Is there really a “Sixth Borough” in New York City?

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I know what you’re thinking:  there are only FIVE boroughs in NYC.  What do I mean by a Sixth Borough?

This idea came to me after reading a New York Times Op-Ed article by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Foer wrote about a mythical Sixth Borough, describing it as “an island, separated from Manhattan by a thin body of water,” and how “Each year after, a few inches at a time, the Sixth Borough receded from New York”.  To create a sense of mystique, he obfuscated any evidence behind his urban myth with lines like these:

“You won’t read about it in any of the history books, because there’s nothing…to prove that it was there at all. But even though most people will say they have no time or reason to believe in the Sixth Borough…they will still use the word ‘believe.”’

After reading Foer’s piece, I remembered the 2011 film adaptation of his novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, starring Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, and Thomas Horn.  There was a scene when Thomas Schell (Tom Hanks) is telling his son, Oskar (Thomas Horn), about a Sixth Borough that drifted away a long time ago–quoting lines directly from Foer’s Op-Ed piece.  Thomas dies in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, creating a deep void in Oskar’s life that is temporarily filled by his quest to find the residents of the mythical sixth borough.  Just like Oskar, I felt a desire to set out on my own quest for this destination.

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The Sixth Borough has been described by various journalists as a grouping of neighborhoods, communities, or demographic populations with a special affiliation to New York City’s cosmopolitan character.  In a March 2011 press release, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated that the “waterfront and waterways–what we are calling New York City’s sixth borough–are invaluable assets”.  Later that year, my former schoolmates at Columbia University created a website with six documentaries about New York City’s waterfront communities.  In the years that followed, other sources like Time Out New York, New York Magazine, Gothamist, Metropolis Magazine, and WNYC 93.9 FM have generated numerous stories about this coastal Shangri-La, overlapping the boundaries of all five boroughs like a geographic Venn diagram.  Overlapping the physical and virtual, the green spaces and concrete, the real and the perceived.

So does the Sixth Borough really exist?  Maybe it’s enough for us to want to believe in it.  Or as Foer put it:

“Was there really a Sixth Borough? There’s no irrefutable evidence. There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced…Maybe it’s our own nostalgia for what’s past, or our own hopes for what’s to come. Or maybe it’s the residue of the dreams…”

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