Love the conciseness. I think Sherlock Holmes said that when you throw out everything that's total bullshit, whatever remains is what you're left with.
It took me quite a while to read it all the way through, but so glad that I did. You really had me convinced that you had moved to Los Angeles. What a naive fool I am! Looking forward to your new NYT Opinion column next year.
I will be sure to send people your indispensable list of things you can find only in New York, such as Soggy Street Hot Dogs, Affordable Pizza Slices, and Amusing People Who Are Also Brusque.
I was particularly drawn to the elegant way you teased out the influence subway planning had on the postmodern literary of 20th century New York. Do we, indeed, get a Joseph Heller without the Nassau Street Loop?
It happens to also explain why no one in L.A. reads.
I hope that my point about the city’s alternately joyous and dire symbiosis was clear. I mean, without a Robert Moses, would we have been blessed with a Jane Jacobs?
I thought you made the point brilliantly. I especially liked your analysis of how one could draw a straight line from Edna St. Vincent Millay to the gentrification of SoHo.
I mean, without The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver would we have a Dolce & Gabanna on Mercer St.?
Just as the great E.B. White once said, “It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.”
Some of that bifurcating concept of city as both stage for the drama of daily life and as malevolent concrete jungle waiting to be scythed and paved over with highways; I felt that in this piece.
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It happens to also explain why no one in L.A. reads.
I mean, without The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver would we have a Dolce & Gabanna on Mercer St.?
(No. As your rightly point out.)