New York, New York, New York

How New York City keeps transforming itself

Author Thomas Dyja discusses how New York City is in a constant state of reinvention.

A Conversation with Thomas Dyja

History in Five: What drew you to write about New York City as a subject? 
Thomas Dyja: Having lived in New York for the better part of forty years, I wanted to understand the changes it had gone through in more detail than just phrases and ideologies. I wanted to know the people and the events, the social and cultural movements that made these times as much as what happened on Wall Street or in City Hall. There had been hundreds of brilliant books about specific aspects of the city, books that explained the universe in a grain of sand, but it was time to talk about the whole beach, time to show the context and intersections and choices that gave us New York today.
 
Can you explain the significance of your title – New York, New York, New York? 
 
TD: William “Holly” Whyte was an extremely influential urbanist who believed that people were the purpose of cities and more people were what cities need to thrive, especially in New York, where he inspired the new attitude to public space that gave us places like Bryant Park. When asked once to name his three favorite American cities, Whyte said, “New York, New York, New York,” which sums up the kind of brimming devotion so many of us have. The title also speaks to the three evolutions the city goes through during these years: The Renaissance under Koch and Dinkins, the Reformation under Giuliani and Bloomberg’s Reimagination.
 
 
Your book spans different years and includes a compelling cast characters. How did you balance telling these different stories within one narrative? 
 
TD: I love timelines. Since all my writing, including my fiction, has been historical in some way, I’ve always used them. To write my first novel, about a series of baseball games between the North and South during the Civil War, I had to lay out a timeline of just about everything that happened in Grant’s 1864 campaign, and then sneak my story into the cracks. Writing a cultural history of post-war Chicago meant huge timelines about architecture and music and art and politics and weaving them all together. For New York, New York, New York, I created one that’s a good six, maybe seven, feet long as a kind of master, then I overlaid another timeline on top of that, broken down by chapters. And then I did smaller, more detailed timelines for each chapter to let me figure out pacing and progression. That’s one way to think about it. The other metaphor I always have is structural, or architectural: You need to build a framework of fact and causality, and then decorate it with style, with color, with people, events. Either way, I need visual aids to turn it all back into words. 
 
H5: Is there anything you wished to include in your book but couldn’t?
 
TD: I did try to include everything—the first draft was more than twice the size of the eventual book! But then my very wise editor Eamon Dolan helped me shape it into something that was still exhaustive without being quite as exhausting. What there’d been before was just more of everything: More people, more color, more voices, but without as many clear paths through. So sure, it killed me to cut certain quotes and details, but you learn as a writer to identify your gold and defend it at all costs. What’s here is what I feel is essential to tell the stories.
 
H5: How did you approach your research? Did anything surprise you?
 
TD: The first thing I did was forget everything. New Yorkers are POSITIVE about what they remember. They’re absolutely SURE about things which, when you start to research them, didn’t always happen exactly the way they think, and that includes me. So I assumed nothing and just dove in sort of willy-nilly. This was madness but with a certain method because it kept me from starting from a certain subconscious position or narrative. Everything was 3D, and actually 4D because it was all happening in time, too. I read entire runs of magazines, interviewed lots of fascinating people and I guess what was most surprising to me was how some of the least “fascinating,” least flashy, least glamorous people turned out to be the heroes. We pay so much attention to the headlines and the talking points but the real work of transforming the New York we live in—not the one we sell to tourists—was done by people obsessed with making their neighborhoods better, with making the city work better, with making the lives of their fellow New Yorkers better. For every oversized celebrity or billionaire developer, there was a community organizer, a deputy mayor, a starving artist or young rapper who put everything they had into creating New York.
 
H5: What books inspired you as you wrote New York, New York, New York? 
 
TD: It will surprise no one when I say that the first book I sat down and read when I started was The Power Brokerby Robert Caro, and I was certainly inspired by its depth and breadth and width. But it’s also true that mine was always going to be in some ways the exact opposite—that book is about one man over decades while I wanted to do something more fox than hedgehog. So the historian that really thrummed for me was David Kynaston, who’s done a brilliant three-volume history of postwar Britain with the same sweep of society, economics, politics and culture high and low that I aspired to. And Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a constant inspiration. Along the way I read so many great books—a few that really stand out still were George Chauncey’s Gay New York, Cynthia Carr’s biography of David Wojnarowicz, and Lynne Sagalyn’s definitive books on Times Square and Ground Zero, but there are dozens more.
 
H5: Which do you prefer – a classic New York slice or a classic New York bagel?
 
TD: The bagel. Somehow bagels have always been a part of my life in New York. In college I’d wander down to H&H late at night because it was just about the only thing open, and they were great for hangovers. Then Sunday morning bagels and the Times in bed with my wife; waiting for Lenny’s to open at 6 am with my kids who’d been up since 5; breaking the fast with the extended family on Yom Kippur; lunch with friends at Barney Greengrass or bringing bags of bagels to them when you visit. Bagels are a kind of social currency in New York; they’re literally how we break bread together.
 
H5: What would you like readers to take away from your book?
 
TD: I want people to understand that New York is constantly changing, and that they have the power to help direct that change if they choose to live actively in the city.
BACK TO TOP