The Akashic Books Noir Series, 2006

The City.

See, that’s what we call it. The rest of the world calls it the Apple, or, more formally, the Big Apple, and we don’t object to the term. We just don’t use it very often. We call it the City and let it go at that.

And, while the official city of New York is composed of five boroughs, the City means Manhattan. “I’m going into the City tonight,” says a resident of Brooklyn or the Bronx, Queens or Staten Island. Everybody knows what he means. Nobody asks him which city, or points out that he’s already in the city. Because he’s not. He’s in one of the Outer Boroughs. Manhattan is the City.

A few years ago I was in San Francisco on a book tour. In conversation with a local I said that I lived in the City. “Oh, you call it that?” he said. “That’s what we call San Francisco. The City.”

I reported the conversation later to my friend Donald Westlake, whose house is around the corner from mine. “That’s cute,” he said. “Of course they’re wrong, but it’s cute.”

The City. It’s emblematic, I suppose, of a Manhattan arrogance, of which there’s a fair amount going around. Yet it’s a curious sort of arrogance, because for the most part it’s not the pride of the native. Most of us, you see, are originally from Somewhere Else.

All of New York-all five boroughs-is very much a city of immigrants. Close to half its inhabitants were born in another country-and the percentage would be higher if you could count the illegals. The flood of new arrivals has always kept the city well supplied with energy and edge.