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certainly embellish a plan, whatever may be their effects to convenience and utility.” In the end, they decided that “they could not but bear in mind that a city is to be composed principally of the habitations of men, and that straight-sided, right-angled homes are the most cheap to build, and the most convenient to live in. The effect of these plain and simple reflections was decisive.”
    Because the city was ringed by water, they reasoned, residents would have plenty of fresh air. So why waste precious space on parks or public squares?
    But by the mid-nineteenth century, as New York became the country’s most populous city and its financial stronghold, its elite clamored for equal footing with the grand capitals of Europe. Great cities, they saw, needed great public spaces. Civic leaders and philanthropists pressed. Soon, a pantheon of visionaries built: Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, Whitney Warren, Richard Morris Hunt, Stanford White, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and Ignaz Anton Pilat. Before long, the grid sprouted one of the country’s most impressive collections of landmarks and public spaces: Central Park, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, Washington Square Park. I was drawn to these places not just for their outstanding design. It was also that, in a city determined to remake itself every few years, these places were survivors. Over a yearlong search, I tracked down couples who had met by chance in each of those seven places and in two others—the subway and the street—that I saw as cornerstones of New York’s public landscape. The couples’ stories are this book’s heart.
    Olmsted was rhapsodizing about his newly built Central Park and Prospect Park in an address to social scientists in 1870, but he might as well have been talking about any of New York’s extraordinary public places. Inside, he said, you will find people
“with an evident glee in the prospect of coming together, all classes largely represented, with a common purpose, not at all intellectual, competitive with none, disposing to jealousy and spiritual or intellectual pride toward none, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each. You may thus often see vast numbers of persons brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile.”
    These places not only bind people of widely different circumstances. They also hurry heartbeats and flood veins with adrenaline. Lean from the wind-lashed observatory atop the Empire State Building and look down, your stomach dropping, at a city becalmed. Steam across New York Harbor until the sheer mass of the Statue of Liberty overhangs you, upsetting every sense of earthly proportion. Wade into the permanent sunshine of Times Square at midnight and lose yourself, for a moment, in the madness of crowds. And pleasure? It is everywhere. It is in the sight of Alice of Wonderland in Central Park, and in the voices of folk singers in Washington Square Park. It is in the flutter of whispers along the arch at Grand Central Terminal, and in the sanctuary hush of the back galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    People. Adrenaline. Pleasure. The makings of attraction are all there.

    THE COUPLES in this book hail from across America and the world. Most don’t live in New York City. Some never did. What mattered to me was that they met there, in one of its iconic public places. Each of the nine stories begins just before that chance meeting—when they are strangers, oblivious to how, in moments, their lives will irrevocably change. The stories, each a separate chapter, span from the early 1940s to the present. A look at where the couples are now appears in a set of postscripts at the end of the book.

    I am deeply indebted to the couples for their good humor and patience with what must have seemed like an onslaught of