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questions about some of the most intimate moments in their lives. Their willingness to make their stories public, I discovered, often had nothing to do with vanity. Several saw their first encounters as an affirmation of the everyday miracle that is New York. Others said they simply wanted to set something beautiful in the world.
    Surveys show that even with the rise in Internet dating, most people still meet their partners through their circle of friends. In one recent study, just 6 to 9 percent of married people reported meeting their spouses in a public place, though what share of those meetings were chance encounters is impossible to tell. Still, there is an undeniable poetry to love born of chance. And for such a chance, there remains a stubborn yearning. To find believers, you need look no further than the “Missed Connections” or “I Saw You” listings that fill the back pages of newspapers and websites.
    In Shakespeare’s As You Like It , Rosalind says of the chemistry between her sister and Orlando’s brother, “No sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved.”
    For many of us, such meetings will never overspill the banks of fantasy. Then there are the few—might it be you?—with the luck, or sense, to be in exactly the right place.

A Note on Method
    To write these stories, I conducted hours of interviews with each of the couples. In most cases, I first spoke with husband and wife separately, by phone, to capture the start of relationships from each spouse’s point of view. In some cases, I also talked with friends and relatives to help flesh out parts of the story. Then I visited each couple in person—trips that took me to California, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, and across New York. Most of the couples were unflinchingly generous, sharing not just the details of their lives but photos, notebooks, newspaper clippings, letters, drawings, timelines, and diaries. I complemented the interviews with library research on New York City architecture and history and with extended visits, with a camera and notepad, to the places where the couples met.
    In the interviews, I pressed the couples for details of conversations during their first meetings. I asked about their thoughts and feelings at turning points in their stories and about their broader values, fears, and aspirations. I also wanted the specifics of key scenes: what places looked and smelled and sounded like. In some cases, however, many years had passed since the events. Where memory fell short of perfect, I allowed myself to imagine plausible dialogue and minor scenic detail. In every instance the imagined dialogue or detail was an outgrowth of what I knew of the couples, the places they inhabited and their times. In the interest of bringing these stories to life and deepening their larger meanings, I permitted myself this small artistic license.

    For reasons of privacy, couples were given the option of changing their names. Three of the nine chose to do so; the use of pseudonyms in those cases is noted in the postscripts at the end of the book. The names of minor characters in some of the stories were changed.

Green
    CENTRAL PARK
    The 843 acres of winding paths, rolling meadows, and water at the heart of Manhattan offer an illusion of unspoilt wilderness—of an island before the invasion of bricks and people and concrete. But in truth, Central Park is as man-made as the surrounding city. It is not an original landscape, but the painstaking articulation of a social philosophy: that a city riven by economic stratification owed its masses an oasis from the ravages of toil. “It is one great purpose of the Park,” wrote Frederick Law Olmsted, its chief designer, “to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God’s handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost,