Manhattan Noir

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The City.

See, that’s what we call it. The rest of the world calls it the Apple, or, more formally, the Big Apple, and we don’t object to the term. We just don’t use it very often. We call it the City and let it go at that.

And, while the official city of New York is composed of five boroughs, the City means Manhattan. “I’m going into the City tonight,” says a resident of Brooklyn or the Bronx, Queens or Staten Island. Everybody knows what he means. Nobody asks him which city, or points out that he’s already in the city. Because he’s not. He’s in one of the Outer Boroughs. Manhattan is the City.

A few years ago I was in San Francisco on a book tour. In conversation with a local I said that I lived in the City. “Oh, you call it that?” he said. “That’s what we call San Francisco. The City.”

I reported the conversation later to my friend Donald Westlake, whose house is around the corner from mine. “That’s cute,” he said. “Of course they’re wrong, but it’s cute.”

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