New York Money

Rockefeller Plaza

"In New York, money was there to gawk at, money the likes of which I had never seen. It strolled down Fifth and Park Avenues, alone or in pairs, and it laughed and conversed behind the windows of restaurants at tables with wine bottles and pressed white linen napkins and low candles. It stepped out of taxis in shoes with soles that appeared never to have touched a sidewalk, and it slumped gracefully in the backseat of chauffeured limousines. It sparkled in displays of watches and earrings and scarves in stores I was too shy to enter."
Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future

Bourgeois Improvement

Central Park North

"I am still in New York, but the city I lived in then is not the city I inhabit now. Money remains ascendant, but its glow has spread across the borough of Manhattan. The faded signs, tattered awnings, peeling posters, and filthy bricks that gave the streets of my old Upper West Side neighborhood a generally jumbled and bleary look have disappeared. When I find myself in the old haunts now, my eyes are  met with the tightened outlines of bourgeois improvement."
Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future

New York Money

Fifth Avenue

"When I arrived in New York, the money I saw flabbergasted me. It sashayed on Fifth Avenue and giggled in galleries and generally showed itself off with such unabashed glee that it was impossible not to admire it or envy it, at least a little."
Siri Hustvedt, Yonder

Newness

The New School

"I had never seen anything like New York, and its newness held the promise of my future: dense with the experience I craved——romantic, urbane, intellectual."
Siri Hustvedt, Yonder

Odd Duck

Times Square subway station

"I wasn't an 'odd duck' in New York, the city that accommodates or ignores all ducks."
Siri Hustvedt, Yonder

Place of Worship

Third Avenue

"I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it—the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy."
Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros

New York Fictions

Fifth Avenue

"New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be. It's a place where fictions run freely and plentifully, where people are allowed a certain pretense about themselves, where cultivating a persona or an idea of how to live is permitted, even encouraged."
Siri Hustvedt, Yonder

Home at Last

FDR Drive

"Despite the harshness of everyday life—the raw, cold, scraping sensation of never leaving the street, because my apartment felt as if it were in the street—I was at home in New York. This feeling of being 'home at last' corresponds to my idea about the city, an idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility."
Siri Hustvedt, Yonder

Never Quiet

Freeman Alley

"New York City is never quiet. There are corners of stillness, streets empty for minutes at a time, but then the peace ends. People chatter, sing, cry out."
Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold