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WELCOME TO THE CITY ISSUE!

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While researching for The City Issue, I revisited “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion’s classic homage (and farewell) to New York City. And although I would gladly tattoo ninety- percent of this piece on my body, I was moved to tears [it was a rough week] where she writes:

I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. . .To those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.

New York is perhaps the most socially constructed city of all: the promised-land for dreamers and the living-end for the faint-of-heart. It’s where the 1-percent work, the “terrorists” attacked, our proverbial crosshairs meet, and only the strong survive. [And everyone knows it.] That’s why upon hearing that anyone lives in New York City, reverence and social capital is immediately granted. It’s as if you can separate the population by those who made it here—and those who wished they could.

To come to New York is to decide that a dream is worth fulfilling, the unknown worth facing, and no means too costly for its end. You have to be capable of truly relinquishing control, abandoning fear, and accepting mass socioeconomic inequity. You have to really grasp that life here is a free-for-all; you can see poverty, heartbreak, and a Birkin bag all on your morning commute. And more often than not, you have to get here by leaving a place that is likely nothing like New York, because as any New Yorker will tell you: “There’s New York, and there’s everywhere else.”

This is not to discredit the many other great cities of the world. In fact, my inspiration for this issue came from urban theorist Elizabeth Wilson—who wrote the two definitive texts about women in the city—in reference to London. Additionally, in the midst of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, Emma Staffaroni offers her insight on protest and mobilization gained from her time in Paris. And our resident girl-about-the-globe Kelly Banbury shares personal photos from Mexico City.

But let me be clear: this editor believes that New York is the quintessential “city” and I organized this issue accordingly. Perhaps it’s because deep down, in the United States at least, when we refer to “the city” we are almost always referring to some abstraction of NYC.

I am so proud of this issue—it has elements of everything that motivates me to keep moving forward in this great Xanadu: sociologist and writer Ryan Moore reviews Elizabeth Wilson’s groundbreaking books on women, fashion, and urbanity; Elizabeth Wilson, herself, takes on my Ten Questions; Historian Rona Holub previews her upcoming (and highly-anticipated) lecture at this year’s Researching New York Conference; meanwhile, I profile some of the best “Coming to New York” stories I’ve ever heard.

Additionally, Miss Reece is back with a gorgeous piece reflecting on public space in New York and the contradictions within it (polarizing socioeconomics, the male gaze, and white privilege); Brooklynite John Walker tackles the cultural supremacy of New York; and Jamie Agnello returns (by popular demand) with more Uptown-prep-school-drama inspired poetry.

So it is with much adoration that I welcome you to Re/Visionist’s City Issue. [It’s a good one. Promise.]

xx

Caroline

The City Issue:



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