Night is Abolished

Third Avenue

"Night is abolished. . . .We have seen restaurants full at dawn— with people who will be at work four hours later. New York is a town that never halts, never slacks off. Subways and street-cars run up and down all night long, twenty-four hours a day. . . . Everything goes fast. . . .New York is a perpetual thunderstorm."
Paul Morand, Mirror for Gotham

Violence

East 56th

"New York's supreme beauty, its truly unique quality, is its violence. Violence gives it nobility, excuses it, makes its vulgarity forgettable. For New York is vulgar; it is stronger, richer, newer than anything you like, but it is common."
Paul Morand, quoted in Mirror for Gotham

Town of Contrasts

"A town of contrasts, puritan and libertine; the two-sided picture of a well-policed America and a savage continent, of East and West; a few yards from the luxury of Fifth Avenue and one is in battered and dirty Eighth Avenue. New York is the symbol of America, and half of its population is foreign; it is a center of Anglo-Saxon culture, speaking Yiddish; . . . after making you rich in a week, it ruins you in one morning."
Paul Morand, Mirror for Gotham

Inclusiveness

"New York will achieve its position—it has achieved the position it has—rather by in- than by exclusiveness, and it is good that there should be a place where all sorts of foreignesses—all sorts—should be united as it were in a common frame."
Ford Madox Ford, quoted in Mirror for Gotham