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

Contrast

Fifth Avenue

"The thing that interested me then as now about New York—as indeed about any great city, but more definitely New York because it was and is so preponderantly large—was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed  between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant."
Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City

Out of the Game

East 23rd

"New York's a tough town without the coin, isn't it? You never get a glance when you're out of the game."
Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City