Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream.
The irregular houses were like the broken read more

Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream.
The irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs
lining deep gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous;
some lay in long, monotonous rows like, the basalt precipices
hanging over desert canons. Such was the background of the
wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city.
But into this background were cut myriads of brilliant
parallelograms and circles and squares through which glowed many
colored lights. And out of the violet and purple depths ascended
like the city's soul, sound and odors and thrills that make up
the civic body. There arose the breath of gaiety unrestrained,
of love, of hate, of all the passions that man can know. There
below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be brought from
the four corners of the earth to instruct, please, thrill,
enrich, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus the flavor of
it came up to him and went into his blood.

Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, read more

Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.

A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.

A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.

It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.

It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.

Lo! body and soul!--this land!
Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and
The sparkling and hurrying tides, and the read more

Lo! body and soul!--this land!
Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and
The sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships;
The varied and ample land,--the South
And the North in the light--Ohio's shores, and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies, covered with grass and corn.
- Walt Whitman,

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here read more

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of exiles.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does

Stream of the living world
Where dash the billows of strife!--
One plunge in the mighty torrent
read more

Stream of the living world
Where dash the billows of strife!--
One plunge in the mighty torrent
Is a year of tamer life!
City of glorious days,
Of hope, and labour and mirth,
With room and to spare, on thy splendid bays
For the ships of all the earth!

"If you don't mind me asking," came the bell-like tones of the
Golden Diana, "I'd like to know where read more

"If you don't mind me asking," came the bell-like tones of the
Golden Diana, "I'd like to know where you got that City Hall
brogue. I did not know that Liberty was necessarily Irish." "If
ye'd studied the history of art in its foreign complications,
ye'd not need ask," replied Mrs. Liberty, "If ye wasn't so light
and giddy ye'd know that I was made by a Dago and presented to
the American people on behalf of the French Government for the
purpose of welcomin' Irish immigrants into the Dutch city of New
York. 'Tis that I've been doing night and day since I was
erected."