With a poet's clear eye and a journalist's curiosity about how a
city works, Dan Barry shows us New York as no other writer has seen
it.
Evocative, intimate, piercing, and often funny, the essays in "City
Lights" capture everyday life in the city at its most ordinary and
extraordinary. Wandering the city as a columnist for "The New York
Times," Barry visits the denizens of the Fulton Fish Market on the
eve of its closing; journeys with an obsessed guide through the
secret underground of abandoned subway stops, tunnels, and
aqueducts; touches down in bars, hospitals, churches, diners,
pools, zoos, memorabilia-stuffed apartments, at births and
funerals, the places where people gather, are welcomed, or depart;
talks to the ex-athlete who caught the falling baby, the
performance artist who works as a mermaid, the octogenarian dancers
who find quiet joy in their partnership, and the guy who waves
flags over the Cross-Bronx Expressway to wish drivers safe passage.
Along the way, Barry offers glimpses of New York's distant and
recent past. He explains why the dust-coated wishbones hanging
above the bar at McSorley's Old Ale House belong to the doughboy
ghosts of World War I. He recalls a century of grandeur at the
Plaza Hotel throught the tales of longtime doormen who will soon be
out of a job. He finds that an old man's quiet death opens back
into a past that the man had spent his life denying. And, from the
vantage of the Circle Line cruise around Manhattan, he joins
tourists as they try to make sense of still-smoldering ruins in
Lower Manhattan three weeks after September 11, 2001.
Each story in "City Lights" illuminates New York, as it was and as
it is: always changing, always losing and renewing parts of itself,
every street corner an opportunity for surprise and revelation.
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