What, indeed, is a New Yorker?
Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish?
He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them.
Something has been added to him which he had not had before.
He is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood.
He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...
The change he undergoes is unmistakable.
New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron.
Those who are cast into it are born again.
Charles Whibley, American Sketches
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