New York stories
Dan Saltzstein brings stories about the most famous city in the world to life in "That's So New York"
New York City has its own genre. It’s one of the few places in the world that is a character. It’s where dreams come true and die. It’s home to so many cliches that they’re almost not cliches in the context of “the greatest city on earth.”
The question becomes, “how do you tell a new story about New York?”
Dan Saltzstein has the answer and it’s pretty simple: tweet length stories that are “so New York.”
Two years ago Saltzstein, an editor for The New York Times, sent a tweet out into the land of Twitter (now called “X'“, but I’m ignoring the name change because it’s dumb) asking for stories that could only happen in New York. He walked away from the tweet because that’s what you do if you have a healthy relationship with social media. While away, the answers came rolling in. Everyone has a New York story.
Here’s mine:
A few years ago I went to New York City for something. I forget what now. I was riding the subway from borough to borough. An aimless ride. A couple, who appeared down on their luck, got on and took two seats. They carried a plastic bag with drinks in it and a yellow puppy in their arms. They soon occupied a third seat. I turned off the music playing in my ears from my iPhone. I needed to hear what they were talking about because they had opened a pee-pad and placed it on the seat between them. The man grabbed a bottle of a blue-flavored sports drink from the bag, opened it and poured some in the cap so the puppy could get a good drink of a SPORTS DRINK. Then they placed the dog on the pee pad-and waited for it to pee, on the subways seat that someone could have sat on. And then hey got off. Just like that. It was over.
I’ll never forget that subway ride. It could only happen in New York because the subway is special there.
My story is a lot like the other stories Saltzstein received. He saw a book project come to life in front of him. He commissioned writers to write essays about the topics he found were most common — the subway, rats, celebrities, rules, etc.— and found an artist to bring the stories to life. That’s So New York: Short (and very short) stories about the greatest city on earth was born.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did this thing begin?
What happened was a New York story sort of came into my head and I was like, oh, this'll be a fun tweet. I was like, “you know what? Let's make it an open question.” So I tweeted “New Yorkers, what's your most New York moment?” I put the phone down, didn't think about it, and woke up the next morning to thousands of responses. It had gone viral and way outside my network.
I would say hundreds of them were great. There were so many good ones. A bunch of people were immediately like, you have to make a book out of this. These are so great. And I was like, well, I can't just take people's tweets and make a book out of it. I started to think about what can I surround the best of the tweets with that would keep the integrity of the idea of focusing on a New York moment or story, but add different elements.
I put together a proposal with the best tweets, a few essays by me, essays by some guest writers, interviews with some people who sort of intersect with New York in interesting ways, and then some of these sort of silly fact sheets that are sort half real, half fake.
One thing that came easily was that the tweets sort of fell naturally into about seven categories, which became chapters: the subway; animals, which is really rats and pigeons for the most part; New Yorkers are actually nice. A variety of themes that, again, felt natural.
I pitched that and got a deal for it. The publisher, Chronicle Books, found a fantastic illustrator. My only involvement in that was I was like, I would love them for them to be New York based, be a woman, if possible, and to capture the slightly tongue in cheek sort of quality of the book, which they did. Emily Carpenter is her name and she's fantastic and did a great job with the illustrations.
Was there a book you ever wanted to write before this that never got off the ground? Did you ever do a book proposal on something?
I have never written a proposal before.
There definitely are a couple of books, one in particular that I've been sort of noodling on, but that's a novel. I have sort of been picking around the edges of it. At some point I'll hunker down and really focus on it. I like to think that I probably would've by now if this hadn't sort of taken me away from it, but it's tough with a full-time job and a family. I have enormous respect for those people who get up at 5:00 a.m. and write for two hours and then go to work or do a full day's work and then spend two hours with their family and then write for three hours at night. God bless them. I think it's amazing. That's just not me.
To write about New York while being at The New York Times is kind of the perfect place to do it from because, truthfully, The New York Times covers New York. To me the best section is the local section. It's fabulous with the weird stories in it because I think we now kind of think of The New York Times as something else — we think of it as a national newspaper, a global newspaper — but it is still about New York. Do you think the experience there has helped you see the city from the inside a little bit, but also a little tongue in cheek because you're able to make fun of it?
That's an interesting question. I think it’s probably true.
I grew up in Westchester, north of the city, 45 minutes away, but also a world away. I would come in with my family as a kid and then when I was, I don't know, 13-ish, I started coming in with a friend to do goofy stuff. We would go to Broadway stage doors and get peoples’ autographs, not actually seeing the show, but just meeting them, getting their autographs — John Malkovich and James Earl Jones and people like that.
Wait, can we talk about that for a second real quick?
Sure.
The city was more dangerous then and now people won't let their kids go on the subway. Can you imagine?
Totally. I mean, it's something I think about a lot actually.
That would've been late-to-mid-80s, I guess. It wasn't like the 70s. There were certainly neighborhoods that I wouldn't have gone to back then as a 13-year-old. But, looking back on it, to be honest, I am a little surprised that my parents let me do it. The deal was that I had to go with a friend, and I think they just took my word for this honestly.
Not even a cell phone to get ahold of you.
Today, it is something that I think about because I have an 11-year-old and I don’t think she would want to get on a train and go into Manhattan and we live in Queens. Our neighborhood is very neighborhood-y and friendly and whatever, and she feels comfortable there, I think, but I don't even think she would want to go by herself into Manhattan, maybe in a few years.
But you're right, it was definitely a more dangerous place then. I've been very lucky in my life: I've never had a truly bad experience living in the city. But it's interesting, a lot of the stories that came in sort of harken back to that era when the city was more dangerous.
I think a lot of people and I had this romanticized notion of the city, which I think is genuine, but I also think some of it was predicated on the sort of grittiness and the sort of theoretical danger of the city growing up in the suburbs. I mean, it was part of the romance. I was also a huge movie fan, Dog Day Afternoon and The French Connection, my brain was sort of just marinating and all of that stuff, so I think that was probably a part of it.
The book does look back, but because of the drawings, it has a modern feel and the stories are kind of timeless in that we've all had a crazy subway story, so they all fit in every generation. The subway may have newer cars, but it's still a subway.
I totally agree with you. I think there's a sort of timelessness to the whole thing, and there may be certain moments or stories that are more grounded in a specific time, but the vast majority of them, I feel like, could have happened at any point in the last 50, 60, 70 years in New York. That's one of the interesting things to me about the book, which is that one of the things I discussed in the intro is what is a New York story? What is a New York moment? And it's one of those things that's, to a certain degree, indefinable, and, yet, these all very much feel like New York stories and moments to me. I'm not sure I can explain exactly why that is, but there's something there that is very New York about it, and I think that sort of overlaps with that timeless quality that we're talking about, that the subways have always been the subways and sure they were gotten more dangerous and less dangerous.
And what people are reading on them is totally different.
For sure. The biggest change you see every day is that when I was growing up and taking the subway, everybody had a newspaper or book in their hand and people did the newspaper fold where it was an art almost like origami, where you fold it certain way and you get it down to a little rectangle. Now 80-plus percent are probably now are on their phones. That is actually a big difference.
Are there any other changes that you’ve seen?
There certainly are aspects of the city that have changed. I mean, one of the things that I think people complain about New York, and justifiably so, is how much and quickly it changes. Neighborhoods never stay the same. People who grew up in the Lower East Side and now go there and there's super fancy boutiques and restaurants or whatever, the Lower East Side of their childhood is gone and there's a sadness to that. It's also what New York is. New York is constantly turning over and changing.
Both my parents grew up in New York. My dad grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn which, when he was there, was a very secular Jewish neighborhood. It then became a very Hasidic and black neighborhood, and now in the last 15 years or whatever, it's where I feel like somebody in their 20s is living with six roommates. Crown Heights or Bed–Stuy or whatever. There's this inevitable change, and obviously the biggest thing is that people get displaced and priced out of neighborhoods, and that's sad for sure, but to me it's on a larger scale. It's also part of the charm of the city that it's always changing. There's always nothing really lasts in the city.
For a while I was in this little diner club called Diners of Yesteryear, which a spirits and food writer organized, and we would go to restaurants that were, I want to say they were over 60 years old, 50 or 60 years old, something like that. We did it for a couple of years and basically they ran out of places. There's not a lot of places that have lasted that long. I had my 50th birthday party this past year at a place called Parkside Lounge and I realized, gosh, I came here in my 20s, which means that it's at least 25 years old if not more. That's a lot for New York.
Places and neighborhoods are constantly changing. Some of it's sad. The example that always comes to mind is the meat packing district, which there's a romance to back when it was an actual meat packing district. I think there's one or two vendors left now, but we also got the High Line at that, and the Whitney moved down there.
You have the 1980s people clubbing, those stories. There's also some sort of a thing where people are nostalgic for that and you're like, well, so you're a nostalgic for a thing that was that at the time different for that area. Everybody has their own nostalgia. I think that's what this book does really well is you found some friend writers that write about it in different ways and they're coming from different places too, which is I think the other important part about New York.
My goal was to find people who sort of came to New York — and I mean that both literally and figuratively — in really different ways. There are people who grew up elsewhere — Isaac Fitzgerald, Mahogany Browne — and came to New York as adults. Mahogany wrote a really lovely essay about coming to New York as an adult and sort of acclimating to it. Isaac as well. Jason Diamond also grew up outside Chicago and is now the New York-iest, New Yorker I can think of. Then there are people who grew up in New York and have have it in their blood, so to speak, and people who also just come at it from all different angles and different perspectives. I mean, to me as an editor, that's one of the things I love about my job: that I get to edit different writers with different voices and attitudes and whatever.
Working at The Times there's a certain Times-ian quality that you have to get to, but I've been very lucky. I worked in the travel section for nine years and special projects where we use a lot of freelancers for the last seven, eight years, and it's been great to work with writers with all these different voices and backgrounds. My attitude is I come to it as an average reader would and sort of look at it from that perspective. And to a certain degree, the book is that as well, where I picked the tweets and also assigned the essays and wrote the essays that I wrote as well. I really aimed for a diversity of themes and backgrounds and attitudes and voices and all of that. And hopefully that came across.
It’s easy to forget that New York is a place where people go not just vacation, but to live, to work, to create a new life. And you often forget that when you're living in a place, you're kind of stuck in it. You're like, you are almost annoying everybody being around you because you're like, I just need to get through my day.
I think a lot of New Yorkers get irritated by tourists. The classic thing is they're looking up at buildings or they're looking at, well, it used to be maps, now it's their phone or whatever, and you're just, get out of my way; I'm going somewhere. To me, it's like first of all, that's just big city life. That's true in any big city. People are on their way to jobs and doctor's appointments and whatever else. I actually find it sort of charming. I mean, it can be irritating in moments, but I think it's a great reminder in some ways that we do live in this incredible city.
It's funny because I grew up in the suburbs. My daughter grew up in the city, and so oftentimes when she's sort of complaining about the subways or the crowds or whatever, I'll be like, 'look around. A lot of these people came from literally all over the world to visit New York and we live here. It's an amazing thing.