Guardian Travel New York

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1943

A Tree Grows

This ny classic about a new woman growing up is an excellent evocation of Brooklyn together with immigrant experience.

"Johnny took Francie through to the roofing. She saw another globe. Maybe not far was the lovely span of the Williamsburg Bridge. Over the East River, like a fairy town made of gold cardboard, the skyscrapers loomed cleanly."
• Around Meserole Ave and Manhattan Ave, Williamsburg

Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin' Time, 2008

A Freewheelin' Time

Suze Rotolo's memoir of her very early 1960s life with Bob Dylan therefore the extraordinary amount of imaginative and governmental ferment in Greenwich Village.

"Greenwich Village – using its bohemian custom overtaken because of the hep cats of jazz while the music and subsequently the hip people group, which evolved into the hippie tradition with a psychedelic sound recording – had end up being the spot to be."
• Western 4th Street, Greenwich Village

Marshall Berman, Around Town, 2006

Around town

A fantastic illustrated trip of "the crossroads worldwide" catches 100 years of spectacle, both mythic and real.

"Ever since the opening of this instances Tower and also the IRT subway a century ago, into the winter of 1904-05, occasions Square was an amazing environment. Using Its huge crowds, multiple financial institutions of lights, layers of enormous indications, this destination was exceptional …"
• Days Square

Henry James, Washington Square, 1880

Washington Square

No one evokes the field of patrician Old New York better than Henry James within novel, emerge the neighbourhood in which he was created.

"the perfect of quiet as well as genteel retirement, in 1835, ended up being within Washington Square, where Doctor built himself a good looking, modern, wide-fronted home, with a huge balcony prior to the drawing-room windows, and a flight of white marble tips ..."
• Washington Square

Philippe Petit, To Attain the Clouds, 2003

To attain the Clouds

Philippe Petit recounts the day in 1974 as he illegally moved across a tightrope amongst the Twin Towers around the globe Trade Center.

"Wire and I collectively, we voluptuously penetrate the cloudy layer that melts once we approach, once we go involving the twin towers of brand new York City's World Trade Center. We walk on air that softens under each step of the process. We glide each base."
• Ground Zero

Toni Morrison, Jazz, 1992

Jazz

Harlem in 1920s, the administrative centre of Ebony The united states and jazz itself, is the setting for Toni Morrison's dazzling book.

"No matter what dilemmas of being winterbound into the City they endure them as it ended up being well worth almost anything to be on Lenox Avenue secure from fays therefore the things they think up; where pavements … are broader versus primary roadways of this towns where these were born."
• Lenox Avenue, Harlem

Teju Cole, Open City, 2011

Open City

Along the streets of Manhattan, a new Nigerian physician walks and offers a meditation on history and tradition, identity and solitude – a tour-de-force of place which has been compared to W G Sebald.

"within seconds of your going into the Upper Bay, we saw the Statue of Liberty, a faint green within the mist, then quickly huge and imposing over united states, a monument worth title, aided by the dense folds of her gown as stately as articles."
• Statue of Liberty

Joseph Mitchell, the base of the Harbour, 1959

The Bottom of the Harbour

One of America's biggest journalists describes and registers the seas of the latest York additionally the rivermen which work truth be told there.