Biography
I live in New York City, where I was born, the granddaughter of four Jewish immigrants who landed here in the beginning of the last century. I'm a baby boomer who grew up in a lovely Long Island suburb. But I was always drawn to the city. The edginess of New York in the '50s and '60s fascinated me. Years later, when I read Jane Jacobs's masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I felt like she'd fit together the pieces of a puzzle for me. In the most beautiful American prose ever written, Jacobs taught me that cities, no matter how chaotic or beset with problems, have an underlying beauty.
I love all cities, but most of all I love New York because of my deep connection to it, and the warmth it extends towards immigrants. When I began my writing career, I didn't plan to be an urban historian. My beat chose me when I read Jane Jacobs, and wrote her bio.
I didn't become a writer until I was 40, when I began reporting for local newspapers, and then went on to journalism school at Columbia University. Before that, I taught high school Latin and French. I have a Ph.D. in Classics. Yes, really! It seemed a natural progression, from reading the ancient authors in Latin and Greek to doing journalism. From the sublime to the immediate. It's all, ultimately, about the same thing: storytelling.