Growing up in suburban Chicago, Jonathan Liebson heard stories about the fabled New York City of his father's childhood: from the World's Fair to Mayor LaGuardia to the family-owned drugstore in Midtown. He eventually makes his own move to the Big Apple—not as a doctor, like his father, but as an aspiring writer and teacher. Soon, he forges his own indelible ties to the city and lives through important historical moments as profound as from his father's time.Home to some of the cou...

Raised in suburban Chicago, Jonathan Liebson grew up hearing fabled stories about his father's childhood in New York. The Manhattan and Queens of his father's past, and the Lower East Side of his immigrant grandfather, always shimmered in the background—until one day Jonathan finally moved there himself. This was right on the cusp of the twenty-first century: the dawn of a new millennium. The city raced headlong into an era of cellphones, the internet, and many other unpredictable changes....