In Here Is New York, his 1949 love letter to the city, essayist E. B. White called Gotham “the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader, the merchant.” Since New York’s earliest days as a Dutch trading post and throughout its three-century history as a global city, density has been its defining characteristic. The city’s streets, “with their powerful throbs,” wrote poet Walt Whitman in the mid-1800s, produce an “endless and noisy chorus.” Depending on your point of view, New York is either a vibrant, churning bouillabaisse or a caffeinated bumper gallery where death and misadventure lurk around every corner.
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