A million people - manners free and superb - open voices - hospitality - the most courageous and friendly young men, City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts! City nestled in bays! my city! ~ Walt Whitman ~	The city presents in microcosism all the contrasts of our modern life, its worst and best aspects. Here are the broad avenues, and here the fetid streets whose festering filth pollutes the atmosphere. Here, palaces, on which self-extravagance has lavished every artifice for luxury and display. And here, tenements, where, in defiance of every law, moral and sanitary, men, women, and children are crowded together like maggots in a cheese. Here are the noblest men and women, putting forth the most concentrated energies in self-sacrificing labors for the redemption of their fellow men, appalled but not discouraged by the immensity of the problem which confronts them. And here, the most hopeless specimens of degraded humanity, in whom, so far as human sight can see, the last spark of divinity has been quenched forever. What shall we do with our great cities? What shall our great cities do with us? These are the two problems which confront every thoughtful American.   ~Rev. Lyman Abbott ~ Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, New York	New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, acts differently. They just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is. ~ Henry Ford ~
The ambiguity . . . in its mixture, . . . nothing one had elsewhere known. It breathed its simple 'New York! New York!' at every impulse of inquiry; so that I can only echo contentedly, with analysis for once quite agreeably baffled, 'Remarkable, unspeakable New York!' ~ Henry James ~		So dwindle away the glories of our magnificent City, which, stripped of the cloud of appearances in which it is veiled, looks but a vast abyss of crime and suffering, with here and there a crystal shooting out over the horrid recess of filth. These are but a few of the black shadows which the City throws across our glass. . . . Is this, then, the highest result of human intellect? ~ George G. Foster ~
New York isn't a melting pot, it's a boiling part. ~ Thomas E. Dewey~		New York is much better shaped as a cucumber than as a city. ~ Junius Henri Browne ~
When an American stays away from New York too long, something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead, a little afraid. ~ Sherwood Anderson ~		A hundred times I have thought, New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe. ~ Le Corbusier ~
[The New York rough] is not totally depraved, for total depravity is impossible; but his redeeming traits are so few, only the microscope of a broad charity can detect them. ~ Junius Henri Browne ~		New York is an arrogant city; it has always wanted to be all things to all people, and in a surprising amount of time, it has succeeded. ~ Paul Goldberger ~
When it is good, New York is very, very good. Which is why New Yorkers put up with so much that is bad. ~ Ada Louise Huxtable ~		Fashion upon Mahattan Island will admit of no compromise with Reason and refuses to listen to the voice of Common Sense. ~ Junius Henri Browne ~
Glorious City! happy people! nothing but palaces and carriages, splendor, luxury, and ease! Could we read the secret history of fashionable life, [it] should make the soul recoil in horror and amazement to find that all this brilliant and dazzling display of wealth, beauty, taste, and refinement was but the fantastic and mocking mask of a wide-yawning domestic hell. (condensed) ~George G. Foster ~		. . . New York would become home to the greatest concentration of wealth in human history. It would also become home to the greatest concentration of poverty, and to the greatest divisions of rich and poor, not one city, but two: one dazzling and one benighted; one city of sunshine, and another of shadow. ~ Narration ~
In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? ~ Mark Twain ~		New York is an arrogant city; it has always wanted to be all things to all people, and in a surprising amount of time, it has succeeded. ~ Paul Goldberger ~
Vulgar of manner, overfed, Overdressed, and underbred; Heartless, Godless, hell's delight, Rude by day and lewd by night. Purple-robed and pauper-clad, Raving, rotting, money-mad; A squirming herd in Mammon's mesh, A wilderness of human flesh; Crazed with avarice, lust, and rum, New York, thy name's delirium.   ~ Byron Rufus Newton ~		Clouds and sunshine, corpse lights and bridal lamps, joy-anthems and funeral-dirges, contrast and mingle in New York! Every ripple of light-hearted laughter is lost in its faintest echoes in a wail of distress. Every happy smile is reflected from a dark background of despair. ~ Junius Henri Browne ~