Manhattan’s rents are such that few of its neighborhoods are available these days to most immigrants (though it remains the first choice of those fortunate enough to arrive with abundant funds). But it too is a city of newcomers, not so much from other countries as from other parts of the United States, and even from the city’s own suburbs and the outer boroughs as well. For a century or more, this is where those young people most supplied with brains and talent and energy and ambition have come to find their place in the world. Manhattan holds out the promise of opportunity-to succeed, certainly, and, at least as important, to be oneself.

I was born upstate, in Buffalo. In December of 1948, when I was ten-and-a-half years old, my father and I spent a weekend here. We got off the train at Grand Central and checked in next door at the Hotel Commodore, and in the next three or four days we went everywhere-to Liberty Island (Bedloes Island then) to see the statue, to the top of the Empire State Building, to a Broadway show (Where’s Charlie?), a live telecast (The Toast of the Town), and just about everywhere the subway and elevated railway could take us. I remember riding downtown on the Third Avenue El on Sunday morning, and even as my father was pointing out the skid row saloons on the Bowery, a man tore out of one of them, let out a bloodcurdling scream, turned around, and raced back inside again.

I think I became a New Yorker that weekend. As soon as I could, I moved here.

“Why would I want to go anywhere?” my friend Dave Van Ronk used to say. “I’m already here.”

Manhattan Noir.

While I might argue Manhattan’s primacy (assuming I could find someone to take the other side), I wouldn’t dream of holding that everything worthwhile originates here. Even as so many Manhattanites hail from somewhere else, so do many of our best ideas. And the idea for this book originated on the other side of the world’s most beautiful bridge, with a splendid story collection called Brooklyn Noir.