Monday, January 31, 2011

Pain in the Neck

Billboard in Times Square

"New Yorkers are a pain in the neck. Always thinking about money."
Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Friday, January 28, 2011

Will Go On

Pier 54

"Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us."
Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Depends on Immigration

The Immigrants statue

"The fact is that America depends on New York and New York depends on immigration."
Rudolph Giuliani, The Quotable Giuliani

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Sesame Street

Times Square

"I always imagined that New York felt like Sesame Street. The urban decay. The community aspect. The multiracial thing."
Jeff Whitty, Avenue Q: The Book

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

A Monument of Splendor

Manhattan seen from Roosevelt Island

"The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach."
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

Monday, January 24, 2011

Melting Pot?

Surf Avenue

"Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums."
John Kenneth Galbraith,  A View from the Stands

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Empire City

Empire State Building

"Everyone who lives here thinks the city is such hot shit. New York just sucks you in with all its coolness. But the Empire City has no clothes. It was buzz, spin, and hype without any substance."
Arthur Nersesian, Dogrun

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Big Men with Little Soul

Riverside South

"New Yorkers are prone to boast of their superiority over the denizens of other cities, but it is a fact that the American metropolis is inferior in culture, intelligence and morals to almost any city in the world. It is the home of big men with little soul, big newspapers with little editors."
Henry O. Morris, Waiting for the Signal

Friday, January 21, 2011

Jostling for Space

96th Street Station

"New Yorkers are so accustomed to subways and elevators, fighting to get a seat and jostling for space, that it's a hard habit to break. They come skiing in Vermont and spend all day charging lifts."
John Hilferty, Moonlight in Vermont

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Story of the World

Statue of Liberty

"To Europe she was America, to America she was the gateway of the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world."
H.G. Wells, The War in the Air

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Monday, January 17, 2011

The City That Never Lets You Sleep

Lexington Avenue

"It's so loud. All the time. Yes, it's the city that never sleeps. Well, guess what? I like to sleep! I've been tired for eight years!"
Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), How I Met Your Mother

Saturday, January 15, 2011

No Local Pride


"There is this to be said for New York City: it is the one densely inhabited locality -- with the possible exception of Hell -- that has absolutely not a trace of local pride."
Irving S. Cobb, New York

Friday, January 14, 2011

The Fantasy of a Mechanical God

Harlem

"New York is unreal. A simple tree is more real than it.
It is the fantasy of a mechanical God.
New York is a monster furiously disemboweled by men like maggots.
Had religion given rise to it, what would we sincerely think of this religion?"
Jean Toomer, A Jean Toomer Reader

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Hurry and Flurry


"Many years ago I learned to discount the hurry and flurry of New York. We are no busier than Bridgeport or Jersey City, but we pretend we are. It is necessary for our municipal vanity to squeeze and jam and rush and crush."
James Huneker,  New Cosmopolis

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Central Park

Central Park

"Manhattan is a city without trees, but there is a ghetto for them: Central Park."
Raymond-Léopold Bruckberger, One Sky To Share

Monday, January 10, 2011

Sunday, January 9, 2011

The Destinies of the Nation

Fraunces Tavern

"The great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation than five times the population of any other portion of the country. "
Willis A. Gorman, quoted in The New Metropolis

Saturday, January 8, 2011

The Composition of a Mad Artist

Lower East Side

"A collage of disparate, violently-yoked-together elements, New York was the surreal composition of a mad artist."
E.L. Doctorow, Creationists

Friday, January 7, 2011

The Most Wonderful Street

Broadway

"The most wonderful street in the Universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself."
James Dabney McCabe,  Lights and Shadows of New York Life

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Where Talent Flowers

The Juilliard School

"If the talent of America is not born here,  it usually flowers here, for this is the stimulus, the forcing ground, and the marketplace."
Marya Mannes, The New York I Know

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Technicholor Bazaar

Flower District

"Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar."
Kenneth Tynan, Tynan Right and Left

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Rosetta Stone

Sidewalk Art by Keith Haring (Prince and Broadway)

"Manhattan is the 20th century's Rosetta Stone."
Rem Koolhaas,  Delirious New York

Monday, January 3, 2011

Street Challenge

Broome St.

"In New York, constantly, the street is challenging you to relate to it."
Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stone Interviews

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Saturday, January 1, 2011

New Year's Day

42nd Street Subway Station

"New Year's Day in New York is not the less one of the cheerfullest and most humanising celebrations extant among a noble, but perverse people, who have repudiated the greater part of the traditional observances to which Europeans pin a reverent and affectionate faith.  I wish --abating the plethoric eating and drinking-- that it were always New Year's Day in New York, and in the whole of this magnificent empire of Democracy turned crazy."
George Augustus Henry Sala, My Diary in America in the Midst of War