Now I've seen some pretty immoderate opinions on this, and fairly considered ones as well; but for me to Identify a New Yorker, I have to put my foot down on this whole business of birth and the Romanticism of being born in the City as being your Forever Metrocard on the Subway of Acceptance, that those born outside New York but who claim it for their own can never be New Yorkers. If this were so, New York itself would be static, and not the City of Ebb and Flow as we adore it. New Yorkers make New York, all of them, out of their Participation and Commitment to the City as Citizens; the fellowship that united us within the City and within the Nation following September 11th will be made completely vain, the nobility of the City I love further lost, if we are so foolish together not to see what it is in New York that is a microcosm of the glory of being American.

My Dutch ancestors settled in New York when it was New Amsterdam in the 1600s. More than this, my great-grandmother came through Ellis Island to New York from outside of Oslo, Norway; my great-grandfather from Cork, Ireland. They settled in Woodside, Queens; my grandmother grew up there, and would work on the 83rd floor of the Empire State Building in Midtown Manhattan. She married a Polish New York detective who worked in Red Hook, and they moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; my mother and uncle grew up there, and my uncle would work with the Metropolitan Transit Authority on the New York subway. He was called in on September 11th to clear the tracks under the World Trade Center.

But I did not grow up in New York, not strictly. Though born in the West in Denver, Colorado it had no hold on my personality for how I left it in infancy; it is only a vague fact of my origin, and nearly unconnected with the rest of my life. I grew up in Rumson, New Jersey within the New York Metropolitan Area. Am I disqualified from being a New Yorker, am I Bridge-and-Tunnel then? This is absurd. New York City has always been marked for its inclusiveness, even as it has contradicted itself with impenetrable ethnic and economic enclaves, is a city of neighborhoods that have been paved and paved over again, a city that forgets itself in sleepiness (even the City that Never Sleeps must feel drowsy now and again) and remembers itself when suddenly jolted awake. Even the Twin Towers that have fallen, so emblematic now and forever of New York, were the epitome of this welcoming, enveloping spirit: twinned to forever represent the Interstate Compact made possible through the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Had this spirit not pervaded, there would be no bridges as we know them now, or tunnels, feeding new minds and new energy into the City and relieving it by taking them out again. Or should I quote the famous words given over to the Statue of Liberty?

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The twin cities at that time were Manhattan and Brooklyn, before the inclusive union of Greater New York in 1898, the poem written by Emma Lazarus in 1883. Let us not forget the Spirit that keeps New York alive and thriving in new, myriad ways. It is this animating principle that has made New York forever and ever the very animating engine, like a heart pumping, the very soul of these United States of America.