Read Online Here is New York by E.B. White - Free Book Online

Introduction
ROGER ANGELL
    In a foreword to this slim book, published in 1949, E. B. White takes note of the changes that have come to New York City since its contents first appeared, in the form of a
Holiday
magazine article, a year earlier. The Lafayette Hotel, on Ninth Street, where he nurses a drink at the café and watches a sunset, has already passed, “despite the mention.” But he declines to revise his text, and says that it is the reader’s, not the author’s, duty to bring New York down to date. This is sound advice, even after fifty years, during which time New York has continued to alter itself at the same almost unimaginable pace. Many of White’s places and references in
Here is New York
are long gone. The Third Avenue Elevated, the neighborhood ice-coal-and-wood cellars, Schrafft’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue, the ancient book elevators at the Public Library, the old Metropolitan Opera, the
Queen Mary
and her mournful horn, and the dock from which shedeparted—all have vanished from sight and almost from memory. The thought occurs that this book should now be called
Here Was New York
, except that White himself has foreseen this dilemma. The tone of his text is already valedictory, and even as he describes the city’s gifts he sees alterations “in tempo and temper.” Change is what this book is all about.
    In 1947, I was a young editor and writer with
Holiday
, a new and lively monthly that invited top-level authors and artists and photographers to participate in the emerging postwar travel boom, born out of the favorable rate of the dollar abroad and the arrival of the long-distance airliner.
Holiday
paid well and was lavish with expense accounts, and previously housebound talents—V. S. Pritchett, Saul Bellow, Frank O’Connor, William Faulkner, Ludwig Bemelmans, Flannery O’Connor, S. J. Perelman—were quick to update their passports and come aboard. Their pieces perked up the general level of travel writing, and looked good on the magazine’s ample pages, which also presented photography by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Arnold Newman.E. B. White was an inveterate non-traveler, however, and when Ted Patrick, the editor, invited him to leave his home in North Brooklin, Maine, and revisit his old haunts in New York for the magazine, he went along with the idea mostly because of me, I suspect, and because of the season. I was his stepson, and his byline in
Holiday
would be a thrill for me and perhaps even a little career boost. And besides, the assignment would take him out of New England in mid-July, which was hay fever time Down East. He called me up and said OK, he’d give it a try. He told me that Patrick’s letter, offering the assignment, had begun with the thought that he might “have fun” writing about New York, and he wanted me to tell him that the project had almost foundered right there. “Writing is never ‘fun,’ ” he said ominously. Just the same, he came down (by train) in hot weather, put up at the Algonquin, across the street from his old
New Yorker
office, and then went home and wrote. The rest, including the heat wave, is in the book.
    Modest and effortless, White’s prose almost effaces the brisk efficiency of his plan—a whole city(well, it’s mostly Manhattan) delivered in seventy-five hundred words—and the elegance of his beginning and closing lines. That final sentence, about a tree in an East Side garden, has stayed clear in my mind for half a century, just as it has for many thousands of other readers, I imagine, perhaps because of the power of its reversed verb, “not to look upon,” within the murmured thought. Only when I read the book again, just recently, did I realize how much of it is written from the point of view of an exile. The Whites—E. B. (“Andy” to his family and friends) and my mother Katharine (and their son Joel) had become year-round Maine residents in the late 1930s, but then came briefly back to the city