Halloween

Broadway

"Halloween in New York is redundant. 'Let me put a costume on over my costume and a mask on over my mask.'"
Lewis Black, Nothing's Sacred

Heart Attack

Mount Sinai St. Luke's Emergency Room

"New York is enough to give anyone heart attacks."
Virginia Foster Durr, Freedom Writer

New York Weather

"Tornado" by Michael Sailstorfer

"New York weather is like living on the steppes: you never know what surprises are in the offing."
Ira Berkowitz, Old Flame

Waiting for a Table

The Standard Grill

"They say life's what happens when you're busy making other plans. But sometimes in New York, life is what happens when you're waiting for a table."
Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Sex and the City

You Can Always Tell a New Yorker

West 57th

"You can always tell a New Yorker by his gait, like a parrot on a mahogany table."
Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Shadow Patriots

The Center

Duffy Square

"New York is probably the only place on earth where one feels in the center and not peripheral."
Italo Calvino, quoted in Kazaaam! Splat! Ploof!

Built Upon Something Else

Ninth Avenue

"Everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected."
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Brokenness

Pavement on Riverside Park

"I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal."
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

Living Organism

Flower District

"New York: it's a living organism, an ever-changing tapestry."
Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), How I Met Your Mother

Dear Old Fool

Prince Street

"New York isn't dreadful at all. It's mostly stupid — just a dear old fool."
Alexander Black, The Great Desire

Unnatural Lives

Morningside Heights

"New Yorkers think the world revolves around New York, yet almost all of them hate their unnatural lives, especially those who have lived in other places."
Lella Secor, Lella Secor: A Diary in Letters

Off the Map

Centre Street

"Lower Manhattan. It was so easy to get lost there, to disappear off the map. And New York was one city where they could get whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it."
James Patterson, The Big Bad Wolf

Workaholic and Wealthy

The Trump World Tower

"New York is a bustling, muscular, exhausting, super-materialistic, brutally expensive workaholic's city where it can often seem that everyone else is enormously wealthy and successful — everyone but yourself and the millions of poor people you pass every day out on the streets and in the subways."
Francisco Goldman, The Beacon Best of 2001

Chicago

Bowery Mission

“That's how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough, let's go west.'”
Richard Jeni, Almost Wet Your Pants Book of Humor

Self-Conscious

Williamsburg

"That was the thing about New York City: the truth was everyone was so self-conscious about their own situation they didn't have the headspace to notice anyone else."
Bridget Siegel, Domestic Affairs

Work in Progress

Empire State Building

"Manhattan will always be a work in progress."
Adelle Krauser, Bloodlines

Creating a Community

Simon & Schuster headquarters

"Living in New York —which has no sense of community— makes me want to create one on the page."
Richard Peck, Richard Peck: The Past is Paramount

Rules for New Yorkers

West 23rd St.

"There were rules for New Yorkers—like don't be spazzy if you see a famous person, fold your pizza before eating it, know how to hail a taxi with confidence."
Lauren Myracle, Ten

Status Symbol

Stroller parking area in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

"Large families have become a status symbol in New York. Four beautiful children named after kings and pieces of fruit are a way of saying 'I can afford a four-bedroom apartment and $150,000 in elementary school tuition fees each year. How you livin'?"
Tina Fey, Bossypants

Dressed Up

Fashion District

"One of the things I love about New York City is how much people dress up for one another. Walking down the street is such a pleasure, because people are really turned out. Yes, it probably took them more than five minutes to get ready, but it was so worth it. They make the city a prettier place."
Tim Gunn, Gunn's Golden Rules

All Wrong

Times Square

"New York is all wrong, superficial, un-American, overcrowded."
Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade

Everyone Fits In

Park Avenue Arch Bridge

"Welcome to New York City, a place where you fit in, no matter who you are."
Andrew Stone, Hedonist's Guide to New York

Performance

Radio City Music Hall

"New York City is more a place of performance than creation."
William O'Rourke, Signs of the Literary Times

Always Faithful

Italian American Museum

"It's just incredible how anyone who sets foot in that city feels like they've become the owner of a small piece of something indescribable, something unique and intimate, that they can carry away with them to another part of this world. Something that you'll always come back in search of. Because New York never stops changing, but it remains faithful to itself and to those who love it."
Luca Spaghetti, Un Amico Italiano

Tough Town

The Ansonia

"What can I say? This is New York. Not everybody gets to make it."
Gavin Doran (Terry O'Quinn), 666 Park Avenue

A Year in New York

11  West 42nd

"A year in New York is worth three anywhere else."
Dave Winfield, Winfield: A Player's Life

City of Impostors

The High Line

"There is no city in the Union in which impostors of all kinds flourish so well as in New York."
James Dabney McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life

The Earth Spins More Quickly

Times Square

"In New York the earth seems to spin more quickly round its axis."
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Herbert Beerbohm Tree: Some Memories of Him and of His Art

Pie Fight

Tom's Restaurant

"Walking down the streets of New York is like being in a pie fight."
Jerry Seinfeld, quoted in New York magazine

Divesting

Mobile ATM in Morningside Heights

"No other city in the United States can divest the visitor of so much money with so little enthusiasm. In Dallas, they take away with gusto; in New Orleans, with a bow; in San Francisco, with a wink and a grin. In New York, you're lucky if you get a grunt."
Fletcher Knebel, The Traveling Curmudgeon

In Plain Sight

East 53rd

"That was the thing about New York -- you were never alone and you always were. You were lost in plain sight."
Lisa Unger, Darkness My Old Friend