"Here is New York" Summary

What E.B.White is talking about in his “Here is New York” book is that New York is a city that has many different people.

One is people that originally live there and are accustomed to all the changing areas, and the second kind is people who work there during the day, and leave at night.

The last kind are tourists, coming in the Summer or the Fall to examine the beauty of New York. For the New Yorkers who live there, they cannot bear to even move another block, as they are in their own “little bubble”, and the people they visit normally expect them to come every day, in an exact time period.

As said in the book, “Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.” New York welcomes all kinds of people, and doing this makes New York a special and unique type of city.

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Here is New York by E.B.White (1949)

The oft-quoted thumbnail sketch of New York is, of course: “It’s a wonderful place, but I’d hate to live there.” I have an idea that people from villages and small towns, people accustomed to the convenience and the friendliness of neighborhood over-the-fence living, are unaware that life in New York follows the neighborhood pattern.

The city is literally a composite of tens of thousands of tiny neighborhood units. There are, of course, the big districts and big units: Chelsea and Murry Hill and Gramercy (which are residential units), Harlem (a racial unit), Greenwich Village (a unit dedicated to the arts and other matters), and there is Radio City (a commercial development). . . and many other sections each of which has some distinguishing characteristic.

But the curious thing about New York is that each large geographical unit is composed of countless small neighborhoods.

Each neighborhood is virtually self-sufficient. Usually it is not more than two or three blocks long and a couple of blocks wide. Each area is a city within a city within a city. Thus, no matter where you live in New York, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen (deli) (beer and sandwiches delivered at any hour to your door), a flower shop, a movie house, a radio-repair shop, a stationer, a haberdasher, a tailor, a drugstore, a garage, a tearoom, a saloon, a hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop.

Every block or two, in most residential sections of New York, is a little main street. A man starts for work in the morning and before he has gone two hundred yards he has completed half a dozen missions: bought a paper, left a pair of shoes to be soled, picked up a pack of cigarettes, ordered a bottle of whiskey to be dispatched in the opposite direction against his home-coming, and notified the dry cleaner that a pair of trousers awaits call.

Homeward bound eight hours later, he buys a bunch of pussy willow, a light bulb, a drink, a shine -- all between the corner where he steps off the bus and his apartment. So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back. (Pages 34-36)