Where History is Happening

Manhattan District Attorney's Office

"Look around, look around at how
Lucky we are to be alive right now
History is happening in Manhattan and we
Just happen to be in the greatest city in the world
In the greatest city in the world!"
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton

Partner or Lover

"LOVE" by Robert Indiana

"Ask anyone who's lived in New York for an extended period of time, on purpose, and they will testify that New York is the best place in the world. They love New York so much, they actually talk about the city in romantic terms. Like it's a partner. Or a lover."
Erin Clune, How to Leave

Center of a Lot of Things

Bethesda Terrace and Fountain

"New York is more exciting, I guess, than even Paris or London is, for the moment. New York’s the center of something; I don’t know what, really—the center of a lot of things. With all its problems and chaos and craziness, it’s still a great place to live. I can’t see myself living anywhere else."
Robert De Niro, Interview Magazine

Unlikely Encounters

Number 7 train

"It’s such a layer cake of different people constantly crossing paths. It’s not like other kinds of cities where people drive a lot; New York is so compact that we see each other in the subway, on the bus or on the street all the time, and are always having encounters with unlikely people."
Rebecca Miller, The Guardian

Unexpected New York

Union Square sign

"New York is marked by a sense of anything-is-possible discovery. Turn the corner and you may notice the bottom of a street sign decorated with intricate terrazzo, or a small sign for a private cemetery in the East Village. Here, the unexpected will always find you, but if you take time to appreciate the expected, you may find it’s the least expected of all."
Isabel Slone, The Toronto Star

Greatest and Lowest

Fifth Avenue

"New York is a city of the greatest and the lowest, and all you gotta remember is that they exist side by side, about five feet from each other."
Haughton Murphy, Murder Takes a Partner

Spring Rain

Lerner Hall at Columbia University

"A spring rain in New York is like no other. When it's over, you feel as though your troubles were washed away."
Ronald Higgins, Maggie, I Love You

New Yorker

The New Yorker Hotel

"Please don't call me an American. I'm a New Yorker."
Anonymous, quoted by Overheard in New York

Lost in New York

Lower East Side

"The thing about New York is, just think it and find out where it is because there is literally anything you could possibly want to do here. I would say get lost—that’s the main thing. Go out, get a bike and just decide that you’re going to spend three hours exploring. I guarantee you you’re going to find food, shops, people, experiences that you weren’t expecting but are going to love."
Josh Groban, NYCGo.com

Atom Bomb

 

"New York is so blasé; you could set off an atom bomb and no one would react."

Alan Rogers, InfoWorld

Orgy of Irishness

Spectators at the St. Patrick's Day Parade

"Not even Dublin celebrates St Patrick's Day like it is celebrated in New York, where everyday life comes to a halt to honour an obscure trans-Atlantic saint who, although a Welshman, inspires an orgy of Irishness."
Damien Enright, A Place Near Heaven

Never Listening

Penn Station

"People in New York never really listened to anyone else; they just waited for a break in the action so they could start to speak, push off with their own boat into the slipstream of talk."

Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

Beautiful and Amazing

Greenacre Park

"You can live in New York your entire life and feel like nothing will surprise you—you've seen it all. And then one day you come across something you never knew was there, something beautiful and amazing that can't possibly exist in New York City, but there it is, right in front you, and you can only marvel at it."
Nick Santora, Fifteen Digits

Cooler Than Thou

The Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch

"If Paris is your stuffy grandmother, then New York is your cooler-than-thou older sibling, the one who lets you break curfew but also hardly acknowledges your existence."
Marina Khorosh, Vogue Magazine

Great for the Young

The Cooper Union

"Everyone moves to New York wanting it to be the ideal of what they grew up with. New York is always in flux, so I don’t think anyone gets what they came for. But it also encourages people to change it themselves. New York is great when you’re young and that will always be true."
Scott Ewalt, Ponyboy Magazine

Magical Feeling

Battery Park

"When you live in New York City, there's a magical feeling you get whenever you run up the steps out of the subway, spin through a revolving door out of your office building at the end of a long day, push open a window to let in the spring scent of blossoms. There's a split second where the city hits you, greets you, slobbers a kiss on your face like a puppy."
Kate Spencer, In a New York Minute

New York 'Tude

Sign in Downtown Manhattan

"New York I thought I knew before moving here. I’d played here and done a lot of work here. But moving was a big shock. I didn’t know there would be so much hassle on a day-to-day basis. It doesn’t take long for me to get what a friend of mine calls a ‘tude’--like attitude, New York style. It’s not quite a bitchiness, but a crankiness, a short fuse."
Connie Chung, Los Angeles Times

Small World

Riverside Drive and West 72nd

"New York is a big city, obviously, but the Upper West Side is a small world."
Abbi Waxman, Adult Assembly Required

Pacing New York

East River Park

"New York needs to be paced, to be left and returned to, like a lover who asks too much. And when you do return, with that unfailing excitement you cross the Henry Hudson Bridge and realize you are back. To return to New York is to repossess it. After a year abroad or a day in the country, you hungrily reclaim the city, and the city responds, recharging you, awaiting your deepest pleasure."
Stephen Brook, New York Days, New York Nights

Never Boring

"New York is very upfront about what it is. It's sexy. It's dangerous. It's powerful. It's seedy. It's funny. It's crazy. And it's never boring.''
Mariel Hemingway, The Roanoke Times

Entire World

The Unisphere

"NYC was a city where you could just sink into the background and watch the world interact in the most magical and mysterious ways that there were. It was like the entire world converged on New York City, and it all blended together. The rich and poor, native and foreigners, the seen and the unseen. It had everything a people-watcher could want."

Lexy Timms, Unknown Identity

Grade School Teacher

PS 2 The Meyer London School

"Hollywood was the grade school teacher who started you off with an 'A' until you failed. New York was the one who gave you an 'F' until you proved you deserved better."
Sloane Crosley, The Clasp

Paired Off

Sarah D. Roosevelt Park

"When did everybody stop smoking? When did everybody pair off? This used to be the most exciting city in the world, and now it’s nothing but smoking near a fucking open window. New York is over. O-V-E-R. No one’s fun anymore! Whatever happened to fun? I’m so bored I could die."
"Lexi Featherston" (Kristen Johnston), Sex and the City

Busload of People

Casey Stengel Depot

"New York is such a romantic place in the sense that anything can happen at any moment. But there’s also a specialness about New York. New York is like: 'Bitch, I don’t need you. If you don’t like it here, you can leave. I’ll be fine. There’s another busload of people coming in.'"
Phoebe Robinson, The Washington Post

City of Dazzling Wealth

Lower Manhattan

"In the shadow of those grey and white pinnacles had grown up a modern Baghdad where the ends of the earth came together. A greater Italian city than Rome, a greater Irish city than Dublin, a greater German city than Cologne;  a city of dazzling wealth whose towers had once looked like peaks of solid gold to hungry eyes reaching beyond the horizons of the old world; a place that had sprung up from a lonely frontier to a metropolis, a central city, bowing to no other. A place where civilisation and savagery had climbed alternately on each other's shoulders, and reached their crest together."
Leslie Charteris, The Saint of New York

Most Beautiful Thing

Times Square

"The first thing that people photograph or digest in New York is Broadway and Times Square–it's the most beautiful thing in New York, and in America."
William Klein, Aperture

Constant Regeneration

Rose Hill

"I love New York! I love the energy of this city, the way it constantly regenerates. To always be alive, to know how to be optimistic. To understand novelty."  Sylvia Jorif, Condé Nast

Big Celebration

East 18th Street

"Hey New York is my sanctuary
Where the bankers are actors
And the waiters all are stars
It's a big celebration
Oooh yeah."
Anne Heaton, Hey New York

Possibility City

Harlem

"My own favorite thing about New York: It is possibility city. Nowhere else do you have as much of a sense when you get up in the morning that your life could be completely different by evening, merely according to whether you turn right or left when you get to a particular street corner."
Jay Molivesher, New York Magazine

Values of a Time

Greenwich Village

"New York, and in particular Brooklyn, is undoubtedly where the creativity of the inhabitants suggests new ways of speaking, dressing, and behaving. After a few years, these ways of presenting, discovered in New York, are assimilated around the world and used as fashions, unfortunately also with a certain superficiality. New York is the place that best captures the values of a time."
Gaetano Pesce, L'Officiel USA

Where People Come to Make It

The Pierre, 520 Park Avenue and the Sherry-Netherland

"I've always had a real fascination and attraction to New York. I think New York is a city where people come to make it.''
Darren Star, The Roanoke Times

A Slum

Williamsburg

"Unless you're rich, New York is like a slum. It's like India."
Jennifer Miller and ‎Jason Feifer, Mr. Nice Guy

Forced to Interact

168th Street subway station

"New Yorkers nurture so many industries — finance, trade, and tech — and have so many influences, and come from so many cultural backgrounds. And because we’re forced to be together and interact physically in our daily lives, my life feels more vital. We take the subway with lawyers, homeless people punching each other, nurses falling asleep on their way home, teachers scolding their students, and many other people from every walk of life."
Ethan Hawke, Variety

My Valentine

Pier A

"Moscow is Red, Pittsburgh is gritty. 
I know a nicer kind of city. 
It's on the Hudson, not the Rhine. 
Manhattan, be my valentine."
Phyllis McGinley, Valentine for New York

Interest in New York City

Sign in the Civic Center

"Almost everyone has heard of New York and almost everyone has an interest in New York. Even people who hate New York have an interest in New York—or else why would they bother to hate it?"
Fran Lebowitz, Time Out New York

Battery

"Sea of Light" exhibit on the South Street Seaport

"New York is a battery, it gives you energy from I don't-know-where. To me, it's magical."
Luis Guillermo Martínez, La Cuarta

Don't Blame New York

Bowery

"Don’t blame New York for your dreams that died
Don’t blame New York when you’re too tired to try
Don’t blame New York for how much you eat
Don’t blame New York when you cry in the street
Don’t blame New York for the places you grieve
Don’t blame New York if you need to leave."
Jim Andralis, Don't Blame New York

No Prejudice

Downtown Manhattan

"New York is a melting pot. In my neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, the kids were black, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Greek and Jewish, and there was no prejudice. They all beat me up on the way to school."
Richard Belzer, quoted in The New York Times

Leaving New York City

Riverside Park

"Who doesn’t think about leaving New York City at least once a day? It’s like the house in Poltergeist: the house wants you to leave, but you keep fighting it. Living in New York is great, but it's awful too."
Jason Diamond, Never Can Say Goodbye

American Dream

Times Square

"The heart of New York is grit and resilience. New York is truly a city of dreams and a city of immigrants. It embodies the American dream."
Nicola Mendelsohn, Time Out New York

Map of New York

Lexington Avenue

"Everyone had a fragile web of friends on the map of New York – friendships that had nothing to do with geography, neighborhood. Everyone in his way excluded the masses, the unknown, the potential enemy."
Patricia Highsmith, A Dog's Ransom

Not for the Pure of Soul

Lower East Side

"New York is not for the pure of soul, the sweet of spirit, the model of sanity or the paragon of civility. It is the city that gave part of its name to the Bronx cheer and cherishes its Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol of the art of bilking the innocent."
Russell Baker, The New York Times

Everyone is Weird

Times Square subway station

"Whatever, it's New York. Everyone's weird."
Ashley Poston, Geekerella

Say Anything

Astor Place

"In the beginning I was of the mind that I could say or do anything. I was from the Bronx, and who didn’t say what they thought there?"
Jennifer Lopez, Vogue

Change, Chaos and Disfunction

Morningside Heights

"There is a magical/diabolical allure of the constant change, disfunction, and chaos of this city. It has transformed right before my eyes leaving a transitory, impermanent feeling that radiates in my soul. NYC is my DNA—it's what makes me who I am today. The strength and vitality that beats within me is because of this astronomically powerful city." 
Richie Shazam, Vice 

Fast Paced

FDR Drive

"New York is very fast-paced. You're always running; you're always busy. It's just something I love."
Julia Danan, Whitman

New York Demeanor

Wall Street

"In many ways Wall Street was the one part of America in which Japanese citizens, especially those from Tokyo itself, felt most at home. The buildings were so tall as to deny one a look at the sky, the streets so packed that a visitor from another planet might think that yellow cabs and black limousines were the primary form of life here. People moved along the crowded, dirty sidewalks in bustling anonymity, eyes rigidly fixed forward both to show purpose and to avoid even visual contact with others who might be competitors or, more likely, were just in the way. The whole city of New York had taken its demeanor from this place, brusque, rapid, impersonal, tough in form, but not in substance."
Tom Clancy, Debt of Honor

Most Moral

Church of the Transfiguration

"New York is the cleanest city on earth. You can't find a more moral race of people anywhere." 
Peter McGuinness, The American Establishment And Other Reports Opinions And Speculations

Emotional Place

Astor Place

"New York is an emotional place. It's a place where people feel willing to express themselves."
Matthew Lella, CanadianArchitect.com

Different Walks of Life

West 34th Street

"One of the reasons we live in New York is because, without having to explain things to the girls, they can walk around the streets and just by looking around them see that the world is composed of all different people from different walks of life, different languages and different socio-economic backgrounds. They pick it up through osmosis."
Matt Damon, The Guardian