Agreeable

"New York is a big place, & is rapidly becoming an interesting one. I am struck, throughout, with the rapid & general increase of the agreeable in American life, & the development of material civilization."
Henry James, Henry James: A Life in Letters

Newness

The corner of New and Wall streets

"The newness of New York — unlike even that of Boston, I seemed to discern — had this mark of its very own, that it affects one, in every case, as having treated itself as still more provisional, if possible, than any poor dear little interest of antiquity it may have annihilated"
Henry James, The American Scene

Arithmetic

9 West 57th St.

"The city of New York is like a tall sum in addition, and the streets are like columns of figures. What a place for me to live, who hate arithmetic!"
Henry James, The Impressions of a Cousin

Vast and Startling

Midtown West

"New York was vast, New York was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite backward generations that accounted for anything."
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

Charmless

Elizabeth Street

"New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire”.
Henry James, Selected Letters of Henry James