Foulkes interweaves the story of the creation of the musical and film with the remaking of the Upper West Side and the larger tale of New York's postwar aspirations. Making unprecedented use of Jerome Robbins's revelatory papers, she shows the crucial role played by the political commitments of Robbins and his fellow gay, Jewish collaborators, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents: their determination to evoke life in New York as it was actually lived helped give West Side story its unshakable sense of place even as it put forward a vision of a new, vigorous, determinedly multicultural American city.