Heart of the City (43 page)

One or two couples in the book heard about my project and contacted me. But most I found through a relentless dragnet for compelling stories. I owe a few people a thousand thanks for helping to identify candidates for the book. Mike Holtzclaw, entertainment critic for the
Daily Press
of Newport News, Virginia, tracked down a terrific couple he’d briefly mentioned in a long-ago column. Ryan Brenizer, a phenomenal New York City photographer, put me in touch with a beautiful couple whose wedding he had just shot. Just when I was despairing of finding any couples who’d met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lily Koppel, a fellow writer, offered up her charming parents.

I appreciated the hard work and dedication of two New York- based research interns in the summer of 2009, Amanda Martinez and Anthony Martin. Though still in college, they tirelessly worked the phones, the blogosphere, and their feet to hunt down leads. Thanks very much to Laura Harris and Ellen Locker, librarians, respectively, of the
New York Post
and
New York Daily News
, for letting me rummage through their newspapers’ clip files. Thanks as well to Jonathan Pace of the New York Public Library, and to staff at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I am grateful, too, to Laura Katz Smith, a curator at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, who miraculously turned up a copy of the spring 1951 schedule of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad line.

My agent, Andrew Blauner, believed in the book from day one, and his enthusiasm was wind at my back. Thanks very much
to the team at Da Capo Press and especially my editor, Renée Sedliar, a poet with an eye for detail and an ear for the subtleties of language.

I thank my wife, Meg, and my children, Seth and Phoebe, who endured more absences than I would have liked. And thanks to my mother and father, whose own love story was the inspiration for this book. If my first book was a tribute to my father, this one is an homage to my mother, Stephanie, and her family’s roots in New York City.

Most of all, I have to thank the couples who gave so much of their time and their hearts to this project. And that includes those remarkable couples whose stories I am so sorry I could not fit in this book. Though most didn’t know me from Adam, they gamely took my first cold call and eventually spent hours on the phone, over e-mail, and in person answering what must have seemed like a barrage of questions about some of the most intimate moments in their lives. For their patience and trust, I am profoundly grateful. They did it not for themselves, I saw, but so that the world—and the cause of love—might be in some way richer for their stories.

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Copyright © 2011 by Ariel Sabar

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sabar, Ariel.
Heart of the city : nine stories of love and serendipity
on the streets of New York / Ariel Sabar.—1st Da Capo
Press ed.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-306-81944-5

1. Love—New York (State)—New York. 2. Love
stories. 3. Environmental psychology. I. Title.
BF575.L8S313 2011
947.7_10430922—dc22
[B]
2010029916

 

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