Quotes About Cityscape

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan.

There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn.

For instance, as the police arrive, there are girls lined along the street, girls in miniskirts, thigh-highs, and halter tops. (The sea wrack Milton hoses from the sidewalk every morning includes the dead jellyfish of prophylactics and the occasional hermit crab of a lost high heel.)

Out here, you find out that the city fools you about how things really work.

The thing you gotta understand about L.A. is that everything is suburbia. Los Angeles isn't set up like San Francisco or New York.

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.

Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

The jumbled brick and stone of the city's landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time.

Nothing is so alien, so bleak and unfriendly, as the strip of gas stations—cut-rate gas stations—and motels on the rim of your own city. You fail to recognize it. And at the same time, you have to clasp it to your bosom. Not just for one night, but as long as you intend to live where you live.

Mr. Tagomi turned to a passer-by, a thin man in rumpled suit. "What is that?" he demanded, pointing. The man grinned. "Awful, ain't it? That's the Embarcadero Freeway. A lot of people think it stinks up the view.

A city is half beast and half machine, with arteries of fresh water and veins of foul, nerves of telephone and electrical cables, sewer lines for bowels, pipes full of pressurized steam and others carrying gas, valves and fans and filters and meters and motors and transformers and tens of thousands of interlinked computers, and though its people sleep, the city never does.

The ride had begun. The theatre and club spectaculars seemed to stick up into the sky at all sorts of crazy angles, probably because most of them were planted diagonally on rooftops. Follow Thru, Whoopee, Show Boat, El Fay Club, Club Richman, Texas Guinan's. It gave the town the appearance of standing on its ear. ("The Number's Up")

Parts of Chicago are wondrous fair, and parts of Chicago look postapocalyptic. This block had seen the apocalypse come, grunted, and said, "Meh.

Except for levees, there are no natural land surfaces in the city that are higher than fifteen feet above sea level. Canal Street meets the river at an elevation of fourteen feet above sea level; Jackson Square, only six blocks downriver, is only ten feet above sea level. The Tulane University area is a mere four feet above sea level, while the intersection of Broad and Washington Streets (originally part of the backswamp, now Mid-City) is two feet below sea level.

They wound their way through a labyrinth of streets, partly following their noses, partly the orientation of the map. Jardines, Mirasol, Cruz, Puentezuelas, Capuchinas... Each word held its magic. They were like brushstrokes painting the landscape of the city, each one helping to build up a picture of the whole.

New York is so dry.

Long-time inhabitant of steeples, accustomed to contemplating, from his perch on a rainspout, the expanse of roofs, he knew that the souls of cities are more substantial and more lasting than those of all their inhabitants put together.

In the street, he turned west and walked against a tide of blank-eyed, gum-chewing faces. A taxi went over a manhole cover, clink-clank. Steam was rising from an excavation at the corner. The world was like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. What was the pont of all these drab buildings, this dirty sky?

One of the things I thought a lot about was how can we get the views, for instance, the main plaza, you look up to Telegraph Hill from there and therefore it would be a disaster to close that view off.

Sunday brunch at Soho House. The views of L.A. are spectacular.

I could've shot the whole East Village, because it was and is my neighborhood. But Seventh Street is precious to me.