The posters are suggestions of a larger whole, a grand design that chews up people and swallows them, every day. New York is a huge city, the epitome of urban civilization. It's sick--sick with a cancer. Standing in the 23rd St. subway station at 2AM, alone, you feel the seconds slow down. Linear time betrays you. But then the train arrives, just in time. That feeling was a warning: come the dawn, you'd have been another face on a poster, another corpse in the river, except for the arrival of the train and the chance for escape it represents.

Dennis Detwiller, "Millenial NYC," from Delta Green, © 1997

TWELVE MILLION SOULS AT A GLANCE

New York City is the hub of a sprawling urban landscape that extends for miles in any direction, across the rivers north into upstate New York and Connecticut, west into New Jersey, and east into Long Island. The rivers border New York, the Hudson running along west of Manhattan Island, the East River running between Manhattan and Long Island, and the Verazano Narrows, between the rest of the City and Staten Island, emptying the Hudson and East Rivers into the ocean.

New York City is comprised of five boroughs. Manhattan sits at the center of the city, housing City Hall and most of the landmarks for which the City is famous. Brooklyn and Queens are the largest boroughs, each of them occupying a corner of the westernmost end of Long Island. The Bronx sits on the mainland just across the rivers from Manhattan and Long Island. Staten Island sits in the Verazano Narrows near New Jersey, linked to the rest of the city by the Verazano Narrows Bridge and constant ferry lines.

New York is home to countless cultures and subcultures of all nationalities, all bound together in neighborhoods and villages across each of the five boroughs: Little Italy lies adjacent to Chinatown in Manhattan, both nestled against City Hall and Police Plaza with Wall Street only blocks away; the graffitti-stained urban blocks of Brooklyn and Queens fade into tree-lined suburbs. The neighbors are not always peaceful. Crime is plentiful in a city so large and so closely-packed, and some crimes are sufficiently brutal, or so callously unavenged, to set an entire community into demonstrations or even violence.

For above all, New York, from its taxicab-choked downtown streets to the stained urban sprawl to the factories to the rumbling subways, is a political place. The city government is huge--the New York City Police Department includes over thirty thousand officers--and successive generations of more or less liberal administrations have seen the role of the government expand constantly into every area of life. The personal is indeed political. If an event of consequence happens in the city, there will be political consequences, and there will be political activists and leaders involved to seize whatever opportunity might present itself.

FOR MORE INFORMATION . . .

New York City
New York City Map
New York City Precinct Map
The New York Field Office of the FBI
The New York Insider