How the Theme Song From a Maligned Martin Scorsese Movie Became New York City’s Unofficial Anthem

In 2020, when Covid-19 was at its worst in the nation’s most populous city, many neighborhoods fired up loudspeakers around 7 p.m. to provide a musical tribute and cheers to New York’s first responders. The song that often reverberated through the streets and alleyways was the city’s unofficial anthem, “Theme From New York, New York,” powered by the familiar voice of one of the 20th century’s most recognized vocalists, Frank Sinatra. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere. It’s up to you, New York, New York,” Sinatra famously belts.

“It’s as brassy and over-the top-as ever—and yet, playing out across a cooped-up city of crowded apartments and masks and gloves, its bottomless optimism can visibly bring smiles, a short pause to The Pause,” reported the New York Times. That year’s Macy’s Fourth of July fireworks display used the song to unshackle a city imprisoned by a pandemic.

People can also hear the song played at the end of every New York Yankees home win. And the tune has been heard everywhere from the New York City Marathon, the Belmont Stakes and recently the New York Liberty’s championship celebration.

Though he was not the first to record it, Sinatra made the song his own. “There is something grandiose and spry about Sinatra’s rendition of the song,” says John Troutman, music curator at the National Museum of American History. “It is boisterous and swings, and he establishes a claim to the song, perhaps, through listeners feeling comfort and nostalgic through hearing his, by then, well-worn but oh-so-Sinatra evergreen delivery and big band arrangement.”

The song was introduced as the theme of the financially unsuccessful 1977 film New York, New York, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, who made its initial recording. De Niro played a significant role in the anthem’s creation. After hearing the original title theme produced by the writing team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, the actor rejected it. The songwriters went back to their work and after a 45-minute session returned with a triumph. Minnelli performs the song in the film, and her version was released as a single from the soundtrack.

Later, Sinatra performed “Theme From New York, New York” in 1978 at Radio City Music Hall, where the crowd loved it. His wife, Barbara, had encouraged him to perform it. He was hesitant to record the song because he thought it belonged to Minnelli. He consulted Minnelli, and according to Sinatra’s daughter, Tina, “She told him, ‘It’s OK, Uncle Frank.’” The song found a place on his triple album, Trilogy: Past Present Future in 1980.

Sinatra’s recording has become New York City’s declaration of toughness and determination during times of trouble. In the 1980s, the financially strapped metropolis faced a variety of issues, including widening poverty, the crack cocaine epidemic, and the AIDS epidemic and underfunding for AIDS relief. In February 1985, Mayor Ed Koch unofficially designated it as the city’s song. “The proclamation was never written into law, so our city technically remains anthem-less,” wrote Jonathan Wolfe for the New York Times in 2017.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, this music also bolstered the city. After the attack that killed almost 3,000 people, more than 400 of whom were firefighters and police officers in New York, fear emptied Broadway’s theaters. To bring audiences back, a 30-second commercial on major television networks and in movie theaters featured a throng of Broadway stars such as Bernadette Peters and Joel Grey in Times Square singing the officially titled “Theme From New York, New York,” and that effort helped to fill the theaters once more.

The National Museum of American History holds the sheet music for the song and a wide selection of items that trace Sinatra’s long career and his fascinating life. “We maintain over 1,000 objects related to Sinatra, including comic books, fanzines, fan club flyers, his trademark bow ties from the 1940s, posters, sound recordings, and much more,” says Troutman. “He was everywhere.”

Sinatra grew up in the shadow of Manhattan’s skyscrapers across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, just a five-mile journey via car today, but it might have seemed much farther to a young singer hoping to launch a career in the nation’s most competitive locale. “Growing up in Hoboken, he used to go to the waterfront and stare across at the emerald city,” said Sinatra biographer James Kaplan. Thus, Sinatra’s “Theme From New York, New York” is in many ways the singer’s own story. Often, as a young man, he traveled to Manhattan to see his idol, Billie Holiday, perform.

During the World War II years, “his fame was built through struggle and invention, going back to his early days with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, when he honed his chops with some of the finest bands of the day,” says Troutman. “His elevation as a teen idol to bobby-soxers in the 1940s predated and was comparable to the attention that rained down on Elvis.”

In 1954, Sinatra won the Academy Award for best supporting actor in the film From Here to Eternity. “Even when rock ’n’ roll was hitting its stride in the 1950s, he continued to top the charts, and, of course, his films brought his face, voice and titanic charm to the big screen,” Troutman says.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Troutman notes, Sinatra’s reach expanded through television appearances and residences in Las Vegas. Sometimes, he led polished performances with Rat Pack buddies Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop.

Gay Talese wrote for Esquire in 1966 that “he seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has the money, the energy and no apparent guilt. In an age when the very young seem to be taking over, protesting and picketing and demanding change, Frank Sinatra survives as a national phenomenon, one of the few prewar products to withstand the test of time.” Talese wrote that Sinatra’s ballads “warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers.” Talese suggested that at least two generations of men “were eternally in his debt” as beneficiaries of those ballads.

In 1980, “Theme From New York, New York” became his last hit, and it soon replaced “My Way” as the closing piece in his concerts.

During his lifetime, Sinatra’s talent brought him into the public eye, and his lifestyle kept him there. Parts of his persona might have been fatal flaws for another performer. Speculation about Sinatra having connections to the mob persisted, and his relationships with four wives and well-publicized dalliances were widely followed. Pete Hamill once characterized Sinatra as “the most investigated American performer since John Wilkes Booth.” Neither the positive nor the negative press was forgotten.

Today, nearly 27 years after his death in 1998 at age 82, his music is viewed as classic. “He remains in large part a household name,” says Troutman. In 2015, the year that marked the 100th anniversary of his birth, Sinatra was honored by events from Hoboken to Beverly Hills to Miami Beach. A restaurant in Las Vegas carries his name, and SiriusXM’s Siriusly Sinatra station celebrates the great American songbook, with special attention to its namesake’s life and work.

As an artist, he made the lyrics and the timing essential contributors to his success, wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

Songs like the New York anthem keep his memory alive. Novelist William Kennedy wrote that what made his recordings special was “that you can listen to them not only forever, but also at great length without overdosing, once you have been infected.”

Alice George | | READ MORE

Alice George, Ph.D. is an independent historian with a special interest in America during the 1960s. A veteran newspaper editor, she is recently the author of The Last American Hero: The Remarkable Life of John Glenn and has authored or co-authored seven other books, focusing on 20th-century American history or Philadelphia history.