“There are only three cities in America — New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” — Who said it?

I never thought to question the attribution of this famous quote. I’m not sure why because I have certainly sought out the original sources for other quotes. With this one, though, I did not question that Tennessee Williams was snarky enough to say this. But did he?

The attribution seems to come from a profile written about Tennessee in a 1984 book by Mel Leavitt called Great Characters of New Orleans. This was one year after Tennessee died. The profile begins:

“There are only three great cities in the United States,” Tennessee Williams once said. “New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. All the rest are Cleveland.”

While researching something else entirely, I came across a reference from 1934 of Herbert Asbury attributing the quote to O. Henry. Asbury had already written about New York (The Gangs of New York ©1928) and San Francisco (The Barbary Coast ©1933); he was working on his next book about New Orleans, which became The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld published in 1936.

This completely derailed my research. 1934 is certainly before Tennessee Williams could have said this as he didn’t make it to New Orleans until 1938-39. Tennessee was born in 1911. Who said it?

O. Henry started his 1904 short story, “A Municipal Report,” with the quote, attributing it to Frank Norris:

Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are “story cities”—New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco. —Frank Norris

“The Municipal Report” by O. Henry¹

But the story is about Nashville. O. Henry wanted to prove that there were other great American cities beyond these oft-repeated three². It seems that Herbert kind of missed O.’s point with his giddy predictions.

“I expect to find more glamour and less sordidness in New Orleans than I did in San Francisco,” Asbury said, a particularly hilarious premonition in hindsight.

Frank Norris was a newspaper man, who wrote primarily about San Francisco. Samuel Dickson included the quote in a chapter about Frank in his 1947 book called Tales of San Francisco, but I cannot find this book to see what it says beyond the Google preview. The chapter is available for purchase for $42³, so maybe my next big tip will fund this curiosity. My sister’s public library in the Bay Area has eight copies available, so maybe she will be inclined to help her sister out. 🙂 Update November 2024: During a visit to my sister and her new baby, I insisted on a trip to the library to get the new baby a library card, of course. I took the opportunity to look up the chapter on Frank Norris. I’m certainly glad I did not spend that $42 because the quote is a total throwaway line. It’s a section about his early life, talking about his parents, and it implies that Frank was not the first to say this either.

Of course, the parents did the worst possible thing parents of an overimaginative child could do. When the boy was fourteen years old they were established in Oakland, and from Oakland soon moved with him to San Francisco. They stayed for a short time at the old Palace Hotel, and then Norris purchased the Henry Scott residence on Sacramento Street near Octavia. Life became a living story for the boy. In fact, it was only a very few years later that he was to be one of the first to say, “There are just three cities in the United States that are ‘story cities’ — New York, New Orleans, and best of all, San Francisco.”

In 2015, the website Quote Investigator published an article about the quote, finding similar references all the way back to 1895⁴. New Orleans does not become involved in the mix until 1936 in this timeline though, and O. Henry published his story in 1904. However, the timeline makes it evident that there are plenty of other references to the three cities much earlier than our beloved playwright could have said it. And that there are many other cities that are considered irreplaceable in this massive country.

I have no doubts that Tennessee did say this once, long after the original source was forgotten. Mark Twain, another source sometimes cited for the three cities quote, wrote in his autobiography:

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.” 

I wonder what Tennessee would think about the quote and how his name has become lastingly attached to it.

Sources

1. Henry, O. “The Municipal Report,” © 1904 http://fullreads.com/literature/a-municipal-report/ ↩︎
2. Marshall, Alexis. “Curious Nashville: Why Did O. Henry Choose The City For His Famous 1904 Short Story?” WPLN News Nashville, December 28, 2018. https://wpln.org/post/curious-nashville-why-did-o-henry-choose-the-city-for-his-famous-1904-short-story/# ↩︎
3. Dickson, Samuel. Tales of San Francisco, Chapter XXIV Frank Norris, Stanford University Press ©1947. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781503621039-056/pdf?licenseType=restricted ↩︎
4. “There Are Only Three Great Cities in the U.S.: New York, San Francisco, and Washington. All the Rest Are Cleveland,” June 18, 2015. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/18/cleveland/ ↩︎