The Bellow-blogging continues

In the Times, Joseph Berger tries to claim Saul Bellow for New York City:

Chicago was where he grew up, went to college and eventually settled. But he lived in New York as a young writer, and New York's frenzied streets, its apartments with bathtubs in the kitchen and cockroaches in the toaster, the benches on its traffic islands filled with idlers and the old, the onion rolls from Zabar's, even the pigeons, exerted a powerful and deeply ambivalent pull on him.

While this article has convinced me that I need to read "Seize the Day," which is apparently set in the Ansonia (which is, along with the Police Academy building near Little Italy, the site of my future apartment, one day when I am old and various cities are fighting over which gets to claim me as its own), I don't really buy Bellow as a New York writer. He sees NYC from a Chicagoan's perspective, and no Chicagoan can avoid the comparisons of their own city with the denser and more famous one to the east. Sure, New York has a more extensive public transportation system, but Chicago, well, Chicago has a University. Chicago also used to have an agnes b., but no city's perfect.