Author’s New York state of mind

NEW YORK —  Colson Whitehead is in love -- with New York City.

He remembers living on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side when only one bar was on it. He remembers the Upper West Side before a paved walk ran from the upper reaches of Riverside Park to the lower tip of Manhattan.

“Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there,” Whitehead says.

More than anything, he appreciates the city’s energy -- the subway crowds during rush hour, the smell of Chinatown on a hot day.

The culmination of these observations is his third book, a collection of essays called, “The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Chapters.” It’s a slim, fast-paced book not unlike E.B. White’s “Here Is New York,” which talks about Times Square, Coney Island, Broadway, the Port Authority and the Brooklyn Bridge in 1949.

“I think the way I structured the book I may have added a little bit of beauty,” Whitehead says. “But I think I balanced out the exploration of the kind of moments that make the city beautiful with moments that when you just want to get out of town and flee because the misery is too much. I was trying to get both sides.”

Whitehead, a 33-year-old native New Yorker, is sitting in an East Village bistro and talks about his beloved city while enjoying a plate of filet mignon and a glass of wine.

He writes about the New York he knows, and says that no two versions of New York are the same. Even large landmarks are different to different people, which is what makes a place as massive as New York digestible. “I don’t have a lot of street names in the book because my Broadway is my own and yours is yours.”

The book is already garnering praise -- at least in New York.

A reviewer for the New York Times wrote, “Navigating a chapter is a bit like walking through six blocks of Midtown at lunchtime: Everything conspires to slow you down, but you will have taken in more sensations than you could reasonably expect from such a distance anywhere else.”

Whitehead grew up skipping from neighborhood to neighborhood around Manhattan. His favorite was 101st Street and West End Avenue, because of the grand buildings and the wonderful, manic pace. A few years after finishing Harvard University, he tried to live in San Francisco for about a year and half, but soon came back home.

He and his wife, journalist Natasha Stovall, recently bought a house in Brooklyn. Whitehead finds this somewhat ironic because he said he was a self-proclaimed “Manhattan Snob” growing up and had only been in Brooklyn twice before moving to Brooklyn’s Fort Greene section after graduating from college. Back then, he wrote a television column for the Village Voice, and Fort Greene was the hip, bohemian neighborhood of the day.

“The Colossus of New York” came to fruition shortly after Whitehead finished writing his second novel about two years ago called “John Henry Days,” the story of a journalist named J. Sutter who makes his way through life by freeloading off of media junkets. He was still “on” creatively and was looking for an outlet for some of his energy. He had always been a roamer, and he started putting together essays about different areas that appealed to him.

In the chapter about the subway, he writes, “Straphanging is actually an antiquated term. It’s all metal now, swiveling commas, poles in perpendicular arrangements. But they still hang, still droop, dangle on curled fingers. Feet next to feet. The pole is sickeningly warm God forbid moist from previous fingers.”

He emphasized that even though he addresses some things that are uniquely New York, such as walking through Times Square, he hopes that the book translates easily to other cities.

“I use New York to talk about home,” he says. “But the ideas in ‘Colossus’ could be transferred to other cities. The story about Central Park is really about the first day of spring in any park. The Coney Island chapter is really about beaches and summer and heat waves.”

The project was also a welcome break from the long-term process of his novels. In 1999, Whitehead published “The Intuitionist,” the story of Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector who gets mixed up in scandal when an elevator goes into free fall and it is blamed on her.

The book earned him a Whiting Award for young writers with exceptional promise. Three years later came “John Henry Days” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly after, Whitehead won a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship.

Whitehead now writes at home and occasionally teaches at Columbia University and the University of Houston. Walking is the only exercise he gets, and like so many New Yorkers, he doesn’t drive.

He has a third novel slated to come out in the spring. After that, he’s not sure what’s in store for him.

“I love getting out of the Q train at Union Square,” Whitehead says. “It’s such a mix of people, like a party. There’s always an errand you can do along there, whether it’s picking up contacts or buying poker chips.”