Looking inside Big Apple fascinates writer

NEW YORK — Colson Whitehead is in love — with New York City.

He remembers living on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side when only one bar was on it. He remembers the Upper West Side before a paved walk ran from the upper reaches of Riverside Park to the lower tip of Manhattan.

"Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there," Whitehead says.

More than anything, he appreciates the city's energy — the subway crowds during rush hour, the smell of Chinatown on a hot day.

The culmination of these observations is his third book, a collection of essays called, "The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Chapters." It's a slim, face-paced book not unlike E.B. White's "Here Is New York," which talks about Times Square, Coney Island, Broadway, The Port Authority and the Brooklyn Bridge in 1949.

"I think the way I structured the book I may have added a little bit of beauty," Whitehead says. "But I think I balanced out the exploration of the kind of moments that make the city beautiful with moments that when you just want to get out of town and flee because the misery is too much. I was trying to get both sides."

Whitehead, a 33-year-old native New Yorker, is sitting in an East Village bistro and talks about his beloved city while enjoying a plate of filet mignon and a glass of wine.

He writes about the New York he knows and says that no two versions of New York are the same. Even large landmarks are different to different people, which is what makes a place as massive as New York digestible. "I don't have a lot of street names in the book because my Broadway is my own and yours is yours."

The book is already garnering praise — at least in New York.

A reviewer for The New York Times wrote, "Navigating a chapter is a bit like walking through six blocks of Midtown at lunchtime: Everything conspires to slow you down, but you will have taken in more sensations than you could reasonably expect from such a distance anywhere else."

Whitehead grew up skipping from neighborhood to neighborhood around Manhattan. His favorite was 101st Street and West End Avenue, because of the grand buildings and the wonderful, manic pace. A few years after finishing Harvard University, he tried to live in San Francisco for about a year and half but soon came back home.

He and his wife, journalist Natasha Stovall, recently bought a house in Brooklyn. Whitehead finds this somewhat ironic because he said he was a self-proclaimed "Manhattan Snob" growing up and had only been in Brooklyn twice before moving to Brooklyn's Fort Greene section after graduating from college. Back then, he wrote a television column for The Village Voice, and Fort Greene was the hip, bohemian neighborhood of the day.