Breadline on Sixth Avenue by Edward Steichen, c.1930's
Blossom Dearie - Manhattan from Once Upon A Summertime (1958)
“New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it’s all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.
When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks my guts. New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves….A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. And Forty-Second Street! The top of the world, they call it. Where’s the bottom then? You can walk along with your hands out and they’ll put cinders in your cap. Rich or poor, they walk along with head thrown back and they almost break their necks looking up at their beautiful white prisons. They walk along like blind geese and the searchlights spray their empty faces with flecks of ecstasy.”
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
New York City by Lee Friedlander, 1974
“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts it size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidarity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of a first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.”
--E.B. White, Here Is New York
Still from Manhattan (1979)
"Chapter one. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion...[No, make that] he romanticized it all out of proportion. [Yeah.] To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin...[uh, no...Let me start this all over.]
Chapter one. He was too romantic about Manhattan--as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street smart guys who seemed to know all the angles. [Nah. Corny. Too corny for my taste. Let me try to make it more profound.]
Chapter one. He adored New York City. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out, was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in...[No, it's gonna be too preachy. I mean let's face it, I wanna sell some books here.]
Chapter one. He adored New York City. Although, to him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage...[too angry. I don't wanna be angry.]
Chapter one. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled, sexual power of a jungle cat. [I love this.] New York was his town and it always would be."
--Opening voice-over from Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979)
