Top 5 Most Romantic Cities

New York by Kelly Bare

Obvious choice? Maybe. Wanna make something of it? The truth is, leaving this brash five-borough beast of a town off any list of superlative cities would be unthinkable. It’s impossible to deny that the place that spawned Sex and the City and metrosexuals, G-strings and gossip rags, really did write the book—and publish the magazine article, and broadcast the Katie Couric interview, and bring you the reality-TV show—of love, American-style. Best of all, you don’t have to get engaged to Donald Trump to enjoy the finest wooing and cooing New York has to offer. In a city full of dreamers, imagination works just as well.

Just witness how New York might seduce an innocent young girl writing at her kitchen table. It’s July, and sultry. A rivulet of sweat is trickling down the back of her neck. Trucks and buses brush past her open window; a subway train—which she knows is packed with passengers, body to body—sails by, its deep rumble mixing with Latin music on the corner, mingling with exhaust fumes, and drifting in, uninvited, insistent, unrelenting. Even the Mister Softee man with his truck and his frozen treats and his tinkling, slightly forlorn tune can only transport her for a moment and then she’s straight back into the rhythm of a city just below the boiling point. When the sun sinks and the asphalt cools, she knows that New York will play a more genteel lover, offering her and a date the Philharmonic in Central Park, with a bottle of wine during and fireworks after, and maybe fireworks after that.

She could just as easily close her eyes and imagine summer turning to fall, when the Greenmarket at Union Square has 17 varieties of apples trucked down from their leafy homes upstate and laid out in a rainbow between the bright orange pumpkins and dark, dusty beets. Before she knows it, it’s wintertime, and her fingers are frozen from waving, trying to hail a taxi, but suddenly there’s a handsome stranger in a bright red cashmere scarf who’s offering her his cab and smiling, his grip firm as he helps her inside. Behind her, lovers glide arm in arm around the rink at Rockefeller Center, and she really can smell chestnuts roasting over an open flame ‘round the corner at 50th and Fifth.