Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Awful Hurry

Times Square (Pixabay)

"New York is a six-reel movie, with the film running backwards, sideways, cross-ways, but never in sequence. Nobody seems to be going anywhere, but is in an awful hurry to get there."
William Henry McMasters, Originality and Other Essays

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Only Friend

Greenpoint


"Sometimes I feel like my only friend
Is the city I live in, is beautiful Brooklyn
Long as I live here believe I'm on fire hey
Cause it's the B-the-R-the-O-the-O-K
L-Y-N is the place where I stay
The B-the-R-the-O-the-O-K
Best in the world and all USA."
Mos Def, Brooklyn

Monday, August 29, 2016

Too Close and Too Far

Williamsburg North


"No matter what you're doing in New York you're not the only one, and the absurdity is that this movement and buzz makes you feel especially anonymous. People living too close to and too far from one another at the same time."
Darin Strauss, Half a Life

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Creative

Chinatown


"New York may be many things to many people, but it is most certainly creative. It is weird and off-the-wall. This is a place where, at bare minimum, two costume parties, one themed burlesque show, three classes and lectures on some topic I’ve never dreamed of, not to mention dozens of art shows, plays, readings, and more, happen every week."
Jillian Steinhauer, Hyperallergic

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Central Park

Central Park

"The time will come when New York will be built up, when all the grading and filling will be done, and when the picturesquely—varied, rocky formations of the Island will have been converted into foundations for rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of erect, angular buildings. There will be no suggestion left of its present varied surface, with the single exception of the Park."
Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance

Friday, August 26, 2016

New Canaan

North Williamsburg


"Nobody loves New York more than I do, but I feel like the city's getting suburbanized itself. Less diverse, less edgy. It's more like New Canaan than like the city we moved to."
Jay McInerney, Bright, Precious Days

Thursday, August 25, 2016

The Nation

The Water Club


"New York was or was always becoming what the rest of the nation turned out to be."
Milton M. Klein, quoted in The New York Times

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

How to Live in New York

East 23rd


"She'd learned how to live in New York. She knew now never to eat lunch from the hot bar at Korean delis, never to buy shoes from the brandless leather joints that popped up in glass storefronts in Midtown, that there was more space in the middle of subway cars than at the ends, and that the flowers sold at bodegas were usually sourced from funerals."
Stephanie Clifford, Everybody Rise

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

A World for Everyone


"Even in New York City, even in a place of many nations and cultures, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, preferred their kind when it came to those they kept closest. And why shouldn't they? It was far easier to do so than to spend one's limited energy trying to blend into a world one was never meant to be a part of. That was what made New York so wonderful. It had a world for everyone."
Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers

Monday, August 22, 2016

Awake City

Zuccotti Park

"As a New Yorker the idea of a sleeping city was baffling to me. Even at five a.m. New York was alive with stumbling drunks and garbage trucks and crazy people screaming at fire hydrants."
Moby, Porcelain

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Heartbreaking

East Village

"A city that is as heartbreaking in its beauty as it is in its poverty and decay. It is still a city of dreams—promised, built, and broken."
Ada Louise Huxtable, On Architecture

Saturday, August 20, 2016

Red Hook



"This isn't some tourist town all prettied up for the guests; industry and residents live side by side. Sure, time is changing that, but—back then, at least—Red Hook was where you wanted to be should the zombie apocalypse come."
Amy Haimerl, Village Voice

Friday, August 19, 2016

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Galaxy



"Outside New York, a high place where with one glance you take in the houses where eight million human beings live.
The giant city over there is a long flimmery drift, a spiral galaxy seen from the side.
Inside the galaxy, coffee cups are being pushed across the desk, department store windows hold out a begging cup, a whirlwind of shoes that leave no trace behind."
Tomas Tranströmer, The Half-Finished Heaven

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Shoe Box

East 23rd


"I never wanted to compromise and put down stakes in any other city. It always had to be New York for me. I know I can be a flake, but this is one goal from which I never deviated. Even if it meant I had to live in a shoe box, I never cared, as long as it was a New York shoe box."
Amy Schumer, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

New York Rubes



"You can fool yourself if you're raised in New York. Think that somehow your birthplace alone makes you cosmopolitan. But it isn't true. We're rubes too. For us a trip to Scarsdale is a safari."
Victor Lavalle, Big Machine

Monday, August 15, 2016

True North


"For me, growing up in New Jersey, New York was true north on the compass, the place you looked for from the highest point in town."
Elisabeth Egan, A Window Opens

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Pain in the Ass


"It didn't matter if life in L.A., frankly, was sweeter, milder, easier, prettier. Being a New Yorker was cooler, partly because it was such a pain in the ass to live there."
Tim Murphy, Christodora

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Skyline Call

Manhattan skyline and Williamsburg North landing


"There it was on my left: Manhattan. The skyline I had glimpsed from the plane when the captain tipped his wing. The skyline I had seen all my life on television and in films. A skyline hat was as much a symbol of my dreams in fashion as it was a symbol of America and its financial prowess. A skyline that called out to me, 'Come and get it, sucka!'"
Alex Gilvarry, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant

Friday, August 12, 2016

Wax Museum

Madame Tussauds

"New York in August? It's like a great, big melting wax museum."
Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton), Mad Men

Thursday, August 11, 2016

New York Kids

Lower East Side

"Welcome to New York City, where all the kids are rich and no one can figure out how!"
Jesse Eisenberg, The Spoils

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Gospel in Every Crowd



"New York is calling me
It's on the phone
It's like the rooftop songs
Up from the cobblestones

You will never hear me say
'The city street's too loud'
I hear a gospel hymn
In every passing crowd."

Dion and Paul Simon, New York is My Home

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Unsocial Indifference

Park Avenue (Pixabay)

"A walk through New York will disappoint an Englishman: there is an apparent carelessness, a laziness, an unsocial indifference, which freezes the blood and disgusts the judgment."
Henry B. Fearon, Sketches of America


Monday, August 8, 2016

Quiet Night


"It was never dark in New York, and tonight the cloudy sky reflected the city lights in a pale green glow. It was quiet, though. Those few hours when all the creatures of the city, the screeching, roaring buses, the howling ambulances, all seemed to take their rest, when the garbage trucks had not yet trundled out of their caves."
Cathleen Schine, They May Not Mean To, But They Do

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Drunk on New York

Baruch College

"Sometimes she thought she was drunk on New York. She'd been in love with the city when she went to college here, and she was even more in love with it now."
Brian Morton, Florence Gordon

Saturday, August 6, 2016

Mistake

Fifth Avenue

"All New Yorkers make the mistake of thinking that New York is America, which is ironic when you consider the map."
Jonathan Tropper, Plan B

Friday, August 5, 2016

Cartoon

Alphabet City

"New York is silly and rather stupendous, rather like a badly drawn cartoon in the self-style funny section of a Sunday paper."
John Dos Passos, quoted in Remarkable, Unspeakable New York

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Public and Private

The High Line (Pixabay)

"Public and private space and time are not separated the way they are in most cities. New York blurs the boundaries between them in the subway, in parks, in restaurants, in the streets, and even through the walls of the apartments."
Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar, Empire City

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Real

Financial District


"If 1,668,172 people (out of New York's total population of 7,710,346) are to be set down in one narrow strip of land between two quiet rivers, you can hardly improve on this solid mass of buildings and the teeming organism of human life that streams through them. For better or worse, this is real."
Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Old Ways and New Ways

Astor Place

"The odd, old-fashioned pragmatism of New York's ways fascinated her. People who didn't live in the city always thought about it on two ends of the spectrum, magnificent and forward thinking, or dark and violent. But Elly was learning the truth. New York was the keeper of all things good. Old ways and new ways gathered together in a perfect hum of logic."
Suzanne Palmieri, The Witch of Little Italy

Monday, August 1, 2016

Masculine Energy

FDR Drive

"The French capital, with its round arches, curvaceous bridges, flowing water, incandescent light, and street names such as rue Madame and rue Princesse, represents a feminine energy, whereas New York exudes a masculine one, with its towering skyscrapers, rigid city blocks, and raw aggression."
Isabelle Laflèche, J'adore Paris