MY First New York

Today marks the release of My First New York, which features "candid accounts of coming to New York by more than 50 of the most remarkable people who have called the city home" from New York Magazine.

I can't WAIT to read this...and it inspired me to share my own "early adventures in the big city."

I moved to New York from Alabama three months after graduating from college. Talk about a fish out of water! I had only ever been to NYC twice before...and one of those visits was for my job interview.

I arrived on the Saturday before Thanksgiving 1997, so, naturally, I didn't return home for the holiday. My then-boyfriend and I headed down to see the Macy's parade in person, but the weather was really cold and windy that day, so we didn't stay very long. In fact, that was the year the Cat in the Hat float caused that horrible accident.

We had "Thanksgiving" lunch in Chinatown, and the waiter recommended the house specialty, salt and pepper prawns...with the shells on. I remember balking at eating the shrimp without peeling them, and the waiter insisted, coaxing that it was "good for the nails, and good for the teeth." As everyone else I knew was eating turkey that day, I remember feeling very cosmopolitan.

As overwhelmed as I often felt those first few weeks, I always felt the sensation that I was where everything in the world was going on, a 22-year-old's perception of being in the epicenter of the universe. And, in the two years of my residence, while I became adept at living there, I never lost that initial feeling of awe for the city.

Here's My First New York in pictures:

My apartment building

I lived on the Upper East Side, on 77th Street
between 1st and 2nd Avenue

I worked for Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
Our office backed up to Rockefeller Plaza.

I was the editorial assistant to the editorial director of Pocket.

Here is where all said assisting was done.