City Slickers

Discusses the influential and powerless, the unusual and the common, native New Yorkers and tourists, and the others who give the city its character.
Reprint. Originally published: New York : Times Books, c1987.

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Geist covered New York for four years, documenting the loosely organized chaos that typifies life in America's eccentric city. For both local readers and for those outside New York in what Geist calls 'mainland America', here are New Yorkers at their best and most revealing. To get it right, he got up at 5am to trail the walker of 23 dogs, and stayed up until 5am with a socially powerful doorman at New York's hottest dance club. He took notes while riding horseback with a cop on 42nd street, pedaling a bike with the city's messenger corps, sitting on an exercise machine at the status conscious vertical club, and swaying on aluminium scaffolding eyeball to eyeball with the Statue of Liberty.