Identification with New YorkIf Edgar’s life doo Bronx，because of which it is called by sohen Billy Bathgate goes farther，because as a gang boy，he wanders to farther places，not only within the “center of the city ” Manhattan of New York，but also to other cities of Ahere are three other cities that Billy travels to，all of which are seen by Billy as antitheses to New York. Billy，as a boy born in New York and growing up in New York has a strong identification with the city，like the author Doctorow himself.
New York is the city which gives Billy the sense of assurance. It is the city that helps to conquer his terror on his way from the boathouse to Drew’s apartment. It is the city that he misses when he is in Onondaga. It is his New York friends from the nightclub who makes him feel right at home in Saratoga. It is this city that makes Billy aware of his own power, as an independent and resourceful g the Shultz father, as he “reveled in the city he (Shultz) couldn’t enter, ” which bees the city “of” Billy only；and most importantly, it is New York which brings calmness and reassurance when he escapes from the place where all the gang members are killed and thus bees the only survivor.
I climbed up the fire escape, and spent that night, it was October 23, 1935, on the roof of the Robert Adams hotel in Newark New Jersey, sobbing and sniffling like a wretched orphan, and falling asleep finally in the paling dawn, where to the east, I could see in the distance the reassuring conformations of the Empire State Building. (Doctorow 1998:306)
Here again，the Empire State Building as a synecdoche of New York, “reassures” the wandering gangster Billy that at least he has a home called New York.
Billy has a keen eye for the place he wanders in. In whatever city he wanders in, there will be an instinctual coween that city and New York. In Saratoga he coreets along which he travels with Drew as having “the insolence to call itself Broadway.” He says that the place looks like old New York, with “civilized shops with New York names and stripped awnings lowered against the evening sun, the people strolling in the street, ” which is “something appropriate too.” But the Jersey City and Newark, however, do not gain such a positive ment at all:
Both cities together being just a continuous dreary afterthought of New York, a kind of shadow on the wrong side of the river, you could tell they thought they were the Bronx of Brooklyn, and they had the bars and the streetcars and the e shops and warehouses, but the air stank in a different way, and the stores were old-fashioned and the width of the streets was wrong and the people all had that look of being noplace, […] it was a most depressing flatland, a o displacement, and I could tell Mr. Shultz would go out of his rying to get fortable prowling from Union city to Jersey City to Newark to find the best window where he could look out and see the Empire State Building. It was a ceion about that, it was too ugly to live in. (285)
Billy shows great sympathy to his gang father Shultz who is “locked out of doing business in New York, ” the city both of them show enor with. And the truth is, the farther Billy goes away from New York, the more he loves New York. If he plains about the Bronx neighborhood he lives in, he actually praises the city as a whole. This ambiguous attitude towards the city reveals the predicament of this street boy: on the one hand, he envies those living in Manhattan, the world; on the other, he fails to escape from the Bronx neighborhood and has nowhere else to go, as all the gang g Shultz and Bere of his new apartment away from his original neighborhood yet still in the city of New York well illustrates this aplex emotion towards the city.
As Doctorow claierview by Tokarczyk, “All writers find a place for themselves, a home for their imaginations, and I suppose the city is okarczyk 1999:202). Here the city refers just to New York. “I was very lucky to be a New Yorker, ” Doctorow says, “I find myself in a book and anding is: This book is my book” (204). And this book is just Billy Bathgate. So in a sense Billy, the wandering boy’s ambivalent attitude towards New York anding of the city.