Sunday, December 31, 2017

New Year's Wish

Times Square Ball

"New York City on New Year's, is hell, he said. See all those people? Every single one of them has to pee, and there's nowhere to do it. My first New Year's in New York, I'd stand on my fire escape listening to the city-wide cheer of eight million people wishing for happiness at the same exact time, and think how he'd been wrong about that too. "
Julie Buntin, Marlena

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Third Favorite

Manhattan alley (Pixabay)

"'New York is my favorite city,' said Mrs. Lebal; 'After Sodom and Gomorrah, that is.'"
Rob Russo, Champagne Days

Friday, December 29, 2017

Secret Spaces

Brooklyn Navy Yard


"I loved the secret spaces in New York, the vacant spaces. The abandoned buildings of Fort Tilden, sand filling the floors, the abandoned homes in the Navy Yard, their windows broken through by tree branches, the outdoor shuttle train in Crown Heights, moving through the snow and the leaves and the forgotten cigarettes, moving on beside the park suddenly as if through the woods.  I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts."
Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

Thursday, December 28, 2017

New York Weather

Fountain in Bryant Park


"'That's what makes New Yorkers tough,' Earl realized, watching her sweat from so little labor. 'It's not the crime or whatnot. I'm telling you, it's the weather. The winter is too cold, the summer is too hot, and spring lasts a week and a half.'"
Sarah Schulman, The Cosmopolitans

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

No Significant Other Needed



"New York isn't a place where you need a significant other to be happy. There's so much amazing stuff to do, and if we want to be out there doing it, whether with our friends or, pretty often, by ourselves, we can. No judgment, no FOMO."
Carla Sosenko, Time Out NY

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Secret Adoration

Park Avenue

"New York is, in no small sense, America. Other towns and cities may publicly scoff her, down in their hearts they slavishly imitate her, her store fronts, her fashions, her hotel and her theater customs, her policemen, even her white-winged street cleaners. They publicly laugh at her — down in their hearts they secretly adore her."
Edward Hungerford, The Personality of American Cities

Monday, December 25, 2017

Christmas in New York

Saks Fifth Avenue

"It was Christmas in New York and the great metropolis was a wrapped and twinkling present that it was happily giving back to itself as a reward for another shining year done."
Kimberley Tait, Fake Plastic Love

Sunday, December 24, 2017

Growing Pains

Hudson Yards (Jim Henderson / Wikimedia Commons)

"New York still suffers terribly from growing pains, but she has learned to bear them with equanimity. She has outgrown a good many bad habits, though, and in a century or so will be a very presentable young lady."
Arwin van Dam, Travel magazine

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Piss-Elegant

Delancey Street

"I went back to New York just before Christmas. The piss-elegant city wore salt-stained winter clothes and soiled jewels, its colors stunned and mute in the cold."
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

Friday, December 22, 2017

New World

South Street Seaport


"I experienced the harbor as all new arrivals then did, and was dazzled by the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, looming up like nothing I had seen in Europe, and, running between them, deep, deep canyons of streets. Clearly, this was a New World, bold, unsubtle, dynamic, unencumbered by the clutter of the past."
Clifford Browder, No Place for Normal

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Big Cupcake

East 23rd


"I hate that New York is no longer the mysterious urban beast it once was. Even people who moved here two weeks ago hate the suburbanization of New York. People used to come to New York to be part of it all and they still do, but now there is a migration of people who would have never left the suburbs and they want New York to be like where there from. They need KMart and Sears and Target. New York has been invaded--by America!! NYC has gone from being The Big Apple--Sin City--to being the Big Cupcake--mecca of the infantilized masses."
Penny Arcade, Paper Magazine

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Ultimate Dream

Manhattan skyline


"New York has always been the ultimate dream for people— Shangri-la, Atlantis, whatever. It's the place where you think anything can happen."
Walter Durkacz, quoted in Meet Me in the Bathroom

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Staten Island

St. George Terminal

"I know Staten Island isn't all heroin and racist cops, you know? It also has meth and racist firefighters."
Pete Davidson, SNL

Monday, December 18, 2017

Newness

The New School


"I had never seen anything like New York, and its newness held the promise of my future: dense with the experience I craved——romantic, urbane, intellectual."
Siri Hustvedt, Yonder

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Crystal Meth



"New York sucks. But it's kind of like crystal meth. Once you get a taste of it, however bad it is for you, you never want to live without it."
Mark Brennan Rosenberg, The Huffington Post

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Tired New York

Madison Square Park


"New York is the city that never sleeps, but it does get tired. Its eyelids grow heavy and it wants to veg in front of the television."
Jennifer Echols, Love Story

Friday, December 15, 2017

Crutch



"New York can be a crutch. Yes, your music career is stalled. Yes, your art remains unknown. Yeah, you've yet to be published or your startup is only hype. But you live in New York, and that makes you better than the people who don't (or so you reassure yourself). Where you live is not an accomplishment."
Ryan Holiday, Thought Catalog

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Vibrant

Lincoln Center (Pixabay)

"New York is an electrifyingly vibrant city with humanity plugged into life at super-high-octane speed."
Zara Cox, Black Sheep

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Candy Store

Store in Coney Island


"New York is an enormous candy store filled with tantalizing things to buy, and at no time more than the period between Thanksgiving and New Year's, when love, you are told, means the purchase and giving of presents."
Rona Jaffe, After the Reunion

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Misfits

Barnard College


"There's only one place to go—New York City. That's where you have to go to get your ideas heard. Besides, it's hard to be a misfit there because that's where all the misfits flock to. Like ninety-eight percent of the population is made up of misfits. "
Tim Tharp, Badd

Monday, December 11, 2017

Pulse of the World



"New Yorkers make a choice to endure a unique set of hardships, all for the glory of living dead smack on the pulse of the world. Rent is astronomical, the weather is bipolar, and the cost of living would make more sense as a lottery winning. The streets are dirty, and the stench of scalding trash entwines with billowing fumes of pollution to perfume the air with a scent that is exclusively ours. We inhale the contaminates just so we can exhale hope. A prideful respiration that says, hey, we are here, and you are not."
Greg Dybec, Elite Daily

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Jolly

East 18th


"I think New York is a fabulous place. I think it ought to be investigated by a committee — the whole town, the twenty million people in it — for being jolly."
Brendan Behan, Brendan Behan: A Life

Saturday, December 9, 2017

First Snowfall



"The first fall of snow in New York is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. White and clean and crisp and clinging to shapes that nature never intended. I walked home through a white cubistic world that Braque would have given his left nut to paint, stopping only for an occasional traffic light."
Harold Robbins, The Inheritors

Friday, December 8, 2017

Corporate Bank

Deutsche Bank

"I love New York, but it’s not a very inspiring place for creativity. It's very expensive, but not even in a Rome type of expensive. It's like corporate bank expensive."
Christopher Bollen, The Rumpus



Thursday, December 7, 2017

Virtues and Vices

Manhattan (Pixabay)

"New York, I thought, was a city defined by its flaws. In every possible way, its virtues were overwhelmed by its vices, as Jekyll was by Hyde. Yet it was these very vices that gave the city its characterlike tar in an oak barrel lending its flavor to Scotch."
Miles Watson, Cage Life

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

No Time or Sunlight

Riverside Drive


"Rome, like Washington, gives you plenty of time and plenty of sunlight. In New York we have annihilated both."
Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood, An Epistle to Posterity


Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Black Hole



"There are places so dense that they seem to contract into themselves to save room. Harlem is one of them, like a black hole of great and flexible darkness hiding mass unseen."
Selin Thomas, The Village Voice

Monday, December 4, 2017

Chronic Amnesia

South Street Seaport


"Chronic amnesia is part of the New York condition. Here even colossal towers are merely placeholders, temporary arrangements of future debris."
Justin Davidson, Magnetic City

Sunday, December 3, 2017

Young and Old

Buildings around Madison Square Park

"Far more than any other city, whether of the past or of the present, New York is one that is both young and old. Insistently young, vociferously young, obviously young, it at the same time displays all the qualities of maturity. It is a city of today, yet also a city of three centuries."
Robert Shackleton, The Book of New York

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Lonely New York

Brooklyn Bridge (Pixabay)

"What is so lonely as lonely New York 
With the people milling about. 
Drifting alone in the gathering crowds 
Hearing them laugh and shout."
Paul E. Pepe, Five Women I Love

Friday, December 1, 2017

New York Tribe



"I always urge the newcomer to surrender to the city's magic. Forget the irritations and the occasional rudeness; they bother many New Yorkers too. Instead, go down to the North River and the benches that run along the west side of Battery Park City. Watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter; they have existed since the time when the island was empty of man. Gaze at the boats. Look across the water at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, the place to which so many of the New York tribe came in order to truly live. Learn the tale of our tribe, because it's your tribe too, no matter where you were born."
Pete Hamill, Downtown

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Biggest Melting Pot

Jane's Carousel


"I returned to Brooklyn because it's closest to my heart, and I have history here, which I wanted to share with my children. Let's face it, the world has changed everywhere, but NYC is still the biggest melting pot in the world. The diversity in culture is unmatched."
Debi Mazar, NYCGo

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Self Worship

Central Park and Fifth Avenue (Pixabay)

"Rome and New York were impressive, but they knew they were. They had the beauty of a vain woman who had squeezed herself into her favourite dress after hours of careful self worship."
Leonardo D'Onofrio, Old Country

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Futurist City

Cornell Tech

"New York is the Futurist city, the Baden Baden of that dying stench called Europe, the ironic gargantuan offspring of the senility, the debilitating spirituality and black breath of the European succubus."
Benjamin De Casseres, Mirrors of New York

Monday, November 27, 2017

Living in New York

East 13th Street


"I once said to someone that one doesn't come to New York for beauty. I said that's what Paris, or Iceland, is for. I said one comes to New York to live in New York, with all its noise and trash and rats in the subway and taxicabs stuck in crosstown traffic jams."
Bill Hayes, Insomniac City

Sunday, November 26, 2017

The Now

East 13th


"New York might be beautiful but if you stopped to admire it, you were cooked. Each new block was an island, each street a narrow ocean. As you put the last block behind you, each crossing washed you clean. Who had time to dwell on the then when the crush of bodies forced you to pay attention to the now?"
Brendan Mathews, The World of Tomorrow

Saturday, November 25, 2017

Human

Riverside Park

"New York is a huge mass of scrambled humanity, — many races, creeds, colors, — but it is wistfully, pathetically human, after all."
Joseph Fort Newton, Preaching in New York

Friday, November 24, 2017

Mama

North Williamsburg


"To me, New York is Mama. Every time I've ever knocked on its door—no matter what time of day, no matter what condition I've found myself—New York City opens to me. Smacks me upside the head a little bit on my way in, like, 'What's the matter with you now, you big stupid dummy?' but always lets me in. Clears a space for me. Finds a bed for me. Makes room at the table."
Elizabeth Gilbert, Never Can Say Goodbye

Thursday, November 23, 2017

Sense of Destiny

Williamsburg Bridge


"The thing you have to understand about New Yorkers is that they tend to have a sense of destiny. By dint of their location they think they are invincible, indestructible. Impervious to pretty much anything and everything you care to throw at them."
Dylan Jones, The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Magic Name

Manhattan Avenue


"New York! How many bosoms have swelled with rapture, how many cheeks have blushed with shame, how many hearts have been filled with joy, and how many have sunk in despair, at the sound of the magic name of New York!"
Maturin Murray Ballou, The Turkish spies Ali Abubeker Kaled, and Zenobia Marrita

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Caravanserai

Four Seasons Hotel

"New York is the last city in the world in which I would live. But then it is to be regarded merely as a vast hotel, a caravanserai both for America and Europe."
Fredrika Bremer, America of the Fifties

Monday, November 20, 2017

Sense of Humor

People's Improv Theater

"New York is funny. It's the only city where you have to have a sense of humor to survive."
Alan King, New York Magazine

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Insomnia

Midtown


"New York is very freeing, and, because of my insomnia, it's the only place that can really keep up with me.  When I find a city that can keep me busy until four in the morning without having anything to do with prostitution, I'm there."
Jamie Blake, Billboard

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Suburbanization

North Williamsburg


"New York was the unbridled engine of the nation's progressive culture and creativity, sustaining a diversity of people, feeding the world with art, ideas, and ways of life that pushed the boundaries of convention. But now it seems this period has come to an end. The spirit of the city as we knew it has vanished in the shadow of luxury condo towers, rampant greed, and suburbanization."
Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York

Friday, November 17, 2017

No First Class

W train


"When you're on the subway, there's no first class. Everyone's there together. I have kind of a joke I do when people ask 'why would you raise your kids in New York City?' And I say, 'So they don't end up like you.'"
Jim Gaffigan, NYCGo

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Concrete, Gridlock, Neighbors



"Miles of concrete, world-class gridlock, neighbors who won't even press the down button in the elevator for you: that's New York."
Dilys Winn, The New York Times

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Mandatory or Forbidden



"New York is a funny place. Living here is either mandatory or forbidden, it seems; there's no middle way."
Amanda Cross, Honest Doubt

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Sound and Fury



"New York is a state of mind, full of sound and fury signifying nothing."
Edward D. Hoch, City of Brass

Monday, November 13, 2017

Human Kindness

West 14th


"I do not exaggerate when I say that New York is unique in the history of human kindness. New York is not a problem. New York is a stroke of genius. From its earliest days, this city has been a lifeboat for the homeless, a larder for the hungry, a living library for the intellectually starved, a refuge not only for the oppressed but also for the creative. New York is and has been the most open city in the world, and that is its greatness."
Ed Koch, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City

Sunday, November 12, 2017

City of Love

Oculus


"People say that Paris is the city of love, but for Raia, New York deserves the title more. It's impossible not to fall in love with the city like it's almost impossible not to fall in love in the city."
Ika Natassa, The Architecture of Love