Thursday, May 31, 2018

Vice and Sleaze

West 14th


"Unlike Times Square, which always seems to me to be apologizing for its present condition, Fourteenth Street realizes that vice and sleaze are just as necessary to a great metropolis as anything else; in fact it is — perhaps unfortunately — generally the amount of those two commodities, among others, that indicate the cultural greatness of a city."
Tristan Jones, Adrift

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Pluto

Hayden Planetarium

"I'm told planet Pluto is not a planetNext they'll be telling me that New York is not the center of the universe."
Tobey Grumet, Popular Mechanics

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Inner Self

Broadway


"To know New York is to walk New York, and to walk New York is to know something greater, something deeper about your inner self."
Peter Ferry, Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction

Monday, May 28, 2018

Golden Egg

Birdhouse in Gramercy Park


''New York is like a nest, where everyone wants to come and lay the golden egg.'' 
Jose A. Tejeda, quoted in The New York Times

Sunday, May 27, 2018

If You See Something

Times Square subway station


"As all New Yorkers know, if you see something, steal something."
Stephen Colbert, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Saturday, May 26, 2018

Oasis of Culture

National Arts Club


"New York is the oasis of culture in this country and if you want to do a quick brush-up on your cultural literacy, you go to New York and hang out there for a few weeks."
Elizabeth Neff Walker, Fever Pitch

Friday, May 25, 2018

Wild



"New York is an awful place--endless, narrow, torn-up streets crowded with hurrying throngs, taxicabs, cars, and full of noise and dust. I am always choked for air. And these streets reek. Where do the people come from and where are they going? They look wild, as if they had to go somewhere, but did not know where that was."
Zane Grey, The Zane Grey Super Pack

Thursday, May 24, 2018

New York City Weather

Gantry Plaza State Park


"Everyone is talking about how nice the weather is. The weather in New York is pretty much the same as at home. Freeze your balls off in winter and sweat your balls off in summer and ten good days in between. This is one of those days."
Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

City that Talks

North Williamsburg landing



"New York is a city that talks. And talks and talks and talks. Not only in different tones—whispers in court, shouts in the subway, grumbles in restaurant queues—but also in many different languages. Language can bridge from the old to the new,  but it can also be used as a drawbridge to keep outsiders at bay. In New York, language is an overworked handmaiden preserving immigrants' habits and rituals as they try to create a new home without losing touch with the old."
Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Local

Trump International Hotel & Tower


"New York, New York, where it's okay to be an asshole so long as you're local."
Eoin Colfer, Screwed

Monday, May 21, 2018

New York Diet

Madison Square Garden


"New York is no town for losers. Its diet is winners."
Mark H. McCormack, Arnie: The Evolution of a Legend

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Magic Moments

Bowery

"New York has magic moments. You stand in Yankee Stadium and look out at Joe DiMaggio's centerfield and Babe Ruth's short rightfield porch, you're by the Rockefeller Center and the light hits you just right, you catch Central Park at just the right moment, when the ducks are swimming and the glaze of the frost is beginning to melt and it'll take your breath away. In New York, you can get those magic moments. You just have to put up with a lot of shit in between. You're living in shit, hour after hour, day after day, and you live for the magic moment. Poof! It's there. Then back to the shit." 
Anonymous former New Yorker, quoted in Neon Metropolis

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Broadway and Houston

Broadway and Houston


"We charged headlong through the still-busy intersection of Broadway and Houston Street. Here, it was once sagely remarked, you could fire a shotgun in any direction without hitting an honest man."
Caleb Carr, The Alienist

Friday, May 18, 2018

New York Women

East 22nd


"New York likes its women a bit neurotic. They're encouraged to create a brainy, adorable, conflicted bustle around themselves—à la Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally or Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Despite having nothing more serious than man troubles, many of my friends in New York were spending more on therapy than on rent."
Pamela Druckerman, French Children Don't Throw Food

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Hope and Despair

Pixabay

"In Rome I am weighed down by a lack of momentum, the inertia of a spent civilization.  In New York I feel plugged into a strong alternating current of hope and despair."
Ted Morgan, quoted in 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Vexation

Manhattan skyline and North Williamsburg landing

"It is a source of perpetual vexation to New Yorkers who live and work in Manhattan that the best views of the city are had by the outer boroughs and New Jersey. But this geographical injustice can be turned on its ear: ´We create the view,´ I have heard a man rationalize, ´and they all look at us.´ And yet one remains suspicious, heading back in, that they do nothing of the kind; that one is a rat on a wheel whose observing scientist has gone home for the night. We spin and we spin and we spin, and no one notices."
Caitlin Macy, The Fundamentals of Play

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Manhattan Address

East 22nd


"In my mind, I had arrived simply by making New York CityManhattan—my new address. You don't have to be from a small landlocked town with six months of winter to know that New York is one of those places—where mystique and myth and overpopulation and opportunity mix to create the frantic cocktail known as freedom."
Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways

Monday, May 14, 2018

Best Places to Live

East 23rd


"A new report did not name New York City as one of the 25 best places to live in the country. 'I'm shocked!' said an adult New Yorker with six roommates."
Seth Meyers, Late Night with Seth Meyers

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Contradiction



"This is my town, it's my place. I love it and hate it; I want to leave and I want to stay.... The frenzy of the place at times, the poverty of the place, the ambitiousness of the place, the shallowness of the place and yet everything I say about it can be contradicted."
Paul Auster, quoted in  Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction

Saturday, May 12, 2018

Grid System

The New York Times building

"People talked about how perfect Manhattan was for walking. The grid system! they said. Its simplicity! But it was the simplicity that stymied her, the rigid right angles that quashed the art of wandering by demanding of you the exactitude, the confidence and conviction, of knowing when to turn right and when to keep going."
Hermione Hoby, Neon in Daylight

Friday, May 11, 2018

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Antithesis

English Speaking Union


"New York is a collection of dreams of infinite numbers of people from different classes and nationalities of our time. . . . This city was created not so much as an anti-thesis of British York, but as an anti-thesis of all that had ever been."
Maria Kuncewicz, quoted in How We Found America

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Almighty Dollar

Wall Street Bull (Pixabay)

"New York is the synthetic word, it is America for the majority of the innumerable worshippers of the powerful Almighty Dollar."
Menotti Pellegrino, Voices of Italian America

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Downtown Manhattan



"The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown, things'll be great when you're
Downtown, no finer place for sure
Downtown everything's waiting for you."
Petula Clark, Downtown

Monday, May 7, 2018

Radio

Mural in Soho


"A friend of mine says that life in New York is like living inside a transistor radio. The noise he was referring to is deflected from the external to the internal, from modern urban life to inner life. Psychic overload — mental noise — becomes a kind of addiction, and turns us all into jazzed-up junkies."
Kay Larson, New York Magazine

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Pure Adrenaline

Washington Square Park


"I was a typical tourist, staring up at the tall buildings, the yellow cabs, the incredible diversity of the people on the street. I wanted to explore every block, the art museums, discos, concert halls, restaurants, and stores. New York was pure adrenaline: big, bold, and loud."
Ivana Trump, Raising Trump

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Worth Visiting

St. George Terminal


"Much of what makes New York so worth visiting is included in the price of the ticket. It costs nothing to look. Nowhere else on earth is there so much (some beautiful, more ugly, but all fascinating) to look at. There is beauty in the mountainous buildings of Manhattan, seen from a distance over the watereither from the nickel-a-ride Staten Island Ferry (known, and rightly, as the biggest travel bargain in the world), or from Brooklyn Heights against the tangerine sky of evening."
Hugh Johnson, Hugh Johnson on Wine

Friday, May 4, 2018

Crazy

Sixth Avenue

"New York is a crazy city and America is a madhouse. Americans are crazy and I find that I'm crazy too."
Ralph Barton, quoted in Things I Remember

Thursday, May 3, 2018

Bottom of the Barrel

Photo: Pixabay

"What people here really think is that New York is the bottom of the barrel — Jewish, immigrants, blacks, and all the gays, the center of perversity, a moral free-for-all. It stares them in the face; it irritates them. " 
Michael Horne, quoted in New York Magazine

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Inexhaustibly New

Williamsburg

"New York is inexhaustibly new. People rediscover its magnificence in just the way that people find out again and again that Beethoven's music is beautiful, or that Shakespeare's poetry is true, or even that love is wonderful each time, all over again, to each person."
LIFE Magazine

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Seize the Day

West 14th


"To be a New Yorker is to learn that the world is there for those who seize the day."
Shaun O´Connell, Remarkable, Unspeakable New York