The Strangest City

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum

"New York is probably, in this regard at least, the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century sweatshops and tenements, the streets pot-holed and buckling while right over there, around the corner, is a Chanel boutique. We go shopping amid the rubble, like the world's richest, best-dressed refugees."
Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

Cutthroat City

Lafayette St.

"The city's almost clean now. They said Guiliani cleaned everything up, but someone will always find a new way to cut your throat."
Ray Fiske (Zeljko Ivanek), Damages

Common Ground

Fifth Avenue

"I think of New York, of its tremendous sense of energy, and it seems to me that it's generated by all those hundreds of thousands of people walking, and walking at great speed, sometimes for twenty, for thirty blocks — people whirl into a place, the door is swung open, other people are leaving, and the sense is one of circulation; perhaps that's the reason everyone talks to each other so easily there — because we all share that great, common ground: New York City's streets."
Kristin McCloy, Hollywood Savage