On First Impressions: I love New York, in part, because growing up in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, by the time I was in high school, I'd seen it again and again in the movies, and it stood for excitement, for romance, for glamour; god knows I couldn't wait to get there. When I first came to New York, I was 16 years old, and it was as if I'd come home. It was as if this is the place, the only place I really want to be. We arrived by train, two, three, friends of mine. We came from Pittsburgh at night, all night on the train sitting up in coach. And we came into Penn Station. Oh my, how tragic, how sad that so many Americans will never know what it was like to arrive in New York for the first time in your life at Penn Station. On Coming Home: When I'm away from it I miss it terribly and when I get back I feel I'm in my place, I'm in my city. And I love the smells. No city smells like New York -- good and bad -- garlic and garbage, fresh bread and toxic junk coming out of the exhaust of buses and cars, and the river and the sea, I smell that salt air often, at night particularly. I love it. On Skyscrapers: What happened in the city of New York when the skyscrapers was born is that buildings turned from crustaceans, which are supported by their walls to vertebrates supported by their skeleton. But the skeleton had to be made of steel. It's one of the great transforming moments of how we live on earth as human beings. On New York's Contributions: Between the end of the civil war and the start of World War I, New York was transformed by the economy of the city and the country, and by marked changes in science and technology that were changing the world. In the year 1869, for example, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed and the Suez Canal was opened. Those two events alone immediately made the world much smaller. You could go around the world in 80 days as Jules Verne demonstrated, and great new wealth was created in the city of unprecedented scale. But it wasn't just that there was great wealth, what's so important to understand too, is that the wealth was being created by new ideas, new processes, a whole new kind of America with the telegraph, with the advent of cheap steel, Bessemer steel, with the discovery of oil and this new money coming from new ways of making money was creating a new city in New York because it was the point at which all these curves, all these traffic patterns were converging. Because of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1870, for example, the first train arrived in New York having come all the way from California. And out of New York comes a whole new wave of American creativity and productivity most tangibly demonstrated in what was being published -- magazines, newspapers, books, but it was also evident in fashion, it was also evident in ideals and philosophical points of view, and political points of view, and with all the money that was converging and with all the creative ecology of the city many people began realizing that they had to do more than just stand by and watch. So it became one of the great founding times in our whole country for some of our most important, admirable, and long-lasting public institutions: The Metropolitan Museum, the New York Public Library, the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Opera, the great clubs of New York -- Union League Club, the Harvard Club, the Great University at Columbia, and the Lowe Library at Columbia, all date from that time.		McCullough, a historian and writer, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography TRUMAN (1992, Simon & Schuster), which spent 43 weeks on the NEW YORK TIMES bestsellers list, and THE GREAT BRIDGE (1972, Simon & Schuster). McCullough is the host of PBS's THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, and has also served as the narrator of several television shows, including Ken Burns's THE CIVIL WAR. A graduate of Yale University, McCullough has served as both a writer and editor for TIME magazine, and held several university teaching positions.