New York is a city that looks better from a distance. The gap can be temporal – the poverty of youth becomes, in time, one’s golden freedom – or spatial. A friend from Chicago complained that Manhattan lacked alleyways: in the summer, our garbage stunk and burned on the sidewalks. On the Brooklyn Bridge, the smell disappears, and all you can see are buildings massed at the edge of the island, the offices crowned with lights, glowing like bottles in a dark bar. The boundaries of other cities blur – at what point do the sprawling lights become suburb? – but Manhattan is an island, cut cleanly against the night. As pure image, New York is flawless: tidy, discrete, simple to hold in your mind, and for this reason particularly easy to romanticize. Emblem, icon, colophon: its skyline stands for a story.