Views from the Burning Bridge

The big thing about any New York neighborhood is its relationship to the center. The city center in Manhattan, with its spectacular cluster of big buildings and bright lights, has a magical aura. It is the focal point of every New Yorker’s primal dream. This dream unfolds itself like a giant panorama. The picture’s foreground is the dreamer’s neighborhood. This is usually across the water (where four-fifths of the city’s population comes from), but it could just as well be on the Lower East Side or in Hell’s Kitchen or Little Italy or Chinatown or Harlem. In the dream, our eyes reach longingly over our tenement or brownstone or rowhouse roofs, and the smooth roofline (most New York neighborhoods have uniform roof-lines) looks like a road.

Over the roofs, over the water, at the picture’s center, our eyes meet the prize: Manhattan’s skyscrapers and skyline, bathed in sunshine or radiating electricity and neon light. The big buildings are framed by an infinite day or night or twilight sky, which gives the picture a vanishing point and embeds the dream in the cosmos. This cityscape has the chutzpah of the biblical dream of Babel: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in th...