New York is both emblematic and exceptional. Close your eyes, think of America and images associated with the city intrude upon your imagination. Yet, like most ‘world’ cities, it stands apart. (And indeed frequently in opposition to the nation’s perceived ‘heartland’. New York might act as a magnet, but it repels as well as attracts.)

In cricketing terms New York remains—like the country as a whole - brimming with potential yet unable to capitalise on it. The city is arguably the sport’s strongest US outpost—it’s home to more cricketers than any other part of the country - but is divided, disorganised and due of its sheer scale unable to organise itself into the driving force, the engine the US game has long needed.

Unlike every other US city cricket has had a continuous presence here for over a century. Every summer weekend you can, if you wish, take a journey out of Manhattan and visit where New York City ‘begins’ (as the sign that greets you on the Brooklyn side of Manhattan Bridge insists). Venture further and you’ll discover the playing fields of Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx—Van Cortlandt Park, Canarsie, Gateway, Marine Park, Floyd Bennett and Baisley Point. There you’ll hear the shouts, the appeals, the clangour of cricket New York-style - a game that has taken on the characteristics of this exhilarating city, a subcultural community that most of its US-born white residents are still barely aware of.

We say ‘still’, since at the end of last decade that community briefly poked its head above the cultural parapet when novelist Joseph O’Neill’s used it as the backdrop to his 2008 novel Netherland. Its narrator Hans is a Dutchman who, separated from his family after they flee with city post 9/11, takes succour playing cricket and making friends among its marginalised milieu. Netherland was a huge critical success and at least posited the idea into the cultural and sporting ether that New York is, could be, a cricketing city. As much as Sydney, Bridgetown or Lahore.

It is this dream, that the city could be the propellent behind the revival of the game in America that has fired its players, administrators and entrepreneurs for a generation. The dream has attracted its fair share of hucksters - indeed one of Netherland’s main characters is a shady cricket ‘entrepreneur’ named Chuck Ramkissoon—but perhaps those are better discussed in another chapter. Our mission for the moment is to trace the contours of the game here, a game that has been shaped, more than most US cities, by immigration.

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For many American cricketers have started their careers, their journey here (though their first sight of US these days is more likely to be the tarmac at JFK rather than the Statue of Liberty, as was the case a century back). It was immigration—largely from the Caribbean—that kept the game alive during the inter war years after it had gasped its last virtually everywhere else in the US. But whilst the game was still visible during its final days in Philadelphia, in New York cricket went underground, undetected and unrecorded by the mainstream US media. It benefited immensely from the huge strides West Indies cricket made during those years. As the game in the islands developed and migration north—particularly to Boston and New York—continued throughout the first half of the 20th Century it had a knock on effect on the game in the North East. New teams, consisting wholly of Caribbean immigrants formed and existing teams were refreshed and often transformed by these new Americans.