City Lights: Stories About New York

by Dan Barry

With a poet's clear eye and a journalist's curiosity about how a city works, Dan Barry shows us New York as no other writer has seen it.

Evocative, intimate, piercing, and often funny, the essays in City Lights capture everyday life in the city at its most ordinary and extraordinary. Wandering the city as a columnist for The New York Times , Barry visits the denizens of the Fulton Fish Market on the eve of its closing; journeys with an obsessed guide through the secret underground of abandoned subway stops, tunnels, and aqueducts; touches down in bars, hospitals, churches, diners, pools, zoos, memorabilia-stuffed apartments, at births and funerals, the places where people gather, are welcomed, or depart; talks to the ex-athlete who caught the falling baby, the performance artist who works as a mermaid, the octogenarian dancers who find quiet joy in their partnership, and the guy who waves flags over the Cross-Bronx Expressway to wish drivers safe passage.

Along the way, Barry offers glimpses of New York's distant and recent past. He explains why the dust-coated wishbones hanging above the bar at McSorley's Old Ale House belong to the doughboy ghosts of World War I. He recalls a century of grandeur at the Plaza Hotel through the tales of longtime doormen who will soon be out of a job. He finds that an old man's quiet death opens back into a past that the man had spent his life denying. And, from the vantage of the Circle Line cruise around Manhattan, he joins tourists as they try to make sense of still-smoldering ruins in Lower Manhattan three weeks after September 11, 2001.

Each story in City Lights illuminates New York, as it was and as it always changing, always losing and renewing parts of itself, every street corner an opportunity for surprise and revelation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Short Stories, Travel, Essays, Book Club, Inspirational

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2007

About the author

Dan Barry is a longtime columnist and reporter for The New York Times and the author of four books, including the forthcoming “The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland.” Set to be released in May 2016, the book tells the story of dozens of men with intellectual disability who spent decades working at an Iowa turkey-processing plant, living in an old schoolhouse, and enduring exploitation and abuse – before finding justice and achieving freedom.
As the “This Land” columnist for the Times, Barry traveled to all 50 states, where he met the coroner from “The Wizard of Oz,” learned the bump-and-grind from a mostly retired burlesque queen, and was hit in the chest by an Asian carp leaping out of the Illinois River. He has since recovered -- though the condition of the carp remains unknown.
He has reported extensively on many topics, including the World Trade Center disaster and its aftermath and the damage to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He has also been the City Hall bureau chief, the Long Island bureau chief, a sportswriter, a general assignment reporter, and, for three years, the “About New York” columnist – all for the Times.
Barry previously worked for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., and for The Providence Journal, where he and two other reporters won a George Polk Award for an investigation into the causes of a state banking crisis. In 1994, he and the other members of the Journal’s investigative team won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about Rhode Island’s court system; the series led to various reforms and the criminal indictment of the chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court.
Barry has also written “Pull Me Up: A Memoir”; “City Lights: Stories About New York,” a collection of his “About New York” columns; and “Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game,” which received the 2012 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.

Reviews

[Charlane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dan Barry is now one of my favorite writers....pure talent! These stories captivated me. I laughed, cried and read with anticipation....hanging on to every word. His stories of every day people are proof that we do not need sensational journalism.

If you know New York, you want to read these stories, and if you don't, you want to read these stories. City Lights is about us all.


Here are the stories I read twice:

People Cringed, But Twelve Cameras Never Blinked
A Thousand Words? This Stash Worth a Trillion
Where Grace Knows No Age, and Stardust Is No Memory
On This Team, Good Hands Are a Given
Keeping His Hands on Wheel.....and on Bow, and Strings
In the Bronx, a Graduation with Honor
At Age Twenty-six, Finding Words to Live By
A Gambler Sees Beyond the Jackpot
Scraps of Life, Amassed into Mountains
Her Name Was Erica; She Was Loved
The Boxer, the Beating, and the Widow
Two Lives, and Two Kinds of Vision
A Day of Tributes, Tears, and the Litany of the Lost
What's Scary and Buried in the Refuge?
The Mind's Eye as a Window to the City
Art Underfoot, and the Angel Who Guards It
Sweet She Ain't, and She Has the Stories to Prove It
A Riddle Once Wrapped in a Tortilla

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed his writing and the collection, but appreciated the stories more when read one or two at a time and savored rather than all at once.

[Russ · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful treasure of a book! This is a collection of Dan Barry's "About New York" column from the New York Times. He wrote the column from 2003 to 2006.

Each of the columns collected here tells a story about a New Yorker. A few are famous, but most are not. They are ordinary New Yorkers, but their stories are nonetheless extraordinary, especially to someone like me who does not live in such a city.

The stories of our lives are more fascinating than we think, and this book proves the point with the addition of the magic spice of Gotham. You will meet the umbrella salesmen; you will meet the man with decades of memorabilia stored in an office; you will meet a group of people who gather at a bar to learn Irish stepdancing; you will meet the Mayor of Central Park. All of these characters, and more, wait for your discovery.

I enjoyed this entire book, every single page. It nourished me. It captivated me. It made me laugh, and it made me feel pain. It took me out of my little world and into dozens and dozens of other little worlds. You will not regret visiting those worlds. Go out and buy this book wherever you can. You will love it like I love it, especially if you love New York.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

O.K. Not too many memorable stories. Fine to read at night to get you sleepy.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are columns collected from the New York Times over the past several years. So it's good for a quick snack of a read while you're waiting for the coffee to brew.

The best pieces are the very few in which Barry is able to stretch out a bit from the usual confines of his column, like the aromatic valedictory to the Fulton Fish Market (p. 61). The section of wrenching 9/11 columns should be taken in small doses. If the Texas Hold 'em piece is a little cheesy (p. 139), still it's good to know what really happened to David Hampton (p. 160), the inspiration for Paul in John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

For anyone who lives or wants to live in NYC, this book really brings out the many hidden stories of people who live there everyday and show how the city affects their life. From the lady who lost a diamond earring to the person called Manhole cover lady and also Flyer-Man. All these stories really add something special to the city that never sleeps. If you don't live there already, it really makes you wish you did.

[David Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was initially cool toward this collection of NYT columns because the writer refuses to use the first person. Where's the personality, the attitude? These could be feature stories. But especially in the final section, about a variety of NYC characters, his sly wit and eye for detail shone through, and I was won over.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories (only about 2 pages each) telling about the life of people living in NYC. The subjects are all over the place, including a woman who opens her home to people so they can enjoy free jazz concerts every Sunday, families that lost loved ones on 9/11, or the local barber's last day before retirement.

[J.P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful little nuggets about life in one of the greatest cities in the world, from the sad closing of generations-old businesses to heartwarming stories of rescues, heroes, and quirky NYC characters. Gracefully, lovingly written. A real gem.

[Jennifer Didik · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 if only because it's a bit awkward reading these consecutively, and in doing so their structures reveal themselves to be a bit cookie-cutter despite the wonderfully unique people and places and plots within each piece.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collection of short stories portraying different aspects of NYC. The writing is clear, concise, and alternates between tragedy and comedy - a great portrait of the diversity of the city.

[Sabur76 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting stories about life in NYC

[Linda Appelbaum · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book with plenty of stories about New York and the people who live there. I especially en;joyed the section about post 9-11.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Evocative, intimate, piercing, and often funny...' Enjoyable read