Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Things Unnoticed

West 113th

"New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick's Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building."
Gay Talese, New York: A Serendipiter's Journey

Monday, August 30, 2010

Wicked

Manhattan Detention Complex

"There's more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh."
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Scranton

Lafayette Street

"New York is like Scranton on acid. No…on speed…no, on steroids."
Michael Scott (Steve Carell), The Office

Saturday, August 28, 2010

No Men and the City

Central Park

"There are no available men in their thirties in New York. Giuliani had them removed along with the homeless."
Miranda Hobbs (Cynthia Nixon),  Sex and the City

Friday, August 27, 2010

Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Power to Charm

Madison Square Park
"If New York has lost the power to amaze, it is gaining the power to charm."
Jan Morris, The World

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Spectator Sport

Broadway

"Forget the Yankees. Real estate would always be New York City's truest spectator sport."
Sally Koslow, With Friends Like These

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Most Dramatic City


"New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying."
Cornell Woolrich, Manhattan Noir 2

Monday, August 23, 2010

The Epitome of Civilization

Midtown

"New York is the epitome of civilization. L.A. is a large garden suburb. Fabulous, of course, but New York is the place that rocks. Anything is possible here."
Chris Niles, Hell's Kitchen

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Rule of New York Society

15 Central Park West

"While it is true in New York that the path to social acceptance can come from money, power, or prestige, one is generally expected to conform to the same sensibility or style as everyone else. Being too front and center is considered déclassé."
Alexandra Lebenthal,  The Recessionistas

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Shriveled Appearance


"New York has taken on a shriveled appearance; nothing is painted or shined, and the people one passes on the sidewalk move slowly, with a stunned look on their face."
Roger Angell, Let Me Finish

Friday, August 20, 2010

Skyscraper Champion

World Trade Center

"This is New York, Skyscraper Champion of the World...Where the Slickers and Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each other...And where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye."
Ben Hecht, Nothing Sacred

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Leaving New York

George Washington Bridge

"Whenever you leave a given place, even if it's only on a temporary basis, in a great many practical ways you cease to exist in the minds of the people there. This is especially true if the place you leave is called New York City."
Kinky Friedman, Ten Little New Yorkers

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Substitute for Paris

Bowling Green Park

"The very idea of being in New York was dreamlike, for like many young Negroes at the time, I thought of it as the freest of American cities and considered Harlem as the site and symbol of Afro-American progress and  hope. I was both young and bookish enough to think of Manhattan as my substitute for Paris and of Harlem as a place for Left Bank excitement."
Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Disappointing

West 70th

"New York was disappointing. The buildings were higher and the crowds thicker; otherwise it was little different from Brooklyn."
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Monday, August 16, 2010

Superior

City Hall Park

"I think New York one of the finest cities I ever saw, and as much superior to every other in the Union."
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Reason People Hate It

Manhattan seen from Roosevelt Island

"Most of the people who run New York down have never been there. And if they ever went, we would destroy them in nine minutes. People hate New York, because that's where the action is, and they know it's passing them by."
George Carlin, Brain Droppings

Friday, August 13, 2010

Genteel

West End Avenue

"You hear little about West End Avenue. It is too genteel to have much taste for publicity."
Christopher Morley, Christopher Morley's New York

Thursday, August 12, 2010

The Worst Aspect

Fox News Ticker

"Loser liberals seem to think they can acquire the savoir faire of Manhattan by adopting the worst aspect of the city — its liberalism. The second-worst aspect of New York City is the traffic, but that doesn't mean you're a cool person if you idle your car in a parking lot in Des Moines for three hours a day."
Ann Coulter, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Crucible


"New York is large, glamorous, easygoing, kindly and incurious—but above all it is a crucible—because it is large enough to be incurious."
Ford Madox Ford, New York Essays

Monday, August 9, 2010

The Town that Never Sleeps

Eighth Avenue

"This is the town that never sleeps. That's why we don't live in Duluth. That plus I don't know where Duluth is."
Larry Lipton (Woody Allen), Manhattan Murder Mystery

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Xanadu

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir

"New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu."
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Between the Moon and New York City

Forty-Second Street


"If you get caught between the moon and New York City
Best that you can do
Best that you can do is fall in love."
Christopher Cross, Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager, Peter Allen (lyrics), Arthur's Theme (The Best That You Can Do) 

Friday, August 6, 2010

Cloacina

Manhole in TriBeCa

"New York, for example, like London, seems to be a cloacina of all the depravities of human nature."
Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Cosmopolitan and Parochial

Globe at Trump International Hotel and Tower

"New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities — in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East."
John Gregory Dunne, Harp

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Star City

Lucille Lortel Playwright Star Sidewalk

"New York City, the incomparable, the brilliant star city of cities, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean Paradox, the inferno with no-out-of bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States."
John Gunther, Inside U.S.A.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Collection of Small Towns

Centre Market Place

"Everyone thought New York was a huge city but that wasn't true; it was a collection of small towns."
Jeffery Deaver, Manhattan Is My Beat