The best books about terrible, beautiful New York

Death and Life, written in the early 1960s – the height of the urban renewal movement – when people were fleeing cities for the shiny new suburbs, caused a sensation among policymakers. Tearing down shabby neighborhoods and replacing them with high rises is all wrong, she argued. In prose so gorgeous it takes your breath away, Jacobs showed us that cities are, in her words, delicate ecosystems. Cities are things of beauty. I’ve reread Death and Life many times, and each time I learn something new. Jane Jacobs taught me why I love New York. 

This 1930 novel (but really, it’s a memoir) takes the reader back to the Lower East Side at the beginning of the 20th century. The shit-poor, packed neighborhood was the first stop for the thousands of Jews then debarking daily from immigrant ships. One of them was my grandfather, who found himself eating out of a garbage can one day and nearly decided to go back to Russia. Michael Gold grew up in this brutal world, became a card-carrying Communist, and wrote this, his only book, as a cri de coeur against the exploitation of immigrant Jewish workers under capitalism. His descriptions of life in the tenements (“A parrot cursed. Ragged kids played under truck horses. Fat housewives fought from stoop to stoop. A beggar sang.”) grab the reader by the throat. A real page-turner, and a reminder of just how recently the Jews in America, many of whom now feel guilty about their “white privilege,” were impoverished and despised immigrants. 

Oh, how I adore Edith Wharton. She skewers the cruelty of Old New York aristocracy—her world—in such elegant, nuanced prose. The House of Mirth is Wharton’s masterpiece. The doomed heroine, Lily Bart, infuriates me—she’s so shallow, so foolish, so blind. She has such terrible values. But I also get that she’s a victim because she’s a woman with fancy tastes and no money, at a time when women had no options besides marriage. That Wharton also makes Lily beautiful—and therefore even more vulnerable to abuse by men—adds to the tragedy. Everybody uses Lily, most of all that asshole, Lawrence Selden, the lawyer who loves her and betrays her. This story takes the reader on an emotional roller coaster. The best kind of read.   

Yes it’s true, there is no city like New York, but I only understood why after reading Shorto’s meticulously researched book about Dutch Manhattan. New Amsterdam was set up in 1624 by the Dutch West India Company, not as a government colony but as a private financial entity. The Dutch were shrewd businessmen, and their culture astonishingly liberal for the times. (Still is). New Amsterdam existed solely to make money and welcomed immigrants because it was good for business. We owe the Dutch for creating Manhattan’s mad-paced, money-centered, anything-goes ethos, the only place in the world where anybody from anywhere feels at home.

Hettie Cohen defied the stifling conventions of her middle-class Jewish Queens upbringing to live the life with her husband, the poet LeRoi Jones in a Bowery loft. When the Black Power movement beckoned, he changed his name to Amiri Baraka and left her. Hettie Jones’ memoir brings to life the Village of the late 1950s and 60s, complete with the beats, their women, jazz spots, and the rich literary scene. A little-known gem about a very specific cultural moment in New York, told in a clear, honest voice.