The Truth about Humanity

West 40th

"New York is the truth about humanity made flesh."
Jesse Browner, Turnaway

Willful Taker

"No one knows better than I do how readily New York takes willfully from one without a thought of what it is taking. But giving is really all there is of life as I see it."
Alfred Stieglitz, My Dear Stieglitz

Reasons to Love New York

Merchants' Gate

"They all loved New York. The pale afternoon light, the stone walls around the park, the radiant freedom."
Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

Melting Pot Supreme

Grace Church

"I came to the Big Apple because it seemed like a good place to lose myself and start over. Shed a skin. Jump into the bubbling stew. Melting pot supreme."
David Klass, Whirlwind

Boulevard of Beautiful Immigrants

"Manhattan, after all, was and still is a smorgasbord of different types of men — a boulevard of beautiful immigrants."
Jameson Currier, Where the Rainbow Ends

Ever Changing

The High Line

"That was New York in a nutshell, I realized. Things changed all the time. As soon as the change was complete, it was impossible to reconstruct the past. It couldn't be done. The former landscape would always feel like a dream or a lie."
Lesley Dormen, The Best Place to Be

The Adversity of NY Real Estate

Diesel store on Second Avenue

"It goes without saying that New York apartments are small, that New York rents are exorbitant, and that New Yorkers are extremely pleased with themselves for being tough enough to survive these adverse conditions."
Francesca DelBanco, Ask Me Anything

The First Glimpse of Manhattan

Battery Park

"The first glimpse of Manhattan is a shocker. The clouds of pollution seem so neat, so localized, fitting like great gaseous dunce caps on the eager skyscrapers."
Ned Rorem, The Later Diaries of Ned Rorem 1961-1972

Confident

The Cable Building

"Did she like New York? Yes. No. Maybe. It was too soon to tell. It certainly felt like a city that was supremely confident in itself."
Viken Berberian, Das Kapital

Worse than Sodom and Gomorrah

Museum of Sex

"This is New York, remember. This is Sodom and Gomorrah, plus crack cocaine and crystal meth."
Joseph Geary, Spiral

Gilded Age

The Crown Building

"The city always seems to be in the throes of a gilded age or coming down from one, and the drama of new wealth and the kinds of things it buys has been at the center of New York experience since Edith Wharton's era."
Editors of New York magazine, New York Stories

Claustrophobic

Buildings on East 37th

"He had been impressed by the skyscrapers in New York, but that city was so tightly packed and claustrophobic that you seldom got a real sense of vista."
Poppy Z. Brite, Prime

Great Diamond

Diamond District

"New York is a great diamond, hard and dry, sparkling, triumphant."
Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White

Same Faces

Bowery

"I'm thoroughly tired of New York;  it's the greatest city on earth but after a while there's just too much repetition, the same faces, the same theatres, the same restaurants, even the same waiters."
Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke

Seeing People Jump

Metropolitan Life Tower

“The ultimate certification of your status is seeing people jump, and New York is a city set up to see people jump."

Tom Wolfe, quoted in The New York Times' Book of New York

The Opposite of an Iceberg

Midtown Manhattan

"I'd only been in New York for a week and a half and I'd already become oblivious to anything that wasn't directly in front of me. The city was the opposite of an iceberg. What you saw on the surface, what was right in your face every day, that was only a third of it, the rest was up in the sky."
Lindsey Kelk, I Heart New York

The Bad Old Days

Clock on Madison Avenue

"That's why New Yorkers are always asking you the time. A wristwatch isn't worth the trouble it takes to get stolen."
Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street

Disordered Mind

Bleeker Street

"The New York subway is a vast disordered mind, obsessing in ruts carved by trauma a century earlier."
Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City

Hard to Pin Down

West 92nd

"New York, like an exquisite but elusive butterfly, is famously hard to pin down. That, of course, is part of its charm."
Constance Rosenblum, New York Stories

Fall Days Are Good Days

"Fall days in New York, like this one, are the good days. They're the days that can make you see there is so much in this city, so much that is vibrant and alive and exciting and exhilarating, even though what comes with that is a little bit dirty and crowded, and perhaps for some, just the slightest bit soul-destroying."
Alison Pace, City Dog

Fiction of Sorts

42nd Street Subway Station

"New York is a fiction of sorts, a construct, a story, into which you can walk at any moment and at any angle, and end up blindsided, turned upside down, changed."
Colum McCann, My First New York

Super 8

Jane's Carousel and Manhattan Bridge

"Brooklyn is the past recorded in faded Super  8. It is innocence, childhood, family, community, a safe place. Brooklyn is Rosebud, Camelot, Atlantis. It is the state of grace that exists solely in memory or fantasy. Brooklyn is the precious thing we've lost."
Donald Margulies, Brooklyn Boy

Where I Should Have Been Born

Washington Square North

"I should have been born in New York, I should have been born in the Village, that's where I belong."
John Lennon, Lennon Remembers

Yokels

Sylvan Terrace

"When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others likeminded, one re-establishes a village community.  Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels."
Paul Goodman, Five Years

Island

West 79th Street Boat Basin

"Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across the hundreds of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island."
Albert Camus, American Journals

Romance and Thought

East River Park

"New York City was a set for romance and thought, as opposed to L.A. which kept the sets locked behind studio doors."
Henry Baum, North of Sunset

The Bible

American Bible Society

"You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York."
William Lyon Phelps, Human Nature in the Bible

Excrescence

Roosevelt Island

"Unfortunately there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not as a part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier."
Robert Moses, Working for the People

The Friendliest Place

Bowery

"Imagine seven million people all wanting to live together. Yeah, New York must be the friendliest place on earth."
Michael J. 'Crocodile' Dundee (Paul Hogan), Crocodile Dundee

Trading Town

South Street Seaport

"New York is like a foreign city. The tumult is fearful; yet it is only a sea-port after all. It has no metropolitan repose. It never can have. It is a trading town."
George William Curtis, Trumps

Everest

GE Building

"To him, content as he was to live on a small scale, New York seemed formidably big, remote, and inhuman, and he assumed that it could be conquered only at a great risk. He was impressed by what he thought of as my courage in venturing so far afield; at once, characteristically, he set about assisting me in my assault upon Everest."
Brendan Gill, Here At The New Yorker