from A history of New York / Washington Irving --
The stranger at home, or, A tour in Broadway / James Kirke Paulding --
from Domestic manners of the Americans / Frances Trollope --
from The journal / Fanny Kemble --
from The diary / Philip Hone --
from American notes for general circulation / Charles Dickens --
Letters from Staten Island / Henry David Thoreau --
from Open-air musings in the city / Nathaniel Parker Willis --
from Doings of Gotham / Edgar Allan Poe --
from Satanstoe / James Fenimore Cooper --
Our city charities / Margaret Fuller --
The eating-houses / George G. Foster --
from Life and writings of Grant Thorburn / Grant Thorburn --
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry ; The old Bowery / Walt Whitman --
Bartleby, the scrivener / Herman Melville --
from The diaries / George Templeton Strong --
Passages in the life of an unpractical man / Frederick Law Olmsted --
from Eight months in America / Ernest Duvergier De Hauranne --
Tyrants of the shop / Fanny Fern --
Personals / Mark Twain --
Imposters / James D. McCabe --
Experience of a Chinese journalist / Wong Chin Foo --
New York under the snow / José Martí --
from A hazard of new fortunes / William Dean Howells --
The down town back-alleys / Jacob Riis.
Opium's varied dreams ; Adventures of a novelist / Stephen Crane --
Drowned their sins ; Summer complaint : the annual strike / Abraham Cahan --
Whence the song ; A vanished seaside resort / Theodore Dreiser --
Honest graft and dishonest graft ; The curse of civil service reform / George W. Plunkitt and William L. Riordan --
from The American scene / Henry James --
from The autobiography of an ex-colored man / James Weldon Johnson --
The lungs / James Huneker --
Gramercy Park ; In the Metropolitan Museum ; Coney Island ; Union Square ; Broadway / Sara Teasdale --
"Come into the roof garden, Maud" / Djuna Barnes --
If I should learn ; Recuerdo / Edna St. Vincent Millay --
Coming, Aphrodite! / Willa Cather --
The tropics in New York ; The Harlem dancer / Claude McKay --
New York / Marianne Moore --
from Port of New York / Paul Rosenfeld --
The finale at the follies ; Thoughts on leaving New York for New Orleans / Edmund Wilson --
Brooklyn Bridge / Vladimir Mayakovsky --
To Brooklyn Bridge / Hart Crane --
Exterior Street / Stephen Graham --
from Up to now / Al Smith --
I go adventuring / Helen Keller --
from New York / Paul Morand.
The police ; Roosevelt and reform / Lincoln Steffens --
from The diaries / Dawn Powell --
from Journey to the end of night / Louis-Ferdinand Céline --
West End Avenue / Christopher Morley --
My lost city / F. Scott Fitzgerald --
The background / Edith Wharton --
Only the dead know Brooklyn / Thomas Wolfe --
Sense of humor / Damon Runyon --
from Black spring / Henry Miller --
Millinery district ; from Autobiography : New York ; from By the well of living and seeing / Charles Reznikoff --
Apology for breathing / A.J. Liebling --
When the Negro was in vogue / Langston Hughes --
Letter to N.Y. / Elizabeth Bishop --
Atheist hit by truck ; The television helps, but not very much / John McNulty --
Welcome to the city / Irwin Shaw --
The genial host / Mary McCarthy --
Story in Harlem slang / Zora Neale Hurston --
As he seemed to a hick / Red Smith --
It is sticky in the subway / David Schubert --
Aspects of Robinson / Weldon Kees --
Here is New York / E.B. White --
The cost of living / Bernard Malamud --
from Red ribbon on a white horse / Anzia Yezierska --
Hell's Kitchen / William Carlos Williams --
The long furlough / Malcolm Cowley.
from A walker in the city / Alfred Kazin --
Up in the old hotel / Joseph Mitchell --
from Junky / William S. Burroughs --
from Memoirs of Bernardo Vega / Bernardo Vega --
A step away from them ; The day lady died ; Steps / Frank O'Hara --
from The immense journey / Loren Eiseley --
Fiorello H. LaGuardia / Robert Moses --
Moving out / John Cheever --
from The New York diary / Ned Rorem --
from The death and life of great American cities / Jane Jacobs --
An urban convalescence / James Merrill --
The thirties ; The climate / Edwin Denby --
Minton's / Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) --
Tourist eye / George Oppen --
from The fire next time / James Baldwin --
National Cold Storage Company ; 47th Street / Harvey Shapiro --
Panic in Brooklyn / Gay Talese --
The landmarker / Louis Auchincloss --
from The fortunate pilgrim / Mario Puzo --
A Sunday kind of love / Tom Wolfe --
Goodbye to all that / Joan Didion --
The cafeteria / Isaac Bashevis Singer --
Lou Stillman / Jimmy Cannon --
February ; Dining out with Doug and Frank / James Schuyler.
Mugging ; Fourth floor, dawn, up all night writing letters / Allen Ginsberg --
from Sleepless nights / Elizabeth Hardwick --
from Sketches from life / Lewis Mumford --
The movies and other schools / Kate Simon --
from Family installments / Edward Rivera --
from Minor characters / Joyce Johnson --
from The intellectual follies / Lionel Abel --
from World's Fair / E.L. Doctorow --
New York, 1936 / Ralph Ellison --
from The mambo kings play songs of love / Oscar Hijuelos --
from Approaching eye level / Vivian Gornick.