Eliot Pierce

My friend Cynthia gave me a copy of The Bronx is Burning when I left The Times last August.

I loved this book — Jonathan Mahler paints a portrait of New York in the summer of 1977 that involves Reggie Jackson, The Son of Sam, Ed Koch, Bella Abzug, George Steinbrenner and Mario Cuomo.

I missed this book when it first came out, and also had never even heard of the ESPN mini-series that came out of it. This book is not just about baseball but is rather about urbanity at its rawest… and makes me happy to live in the New York of 2012 rather than that of 1977.

Torrey’s father Peter sent me a copy of E.B. White’s Here is New York that I read this week on the subway. I first read it probably 20 years ago, and found that it still holds up so incredibly well 64 years after it was written in the summer of 1948. While many of the places have closed, others have opened in their place as Roger Angell so beautifully writes in his introduction to his step-father’s essay 50 years later.

But I was particularly struck by what I found on the third to last page:

“The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.”

I don’t recall reading this quotation anywhere over the course of the last 11 years, since the World Trade Center fell over 11 years ago, but it is just one more example of how this little book captured the essence of New York in 1948 and for many years to come.