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Urbanitas is the product of news saturation, in which word-of-mouth is amplified by print, radio, television, the web, and other news media in a story that, for a brief moment, touches everyone in the big city. Wrapped up in the story, the city dweller identifies for the moment, not with the family or the block or the neighborhood, but with the city itself.

Photo: Martha Cooper

Steve Zeitlin is the founding director of City Lore in New York City.

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If truth be told, I hardly have time to read the paper anymore. I catch the news in snatches. I pick up free and secondhand newspapers. I ask my wife Amanda to give me highlights of her daily cover-to-cover read of the Times, and I hear stray bits of NPR from a coworker’s desk. I can read the paper upside down, held by the person sitting opposite me on a train, or backwards in the subway window’s reflection of the reader in front of me. I live in my own world, and I miss a lot, I know. Maybe I’m not that different from other New Yorkers who pick up the news in bits and snatches. But as for most of us New Yorkers who simply “osmose” the news, some urban moments break through, coming at us from every direction. On my car radio in January, I heard a 1010-WINS reporter ask, “Who cut the cheese? Fingers point to New Jersey.” Hearing the story, I was swept—like a stray, discarded paper—into a New York moment. Such urban moments seem citywide, a flash of news that draws most city dwellers into the fold, bringing out their New Yorkerness. During these moments, I feel not what anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas, which is a spirit of communion with one’s own community, but what might be termed urbanitas, a feeling of being part of a particular metropolis. Urbanitas is the product of news saturation, in which word-of-mouth is amplified by print, radio, television, the web, and other news media in a story that, for a brief moment, touches everyone in the big city. Wrapped up in the story, the city dweller identifies for the moment, not with the family or the block or the neighborhood, but with the city itself. The first few days of 2007 were a chronicle of urban moments, New York City–style. The Daily News called it the “Big Stink.” The Post: “New Jersey P.U. Ripens Apple.” On January 8, 6,500 calls went in to 911, twelve people went to emergency rooms in Manhattan, seven in New Jersey, as a result of an unusual smell. Once the odor subsided, the fun began, as New Yorkers drew on longstanding stereotypes to blame Jersey. The Post quoted Charles Sturcken of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection saying, “That’s where our noses and instruments tell us the smell was coming from.” Mayor Bloomberg was quoted as saying something like, “This gas shall pass.” On January 13, Don Singleton covered Jersey’s response in the Daily News: “’We should sue them, and sue them bad,’ Assemblyman Louis Manzo, a Jersey City Democrat, huffed yesterday as he recalled the many slights New Jersey has suffered, largely from New Yorkers.” Of course Singleton went on to make matters worse by citing some other rather folkloric indignities dumped on Jersey: mosquitoes the size of sparrows, smelly pig farms in Secaucus, and gangster burials in the Meadowlands. A few days earlier, on January 2, fifty-year- old Wesley Autrey, construction worker and navy veteran, earned the headline “Subway Superman,” when he left his two young daughters, Shuqui and Syshe, on the platform and jumped to the tracks to save New York University student Cameron Hollopeter. You needed to be a New Yorker to appreciate what it meant for Autrey to lay atop Hollopeter in the “trough between the tracks,” allowing the train to pass over them. I still stare at the tracks in awe that two people could squeeze themselves into such a tight space. After the train stopped above them, Hollopeter asked Autrey if he was dead. Autrey answered, “You are very much alive, but if you move, you’ll kill the both of us.” When Autrey arrived at work, his boss handed him a hero sandwich and told him to take the day off. Five stories appeared about the Subway Superman in the Times. Personal heroism continues to make a good story, in the hands of an epic bard or a news reporter. Some urban moments are comical, such as the silent protest by the Polar Bear Club, whose icy swims are covered by all the New York news media each January. This year, the group staged a moment of silence by the water’s edge to protest 72-degree weather, claiming global warming is killing this New York City tradition. Some urban moments might be sporting events, such as the Subway Series in New York, when the Mets and Yankees meet in the World Series. Still others are catastrophes such as September 11, which created, along with horrific tragedy, trauma, and hardship, a sense of urbanitas. Often during these urban moments, the distinction between news reports in the media and oral tradition breaks down, with the reporters becoming part of the chain of oral transmission, expressing emotion and passing along rumors like everyone else. (Facts are far from conclusive, for instance, as to whether Jersey actually “cut the cheese.”) When the blackout of 2003 occurred, creating another urban moment, it took New Yorkers about an hour to realize that terrorism was not the cause. Suddenly, a rather joyous sense of urbanitas washed over the city, as New Yorkers walked home together en masse across the Brooklyn Bridge as they had on 9/11—shouldering the Big Apple, each with his or her own story. Many brought grills out on the sidewalk to barbecue meat going bad in their refrigerators. I miraculously managed to find a taxi driver who was gallantly picking up passengers and letting them off, paying little or nothing, all the way up First Avenue. My wife picked up the phone and called Con Ed, imagining that her n’er-do- well husband had forgotten to pay the electric bill, and pleaded with the operator to please turn her power back on. “Lady,” he replied, “there’s a blackout all across the city and throughout the Northeast!”

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