Now, it may be stretching an analogy to compare epidemics of cholera--caused by a known agent--with that epidemic of violent crime... which is destroying our cities. It is unlikely that our social problems can be traced to a single, clearly defined cause in the sense that a bacterial disease is "caused" by a microbe. But, I daresay, social science is about as advanced in the late twentieth century as bacteriological science was in the mid nineteenth century. Our forerunners knew something about cholera; they sensed that its spread was associated with misdirected sewage, filth, and the influx of alien poor into crowded, urban tenements. And we know something about street crime; nowhere has it been reported that a member of the New York Stock Exchange has robbed a poor, black teenager at the point of a gun. Indeed, I am naively confident that an enlightened social scientist of the next century will be able to point out that we had available to us at least some of the clues to the cause of urban crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York is a woman holding, according to history,... a rag called liberty with one hand and strangling the earth with the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a ...flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remark...ably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City.... It is not supposed to have existed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York is full of abandoned churches. A Godless city, but full of superstitions on every subject--art, money, sex, food, health.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »