Been thinking a lot about New York lately, and I thought I would take a look at my Billboard year-end top ten collection (1951-2019) and see what songs could be rounded up using the following search terms: New York, the Big Apple, Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Long Island, Staten Island, Empire State, Harlem, Madison Square Garden, Central Park, Times Square, and Broadway. In total, 19 songs emerged, and here I present one for each of the decades from the 1960s to the 20teens in reverse chronological order:

The other songs that the search resulted in are “Surfin’ U.S.A.”, “Staying Alive”, “Maria, Maria”, “Smooth”, “Rumpshaker”, “In Da Club”, “Lean Back”, “Give Me Everything”, “We Are Young”, “Harlem Shake”, “Can’t Hold Us”, “Talk Dirty”, and “That’s What I Like”.

And a couple of my personal favorite songs that mention New York but are not in the collection (although the second occurs in the Billboard year-end Top 30 collection for 2010):

Also, full disclosure: I’ve never really been to New York City. But I have some friends who have, and they wrote a song about it: