AT ZITO’S BAKERY ON BLEECKER STREET, a Greenwich Village institution, there are two framed photographs on the wall behind the counter. One is a picture of the Pope. The other is a picture of Frank Sinatra smiling broadly and holding a loaf of Zito’s bread.

Directly after every baseball game the Yankees win at Yankee Stadium, the public-address system plays Sinatra’s recording of “New York, New York.” When the Yankees defeated the Atlanta Braves in the sixth and final game of the 1996 World Series, capping an improbable comeback from a two-games-to-none deficit, it seemed as if everyone in the stadium was singing along, swelling the final chorus: “And if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere, / It’s up to you, / New York, New York.” The aging Sinatra—he was in his sixties when he recorded “New York, New York,” the last of his blockbuster hits—does amazing things with the initial And in the lines just quoted, twisting and turning the word as if it contained not one but three or four syllables; the voice seems to go down a valley and come back up a hill on the other side. The gesture is inimitable though it also invites imitation, and watching a Sinatra fan trying to duplicate the effect can be very entertaining. Here it was the instrument of joyous release. Here you had a crowd approaching 60,000 people getting into the act. It was a great moment of New York solidarity, and it was also in its way an expression of Frankophilia, the populace’s love for the greatest of all popular American singers.

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