People arriving in New York City for the first time have had reactions ranging from fascination to astonishment to horror. Here are six of their perspectives ranging from 1915 to 1967, from a journalist, a poet/artist, a Socialist, a suffragist, a travel writer, and a songstress.
Journalist Gene Fowler (1890-1960)
Gene Fowler moved from Denver to New York City in 1915. After starting his journalism career at the Denver Post, he worked for four New York papers, eventually becoming managing editor of the New York American and the Morning Telegraph. Later in his career, he became a renowned Hollywood screenwriter. About his arriving in New York, he said:
“During my first months in New York I felt as frustrated as a sword swallower with the hiccups. I lost my fear of the city, however, the day I flew over it together with ten other reporters. We took off in a Caproni bomber piloted by the Italians Juliano Parvis and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s younger son Ugo. Two miles below us, Manhattan seemed but a lizard lazing in the sunlight of a September noon.”
Upon moving back to Denver, Fowler said of New York “I then could hear it two thousand miles away, or so it seemed. The distant chant seemed both repellent and alluring, a
siren’s chorus that even now I seem to hear. I listen to it once again across the many miles and the many years, not with the pathos of yearning for gone days but with the gladness of having known the springtime.”
Poet and Artist Mina Loy (1882-1966)
Mina Loy moved to New York City from Florence, Italy, in 1916. Before arriving she expected the “den of a composite myriad-clawed human monster clutching spasmodically at the dollar.”
But as her ship approached the harbor, the view took her breath away, and she saw that “an architecture conceived in a child’s dream” rose above the mist. Manhattan’s towers shone “with the glittering clamor of a myriad windows set like colored diamonds.”
She would later consider New York the embodiment of the new where the twentieth century was being unveiled, where one had to live to understand the modern world.
Russian Socialist Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
In 1916, Leon Trotsky found himself banned from virtually every country in Europe. He turned his gaze across the Atlantic and arrived in New York in December with his wife and two children.
The family moved into a Bronx tenement. Trotsky wrote for the Novyi Mir, a Russian socialist daily. He frequently joined the political debates at the Café Metropole where Socialists, Marxists, pacifists, and other reformers and radicals debated political views.
Trotsky described New York as the “city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city in the world, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.”
Suffragist Kitty Marion (1871-1944)
Kitty Marion was born in Germany. At fifteen, she escaped from a vicious father who beat her and fled to London. She joined London’s women suffrage crusade, but she had a rather violent streak and was jailed several times. During World War I, the suffragists helped her immigrate to the United States. There she joined Margaret Sanger’s crusade for birth control.
She became a familiar site on the streets of New York hawking Sanger’s Birth Control Review. Her favorite spot was Times Square, which she described as “The most fascinating, the most comic, the most tragic, living, breathing movie in the world.”
Travel Writer Jan Morris (1926-2020)
Jan Morris arrived in Manhattan in 1953 and fell in love with it. Morris returned every year for decades and boasted of seeing the island with both male and female eyes, initially as a man (named James), later as a woman after undergoing a sex change in 1964.
Looking back on the early visits, she described herself as “in a condition of constant wonder… of a marvelously vibrant kind. The color of the cars, and the size of them! The babel of languages, the bluntness, the old-school courtesy, the crime, the opulence, the martinis! The pride, fun, and self-satisfaction of it all, and the grape jelly for breakfast – ugh, the grape jelly…
“Who did not feel like Ginger Rogers or Fred Astaire on a brilliant, windy day on Fifth Avenue?… Was there anywhere else on earth where the poorest of the poor, the loneliest immigrants, would so earnestly declare their faith in the grand dream that was their city?… And this was the walkingest city on earth, with its convenient grid pattern and its relaxed attitude toward jaywalkers. I walked nearly everywhere.”
Songstress Patti Smith (1946-)
Patti Smith moved to New York from southern New Jersey in 1967 after getting pregnant at age 19 and giving her child up for adoption. She was broke so for the first couple of months she just wandered around the city and slept wherever she could find a place – door wells, subway cars, even a graveyard, she recalled. And her impressions of the city:
“The city was a real city, shifty and sexual… The skyscrapers were beautiful. They did not seem like mere corporate shells. They were monuments to the arrogant yet
philanthropic spirit of America. The character of each quadrant was invigorating and one felt the flux of its history.
“The old world and the emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of the artisan and the architects… I didn’t need any entertainment… It was beautiful going to Washington Square or Tompkins Square Park and seeing people gathered to read poetry or sing or play chess. For me, New York meant freedom.”
Illustrations, from above: Lower Manhattan from airplane looking south, 1934; Gene Fowler, 1880; Mina Loy with daughter Oda, ca. 1904 (Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library); Leon Trotsky, 1918; Kitty Marion in New York selling Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, 1925; Jan Morris, on left as James before 1964 gender change, on right as Jan; Patti Smith at Halden Pop Festival, 2014.
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