Hell

Fire escape in SoHo

"Hell isn’t fire and brimstone. It's New York City." 
Karina Halle, Veiled

Tricky

"The city is tricky. The highs are so much higher, but in the lows you drop straight down again to bedrock. It helps that streets are snapped to a grid. There are also psychic boutiques and sidewalk prophets, but until you contrive your own love story set in that city, even one as warped as mine, you remain outside it, looking for signals in the white smoke that rises from under, in the sudden hot laundry smells and the LED typos of street vendors donut easily becomes dount, ominously like don't, to my mind. There was a DOUNT sign on Second Avenue which more than once redirected my superstitious footsteps."
Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

Artistic Freedom

Great Jones Street

"We wrote a song called 'New York.' It was about New York as an idea. A place where anything is possible, a place where you can find complete artistic freedom. We wrote that song on a fucking Scottish island in the middle of nowhere, before we'd ever been to the city; that's how powerful it is."
Jimi Goodwin, quoted in Meet Me in the Bathroom