Marketer of Echoes

East 18th Street

"New York is a great marketer of echoes. The past is translated even into Village rentals and real estate values, into meal prices and hotel rates.  New York seems to thrive also on a sense of national deficiency, on the feelings of many who think themselves sunk hopelessly in unsatisfactory places, in the American void where there is no color, no theater, no vivid contemporaneousness, where people are unable to speak authoritatively, globally, about life."
Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up

Asian or African Town

"New York was getting worse than Naples or Salonika. It was like an Asian, an African town, from this standpoint. The opulent sections of the city were not immune. You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized  Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the barbarous world of color erupting from beneath."
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

Hot Nights

Madison Square Park

"On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok. The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky."
Saul Bellow, The Victim

Demonic

"What is barely hinted at in other cities is condensed and enlarged in New York. New York is stirring, insupportable, agitated, ungovernable, demonic."
Saul Bellow, quoted in New Life at Ground Zero

Fraud and Abomination

The Helmsley Building

"New York is a fraud and an abomination."
Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow: Letters

Sodom and Gomorrah

Eighth Avenue

"New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it."
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet