Come on! The Met. You can time travel, hop continents, see art that stuns you, and then take a walk through Central Park. What’s more New York than that?

Too many to choose one, so I’ll give you two. Born New Yorker Cassandra Jenkins’s 2024 album My Light, My Destroyer has all the beauty, poetry, longing, and rhythm of a soundtrack for those first fall days when cool north winds blow off the Hudson. The other is more of a mood, energy, and sensibility: the 1989 song Start Today by Gorilla Biscuits. I remember hearing this anthemic New York hardcore masterpiece over the sound system at a punk show when I was a kid in high school in St. Louis. Someone had to tell me who they were. I wanted to know where they were from. 

Without a doubt, Darryl Pinckney’s 2022 Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street Manhattan. It’s a story of Pinckney’s apprenticeship and friendship with the titan Elizabeth Hardwick in New York’s literary and art worlds of the 1970s and ‘80s. But, more importantly, the memoir crisscrosses different New Yorks, affirming that it is the multiplicity of experiences—and difference itself—that makes New York great. 

It’s not exactly a film, but Nan Goldin’s essential and ever-changing slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, initiated in the late 1970s, feels like New York’s home movie—simultaneously personal, insular, and relatable. Nan never makes you feel like you missed out and should have been there; she makes you want to make your own New York as passionate as hers. 

I love David Hammons’s 2014-21 Day’s End, the artist’s homage to Gordon Matta-Clark that sits on the Gansevoort Peninsula right across from the Whitney. Taking its outline and site from the long-gone Pier 52, it’s a monument that is also just a sketch, open to the world and everything around it. It’s a goodbye to a New York that was, and a greeting to the one that still will be.