Ebbing Away

"The Manhattan harbor no longer meant much, either. The channel was not deep enough for the world's largest ships, and the skyline couldn't compare with Shanghai or Singapore. The new World Trade Center was respectable enough, yet was just another symbol, really, for it was a historical certainty that the money would ebb away from New York as it had drained from Paris and Brussels the century before. That is, if another massive hurricane didn't doom it first."
Colin Harrison, You Belong to Me

Great and Romantic Place

Grand Central Terminal

"Have I said yet that Brooklyn is a great and romantic place? Its simultaneous multiplicity catches in the brain, it is a streaming, strange place. Its history is generally unknown to the immigrants who arrive each generation, who come to the church spires and endless blocks of row homes, the places named after the dead, the names themselves Anglicized versions of the words used by the Dutch settlers who seized that green heel of land where the Hudson meets the Atlantic."
Colin Harrison, Bodies Electric

Never-Completed Masterwork

Times Square

"That is what New York is, a never-completed masterwork, torn down even as it is resurrected, each minute populated by a different swarm of humanity streaming in and out."
Colin Harrison, Never Can Say Goodbye

Bad Possibilities

"New York City is a landscape of bad possibilities."
Colin Harrison, Manhattan Nocturne