Only touring politicians, and the battered scribes who cover them, continue to delude themselves about knowing New York. They think there is nothing much to know, and what they do know is usually a string of proper nouns: Rudy, the Yankees, Broadway, the New York Times, Elaine’s, the Empire State Building and maybe Puffy Combs. Easy. It’s the Cliff Notes version of a city. The visiting pol can utter a few words of place recognition, get photographed in a New York school, descend into the familiar vague blather, and head for the airport, often without stopping for a single red light. Not a thing is ever learned.

The most famous current example of this national type is Hillary Rodham Clinton. She is earnest; she claims to be “listening”. But alas, she is even less equipped for dealing with New York than ordinary people who have lived in other large cities. In certain essential ways, every city is like any other; residents must deal with traffic, public transportation, garbage, an imperfect school system and crime while maintaining some hope for a better life. Such concerns have been largely absent for the adult Hillary Clinton. When young, of course, she lived in Chicago. But for years, even when working at a law firm in Little Rock, she has been largely immunized from the daily pressures of city life. Others did the grocery shopping. State troopers or the Secret Service have warded off danger and annoyance. She is a kind of citizen of area code 800; that is, she is not from anywhere, except the country of politics. In important ways, a native of Mexico City has a better chance of adjusting quickly to the city of New York City than poor Hillary. It is no wonder that she has chosen to be insulated from its energy, confusions and daily collisions, large and small, by settling in a well-defended suburb.

That’s sad, because she’s obviously intelligent and might learn many things in New York City that will never be answered as she wanders alone, like Citizen Kane, through the 13 echoing rooms of the new Clinton mansion in Chappaqua. But her hired handlers must know that for Hillary, it is already too late to become a New Yorker. She can, for example, never be alone in the city. That’s a condition general for many, and essential to find your own version of New York. She can’t discover, through serendipity, her own special places: a certain cozy restaurant, a cherished bookshop, a hairdresser in Chinatown, a record store that specializes in the blues. She can’t make friends with people who have lived lives radically different from her own.

If she ventures into a subway, she will be surrounded by a cuadrilla of armed bodyguards, campaign honchos, reporters and photographers from New York and Washington. She can’t pick up a soft drink at a Korean grocer’s or wander alone into Bloomingdale’s. Wherever she goes, she will be the person looked at, not the person looking. That is, she is a celebrity. If she asks an ordinary citizen a question, she might get a few blurted sentences in reply but nothing resembling a conversation. It’s just too late for all that. Even John Rocker of the Atlanta Braves has spent more time on the subway than Hillary Clinton has, although the poor rube failed totally to understand what he was seeing.

What Rocker was seeing was the essence of New York: people from everywhere, going and coming to work or play, in a city that doesn’t care where they were born. People, in a very generalized way, like Rocker the Putz, and like Hillary the Politician. But those people on the number 7 train – Mexicans, Dominicans, Koreans, Russians, and according to Rocker, a few guys with purple hair -- were doing what was necessary to become New Yorkers. They were working at it, accepting it, earning their own small place in the larger city. They are an essential part of the city’s dailiness.

More important, they represent one of the overlapping templates that make up the city. To understand New York you must recognize those templates. The most durable one of all is the triumphant tale of the immigrant. The people of the number 7 train are the heirs of a tradition almost as old as the city itself. The great 19th century waves of Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants were not the first to find work and freedom in New York; the city had been absorbing strangers since the early seventeenth century. But those immigrants established the powerful essentials of the modern New York myth: initial rejection by those already here, followed by a reluctant embrace and eventual acceptance and triumph. The immigrant template had a three-act structure: first you worked for someone else, then you worked for yourself, then others worked for you. The myth was driven by optimism, not, as some say, by greed; you might work digging sewers but your children would go to a university. And all of you would be free.

As a corollary to the immigrant template, there was a sub-template. In an important way, it was established by the African-Americans who were in New York for centuries before the European immigrants started arriving in the millions. This was the insistence that if you were to become a true New Yorker, you must pay your dues. That is, you must show, day in and day out, that you can put up with every manner of inconvenience, irritation or flat-out bigotry and injustice in order to stand tall in the world. You would not bow. You would not scrape. You would bend your knee to no man. But you knew from the hand you were dealt that you didn’t make it in New York just by showing up. You went to school, you took low-level jobs to get started, and then you worked your way up. You went to Julliard before you arrived on the stage at Carnegie Hall. For some, this was an act of faith that was not rewarded; the deck was stacked, or the luck didn’t hold, or the economy collapsed (as it did in the Great Depression). But that sub-template about paying dues is more than an empty sentiment; for millions, it has worked beyond the wildest dreams of those who fled slavery, famine, pogroms, or tyranny.

Which leads to another template: a sense of the past. New York is one of those rare American cities that actually has a long history. Some of its buildings provoke images of the past, as do the names of streets and parks and neighborhoods. But often the past can’t be seen; it exists only in memory or lore. Many New Yorkers have never gotten over the departure of the Dodgers and Giants in 1957 and millions of us remember the day the war ended in 1945. We remember scandals, too, and race riots, swindles and heists, great fires and sensational murders, and can tell you the names of the streets where they took place. This is not nostalgia; it’s a true sense of history, at once specific and universal, which leads to knowing in your bones that almost every variety of human folly has happened before in this city. This leads both to a certain fatalism, and to a cool kind of forgiveness in our nature. We don’t easily get shocked or surprised or outraged. We often say about some unspeakable act: So, what’s new?

But we live with a more sinister New York template too. From the early 19th century, all New Yorkers have accepted the dark mythology of organized crime. This is also true of other large cities; Dickens, Balzac and Eugene Sue wrote many volumes about crime in European cities and in the early 19th century American newspapers and popular novels were full of murder victims. In the 20th century, crime became more elaborately American, with the establishment of secret criminal societies headed in turn (or in combinations) by the Irish, the Jews and the Italians and now passing into the hands of Colombians, Dominicans and Russians. On the level of the street, the New York version has always assumed the form of psychological matter and anti-matter; there was the perceivable world, and then there was the secret world, with its dark glamour and occult powers: the Mob. Nobody in my childhood ever discussed the powers of the Freemasons; they talked about Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.

This alternate world accounts for other parts of the New York character, particularly in the presence of the feral young. A certain wariness is part of the New Yorker’s view of the world, a pause to make a swift judgment that could be a matter of life and death. That’s why most New Yorkers are watchers. They can read the various languages of danger. They can distinguish quickly between citizen and predator. They can instantly analyze the terrain of a midnight street. Above all, they learn early to make distinctions between true tough guys and phony tough guys. When they hear some politician talking about how tough he is, or will be (particularly against people with no defenses), they usually laugh. When they see some rich hip-hopper performing toughness, they sneer. True tough guys don’t talk tough; they are tough.

These hidden templates, created by enduring memory and ongoing experience, make up a vast sub-text in New York. Every new arrival must make a project of uncovering them. Like the subway system itself, they help connect the boroughs and the neighborhoods. They are common to black, white, Asian and Latino New Yorkers and are being absorbed by the New Immigrants too. They aren’t taught in schools but they can be learned. All it takes is time. Touring politicians, and the visiting reporters who must chart their staged appearances, never have time to truly feel their abiding power. In her isolation, Hillary Clinton won’t be able to absorb them from the dead language of a position paper. But of one thing they can all be certain: the truths about New York City will not rise from the fraudulent concoction of a photo op. They must be lived: day and night, week after week. And even then, usually at that precise moment when you arrogantly think you understand New York at last, there will be some immense shift, and you will be forced to start over. Humbly.