Thursday, August 31, 2017

The City That Doesn't Sleep

East 42nd



"New Yoooork!, New Yoooork!
The Cityyyy that doesn't sleep, New Yoooork!
(Cause sleep is the cousin of death)"
LL Cool J, New York

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Change and Nostalgia

West 10th Street



"It's often said that the one constant in New York's history is change, but that's not quite right. There is also nostalgia. Together the two form a distinctively New York emulsion of restlessness and regret. Change and nostalgia are the sweet and  sour of life here, complementary opposites that New Yorkers unthinkingly keep in equilibrium."
Justin Davidson, Magnetic City

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Re-Examination

Columbia University


"Every three to four years you re-examine why you are in New York, and all you can see are the bad points and these New York Crises are cyclical. Every three to four years you question your sanity, your being there. I think we were .simultaneously re-examining ourselves, wondering why we were putting up with that awful city."
Wilton Barnhardt, Emma Who Saved My life

Monday, August 28, 2017

Public Restrooms

Bryant Park

"A new article has been published ranking New York City's best public restrooms and congratulations yet again to... the subway."
Seth Meyers, Late Night with Seth Meyers

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Hard on the Body

Penn Station

"New York is hard on the body (kind of like sparring a few rounds with Tyson but coming out of it with both ears intact) and potentially mind-altering, but you don't realize it until you leave the island behind and see how life looks on the other side."
Tamara N. Houston, Waiting for Jules

Saturday, August 26, 2017

New York People

St. George Terminal

"Oh New York, oh your glorious people. Your Puerto Ricans, your Hebrews, your Muslims, your Chinese, your Eurotrash, that fat little fuck Norman Mailer, your uptown rich socialites, your downtown scum, your Black Americans, your Koreans, your Haitians, your Jamaicans, your kitchen Irish, Julian Schnabel, your Far Rockaway and Staten Island white trash.  Oh New York, I loved your people. They were all so beautiful! Many of them were hideous, really ugly with terrible teeth, but even the ugly ones were beautiful too! Oh I was in heaven."
Jarett Kobek, The Future Won't Be Long

Friday, August 25, 2017

Cat's Cradle

World Trade Center


"New York in a nutshell is what it is — a teeming, gleaming cat's cradle of geometric patterns set in motion against a clear blue sky. Helluva town."
Linda Yablonsky, Time Out Book of New York Walks

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Good Day

North Williamsburg and Manhattan skyline


"I love this city. I love everything it has to offer and I love that there's this feeling that you really have to earn it here. You're not entitled to anything. New York makes you work for it—so when you have a good day, you've earned it."
Desi Lydic, New York Family

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Syncopation



"Oh, New York. It is a most marvellous city – deliciously sprawling and filled with an energy that I can feel even from here. The very buildings seem alive. They are not tidy and tended as in Mayfair; rather, they are mismatched odds and ends of brick and mortar and humanity all pushing against one another in some strange, glorious syncopation – a new rhythm I long to join."
Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Hot Nights

Madison Square Park

"On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok. The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky."
Saul Bellow, The Victim

Monday, August 21, 2017

Unsurprising

"Spot" by Donald Lipski


"Nothing, in New York, is really surprising, when you come to think about it — once you've got over your surprise."
William Boyd, Bamboo

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Hell and New Jersey

Battery Park


"Living in New York is really like living in hell, but in hell at least you know there's a heaven somewhere, but when you live in New York, there's only Newark and Trenton to think about."
Christopher Durang, Naomi in the Living Room & Other Short Plays

Saturday, August 19, 2017

Andalusia Plains

Midtown


"New York reveals itself only at a particular height, a particular distance, a particular speed. These are not the height, the distance, or the speed of the pedestrian. The city is strikingly like the great Andalusia plains—monotonous when you pass through on foot, superb and varying when crossed by car."
Jean-Paul Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live

Friday, August 18, 2017

Most Desired, Least Beloved



"Few feel any huge affection for New York, that most desired but least beloved of cities."
Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140

Thursday, August 17, 2017

New York Jewels

Gantry Plaza State Park


"The city always seemed alive to me, a great, jagged dragon sitting on its jewels—the unexpected alley garden on the Upper West Side, welcoming you to sit and rest; the homeless man on Madison Avenue who offered critiques of your outfits for five bucksthe brownstone on East Eighty-first street where no one lived, but which could be accessed by the garden door, so you could wander the empty rooms as if you owned the place. "
Kristan Higgins, If You Only Knew

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Glowing City



"He saw the skyline of New York. He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him."
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Native Tongue



"I knew that New York City was my spiritual home from the age of twelve. I felt territorial from the first moment I glimpsed the city. The place knew who I was without me having to explain myself. I felt as if I'd been struggling to speak a foreign language my whole life and unexpectedly found myself dropped into the country of my native tongue."
Rosanne Cash, Never Can Say Goodbye

Monday, August 14, 2017

Petri Dish

Sixth Avenue


"You'd go around the world and you'd have respect because you are from New York. 'Oh, you're from New York?' People who don't live in New York bow down to this mythic thing. Because you needed to have a certain courage to live here. Your exposure to everyone was full blast. If you could thrive in this little petri dish of intense humanity, that deserved a bit of honor."
Jaleel Bunton, quoted in Meet Me in the Bathroom

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Idea or Neurosis

East 23rd Street


"New York is less a place than an idea or perhaps a neurosis."
Peter Conrad, The Art of the City

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Forest of Glass, Steel and Cement




"In this forest of glass, steel and cement, in this extraordinary New York so difficult to define you will rediscover, O voyager, the gigantic masks of the antique gods, you will rediscover the eternal sadness of the plaster Antinous and the immense solitude of the Pantheon on summer nights, beneath the great sky all streaming with stars."
Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros

Friday, August 11, 2017

Passion and Song



"The heart of New York is a heart of passion and of song. Her brain is incandescent. All motion in New York, whether physical, or mental, flashes. The total activity of New York resolved into abstract motion would become lightning."
Benjamin DeCasseres, Seven Seas Magazine

Thursday, August 10, 2017

New York Population

Pier A


"New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn't meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn't visit their new baby, three million furious you didn't see their new show, one million furious you didn't call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you."
Andrew Sean Greer, Less

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Dreamers

Greenpoint


"New York is a place for dreamers, but, more importantly, a place for dreamers to be sobered and made to feel inadequate."
Genna Rivieccio, Culled Culture

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Village

West 10th Street


"Maybe I'm wrong to stay in the Village. It is so unlike the rest of New York, even though it's in the centre of the city. It is so like Paris, but deep down you realize that this is an unwitting similarity which does everything to make you believe it's deliberate."
Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris

Monday, August 7, 2017

Fast Lane

Brooklyn Bridge (Pixabay)


"To love New York is to love life in the fast lane, with a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam every five blocks."
Peter W. Kaplan, Single States

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Aquarius

Staten Island Ferry Whitehall Terminal

"Do you realize that one can't look in any direction in Manhattan without seeing water at the end of the street: the Harbor, the Hudson and East Rivers, the Narrows, and even the Atlantic. Here we are entering the age of Aquarius, the age of water, with New York the wateriest city in the entire world. Yet we, who could be beachcombers on a dozen exciting waterfronts, live here as if we were in the middle of the Sahara!"
Helen Hayes and Anita Loos, Twice Over Lightly


Saturday, August 5, 2017

Self-Erasing

Soho


"That is New York as I know it: the city that sets about erasing itself the moment you take it out of the box."
John Freeman Gill, The Gargoyle Hunters

Friday, August 4, 2017

Quick Buck

West 32nd


"As usual, he marvels at the drive and frantic energy of this city. New York is a den of hustlers in pursuit of the quick buck."
Lawrence Sanders, Capital Crimes

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Goal



"I think of all the powerful or semi-powerful men and women throughout the world, toiling at one task or another—a store, a mine, a bank, a profession—somewhere outside of New York, whose one ambition is to reach the place where their wealth will permit them to enter and remain in New York, dominant above the mass, luxuriating in what they consider luxury."
Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Chelsea Morning



"Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning and the first thing that I heard
Was a song outside my window and the traffic wrote the words
It came ringing up like Christmas bells and rapping up like pipes and drums."
Joni Mitchell, Chelsea Morning

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Hangover

Long Island City


"Reasonable people flee the city in August because New York in August is like a hangover without aspirin."
Kelly Killoren Bensimon, A Dangerous Age