There’s nothing like a New York City summer: as temperatures climb, the city comes alive. This week, we’re bringing you five views, past and present, of New York at its sizzling best. Arthur Miller remembers what New York was like before air-conditioning, when families looking to cool off would spend the night in Central Park. (Their alarm clocks, he writes, filled the park with “a mild cacophony of the seconds passing.”) Jonathan Franzen recalls the summer of 1981, when he moved to New York to explore its “romantically deserted vistas” and become a novelist. Doreen St. Félix reports from the city’s preëminent jump-rope competition, the Double Dutch Summer Classic; Adam Gopnik spends a summer as an N.Y.C. locavore, eating food grown in the five boroughs; and Carolyn Kormann undertakes a unique summer project—swimming in every pool in Manhattan. “As I marked the locations of Manhattan’s pools on a map, a constellation emerged: the people’s moat, a secret waterway, a liquid realm,” she writes. “Among the honking taxis, flashing lights, and fretful pedestrians, I would swim.” Maybe these pieces will inspire your own explorations.
—David Remnick
“The city in summer floated in a daze that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting ‘Hot enough for ya? Ha-ha!’ ” Read more.
“On the Fourth of July weekend, we got up onto the old West Side Elevated Highway (closed but not yet demolished) and went walking past the new World Trade Center towers (brutalist but not yet tragic) and didn’t see another person in any direction. Romantically deserted vistas were what I wanted in a city when I was twenty-one.” Read more.
“The sound of taut ropes lashing on concrete at short intervals is, to me, the sound of summer.” Read more.
“So I made our local dinner. Aside from the spices and the olive oil—which we allowed ourselves under what is called a ‘Marco Polo exemption,’ common to localism—everything in the dinner hailed from, or had at least seen its first or last days, within the city limits of New York.” Read more.
“I got the idea for my best summer stunt during the bleakest days of last winter. When things seemed like they couldn’t get worse, I started to think about swimming across Manhattan—about plowing through every pool on the island.” Read more.
