New Yorkers

(by Craig Taylor)

Near the start of this book, Craig Taylor writes about how he “wanted to craft a book about New York in the twenty-first century, filled with the voices and sounds and places and people of New York, the life of the city right now,” and I think the book definitely succeeds at being that. Taylor lived here for six years (starting in 2014) and interviewed over 180 people; the book is made up of the stories of about 75 of those people, which are included verbatim. So it’s one first-person narrative after another, plus three sections that focus on Taylor’s experiences volunteering at a church’s Sunday-afternoon soup kitchen and his friendship with Joe, a Vietnam veteran he meets there.

There are so many great stories from so many people, about so many different topics. A lice consultant talks about her work, as does an elevator repairman. A singer who’s blind talks about navigating the streets and sidewalks with his seeing-eye dog. A nanny and a personal assistant talk about the idiosyncrasies of the very rich; a guy whose family owns bodegas talks about the different foods and cultures of different neighborhoods. There are immigrant stories and 9/11 stories and Hurricane Sandy stories. There are multiple visits to the Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum. There’s a chapter about the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic that made me cry, twice. There’s a great interview with a Statue of Liberty security guard who talks about learning the words for “belt, wallet, watch” in other languages, and about how he calls the statue his work wife.

Near the start of the book, Taylor says this, about the appeal of New York: “I loved the endless sense of “and this”-ness: this man, and this woman, and this look, and this detail, and this necklace on that cyclist, and this and this—a richness that sank down beneath you ’till it hit the serpentine and schist, the Fordham gneiss and Inwood marble and Hartland formation. Until that point, there was always more. And then you crossed to the next block and started the process all over again. This and this and this.” I love that so much, and I so agree—and if you do too, you’ll probably like this book.