A Tale of Two New Yorks

Dec 21

It is the best of cities, it is the worst of cities… New York City is an enduring site of wonder and romance but also, in the eyes of the budding writers here reunited, a city where squalor and chagrin run rampant. It is precisely the city’s monster-like nature, its conflicting mix of glitter and grime that makes the stories here collected so refreshingly appealing.

Written as a class exercise for the Macaulay “The Arts in New York City” Seminar, these stories offer a sketch of a city seen through the eyes of its young dwellers. They are both Baruch College and Macaulay Honors College students. They have been born in the city or abroad; they have uttered their first words in English, Cantonese, Spanish, or Hebrew. They live in Steinway, Bensonhurst, Kew Garden Hills, or in Midland Beach—places cautiously avoided by all rom-coms. They navigate the wide geography of the megalopolis with the help of the much-needed—and many times despised—subway system. There, in the city’s bowels, they join the most peculiar parade of people from all ages, religions, genders, ethnicities, and criminal backgrounds. Once they come to the surface, the Empire State appears only obliquely, seen from the corner of an eye in a moment of distress.

For them, the City is a boisterous temptress that, in the space of a minute, can turn delight into fear and wonder into disgust. They live here now, and probably will forever, even if the drive to escape from its iron and cement claws is too strong. They are dynamic, diverse, multilingual, and curious. Every time they step out of their doors the city embraces them with its wild shadows and its neurotic lights, its steel-cold countenance, and its unexpected portion of humanity. And despite its exaggerated and formidable features, they embrace it back with the fondness and resilience they could have only acquired in New York.

This is their collective attempt to paint the literary portrait of a New York many think they know. A portrait that eschews glamour, dazzling skylines, and powerful tycoons only to reveal that New York City’s biggest strength and wealth lies in its young and multicultural inhabitants who make it more humane each day, more unprejudiced, and who will ultimately secure its future.

Adrian Izquierdo
Department of English

Special thanks to docent Kezia Velista and the New Media Artspace for creating artwork for this piece. Check the New Media Artspace out at http://www.newmediartspace.info/