In the middle of the twentieth century a city in the new world arrived on the global stage. It quickly became the most influential and exciting place on the planet, a place with more energy and originality than everywhere else put together. Dr James Fox, Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities I: New York, BBC 2014
I think it all got started in one remarkable year: 1951. This was the year when the city’s irrepressible creative spirit exploded into life. When the world’s greatest jazz musicians pioneered modern music. When Jack Kerouac gave the beat generation a voice. And Marlon Brando redefined modern cinema. ibid.
‘Madison Avenue was a passionately wonderful place to work.’ ibid. Jane Mass copywriter
By 1951 the pressure to conform was immense … New York, the consumer capital of the world, was also home to the biggest rebellion against ’50s conformity: the Beat Generation. ibid.
Kerouac’s novel went on to become a bible for the Beat Generation, a handbook for all those who wished to rebel against American authority. ibid.
Bebop was certainly the soundtrack of the counter-culture. ibid.
Without New York in 1951, modern life would be very different indeed. ibid.
Penn Station, New York City ... When I first came down the tunnel it looked dangerous, man. Looked real dangerous. ’Cause even in daytime it was dark. And like I was scared ... It can’t be as bad as it is on top. Marc Singer: Dark Days 2000, music DJ Singer *****
I been down here for fucking five years, going on six ibid.
You be surprised at the stuff I be finding. And I be selling and getting top dollar for. ibid.
She told me, Either the drugs or me. And I kept saying Her, but I kept fucking going back to the drugs. One day when I went home my clothes were all packed, man. ibid.
I sell anything. What sells the best? Nasty movies. Nasty faggot movies. ibid.
My father was a dope fiend and an alcoholic. My mother she didn’t give a fuck. She let my father beat on her and beat on me and my sisters. She wouldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t do anything. I haven’t spoken to them in ten years and I don’t care to. They don’t give a damn about me right now. They had sixteen years to love me and treat me like a son and much less treat me like a human being, and they couldn’t do it then, and they couldn’t do it now. ibid.
In response to external pressures, armed Amtrak police are ordered into the tunnel to tell the residents that they have thirty days to pack up and evacuate or face a forcible eviction. Filming was prohibited. ibid. commentary
When they woke me up they had guns and everything. ibid.
I don’t want to go to the shelter. ’Cause I don’t want to worry about someone stealing my shit ... It’s infected with drugs. ibid.
Being homeless is all types of problems – you never know what lies ahead. ibid.
It’s hard to believe this is our last day in this place. I thought this day would never come. ibid.
Dark days. Real dark. ibid.
New York was made by men: it took almost the same time to reach its present condition as it took to complete the Gothic cathedrals. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: Heroic Materialism 13/13, BBC 1969
Behind this grim uniformity lurks an even grimmer poverty. And problems that seem almost insoluble. ibid.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world. F Scott Fitzgerald
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I like to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it. Overripe as if all sorts of funny fruits are going to fall into your hands. The Great Gatsby 1974 starring & Robert Redford & Mia Farrow & Bruce Dern & Sam Waterston & Karen Black & Scott Wilson & Lois Chiles & Edward Herrmann & Howard da Silva & Kathryn Leigh Scott & Regina Baff et al, director Jack Clayton
After Gatsby’s death New York was haunted for me. That said my once golden shimmering mirage now made me sick. The Great Gatsby 2013 starring Leonardo di Caprio & Tobey McGuire & Carey Mulligan & Joel Edgerton & Isla Fisher & Jason Clarke & Elizabeth Debicki & Jack Thompson & Amitabh Bachchan et al, director Baz Luhrmann
New York, New York!
It’s a hell of a town!
We’ve got one day here and not another minute
To see the famous sights!
We'll find the romance and danger waiting in it
Beneath the Broadway lights;
But we’ve hair on our chests
So what we like the best are the nights
Sights! Lights! Nights!
New York, New York, a helluva town
The Bronx is up, but the Battery’s down
The people ride in a hole in the groun’
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town! … Gernstein et al, New York, New York: (On the Town)
This is New York: eight million people live, work and die here. This is my city. Susan Sontag, 1960s documentary
The Seagram Building gleamed like a switchblade in the autumn sun. ibid.
It has been calculated that people in New York travel on average a farther distance vertically than they do horizontally. This is due to the height of the many tall buildings which makes it necessary to climb more than walk on the level. Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! 2006
Citizens may not greet each other by ‘putting one’s thumb to the nose and wiggling the fingers’. ibid.
While riding in an elevator it is illegal for one to talk to another, or to fold one’s hands while looking at the floor. ibid.
I am coming back to New York after five years, and it seems that psychics are taking over the city. Aravind Adiga
If you ride northward the length of Manhattan Island going through Central Park and coming out on 7th Avenue or Lennox Avenue at 110th Street you cannot escape being struck by the sudden change in the character of the people you see. In the middle and lower parts of the city you have perhaps noted Negro faces here and there. But when you emerge from the Park you see them everywhere. And as you go up either of these two great arteries leading out from the north you see more and more Negroes walking in the streets and looking from the windows, trading in the shops, eating in the restaurants, going in and coming out of the theatres until nearing 195th Street 90% of the people you see including the traffic officers are Negroes. You have been having a glimpse of Harlem. The Negro metropolis. James Weldon Johnson
There is anger tonight after four New York City police officers shot and killed an unarmed African immigrant earlier this week. New York television news report of Amadou Diallo, cited Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends: Black Nationalism, BBC 2001
Rush hour in Manhattan: eight hundred thousand people crowd on to subways, looking forward to home ... As the networks fell apart links between one energy centre and another broke ... At Kennedy Airport the radar screen went black. And Flight 911 was in trouble ... Over an area of eighteen square miles thirty million people were now in darkness. James Burke, Connections: The Trigger Effect s1e1, BBC 1978
This abnormal business of actually talking to anybody on the subway caught on briefly all over New York. ibid.
It began with two brothers ... On December 7th the Morenos were going about their daily routine. Their job as high-rise window washers was not without its dangers. Their day started cleaning the glass on an Upper East Side apartment building more than a hundred and twenty metres up ... From forty-seven storeys up the platform plummeted for nearly six seconds before it crashed on to the pavement ... Although one of the brothers had died the other was somehow miraculously breathing. Weird or What? Strange Survival, Discovery 2010
Breathtaking new discoveries show that the inspiration for this mega-metropolis came from thousands of years ago. Ancient Discoveries: Ancient New York, History 2008
A direct link between the Statue of Liberty and the Colossus of Rhodes can be traced through the man who designed it. ibid.
The Statue of Liberty is therefore able to bend with the wind – up to five inches in any direction. ibid.