No one “wins” New York. Ha, ha

God, you didn’t move to play make-believe, did you?

Complaining is the only right you have as a New Yorker.

If New York were a cat, it would eat your face after you collapsed in the kitchen from a heart attack.

The plan you don’t plan for isn’t the plan you planned but it’s usually more original.

You will lose. Everyone loses.

Money only buys two things: lavish self-deceptions and comfortable suffering.

That your rent is a tumor in the guts of your bank account.

New York’s indifference to your plight makes you strong. Fall to your knees and thank New York for making you strong.

Just avoid people who smile too much. Especially when smiling is not the appropriate emotional response to a situation.

Just avoid people who smile too much. Especially when smiling is not the appropriate emotional response to a situation.

New York isn’t your fantasy. You’re the fantasy in New York’s imagination. One day the fever will break and every New Yorker will immediately cease to be.

It’s cold. You’re broke. Dad’s dead. It hurts.

Money is Jesus.

Isn’t that why you moved to New York? To be original?

New York’s indifference to your plight makes you strong. Fall to your knees and thank New York for making you strong.

New York City does not lie. Its honesty is the only thing that makes this cold chunk of over-developed concrete special.

Since the Revolution, Americans had • stressed that what made a republic great was the character and spirit of its people. The ultimate threat of the confidence man was thus his power to subvert the American republican experiment.

They,insinuate themselves into his confidence and friendship."

to a poison, a disease, a source of contamination and corruption. The impressions made by wicked companions were "like poison, taken into the physical system, and will be sure, sooner or later, to reveal its bitter results."

Malleable and confiding by natu;e, the youth proved easy prey

evil comes to them as an enticement."1

Ever since the Great Awakening, the official power and prestige of the American clergy had be~n in a state of decline. With the coming of the American Revoluuon, and espe-cially by the nineteenth century, ministers--l,.~~ ?egun to sh?re up their failing status by claiming major responsibility for formu~g the character of the rising generation in the young republic. 88 But m the confidence man, they found what they perceived to b~ a serious competitor for the power to shape the character of Amencan Y?uth.

young man had just set foot in the city when he was approached by a confidence man seeking to dupe and destroy him. Why did this archetypal villain pop out of the shadows just as the American youth entered the city in search of fame and fortune?

There is the seducer in the shape of the young man who came before him, and who has already lost the last remains of shame. Th

the total enslavement of his victim.

liml!la.i

Although the term confidence man does not appear in the advice manuals, it accurately identifies the villain of the piece. The seducer-whether rake or pimp, gambler or, thief-begins his as-sault on the innocent youth by winning his confidence through an offer of friendship and entertainment.

All the major elements of eighteenth-century republican ideology-the struggle between liberty and power, the danger of corruption and decay, the ultimate threat of tyranny and enslavement-were present in the nineteenth-century confidence game. In it, the passive liberty of tμe American youth falls victim to the self-aggrandizing power of the confidence man.

In the confi-dence game, an impressionable youth fell under the power of a villain who corrupted his character, enticed him into a life of vice, and finally reduced him to slavery.

rustic hero entered [the city] to seek fame and fortune."

unprecedented numbers of young men were leaving their rural homes and families to seek work in the booming cities

The figure of the confidence man was not entirely new within American success mythology. A century before he made his appear-ance in the antebellum advice manuals, he had approached Ben Franklin in the person of Governor Keith of Philadelphia, who falsely promised to set up the naive youth as the colony's printer

Although the term confidence man does not appear in the advice manuals, it accurately identifies the villain of the piece. The seducer-whether rake or pimp, gambler or, thief-begins his as-sault on the innocent youth by winning his confidence through an offer of friendship and entertainment. In the classic antebellum tale of seduction, he then leads the youth into a gorgeous theater-the seducer's natural habitat, for he himself is a skilled actor. He takes him to a fashionable club where he coaxes his prey into accepting his fatal first drink and gradually draws him into a card game. Finally, he lures his victim to a brothel where, if the theater and the alcohol and the gambling have failed to win him to a life of vice, illicit sexuality succeeds. The youth's character has been destroyed, step by fatal step, because he has been tricked into offering his confidence to a man without principle, a man whose art it'is to deceive others through false appearances.

the youth's urban companion. He was the stranger who approached the young man just entering--the city, at the precise moment when all familial and communal re-straints were falling away. The urban stranger began his confidence game with an offer of friendship:

But nineteenth-century advice writers added a significant new dimension to this powerful image.

broke away from traditional re-straints on their conduct,

The youth's character has been destroyed, step by fatal step

The moment the inexperienced youth sets his foot on the side-walk of the city, he is marked and watched by eyes that he never dreamed of.

hlstrom,

I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name "Debbi Lynn" or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.

nformed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysteri-ous 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.

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every comer lay something curious and interest-ing, something I had never before seen or done or known

could taste th~ peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later-because I did not belong there,

I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.

I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the mo-ment it ctually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen t on a cockroach on the tile floor.

I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.

"New faces," he said finally, "don't tell me about new faces." It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised "new faces," there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.

I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself.

Ir 1s EASY to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

minutiae

I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

"but where is the school-girl whp used to be me," and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that.

You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurre~ to me that I was living a real life there.

"New faces," he said finally, "don't tell me about new faces."

In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later,

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

I stopped believing in new faces and began to under-stand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair

There were. years when I called Los Angeles "the Coast,'' but they seem a long time ago.