16 places that shaped the 2016 election: New York, N.Y.

By Nov. 9, the votes will have been cast and counted, there will be a winner and a loser, and the country will begin a slow return to normal. Historians will have their say on the outcome, but all of us who have lived through this election will carry away indelible memories of a shocking year in American history: of a handful of ordinary people, swept up in the rush of history; of a series of moments on which the fate of the nation seemed, at least briefly, to turn; and of places on the map that became symbols of a divided nation. As we count down to Election Day, Yahoo News has identified 16 unforgettable people, moments and places.

For much of the last century, New York City and its suburbs played an outsized role in national politics, even allowing for the fact that it was the biggest city in the country by far. Both Presidents Roosevelt and major national figures including Alfred E. Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller were all closely associated with New York; Barack Obama, Richard Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower all lived there for parts of their adult lives. But beginning in the 1970s, as the city flirted with bankruptcy and its financial and cultural influence waned, it lost political clout as well. New York Mayor John Lindsay’s run for president in 1972 was a disaster. The last national candidate from the city was Democratic Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, who made history as the first woman on a major-party national ticket as Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984. She lost.

But in the last 25 years, New York has regained both its fiscal health and its appeal as a place to live and work. It is only a coincidence, but a telling one, that both major-party candidates this year have their headquarters in New York City, which is also the birthplace and home of Republican Donald Trump, and the adopted home (if you mentally annex nearby Chappaqua to the Bronx) of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The headquarters themselves embody the yin and yang of New York’s appeal. Trump’s staff occupies space inside that cynosure of glamour Trump Tower, which stands next to Tiffany’s on some of the most valuable real estate this side of the Ginza. The lobby of the building features a waterfall cascading down pink marble, the famous gold escalator Trump rode into the race, and a Starbucks with a signed headshot of Trump’s daughter Ivanka blowing a kiss. Clinton picked Brooklyn for her headquarters, an address meant to signal hipness to the millennial voters she is seeking — although her floors of cubicles in neighborhood that could be the downtown of any medium-sized city in the Midwest would disappoint visitors expecting, say, the ground floor of a Park Slope brownstone or a converted artist’s loft on a fashionably grimy street in Williamsburg.

Other New Yorkers have played significant supporting roles in the 2016 election. Democratic runner-up Bernie Sanders was, famously, born in Brooklyn. Former mayor Michael Bloomberg seriously considered an independent run for president this year. Former mayor Rudy Giuliani has emerged as one of Donald Trump’s most vehement surrogates and defenders.

For all the wealth of Silicon Valley, the cutting-edge hipness of Seattle and Portland, the underground chic of Austin or Nashville, New York retains its unique place in American culture. When candidates speak of “Wall Street,” it’s a metaphor for the financial industry, but it’s also an actual street in downtown Manhattan. Of course, it has been years since national candidates bothered to actually campaign for votes in New York ; they show up to raise money, or for symbolic occasions such as the 9/11 memorial last month, held in the shadow of the rebuilt World Trade Center. Al-Qaida made four attacks on 9/11 aimed at the pre-eminent symbols of American power and influence: the Pentagon, the Capitol, and World Trade Center Towers One and Two. New York’s endurance, like the nation’s, shows they failed. – By Jerry Adler

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