The following is excerpted from The Nation Guide to the Nation by Richard Lingeman and the editors of The Nation, with an introduction by Victor Navasky and Katrina vanden Heuvel, with illustrations by Ed Koren.

Frances Fitzgerald

I’m a New Yorker, born and bred, and there are so many places I love in the city I can’t even count  them. But if I had to choose my favorite place, it would have to be Grand Central Station. To me, its main concourse ranks with the Parthenon, the nave of Chartres Cathedral, and the courtyards of the Forbidden City in Beijing, as one of the great man-made spaces in the world (and one of the few made for entirely secular purposes). Flanked by anonymous skyscrapers and crowded streets, it’s a huge surprise in the city. A half million people pass through it every day, yet its majestic height and its perfect proportions give it an extraordinary serenity. People hurrying to work or rushing to their trains rarely look up, but we all feel its influence because, though our paths cross from every angle, we don’t collide or exchange angry words, as we might in the subways or the streets. The space can’t be photographed, much as tourists try. It’s a presence. And when I look up, I feel a sense of elation.

-- Frances Fitzgerald is author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fire in the Lake, Cities on a Hill, America Revised, and other books.


Dan Wakefield

My favorite American place is Lilly’s Apple Orchard in Indianapolis. In the fall, when the leaves go to gold and the orange pumpkins are fat in the fields, a cup of the rich brown cider at Lilly’s Orchard will soothe the soul more truly than all the Prozac manufactured by Eli’s famous family business.  The place inspired my first published fiction (“Autumn Full of Apples,” in The Best American Stories of 1966), which tells how my high school friends and I climbed the orchard’s iron fences on moonlit nights and illegally picked the apples we ate (all the sweeter for being stolen). If any of my high school friends remain to do the job—and are still able to climb the fence—I’ve assigned them to scatter my ashes beneath those trees.

-- Dan Wakefield has written many articles and several novels, including Under the Apple Tree and Going All the Way. His most recent book is The Hijacking of Jesus.


Donald Hall

When I visit big American cities, I like Portland, Oregon, the best. It has the greatest bookstore in the United States, Powell’s, and a lively, somewhat raw feeling in the streets. My favorite place is where I live [Dunhill, New Hampshire]. This is an old farmhouse, nothing fancy whatsoever, with floors that undulate. My great- grandparents lived here, and it stopped being a farm in 1950, when my grandfather had a heart attack. My grandmother lived on until she was ninety-seven and Jane and I moved in the year she died in 1975. The original Cape was built in 1803. When my great-grandfather moved in, in 1865, he had a big family and extended the house back into Ragged Mountain and built a barn on the upward slope. Early on we added bookshelves and a usable bathroom, then, after ten years of woodstoves, central heating. I love the natural world around me, and spend a lot of time enjoying it. I am a solitary and I like the sparse population. I can see one house from where I live— and my assistant lives there. My telephone seldom rings and there are few callers. I work here all alone— my wife, Jane Kenyon, died in 1995—and read and watch the Boston Red Sox in season. Doing poetry readings, I do travel all over the country and during this coming year will visit literary festi- vals in Mexico, Spain and Ireland. Maybe these travels make possible my pleasure in solitude.

-- Donald Hall was Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006. His most recent book is White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946–2006.  The One Day won a National Book Critics Circle Award and The Happy Man won a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.


Roger Wilkins

Washington, D.C., has been my home for the better part of the last forty-five years. When I came here as a quivering thirty-year-old to join the administration of John F. Kennedy, I could never pass within the sight of the Capitol or the White House without gawking. Now as a seventy-five-year-old who has experienced the Nixon, Reagan and Bush II presidencies, who remembers Eastland of Mississippi, Ellender of Louisiana, Talmadge of Georgia and Duke Cunningham and Robert Ney, formerly of the House of Representatives, and Jack Abramoff, formerly of K Street, I still look at iconic Washington with a substantial dollop of awe in my soul. I don’t see the buildings and monuments as symbols of civics-book democracy but rather of the stumbling efforts of a substantial number of decent human beings to govern themselves honorably. I remember great moments, of course—the Cuban Missile Crisis, managed brilliantly out of the White House while all of the chips were on the table; Kennedy sending a civil rights bill to Congress in one of the last months of his life, and Lyndon Johnson driving that bill and the Voting Rights Act through the Congress—-along with antipoverty legislation—-even as he was smearing his legacy with Vietnam. But mainly I think of the young people who come each and every year to bring their ideals to this city and throw themselves into the churning stew of America’s aspirational politics. I find it thrilling when a former student of mine does it and ecstasy when—as in two instances—my children do it.

-- Roger Wilkins is professor of history, George Mason University; former editor at the New York Times and the Washington Post, where he shared the Pulitzer Prize for Watergate reporting. He was chairman and publisher of the NAACP’s journal Crisisand is author of Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism.
 

Howard Zinn

Selma, Alabama, is my favorite place. I remember it for an inspiring moment in November of 1963 when the black citizens of Dallas County jammed into a church the night before they were to defy police and state troopers in an attempt to register to vote, and we all listened to the Selma Freedom Chorus raise the spirit of the crowd to the heavens.

-- Howard Zinn is the author of A People's History of the United States of America and other books


Studs Terkel

Chicago is, of course, my favorite city. Nelson Algren said of it: “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” It is the home of labor battles royal.  Here it was the eight-hour day became part of the world’s vocabulary. Four men were hanged in an obscene, farcical trial. Yet—we finally achieved. The Republic Steel Massacre on Memorial Day, 1937. It was during a picnic that Chicago cops shot ten picnickers in the back. Yet, steel was organized. The Newspaper Guild’s most important victory was cinched at the Hearst Herald-Examiner.What is lacking today is the old Chicago spirit. With older workers out of a job, due to automation used against the have-nots and have- somewhats, Chicago’s god is Janus, the two-headed one. Jane Addams, Al Capone, Samuel Insull; Mayor Harold Washington versus the hacks who sabotaged his every effort on behalf of the working folks. There is an increasing number of the young who form organizations for Peace, Civil Rights and whatever sanity our society has left. Riccardo’s was the great restaurant—here it was writers, actors, activists of old stripe gathered. It was Riccardo who broke the Loop color line. The role Humphrey Bogart played in Casablanca was really our Riccardo; that he was called Rick was a happy accident. And, of course, the lobby of the Wells-Grand Hotel where the arguments were definite and idiomatically eloquent. Finally, there was Bughouse Square, with its soapbox orators, who caused us to laugh and to heckle but, mostly, to think.

-- The late Studs Terkel was author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Good War, Division Street: America, Hard Times, Working and other oral histories.


Amy Wilentz

When I was growing up in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, it was largely a second-generation immigrant enclave, with a sizable Eastern European population, clannish Jewish neighborhoods, and a rising, first-generation Puerto Rican bloc in the poorer areas. Economically, Perth Amboy was on the way down in the late 1960s, the 1970s and early 1980s. A former industrial and manufacturing town, it was in the process of being left behind by the new economy. But now, when I make my annual pilgrimage, instead of boarded-over stores and depressing graffiti, I find a booming place—not yuppified or gentrified so much as Dominicanized. The later generations of Puerto Ricans have assimilated, and Smith Street, the main boulevard of downtown, is now a booming avenida that could be dropped intact into Santo Domingo. Along with lower Manhattan, Perth Amboy was my family’s gateway into America. We came here fleeing poverty, as did so many others. And it’s still a real American town with real American contrasts: there are pawnshops and 99-cent stores on Smith Street, as well as chains and successful local businesses; and city politics is dominated by third- and fourth-generation immigrants. But there is also real Latino street life and, down by the bay—half a mile from the house where William Franklin, Ben’s son, governed New Jersey for King George III—-a newly refurbished marina park established by longtime residents, with a band shell where an orchestra plays Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” every Fourth of July to an audience, many of whom were born in the Caribbean.

-- Amy Wilentz, a former assistant literary editor at The Nation, is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier; Martyrs’ Crossing (a novel) and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen.


William Greider

Almost anywhere in Vermont. Probably there are ugly places in Vermont, but I have driven lots of back roads and not found them. Postcard Vermont is the antique villages and classic old churches with white steeples and I commend them to tourists. It’s also tramping through the woods in May to commune with the rioting wildflowers or discovering an old stone wall lost in the deep forest, our American version of Roman ruins. But what enthralls me and Linda is the Vermont that is an open history book—-still alive and active in the people, the politics and culture. This is the America that might have been if we hadn’t become a big and powerful industrial nation. Vermont missed out on that story, yet it seems oddly grateful for the differences. The state was settled last in New England, mostly by an eclectic mix of stubborn folks trying to make their way in the unpromising terrain. Two centuries later, those people are still here, still stubbornly proud of their differences. They do not intend to change. This may be the only thing Vermonters agree on. The political combat is endlessly entertaining and defined by three sectors—Ben and Jerry’s progressives, middle-middle business types and “Take Back Vermont” rustics who generally resist whatever the other two groups are promoting. The state disputes over volatile issues from marriage rights for gays to “ancient roads,” whether to abandon the thousands of old township roads that still exist on official maps but are lost in the forest alongside the stone walls. Either way, the issue is about redefining Vermont while preserving it.  These people seem to have figured out how to honor the past and move forward.

-- William Greider is The Nation’s national affairs correspondent and author of Secrets of the Temple, Who will Tell the People? and The Soul of Capitalism.


Robert Lipsyte

Shelter Island, quietly floating between the twin forks of Long Island, New York, was always a won- derful place to visit, then to weekend, to summer, now live part-time, but it didn’t become my favorite place until last year when—at my wife, Lois’s, urging—I reluctantly made it my official address so I could vote there. I had never been involved in the politics of New York City, where I was born and raised, because they seemed distant. But on Shelter Island I know the guy running for town supervisor. The issues may be com- plicated, but they fit in my hand. My vote will make a difference. How can it not be my favorite place when suddenly I have a chance to make it better?

-- Robert Lipsyte has been a sportswriter with The New York Times. He has written award-winning young adult novels, including The Contender, One Fat Summer, The Brave and The Chief.


Mike Davis

M & M Bar and Café in Butte, Montana, where on a quiet evening (most) you can hear the ghost ore cars rattling under the “richest hill on earth.” Also the wonderful Unarius Academy of Science in El Cajon, California, where the followers of Nikola Tesla are still waiting patiently for the landing of the “33 Ships of the Federation” and the million-year reign of interplanetary peace.

-- Mike Davis is a journalist, activist, and urban historian who teaches at the University of California Irvine. He is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and other books.


Christian Parenti

The ex-boomtowns of Butte, Montana, and Detroit are, to my mind, America’s most dramatic cities because of their stunning postindustrial desolation. And in Butte you can get good Chinese food until 3 A.M. due to the city’s round-the-clock culture, a residue of its once thriving copper mines. San Francisco’s Mission District is my favorite neighborhood, for its politics of resistance. Bolerium in SF is a great used bookstore. Situated above sweatshops, it’s run by two grumpy old intellectuals whose idea of a joke is giving away Earl Browder pamphlets. My favorite working factory is the Putney Paper Company’s mill in my hometown of Putney, Vermont. My favorite restaurant is the Diner, at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge in New York City; their meals are good, clean and locally sourced, but they don’t make a fuss or silly show about their food politics.

-- Christian Parenti is a roving correspondent for The Nation.


John Nichols

Up on the far northern cusp of the United States, along the shore of Lake Superior, you’ll find the old timber town of Ashland, Wisconsin. Settled by radical Finns and Norwegians who erected great brownstone buildings to protect themselves against the harsh winters, Ashland is a ruggedly handsome city—both physically and politically—where socialists still celebrate May Day in a lakefront park, members of the Northland Anti-War Coalition rally at the old-fashioned band shell and students enroll in Northland College’s Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute to learn a green citizenship that is practiced daily in a region where walking to work on a January morning is an extreme sport. It can snow in May, but an Ashland summer is about as close as you’ll get to heaven on earth. For me, the heart of Ashland is the 200 block of historic Chapple Avenue, where locals shop the Chequamegon Food Co-op for wild rice, gather fresh corn and berries at a seasonal farmers’ market, pick up artisan breads from the Ashland Baking Company shop and then settle at the remarkable Black Cat Coffee House for espresso in the morning and microbrews at night.... If the Black Cat were located in Manhattan or San Francisco it would be hailed by food and design critics as an archetype, a pristine relic of a disappearing Europe or a Beat generation gathering spot. But the folks in Ashland would laugh off such pretenses and steer the conversation toward the more immediate concerns of upsetting the global economic order or identifying the best stretch of shoreline for kayaking.

-- John Nichols is Washington correspondent of The Nation.