Your Own Man

Washington Square Park (Matthew Jesuele / Wikimedia Commons)

"In New York you felt you were no different from anybody else; you were your own man; you were free. At any given minute you could decide to navigate your way up Fifth Avenue to regard shiny luxury watches in shop windows, eat a kosher hot dog on Central Park South, or read Intro to Sociology at an outdoor café off Christopher. And sure, independence had its dark dimensions, its lonely frequented loci, like a scarred green bench in the northwest corner of Washington Square where nobody sought you out."

H.M. Naqvi, Home Boy

Original Settler

Tourist brochures in Columbus Circle

"You could, as Mini Auntie told me once, spend ten years in Britain and not feel British, but after spending ten months in New York, you were a New Yorker, an original settler, and in no time you would be zipping uptown, downtown, crosstown, wherever, strutting, jaywalking, dispensing directions to tourists like a mandarin. "You see,' you'd say, 'it's quite simple: the city's like a grid."
H. M. Naqvi, Home Boy