Most of us are not native New Yorkers. For some, our first home was in Houston, not off Houston; The Strand was a busy thoroughfare, not a used book labyrinth; Dakota was North or South, not a 5-room or 10-room apartment; Gray's Papaya was some dude’s fruit, not a local hot dog joint; and Manhattan was just a mean cocktail, not a rival borough. But this city of many lives and innumerable stories, forever stands as a magnet for those who harbor a zest to create, to succeed, to just be in this great city along with their peers and idols, taking the gamble of a lifetime.

On July 25, 1964, Andy Warhol, who hailed from Pittsburgh and had already lived in New York for 15 years, filmed the top half of the Empire State Building from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m. The resulting footage was Empire, which, slowed from 24 to 16 frames per second, lulls viewers with eight uninterrupted, unrelenting, unadorned static hours of New York’s tallest and most iconic skyscraper. Warhol said the project was imagined "to see time go by." But the experience of watching the grainy black and white structure is more than that as it conjures memories, thoughts, and emotions from each viewer about quintessential New York. And the image luminous, calm, majestic inhales that raw energy, folding it into its own time and history. The true empire of New York, the footage attests, is its role as an enduring palimpsest; its soil and infrastructure as a canvas for its inhabitants.

Impossible to encapsulate, New York is a breeding ground for all art, continually morphing with the people who wash up here, shlepping their suitcases of experiences, ideas, and aspirations. While Warhol gave us an epic, in this issue of Collectanea*, we present snapshots of lives out on our city streets: Voris’s poetic call to the five boroughs, Gelfand's nostalgia for a classic New York long gone and gentrified, Hunt’s homage to New York ambition, Ashlock’s personal account of his grandfather's days in the Soho art boom, Schwartz’s uncle struggling in a hallucinated city, and Heimer’s Salinger-esque romp. We hope you enjoy reading and hearing these New York stories from writers who hail from different states and corners, but who are all New Yorkers by association, will, and zip code.