“Thus he was able to design The Sun to be, if not a perfect instrument, then something rather close. On Printing House Square in lower Manhattan, at the quadripartite junction of Dark Willow, Breasted, Tillinghast, and Pine streets, it had been placed near the center of government, for the political news; the wharves, for the collection of foreign dispatches; the Five Points, for crime; the Bowery, for theater and music; and Brooklyn (via the ferry, until they finished the bridge), for human interest. “In those days,” Harry Penn was fond of saying, “they thought that the only human interest was in Brooklyn. ‘We need a human interest story,’ someone would say. ‘Get a kid and send him to Brooklyn.’ I used to point out that there were human beings in Manhattan, too. They didn’t really believe me. Off I would go to Brooklyn, searching desperately for a human interest story, which, more often than not, would be about a cow.”

Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin — published in 1983

You don’t say.

(via gumplr)

Yet another reason this is the most true book about NYC ever written.

Notes

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