Hanging Out with the Popular Kids

"I've long held the belief that being a fan or a cheerleader of New York is ethically and aesthetically dubious. Like the Yankees and, for that matter, the Mets, New York needs no more fans. This place is dense with wealth, with cultural capital, with anecdote; it is the setting for too many movies, books, and television shows. To be a vocal fan of New York is like hanging out with the popular kids."
Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker

Change in New York

Hudson Yards (Pixabay)

"New York is a place that rapidly adopts, and normalizes, change. Things don’t exist one day and then, after a week, it feels like they’ve been around forever."

Jorge Colombo, The New Yorker

Cosmos

"New York is, of course, a cosmos rather than a mere city."
Vijay Seshadri, The New Yorker

Designated New Yorker

"I’m not leaving. In fact, I feel that I am like the designated New Yorker. Everyone else can leave."
Fran Lebowitz, The New Yorker

Boosting Inmunity

"I’m from New York, where we’re given a lipstick-stained mug filled with dirty hot-dog water to carry down Sixth Avenue until a big drop of what is either Legionnaire’s-disease-infected air-conditioner leak or somebody else’s spit lands in it, then we drink that to get our immune-system boost, thank you very much."
Susanna Wolff, The New Yorker

Character Builder

"I’m from New York. I once paid two thousand dollars a month to live in the freight elevator of the former Filene’s Basement, in Union Square. Then I paid five thousand dollars a month to live in the garbage chute of a postwar luxury condominium on First Avenue. It’s important to live in terrible places when you’re young. A postwar! On First Avenue! That’s how you build character."
Susanna Wolff, The New Yorker

Proud New Yorker

"I'm from New York. I don't drive. I don't know how to drive. I don't know how to do something that teen-agers can do, and I’m proud of it. That’s how much of a New Yorker I am."
Susanna Wolff, The New Yorker

Small Talk With Strangers

"I'm from New York. I don’t need to engage in cordial small talk with strangers. In New York, we greet newcomers by giving them incorrect directions to Times Square and criticizing the way they spread their cream cheese."
Susanna Wolff, The New Yorker

Subjective

"Seems to me there is no true New York, only your New York. It is the most subjective of cities, a place that is hard not to take personally."
David Gilbert, The New Yorker

New York Weather

"I'm from New York, where the weather is only nice two days a year, and do you know what we do on those two days? We stay inside and work, because we're New Yorkers and we’ve got too much stuff to do to care that it's lovely outside."
Susanna Wolff, The New Yorker

Small Things

North Williamsburg

"For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to."
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Facelift

North Williamsburg

"New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face."
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Everywhere

"The idea of living anywhere else has never occurred to me. Indeed, to live in New York is to have lived everywhere."
Glenn Ligon, The New Yorker 

Eau de New York

Grand Army Plaza

"As the days heat up, the sewage stench on the north side of Forty-second Street just west of Sixth Avenue—Eau de Bank of America—ripens, and the ruts of horse shit along Central Park South begin to sing. At certain subway stops, the odor of rotting flesh returns, as though from a winter in Arizona, and all over town you can enjoy the blossoming of that chief attribute of New York: the smell of urine."

Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker

Natural Habitat

Photo: Pixabay

"New York has become my natural habitat. I'd be fenced in anywhere else. I can behave exactly as I want: I can appear, I can disappear."
Lola Szladits, The New Yorker

New York Circles

P.S. 75

"New York is a place where circles almost never intersect, except transactionally—at co-op meetings and parent-teacher conferences, or on jury duty. New Yorkers circulate mostly within their own class and occupational orbits. Manhattan is a hundred small towns unevenly distributed over some twenty-two square miles of city space."
Louis Menand, The New Yorker

Easy

Fifth Avenue

"New York is not a hard place to get around in. If you don’t know where you are, you don't deserve to be here."
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Tempo

Met Life Tower

"Your mother has always wondered why I live in New York. I live here because of the tempo and the fast track, because there are always so many more choices. I live here because it ruins you for any other place. You'll see."
Jean Bach, The New Yorker

One by One

Brooklyn Bridge

"You can do what you want in New York. You can start a business and people will let you live. In a small town, if they don't like you they'll figure a way to keep you out. In New York, you take people one by one."
Bradley Cunningham, quoted in The New Yorker