This chapter examines how writers have spatialized and dramatized the psychology of hope and desire that drives so many New Yorkers lives through scenes of arrival. This literary motif stages a recognizable, affectively charged moment in which the individual first confronts the emblem of twentieth-century technological modernity. New York in such instances stands for the Modern City, the solidly material emanation and at the same time figurative torchbearer of a new century. Into this cityscape, ready for mutual love, the individual arrives propelled, like an inexorably moving train, by desire.