The Epic of New York: A Dialogue of Light and Shadow

From Ellis Island, where crowds of immigrants were processed, and the copper woman of the Statue of Liberty who greeted the ships, this book lets New York speak through its places, each in its own voice. Manhattan explains that with no endless land it learned to look upward, and the Flatiron, the Chrysler Building as Art Deco steel wearing jewelry, the Empire State, Rockefeller Center and the Brooklyn Bridge begun by John Augustus Roebling follow, along with Times Square, Broadway, Central Park, which insists a city needs emptiness as much as construction, and the library whose marble lions guard knowledge. Kahlil Gibran carries Arabic into the city, MoMA, Wright's Guggenheim, the United Nations, Harlem and the Apollo, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, the subway, Grand Central, the High Line, SoHo and Wall Street speak in turn, and the voice lowers for the memory of the World Trade Center, its memorial and the tower that rose after it. A Syrian immigrant arrives carrying coffee, jasmine and photographs of an old home, and Shadow puts the city on trial over rent and unequal opportunity, until Light answers that a city that refuses to see its shadow will never understand its light. The book closes at dawn, with bakers, doctors and mothers waking the city like a prayer, and with the sky that outlasts every tower and God who remains above all things.