  NEW YORK -MARCH 29: Flat Iron building facade on March 29,
2012. Completed in 1902, it is considered to be one of the first
skyscrapers ever built. Photo by © Luciano Mortula / Bookmark
and Share  Years ago at City College set in the brick and
limestone recesses of West Harlem, where corner vendors offered
warm nuts on as indigent hotels burned nearby, I took a summer
course, Literary New York, with the affable and astute Earnest
Hemingway scholar Ira Elliott. In the class held on one of the
top floors of a mammoth building built for riot suppression
(such as easy site lines for sharpshooters, hallways that could
be easily locked down), we poured over the city’s ever-lasting
literary symbolism, the powerful traits that feel as real as a
bent and broken as a tree growing in Brooklyn or the quiet swing
of doors at a posh Bulgari store.  The city has always been a
diverse signifier in urban prose, a deep wellspring of fecund
and fertile images woven through literature and film. Even while
watching reruns of th