Subtitle: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York

The Korean violinist and Pakistani lawyer who strikes up a conversation in a Wall Street elevator. The lost Filipino tourist who boards a lonely A-Train at midnight and asks a fellow passenger—a Brooklyn web editor—the way to Chinatown. The blue-blooded Manhattan painter who decides against her better judgment to share a late-night ride with a stranger hailing the same cab. The thirty-eight-year-old real estate executive who approaches a fifty-one-year-old man in Central Park because she mistakes him for a friend.

Two strangers in public in New York. A chance encounter. And, before long, a wedding.

Heart of the City tells the true stories of ordinary people from starkly different backgrounds brought together by the strange romantic workings of New York’s landscape. This is not a collection of sappy love stories, but a look at how the ecology of New York’s iconic public spaces can turn utter strangers into partners for life. In Heart of the City, places like Central Park, the Met, the New York Public Library, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal, and the subway are not just stops on a tourist map. They are love labs. They are places whose design, history, and social dynamics propel the unlikeliest of people together.

The engine of the book is the true stories of couples who met at a New York landmark, fell in love, and soon married. The romantic narratives are stirring in their own right, but they are filtered through the lens of what experts call “environmental psychology”—how the built environment shapes behavior.

This book is inspired by Sabar’s parents’ own New York love story. His father was born to an illiterate mother in a mud shack in Kurdish Iraq. His mother was the American-born daughter of a well-off Manhattan businessman. Were it not for the peculiar design and demography of Washington Square Park, this son of a Kurdistan and this daughter of Manhattan would never have met.