Quotes About Urban

During the summers the building was empty," she reminisced. "Everybody went away, to Long Island, or Westchester, or the Adirondacks, or the Jersey Shore. If you went to Long Island, the husbands didn't stay behind. The whole city would be empty in the summers. Now if people go away, it's just a weekend. Goodness me, what kind of a summer is that?

strip of real estate than that—to the blocks immediately east, south and west of Central Park.

Other urban voices sounded strident, but the natural Brummie tone hovered somewhere between bewilderment and despair.

If it weren't for the Chicagos and Detroits and Toledos, the terrible things would spread out across the whole country and make trouble for everybody else. Such places were collectors of badness in the way hospitals were collectors of the sick and damaged.

This was my first time in Govan. You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn't look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young teenage boys and girls full of deep and dark depression

Thoreau was our suburban coyote [Edward Abbey].

I looked out my window onto the street, the same street, the same buildings I always see, the windows that stare back at my own; and it was different. The moment was a different moment, of a different now. What I saw from my window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other branch of a river that's been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike: the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks.

T.C.: Um, actually you just said "I live in a parking lot." You didn't mean to do that. Lori: You've never seen traffic on Concord Street at eight o'clock in the morning.

Ah, you poor fools, walking so tall and haughty with your guns and your sticks and your wide belts full of gear like the second coming of Batman, sitting in your little cars full of mechanized fear as you reach for your little radios at the first sign of anything more worrisome than a jaywalker.

Xxx there is a certain kind of peace that you find in the middle of a city when you are the only one on the street, and you can hear your footsteps echo on the dry pavement, xxx

Yokohama does not improve on further acquaintance. It has a dead-alive look. It has irregularity without picturesqueness, and the grey sky, grey sea, grey houses, and grey roofs, look harmoniously dull.

I grew up in a big sky country. Then I lived in Manhattan, where you can only see the sky between buildings, and then I went into a building where you couldn't see the sky at all. I didn't like that so much.

There must be a way to combine the high rise and high-density environment with nature. Maybe we can have our gardens in the sky.

My favorite thing about New York is the view, the skyline.

You're at LaGuardia, and you get in a cab, and it's taking you into Brooklyn, and you're on the BQE, and you can see the skyline, the whole skyline, and it's so beautiful.

There's a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.

I'm about four skyscrapers behind.

There's the downtown area of Tupelo. Did you see the skyscrapers? Two stories.

In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion.

That's what I love about Chicago... It is the staccato aspect of the skyscrapers. But the ground is very loose, very relaxed. It makes Chicago far more pleasant than other cities.

I feel like all Londoners relate more to New York - L.A. doesn't feel like a 'city' city. It's like a sleepy town.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one's own town.

Faced with the way the system does you in the 'hood sometimes, if you don't literally get out, your chances are slim. You'll definitely die mentally. You'll pretty much die physically.

In the 1970s, New York was known as a place of great artistic production. Slowly, my city went from a place of production to a place of consumption.