I know New York City rather well.  That is to say I can get around on the subway without having to check a map more than once.  I knowhow many lines there are (27), how far they stretch (722 miles) and at how many stations (468) they stop. 

I walk a lot, and sit for a while wherever I can: Union Square and Washington Square Parks, on the steps at the library or any museum, anywhere along the water.  Sometimes you have to let the neighborhood pass you by, instead of passing by it.

And when friends who’ve never been there ask, “What’s New York like?” I use a metaphor that is biological in the strictest sense, but human in a more abstract, and, I feel, more accurate sense:  If New York was a human being each part would be fused with a combination of emotional and physical characteristics, the way the eye is the instrument of vision.  The way the breast is both a provider of food, and (in some countries) an object of desire.

The Upper East and West sides would be the two hemispheres of its brain, struggling between the artistic and pragmatic, moral and practical, physical and emotional in every conceivable detail. 

The Villages, East and Greenwich, would be its[1] conscience, the Boroughs its depth of character, Wall Street its arrogance, Broadway its brilliance,[2] Times Square its irredeemable soul and downtown, without question, its courage.

The Park would be its heart and its love.

I don’t claim to be psychic, but places give off a vibe, a palpable but not easily measured sense of place.  Sometimes you like the vibe, sometimes you don’t.  And a lot of times you’ll never understand why. 

You can stand on a street corner in Los Angeles and one in Miami, blindfolded.  Both are warm, occasionally briny, where the ocean washes ashore, the palm leaves whisper one-hundred feet over head, people drive with the windows rolled down and occasionally with their tops off[3], speak with Latin accents.  To many people they may seem the same.  But if you pay attention, go beyond the merely physical, or in some cases more deeply into the physical,[4] there exists another layer.

This underlying sense of place exists whether one is conscious of it or not.  Maybe you don’t “hear” that siren half a mile away, but it’s there, and your brain knows it whether you like it or not and you just can’t get comfortable in your hotel room.  This is an example of the biological, quantifiable [5] aspects of place morphing into the more esoteric psychological, emotional, spiritual (if you will) characteristics

There is the greater question of which came first.  Does New York “feel” the way it does because it affects the people who travel to and live there, giving off an as of yet undetectable pheromone, attracting people of a certain disposition, like birds to specific flowers? 

Or is it that once enough people congregate the place takes on their dominant collective persona, like the crowd at a Phish concert or an English football match? 

Maybe it’s a little of both, one aspect feeding another in a symbiotic relationship where, for example, certain suburbs thrive like pilot fish and others, just as close, get devoured.

Would Vegas be the same if it were, say, in central Nebraska?[6]  Would Chicago be different if it was on the other side of the lake? 

Most of my family, including my parents, was raised outside the United States.  When family visited (from Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Madrid) they were always interested in what America was really like.  Sometimes that curiosity manifested itself through a filter of condescension, usually caused by an artistic or historical sense of superiority from our visitors.  Or maybe it was coming from me.  Many late-starting meals[7] continued into early morning breakfasts; long-standing dessert-plates replaced by dishes of eggs and toast, after-meal black coffee coasting into breakfast coffee with the addition of a little cream and sugar.

Never having been to Poland, the place my father was born, I had grown up assuming that Poland was like one big neighborhood where everyone dressed, spoke, and lived similarly.  But as I grew older I realized, of course, the Poland I had “experienced” was made up primarily of Poleock jokes and images of old ladies in babushkas. [8] 

They could no more easily articulate what made every Pole (or Argentine or Spaniard) different than I could provide the “real” America, positive or negative, they wanted me to confirm for them.  The closest any of us could come was through the most elaborate details: the color of light, the scent of an orchard, warmth; all these things magical in translation but transcendent when experienced.