In the spring of 1524, an Italian explorer named Giovanni de Verrazzano slipped his ship between a gap in the rocky, mid-Atlantic coastline and sailed into what he mistakenly took for a giant lake. This “lake,” really, was a harbor, and it linked to an elaborate system of tributaries, estuaries, and a single, wide river which snaked north along the western edge of a tall, skinny island. Not entirely satisfied with the view, apparently (like most explorers of the day, the captain was searching for a body of water linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, an imagined “Northwest Passage” whose reputation loomed so large in the New World imagination that Thomas Jefferson remained convinced of its existence into the nineteenth century) Verrazzano sailed around the harbor, briefly docked along an uncertain shoreline, and proceeded hastily back out to sea.
Do we care about this story? It’s an interesting counterfactual, I suppose, to consider how differently the history of New York City might have played out had Verrazzano decided to stick around (for one, the island’s first colonists would have spoken French; just as Henry Hudson was a British mercenary representing the Netherlands, Verrazzano sailed on behalf of France). But given the lack of notoriety pertaining to the origin stories of New York City which actually played out, I suspect the lore of Verrazzano’s lap around the future New York Harbor is destined to remain relegated to its present status: a historical footnote and the namesake of the city’s longest bridge.1
If you can name one at all, what’s your preferred New York origin story? Is it Hudson, sailing the Half Moon, pulling up to the southern tip of the island and establishing a trading post for the Dutch in 1609? How about the moment in 1626 Walloon trader Peter Minuit, in the first slimy New York real estate deal, agreed to “purchase” the island of Manhattan from the Lenape for the oft-cited price of $24? Or, for patriotism’s sake, was it the dramatic crescendo of November 1783, when a triumphant George Washington sailed into New York Harbor, waving American flag proudly greeting his troops from the mainland for the first time?
For a variety of reasons, none of these stories has quite stuck in the city’s popular imagination. Hudson’s journey isn’t quite satisfying enough; he, like Verrazzano, mostly happened upon the island in his search for a route to the Pacific, and got out of dodge himself as soon as he was able. Minuit’s purchase is rife with issues; aside from its illumination of the real reason it’s so hard to find an appropriate New York origin story (by 1600, living on Manhattan was far from “original” for at least 100 generations of Lenape locals), the 1626 “deal” between the indigenous residents of the island and the Dutch is fraught with historical inaccuracies, the least of which being that the natives were unlikely to have had any conception of land ownership.2 I love walking through the graveyard at Trinity Church, surrounded by the ghosts of the founding fathers, as much as anyone, but 1783 is simply too late in New York’s development to qualify as an appropriate moment of birth.
What, then, is New York City’s moment? Where’s our Romulus and Remus, our storming of the Bastille, our crossing of the Delaware? Is it possible, in the city so rich in iconography that entire sections of book stores in other cities are dedicated to tomes about New York, that there is no such moment?
The author Lucy Sante both makes exactly this point and takes it to its logical endpoint in “Low Life,” her 1991 classic: the defining story of the city overflowing with folklore is that it contains no defining story:
The myth of Manhattan, therefore, is cast in the future tense. It does not hark back to a heroic past, lacks it Romulus and Remus (except in the image of that transaction between Peter Minuit and the Canarsies, which is simply the first clever deal, the primordial ground-floor entry). New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.
In “Low Life,” Sante does her best to bring the forgotten dead—the sailors, prostitutes, and street merchants of 19th and early 20th century New York—back to life. The author revives a city teeming with hustlers, vice, and a plain weirdness unrecognizable to basically every Manhattanite today. “It was said in the 1880s that you could stand on the corner of Broadway and Houston Street and fire a shotgun in any direction without hitting an honest man,” Sante writes. “A story of the nineties had it that at Broadway and Forty-second someone yelled, ‘There’s the man who stole my watch!” whereupon twelve men ran off.’” Burlesque and striptease performers with names like Carmencita (famous for wearing corsets outside her dresses) and Little Egypt (the “exotic belly dancing prodigy” who “became the metonymic representative of the forbidden throughout the nineties”) generated citywide cycles of hysteria as the “mainstream” Broadway crowd catastrophized the supposed declining morality of the Downtown scene (if they weren’t spotted at the seedier dives themselves, the folks uptown weren’t up to much better). As city elites turned up their noses, newly-arriving immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, China, and Eastern Europe profoundly reshaped the city’s landscape, growing the population at an unprecedented scale and transforming, in an unplanned, ad-hoc fashion, the culture, values, and language of New York City.
Sante’s central thesis: that, far from homogenous and sterile, New York’s story is necessarily kaleidoscopic, cacophonous, irreconcilable (more “Big Onion” than “Big Apple”) arrives as disorientating news for many a modern New Yorker. The city has always been a place of projection, of localism-as-tourism, of torpid mimeticism; one could always stick to its postcard version, and, alternatively, you can still, if you know where to look, find plenty of weirdness in Manhattan. But it’s also true that the island has never been so anodyne, so expensive, so played out. The Knicks are a Kith concept brand; tourists and polo-rocking Big Ten grads alike scrub TikTok to move on the city’s best chopped cheese; some 1940s starlet’s great-granddaughter launches a flavored lip plumper and you can’t walk down the sidewalk in SoHo.
“The city was like this a century ago, and it remains so in the present,” Sante writes of Manhattan’s down-and-dirtiness. “There are, in fact, only two really significant differences between that world and ours: now there is a lot more technology, and everything is much more expensive, even proportionately.”
Having grown up amidst tales of two generations of elders’ upbringing on the Lower East Side, from the fifties through the eighties, I am not one to pine for a return to the city of old. Still, arguing, in a capitalist society, that somewhere is the same…except for that part about how now everything’s much more expensive…is a bit like…well, I don’t know. I’ve struggled for weeks to come up with a proper analogy there, probably because it’s pretty much everything (In a 2003 afterword to “Low Life,” Sante herself hints at her earlier underestimation of the city’s shift as she admits that she is no longer able to afford, despite her relative success, to live in the very burned-out tenements she stalked in her twenties). Anyone operating under the premise that Manhattan is the cultural driver of the city’s underground today, as it was during the nineteenth century period examined by Sante, is delusional, the butt of Nolita Dirtbag’s 2020s update to the famous joke undergirding Saul Steinberg’s iconic New Yorker cover depicting Manhattan as the center of the world:

Steinberg’s cover played on the myopic worldview New Yorkers take as they burrow into the city. But it could as easily be said that the average Manhattanite’s cityview is just as warped; that it’d be an equally appropriate joke to take Steinberg’s perspective, flip it to face eastward, and shrink down the outer boroughs into clumps just as amorphous as the artist’s depictions of China, Japan, and Russia are in the far distance.
Close to eight and a half million people live in New York City. Something like one and a half million of them live in Manhattan. Add together the rest of the neighborhoods which the New York journalist Ross Barkan recently called the outer boroughs of the “professional class” (Williamsburg, DUMBO, Astoria, etc.) and you end up with somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the New York City population living in the true outer boroughs, places, Barkan observes, known derogatorily as “deep” New York:
Among the professional class who live in the coveted outer borough neighborhoods—those that have properly gentrified—there is a term used to discuss and dismiss the rest, one I’ve come to resent: deep. Are you in deep Brooklyn or deep Queens? Depth is a measure of how far you are from Manhattan as well as the cultural exports of the neighborhoods considered to lie in proper commuting distance. It is time measured on the subway, as well as a greater psychological chasm that will not be crossed. Life isn’t quite happening, they imply, in deep Brooklyn or deep Queens. Not like in Bushwick or Astoria.
Whether the “shallow” professional class chooses to acknowledge it or not, it should be self-evident by now that more profound history, using the classical Sante definition, is being made today in the “deep” boroughs than anywhere else in the city by a decent margin. It’s where the political winds of the city are shifting more dynamically; Donald Trump increased his voter share by a larger gap in every outer borough than he did in Manhattan between 2020 and 2024 (as Barkan notes, Trump himself is from the “deep” Jamaica Estates neighborhood). I noticed more MAGA hats on a single stroll through Kingsbridge Heights, in the Bronx, last fall than I’d ever seen on the Lower East Side (I stayed away from Sovereign House, itself the topic of no less than four election thinkpieces, on election night).
It’s also where the population is changing, perhaps permanently, transforming the city just as the much-mythicized waves of immigration from Ellis Island reshaped it around the turn of the 20th century. I suspect I won’t read a better piece of reporting this year than Jordan Salama’s “New Yorker” deep dive into the indigenous Ecuadorian migrant experience in New York City from earlier this month. Where longtime New Yorkers might search in vain for a good origin story, many newly-arriving residents from Latin America today are receiving their preconceived images of the city months or years in advance through Instagram and, especially, TikTok, where friends, family, and acquaintances post about their experience, filtered through a distinct lens:
The most popular videos have hundreds of thousands of views. It is clear that users are emulating one another, particularly given that certain errors are repeated so often that they become trendy. The emoji of the red-white-and-blue Liberian flag is regularly used instead of the American one, and places in the New York area are spelled as they would be pronounced by Spanish-speaking migrants. (Junction Boulevard in Queens is called “La Jonson”; Roosevelt Avenue is “La Rusbel.”)
These migrants have a presence in Manhattan, but it’s in the shadows; working kitchens, on delivery bikes, in the subway. Their relationship with the place is wholly unique, unbeholden to any pre-existing notions of New York “tradition” propped up by curmudgeonly city veterans (many migrants, Salama notes, identify Times Square as merely “that place with the screens”). In this way, is their experience not quintessentially of their new home? I thought relentlessly of “Low Life” as I flipped through Salama’s piece; the slight localized distortions (“Rusbel” for Roosevelt) and community building (thousands of Ecuadorian migrants gather every Sunday at Flushing Meadows to play in soccer leagues whose teams are often organized by their native towns) evident in the Ecuadorian migrant experience here mirror, for example, the early 20th century diaspora of the Italian immigrant community on the Lower East Side organizing itself into blocks based on native region and dialect, or the distinct sayings which sprung out of the various Bowery Boy troupes of the mid-1800s.
New York is so large, so complex, so overwhelming, that it’s not so simple to say that malice alone has led to the widespread dismissal of the outer boroughs by the professional class. But just as the elites of the 19th century largely dismissed the parlor houses, new languages, and funhouses of the Bowery as belonging to a different city, so too the majority of Manhattanite-adjacent New Yorkers overlook the quintessential history playing out right beneath our noses, a neighborhood or two away, in the very city we are supposedly so enamored with elucidating. Understanding New York, in the messy, bottom-up way it must be understood, requires understanding such places, even and especially when such stories fall outside the purview of what’s considered “mainstream” New York. The history unfolding in the outer boroughs today is not transpiring adjacent to some “proper” history of the city. It is New York.
Last month, I hopped on a ferry at Stuyvesant Cove headed uptown on the East River, towards the eastern edge of the Bronx. It was late in the afternoon, and the long, pre-solstice December light struck the underbelly of the arching Hell Gate Bridge, the abandoned, sandy shore of South Brother Island, the cockpit windows sparkling off LaGuardia Airport. At one point, in an effort to orient myself, I peered back into the sun towards Manhattan. Its midtown skyscrapers jutted upward, framed in the foreground by the towering, barbed wire fences surrounding what I realized was Rikers Island. How peculiarly those very tall buildings in the background loomed.
Said bridge was misspelled “Verrazano” until a 2018 correction.