Quotes About Tenements

Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.

The labor leader Samuel Gompers had long considered the production of cigars in unsanitary tenements "one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores" on the city of New York. Realizing

A nice street, Fred. A nice neighborhood. Oh, I know how the intellectuals sneer at suburbia - it's not as romantic as the rat-infested tenements or the hale-and-hearty back-to-the-land stuff. There are no great museums in suburbia, no great forests, no great challenges.

They had this block to themselves. The windows of all the tenements on both sides were marked with the white X of urban renewal; they stood nearly empty, waiting for the wreckers. Within them the cockroaches crawled and the rats chittered, but the humans were away, infesting some other neighborhood.

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.

The housing stock along the broad Edinburgh Road was a linear map of a century of social housing, from scrubby squares of muddy grass around garden city dreams, to high-rise machines for living. Occasionally they passed a wall of undemolished tenements, the old housing design that had worked in the city for centuries.

As he passed a spectacular viaduct to his right, he though about psychopaths, and how they were to be found everywhere, not only in run-down tenements and slums and squats, but even here, in this place of serene beauty.

New York was still here, but it had changed in our absence. It was long after midnight, and vast walls of fog off the river shimmered along the sidewalks like the ghosts of tenements that had long ago been leveled to make way for the parking garages and office buildings. It was a spectral Manhattan, a double-exposed landscape where the past folded back over on itself in overlapping decades.

My family are all Glasgow. I was born there. Govan. When it was very tough. The tenements. All that stuff.

I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under indifferent stars like a seam.

Tenements were a screenwriter's dream—lively, interesting places that lent themselves to narrative.

It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.

Among James Mullett's recruits was Joe Brady, "a giant in stature and a boar in strength," one of twenty-five siblings brought up in the tenements of Dublin's North Anne Street. With his huge block of a face, tight lips, and shock of black hair, Brady embodied the primal, brute strength necessary to act on orders without thought or scruple.

I grew up in a slum neighborhood - rows of tenements, with stoops, and kids all over the street. It was a real neighborhood - we played kick-the-can and ring-a-levio.

When Americans find out I grew up in the tenements, the question they invariably ask me is "how did you end up there?" Americans, it seems, find comfort in reasons and explanations. They honestly believe that if they can find the reason for someone else's misfortune, they can avoid that misfortune themselves. If they could find out how I ended up in the tenements, they could assure themselves that it could never have happened to them.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.