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

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

Up in the heights of the evening skies I see my City of Cities
float
In sunset's golden read more

Up in the heights of the evening skies I see my City of Cities
float
In sunset's golden and crimson dyes: I look and a great joy
clutches my throat!
Plateau of roofs by canyons crossed: windows by thousands
fire-furled--
O gazing, how the heart is lost in the Deepest City in the World.

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,

New York is the Caoutchouc City. . . . They have the furor
rubberendi.

New York is the Caoutchouc City. . . . They have the furor
rubberendi.

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.

Well, little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for
me. . . . Me for it from the rathskellers up. read more

Well, little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for
me. . . . Me for it from the rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is
the West now to me.

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years

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

Silent, grim, colossal, the Big City has ever stood against its
revilers. They call it hard as iron; they read more

Silent, grim, colossal, the Big City has ever stood against its
revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that nothing of
pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely
forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the
lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a
different simile would have been wiser. Still nobody should take
offence. We would call nobody a lobster with good and sufficient
claws.