, and hundreds of people who come into contact with him, tourists and locals alike, are generous enough most of the time to give him money.

4. Separate spheres of Masculinity and Femininity. In the earlier decades in this century, men ruled the public sphere of city life while women were sovereign over the home. (This trend continues to a lesser extent today.) This may be true everywhere in America, but it was especially true in New York, where the city was seen as particularly dangerous. "We children rarely connected with the men, the voices that filled our world were those of women, the Mothers," writes Kate Simon in her memoir Bronx Primitive.⁶ But these habits were enculturated in children at a young age. Smith also writes that after school the streets were the domain of gangs of boys but girls generally walked straight home after school. The different roles men and women had in the city is also apparent in Alfred Kazin's memoir A Walker in the City. Kazin's mother was a seamstress and worked at home, while as a house painter, his father roamed throughout in the neighborhood, if not the whole city.

5. Wackiness and Weirdness. As if in a dream, a young child sees two dogs running down the street -- stuck together.⁷ A woman has enough chutzpa to stop by her quasi-estranged boyfriend's parent's house and sits right down on his mother.⁸ A milk truck stops to pick up two disheveled young people in the middle of the night.⁹ Where else but New York could all of these random events occur? With all those people and a culture where anything goes, weird things are bound to happen in New York, and should be included in any "New York Story." An environment where a person is unlikely ever to see someone again sometimes gets the better of us all. It only helps that the artistic communities in the city are trained to see these things more than the rest of us.

¹Broyard, Anatole. Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 95.

²Jackson, Kenneth T. "100 Years of Being Really Big," The New York Times, Op-Ed page. [Exact page number and date unknown].

³Doctorow, E.L. World's Fair. (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) 101.

⁴Doctorow, 53.

⁵Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Trans. George Lawrence. Ed. J. P. Mayer. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) 627.

⁶Simon, Kate. Bronx Primitive. (New York: Penguin Books, 1982.) 36.

⁷Simon, 60-61.

⁸Broyard, 71-78.

⁹The Clock.