Sunday, September 30, 2012

Concentration Camp

Fence on Hudson Yards

"New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they've built —they've built their own prison— and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners."
Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, My Dinner with Andre

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Great Life

"Alamo" by Tony Rosenthal

"New York's a great life if you don't weaken."
John Dos Passos, The Big Money

Friday, September 28, 2012

The Credo of New Yorkers

Winter Garden

"The credo of all New Yorkers is: Keep to yourself, mind your own business, and import friends from another part of town. Any contact, except with close trusted friends,must remain superficial. It's how to stay healthy --emotionally and physically-- in New York City."
John Bohannon, Abracadabra, You're Dead

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Run, Don't Walk

Central Park

"New Yorkers don't walk, they run. It's joggers trying to keep their figure, pedestrians trying to keep their wallets, tourists who, despite our gridlocked crosswalk signs that say no standing, no stopping, no parking, no kidding, know jaywalking is faster than a cab. They're all in a hurry."
Cindy Adams, Living a Dog's Life, Jazzy, Juicy, and Me

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Sell Anything

Store on Broadway

"New York is like sex... You can sell almost anything if you attach it to New York."
Jay McInerney, Ransom

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Titanic

Domino Sugar Refinery

"New York was titanic, a city of violent, bewildering contrasts. It lusted for ever greater power, greater wealth. It built only to abandon its buildings, obliterate them and build again, in a different way, for another purpose."
Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York

Monday, September 24, 2012

Meeting Place

Paley Park

"New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American."
Djuna Barnes, New York

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Subterfuge

Brooklyn Bridge

"Brooklyn is a subterfuge. It is a piece of jism that hangs off the pecker of Manhattan."
Thomas Glynn, The Building

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Hotel

Hotel Chelsea

"New York City is a great apartment hotel in which everyone lives and no one is at home."
Glenway Wescott, quoted in New York Vertical

Friday, September 21, 2012

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Hermits

Sign on Park Avenue

"New York has more hermits than will be found in all the forests, mountains and deserts of the United States."
Simeon Strunsky, quoted in The Epic of New York City

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

All About Money

World Financial Center

"I really thought New York was going to be sophisticated. Cultured. Instead, it's all about money."
James Wolcott, The Catsitters

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Imperial Rome

Tobacco Warehouse


"Living in New York is like living in the Imperial Rome of our day, and there is a wild dirty electricity to the city which makes it an ideal place to live."
Brian Moore, Brian Moore : The Chameleon Novelist

Monday, September 17, 2012

Sunday, September 16, 2012

First Impression

Freeman Alley

"The first impression of New York is that it is repulsive and vulgar. The broken pavements, the muddy streets, the squares overrun with grass and underbrush, the disreputable horse cars, and the irregular houses plastered with huge handbills have the careless ugliness of an open-air bazaar. The old cities of Europe all have character; this has nothing but commonplaceness."
Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, A Frenchman in Lincoln's America

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Citizen of the World

Dag Hammarskjold Plaza

"That's the magic of New York. People come from all over. I feel a citizen of the world."
Nicholasa Mohr, Puerto Rican Voices in English

Friday, September 14, 2012

Characters

The Puck Building

"New Yorkers like characters. We like larger-than-life figures with guts and the ability to laugh when you punch them in the gut and say: Is that all you got?"
Terry McAuliffe, What a Party!

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Untamed

Columbia University

"New York will always be a turbulent, ungovernable city. It will never be tamed or seeded or grow stagnant. It will have no past, no history, because it will be changing all the time."
Van Dinh Tran, Blue Dragon, White Tiger

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Paris

Washington Square Park

"I do love New York in that way snobs adore Paris, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a city you can keep. I'll take New York, where, yes, the streets do smell, but by and large, the people don't."
Binnie Kirshenbaum, Pure Poetry

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

World Trade Center

FDNY Memorial Wall

"New Yorkers kept the echo of the Trade Center clenched within them, always ready to bloom when a steam pipe exploded or a crane fell, the urban cacophony now shaded with a darker menace."
Justin Peacock, Blind Man's Alley

Monday, September 10, 2012

Sorority

Barnard College

"I joined the one sorority I knew I belonged to: the sorority of New York City."
Alyssa Shelasky, Apron Anxiety

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Nicer than Washington

Grant's Tomb

"I wish we had never come to Washington. New York is so much nicer and the people there are much more amusing; they dance ever so much better and send one flowers all the time, and then they never talk about first principles."
Henry Adams, Democracy

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Friday, September 7, 2012

Of Love and Terror


Bomb Squad truck on Second Avenue

"Honey, we live in Manhattan. Probably all of us are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find love -- or a cab at five p.m. for that matter."
Carolina Aguilera, In the Shadow of the Lighthouse

Thursday, September 6, 2012

One City

Empire State Building reflection

"There is only one city for everyone just as there is one major love. New York is my city because I have an investment I can always draw on —a bottomless investment of twenty-one years (I count the day I was born) of building up an idea of New York—  so no matter what happens here I have the rock of my dreams of it that nothing can destroy."
Dawn Powell, The Diaries of Dawn Powell

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

People on Top

High rise on the Lower East Side

"I lived in Manhattan when I was married. It's OK for work, but I can't sleep with all those people on top of me."
Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), Mad Men

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The Most Exciting Place to Work

Midtown

"New York is the most exciting place in the world to work. London is fun to walk around in and New York is fun to work in."
Don DeLillo, Americana

Monday, September 3, 2012

Melancholy

World Financial Center Plaza

"Without the crowds, New York City seemed very old and melancholy, like someone who had seen many sad things and tried to fill their life with hullabaloo to keep from thinking too much."
Ellen Potter, Olivia Kidney and the Secret Beneath the City

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Upper West Side

West End Avenue

"The Upper West Side is composed entirely of people born in New York who want to be in society, whatever that is, and can't afford to live on Fifth Avenue."
Sinclair Lewis, The Trail of the Hawk

Saturday, September 1, 2012

The Bottom of New York

Hudson Yards

"I dug it all — the streets and the snows and the starving and the five-flight walkups and sleeping in rooms with ten people. I dug the trains and the shadows, the way I dug ore mines and coal mines. I just jumped right to the bottom of New York."
Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan: A Biography