Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photo: Francisco Collazo
**

Though it was published in 1949, E.B. White managed to observe New York timelessly in his lovely little 56-page book, Here is New York

There are so many observations that resonate with me, and one of them is White’s taxonomy of New Yorkers. As those of us who live here know, there are different kinds of New Yorkers: (1) the ones born and raised here, whose roots are so stubbornly planted here you couldn’t pay them to live anywhere else; (2) the commuters, who just experience New York during the day; and (3) those of us who moved here, those of us White refers to as “settlers.”

White recognized that each of these types of New Yorkers gives New York something. The “natives,” he says, give the city “solidity and continuity”; the commuters give it its “tidal restlessness”; and we settlers, well, we give the city a passion akin to the “intense excitement of first love,” each of us “absorb[ing] New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer….”

As I wrote the other day, those fresh eyes grow cloudy after a few years, as the city that was so exciting and so new becomes Chipotlicized and every corner has either a Starbucks, Duane Reade, or Chase Bank.

Sometimes, you just have to remember to look up.

A shop making and selling hand-rolled cigars on the second floor of a building near 34th Street