Sunday, October 31, 2010

Nobody Notices You

East 67th

"New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice."
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Subway Murders

6 Subway Car

"In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car."
George Carlin, Brain Droppings

Friday, October 29, 2010

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Writhing, Uncontrollable

Tompkins Square Park

"Writhing, uncontrollable city! In the years since the city stopped offering garbage collection to Morrisania and Hunts Point, the dogs that roam the streets have been subtly turning into coyotes."
Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Sublime Provincialism


"It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall."
Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Sharks

SHARK Speedboat Thrill Ride

"When walking here, move quickly. Realize that New Yorkers are like sharks: if they stop moving forward, they die (or else bite your head off)."
Fodor's, Fodor's New York City 2010 

Monday, October 25, 2010

The Worst and Best of Cities


"New Yorkers felt superior to everyone, the natives of all other places. They had earned this cultural supremacy, it was their reward for living in the worst --and best-- city in the world."
Roxana Robinson, This is My Daughter

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Inventing the Present

IAC Building seen from the High Line

"New York has never learned the act of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future."
Michel de Certeau, The Blackwell City Reader

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Most Glorious Experiment

Morningside Avenue

"New York is the most glorious experiment on earth of different races and divers groups of humanity struggling and scrambling to live together."
Claude McKay, Harlem, Negro Metropolis

Friday, October 22, 2010

No Place Like It

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir

"There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die."
Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Swinging Town

Saint John the Divine

"God keeps an apartment in New York, incidentally, because this is a swinging town."
Don DeLillo, Underworld

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Monday, October 18, 2010

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Dominant Note

Theodore Roosevelt Statue

"Diversity has always been the dominant note of New York. No sooner has one set of varying elements been fused together than another stream has been poured into the crucible."
Theodore Roosevelt, New York

Friday, October 15, 2010

Aspiration and Accomodation

Gramercy Park

"If the energy of New York is the energy of aspiration — let me in there!— the spirit of New York is really the spirit of accommodation — I'll settle for this."
Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Useless and Evil Things

H. Stern store on Fifth Avenue

"During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year."
H.L. Mencken, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

I Hate New York


"I hate New York,
Except for Broadway op'ning nights,
The magic of those twinkling lights,
The Garden and those crazy fights,
I hate New York."
Steve Allen, Steve Allen's Songs

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

An Open-Air Drug Bazaar

A needle disposal box in the Lower East Side

"Walking the streets of New York is like observing an open-air drug bazaar. The dealing isn't restricted to one location, like Harlem, nor are the transactions conducted in secrecy. In New York it is easier to get hashish than in Marrakech."
Herbert I. London, The Broken Apple

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Carcassone

Midtown Manhattan

"The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags."
Henry Miller, Cosmological Eye

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Paranoia

"Developing Tray #2" by Anne Collier

"Of the cities I know
New York wins the paranoia award."
David Lehman, The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry

Friday, October 8, 2010

Thursday, October 7, 2010

New York is a Woman

Statue of Liberty seen from Battery Park

"New York is a woman holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand and strangling the earth with the other."
Adonis, The Pages of Day and Night

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Monday, October 4, 2010

Charmless

Elizabeth Street

"New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire”.
Henry James, Selected Letters of Henry James

Sunday, October 3, 2010

New York in the Fall

Columbia University

"Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address."
Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), You've Got Mail

Saturday, October 2, 2010

As Nature Demands

Stonewall Inn

"In New York one can live as Nature demands without setting every one's tongues wagging."
George Chauncey, Gay New York

Friday, October 1, 2010

Where the Lord Must Be

Saint John the Divine

"I'm so tired of getting nowhere
Seeing my prayers going unanswered
I guess the Lord must be in New York City."
Harry Nilsson (lyrics), I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City