New York had been a magnet for many years. During 1916, Marcus Garvey joined the ranks of black West Indians in the city: it wouldn't take him long to shake things up. The impending storm in Russia brought Nikolai Bukharin to Manhattan. Writers continued to arrive, Mina Loy perhaps the most renowned this year. Unable to tour Europe, the Ballets Russes arrived in January. Latin American elites were used to decamping to Europe in the summer. The war had put a stop to such tours but the Havana magazine Social helpfully produced a guide to New York, listing the best hotels and clubs over four issues, ensuring that rich Cuban tourists had something to spend their money on. On 30 July, German agents blew up the munitions factory on Black Tom Island in New York harbour, proving that the war in Europe was not limited to Europe. On 16 October, Margaret Sanger opened the country's first birth control clinic, in Brooklyn, violating Section 1142 of the New York State Penal Code, which criminalised the distribution of materials about contraception due to their obscene nature. Sanger had been trying to provoke prosecution in order to push the previously obscure topic of birth control into public debate. The provocation worked: she was arrested.

The cultural revolution continued apace. Modern US drama can be dated from the November production of Eugene O’Neill's Bound East for Cardiff at the Provincetown Playhouse at 139 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, two doors up from the Liberal Club. The actors had had two informal summer seasons on Cape Cod, but that autumn they had organised themselves as ‘The Provincetown Players’, voting to produce a season in New York City. Mexican art made its first impression on New York when Marius de Zayas's Modern Gallery staged an exhibition of Diego Rivera's paintings in the autumn.

Salomon de la Selva doggedly pursued his pan-American project while benefiting from the job opportunities opening up in the teaching of romance languages. His path crossed that of the young Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, who came to New York in January to get married and wrote one of the longest and most intriguing of all early twentieth-century poems, partly about his experiences of what everyone was now thinking of as the city of the future.