Goldsmith - Capital. New York, capital of the 20th century

Enough leeks to coat all Fifth Avenue with vichyssoise.

Brook, p. 53

A Good Humor bar gooily obstructing Park Avenue.

Conrad, p. 316

A violin crafted from wood from an old house in Elizabeth Street.

Berger, Eight Million, p. 164

The Library lions refuse any longer to guard people who believe that wisdom lies in books and vow that theyll repatriate themselves to Africa, where there is still some freedom.

Conrad, p. 203

The statue of Father Duffy in Times Square, mummified on his pedestal by a shroud of plastic sheeting, bundled in his sacking against his cross, against a sky of streaming neon and balletic peanuts.

Ibid., p. 169

When the south tube of the Lincoln Tunnel was officially opened on December 12, 1937, it had already been sanctified by the legend that its glass roof was intended to give travelers a good view of the fishes in the North River.

Federal Writers, Panorama, p. 407

On Sutton Place a man fishes out his eighteenth-story window for eels.

Talese, p. 48

If it were blood pouring out of the hydrants, would people stanch the flow?

Atkinson, p. 229

A naked butcher on a roof in Hester Street.

Mitchell, Ears, p. 189

Dogs wag their tails up and down instead of sideways in the Flatiron Building.

Barnes, New York

Sea monkeys from a curio shop peddling twentieth-century Americana, and these sea monkeys mutate into King Kongsized jumbo shrimp that almost destroy the futuristic city of New New York.

Bennett, Deconstructing, p. 41

An urban science fiction.

Koolhaas, p. 15

A thick-hipped and swollen-breasted nude ignores the snow on the Museum of Modern Art courtyard, tilting her pelvis at the muffled landscape.

Conrad, p. 174

Cloud-descended, these Venuses in transit between the sky and the streets land on the citys rooftops.

Ibid.

What is a ship, in fact, but the great skyscraper turned upon its side and set free?

Sanders, Celluloid, p. 279

Los Angeles is just New York lying down.

Steele, p. 26

skyscrapers
filled with nut-chocolates

Williams, Collected, p. 187

An evening up on the Empire State roofthe strangest experience. The huge tomb in steel and glass, the ride to the eighty-fourth floor and there, under the clouds, a Hawaiian string quartet, lounge, concessions and, a thousand feet below, New Yorka garden of golden lights winking on and off, automobiles, trucks winding in and out, and not a sound. All as silent as a dead cityit looks adagio down there.

Powell, p. 12

The Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older.

Didion, Goodbye, pp. 16877

The buildings, as conceived by architects, will be cigar boxes set on end.

White, Here, p. 55

Dals New York is a laboratory of intensified entropy, where things become surreal in a thermodynamic malaise.

Conrad, p. 146

One of Oldenburgs 1965 projects was an ironing board, canopying the Lower East Side. The board replicates the shape of Manhattan and with its shadow blesses the former ghetto. Its baldachin testifies to the million miles of devoted ironing done beneath it by immigrant mothers sprucing up their offspring.

Ibid., p. 318

He would love to pad Central Park and the slope of Park Avenue with green baize, in homage to the grass of the former and the merely titular vegetation of the latter, and to use them as pool tables. Colored balls would be sent bumping through the park to roll down the declivity of the avenue. Theyd be collected at Grand Central and shipped back uptown on the underground railroad tracks. At 96th Street theyd pop into view again, ready to resume the game.

N. cit.

Christo during the 1960s planned the packaging of three New York buildings, 2 Broadway, 20 Exchange Place, and the Allied Chemical Tower in Times Square.

Conrad, p. 312

Bill told me he had been walking uptown one afternoon and at the corner of 53rd and 7th he had noticed a man across the street who was making peculiar gestures in front of his face. It was Breton and he was fighting off a butterfly. A butterfly had attacked the Parisian poet in the middle of New York.

Denby and Cornfield, p. 3

Breton continued to live in New York City; he remained totally French, untouched by his residence in America, almost as though he had never left Paris.

Myers, p. 37

As reality goes into hiding in the prudish city, realism becomes an illicit art. Sometimes Marsh was denied permission to sketch in the burlesque houses, so he taught himself to scribble on paper concealed in his pocket.