Functional Utopia

"Brooklyn is the conscience of New York. While Manhattan tears everything down and changes everything, Brooklyn does a similar thing, but fails miserably at it. It is a crazy quilt of a place. A mongrel place of sorts. It mixes old and modern in a haphazard way. It represents a tiny microcosm of the world—functional utopia."
Jonathan Lethem, quoted in The Brooklynites

Grubby Brooklyn

"Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan, as on Dean Street, on Bergen, on Pacific.  Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self."
Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude

Manhattan Living

Morningside Heights

"To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid."
Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City

Brooklyn Beyond

Brooklyn and Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

"What's unsettling is to put Manhattan at your back and face the borough. Up from the canyon floor, out of the deep well of streets, gazing out into the Brooklyn Beyond is like standing in a Kansas prairie contemplating distance."
Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

Disordered Mind

Bleeker Street

"The New York subway is a vast disordered mind, obsessing in ruts carved by trauma a century earlier."
Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City

Tourette's

East Houston

"New York is a Tourettic city, and this great communal scratching and counting and tearing is a definite symptom."
Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn