Monuments of Defiance

Financial District seen from Governors Island

"Before them was spread out the ragged panorama of south Manhattan, the wonder island of the West. A narrow hump of rock sheltered from the Atlantic by the broad shoulder of Brooklyn, a mere ripple of stone in the ocean's inroads, on which the indomitable cussedness of Man had elected to build a city — and, not contented with the prodigious feat of overcoming such a dimensional difficulty at all, had made monuments of its defiance."
Leslie Charteris, The Saint of New York