Fountain of Finance

New York Stock Exchange

"Look around, gang,
'cause this sight is a honey.
The Fountain of Finance!
The Mecca of Money!

Yes, Wall Street's a temple,
our nation's salvation.
And we are among
its elite congregation."

Bruce Kluger and David Slavin, Dog on the Roof!

Great City

Robert F. Kennedy Bridge

"New York is a great city to live in if you can afford to get out of it."
William Cole, quoted in New York Vertical

Ayn Ran's Religion

© Andrew Kazmierski - Dreamstime.com

"People tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pest-hole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel."
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Ego

Alice Tully Hall

"The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere; it is not this sort of license that distinguishes New York. It is rather, a lust of the total ego for recognition, even for eminence. More than elsewhere, everybody here wants to be Somebody."
Sydney J. Harris, The Harper Book of Quotations

Subway Crying

Number 7 subway train

"You're not a real New Yorker until you've cried on the subway and not given a damn about what anybody thinks."
Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), How I Met Your Mother

Magic Name

Manhattan Municipal Building

"That enfabled rock, that ship of life, that swarming, million-footed, tower-masted, and sky-soaring citadel that bears the magic name of the Island of Manhattan."
Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock

Money Trumps All

Fifth Avenue

"In New York, making money trumped all, to such a degree that grittiness, if its existence proved financially lucrative, equaled glamour."
Alice Sparberg Alexiou, The Flatiron

Good Things

Brooklyn Heights Promenade

"I am not unappreciative of the good things that can be found in New York, and only in New York, but I am inclined to think that if New York didn't exist, the good things would manifest themselves elsewhere."
Granville Hicks, Small Town

The City that Dozes

55 Water Street

"People who don't know what they are talking about call New York the city that never sleeps. But it does sleep. Well, it dozes."
Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

Everything is Seedy

Chambers St. subway station

"Everything in New York is seedy. Even the best here is somehow outgrowth from the compost around it."
Omar S. Castañeda, Remembering to Say Mouth or Face

Landing for Dreams

South Street Seaport

"Manhattan is a seaport -- and a landing for dreams. Manhattan teems with dreamers."
Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

Peeping Toms

Manhattan skyline seen from Brooklyn

"New Yorkers don't watch birds, we watch each other. Binoculars, telescopes — anyone who doesn't draw their curtains at night is fair game."
Irene Marcuse, Under the Manhattan Bridge

Crystal Conservatory

Perry Street towers

"With money, double-dazzle New York is a crystal conservatory. Take money away, and you're naked and shielding your Johnson in a cataract of breaking glass."
Martin Amis, Money

Brooklyn

Brooklyn Bridge

"It's always a mistake to think that Brooklyn is a borough. Brooklyn is a country."
Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz, Brooklyn: A State of Mind

Disneyfication

Tenth Avenue

"The Disneyfication of New York is over, everyone. At the stroke of midnight, your Lexus is going to turn back into a hot pile of rats fighting over a human finger."
Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), 30 Rock

Extravagant City

World Financial Center Plaza

"City of wharves and stores — city of tall facades of marble and iron! Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!"
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Nouveau Riche

Astor Place

"New York has always been the home of the nouveau riche. I'm the nouveau pauvre now, compared to others."
Brooke Astor, quoted in New York Magazine

The Rocks of Manhattan

World Financial Center Plaza

"Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan."

H.L. Mencken, A Second Mencken Crestomathy

How Many New Yorkers...?

Strand of lights in the South Street Seaport

"How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
None of your fucking business."
Lynne Tillman, No Lease on Life

Mecca

Bethesda Terrace Arcade

"New York is the Mecca of the rich and the poor; it is the Hades of the unhappy medium."
Alan Dale, Wanted

Paradox

Split-Rocker, by Jeff Koons, at Rockefeller Center

"New York remains what it has always been: a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence."
Paul Goldberger, The City Observed: New York

Always Gay

East 51st Street

"New York may be splendidly gay, or squalidly gay; but, prince or pauper, it's gay always."
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes

Real Estate Investing

Greenwich Village

"Everyone in New York knows someone else who could have bought a building 30 years ago for $9.00."
Warren Greshes, The Best Damn Sales Book Ever

Manhattan Island

East 34th Street Ferry Landing

"Being an island is an important thing about New York because even though no one thinks much about it from day to day, they have to go to quite a bit of trouble to get on it and off it. This makes being there something of an event and people don't take it so lightly. New York isn't like so many places that just sort of dwindle away until you're out of town. In New York, it's very definite. You're either there or you aren't."
Andy Rooney, Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

A Devil's Dream

World Financial Center

"New York is a devil's dream, the most urbanized city in the world. It is all geometry angles and stone. It is mythical, a city buried by a volcano. No grass is found in this petrified city, no big living trees, no flowers, no bird but the drab little lecherous sparrow, no soil, loam, earth; fresh earth to smell, earth to walk on, to roll on, and love like a woman."
Michael Gold, Jews Without Money

Boyfriend

The High Line

"New York is like a boyfriend
One I just can't let go of
He's so hard to hate
But too easy to love."
Ashley Jones, New York is Like a Boyfriend

The Crime of Poverty

Homeless on West 13th

"All the world over, poverty is a misfortune. In New York it is a crime."
James Dabney McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life

Photograph

West 58th

“Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller's eyes."

Ann-Marie McDonald, Fall on Your Knees

Self-Attracting Universe

Union Square

"Why do people live in New York? There is no relationship between them. Except for an inner electricity which results from the simple fact of their being crowded together. A magical sensation of contiguity and attraction for an artificial centrality. This is what makes it a self-attracting universe, which there is no reason to leave."
Jean Baudrillard, America

Anywhere Else

Manhattan's West Side

"Living anywhere other than New York is like drinking warm soda that's lost its fizz."
Emily Giffin, Love the One You're With

Spurned Lovers

West Broadway

"If every spurned lover committed homicide, there would be ten times as many prisons and graveyards, and New York City would be empty."
Karen Bergreen, Following Polly