I fell in love with this book at once. In addition to being about my favorite city in the world – as long as I get away for at least a week every few months – I love the styling, and the story, and the illustrations.

It is, as is clear from the title, about New York City. New York, Sasek announces, “is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere and it is full of the Biggest Things.” The tallest buildings that stretch from the bottom of the page to the top; the biggest cars stretch across the bottom of two pages.

Published in 1960, many of the illustrations in this book hold things that are no longer true about New York: paying your fare on the bus is no longer like “putting your pennies in a piggy bank”; there is no longer a tunnel that takes trains into a building – that’s now the Highline walking park; you can no longer buy “almost everything” from a vending machine; the Giants no longer play at Yankee Stadium; New York is no longer the biggest port in the world; even “the biggest store in the world” is rumored to be selling off pieces of itself as condominiums (and is now a horrible place to shop, horrible, I’m sorry to say, John). A nice list at the back of the book updates the statistics quoted throughout the book.

But most of the things Sasek talks about in the book are still true about New York: people still like to stop and gawk at the buildings; children still play in the streets in some neighborhoods; “the greatest humidity and heat attack New York in the summer” still; and electrical cables still burn out when everyone turns on their air conditioners at once, despite the orange and white chimneys designed to release the underground heat; the U.N. still meets here – they close off my street when the general assembly meets, and set up tents for the secret service and others who keep attendees safe; and you can still shop in any language. In fact Queens is the most diverse neighborhood in the U.S. with 47.2% of its residents having been born in another country and you can hear over 100 different languages as you walk the streets.

That is one of the things that my niece, now a college student, who grew up in a very small town out West, loved when she came to visit for the 2nd time recently (the first time she visited, she was maybe 8): that you could walk down the street and hear people speaking so many different languages.

And that’s what drew me, when I first came to visit when I was in high school. Not the biggest buildings and the biggest cars, or the crowds of people, or the bright lights of Times Square: but the diversity. Walking down the street, I could see people wearing clothes and speaking languages and eating foods from all over the world.

It was intoxicating.

And this beautiful children’s book captures that intoxication perfectly.