nonetheless

Interviewer: You say the important thing at the start is a character?

Françoise Sagan: A character, or a few characters, and perhaps an idea for a few of the scenes up to the middle of the book, but it all changes in the writing. For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Françoise Sagan: The Art of Fiction No. 15 (The Paris Review Interview, August 1956)

NYPL’s Ottendorfer Library opened in 1884 as NYC’s first free public library. The landmark library is one of the oldest in the system. 

Designed by German-born architect William Schickel, this landmark building combines Queen Anne and neo-Italian Renaissance styles with an exterior ornamented by innovative terracotta putti. The Branch was a gift of Oswald Ottendorfer, owner of the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung. At the time, the neighborhood was called Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) and had a population of over 150,000 people of German descent. Ottendorfer wished to provide this community with books to cultivate their minds and assist assimilation into American culture. … the branch continues to reflect its community and remains a vital educational and cultural resource for the East Village today.
NYPL on 4sq

(top photo via German Traces NYC)

Mile End

Q: What do you think we’ve lost as public pay phones have vanished, as people have come to rely on cell phones?

A: It’s funny: it used to be that you could see people in pay-phones, but not hear what they were saying. Now you can hear people on cellphones but not always see them. There’s something more invasive about hearing someone else talking than there is watching a dumb show.

I mean, phone booths are essentially transparent rooms where you could see someone laughing, crying, yelling, but not know the actual details. It allowed your imagination to engage with the community.

Now your imagination is invaded by someone else’s reality.

— from Jeremiah Moss’s interview of Peter Ackerman, author of The Lonely Phone Booth

(top photo via Scouting New York:The Last Phone Booth In New York City)

ifyouseesomethingsaysomething:

Smoke and rain
Chelsea, New York

A subway car covered in graffiti [c. 1980’s]

New York of the 1980’s

Big Apple Scenes — Discover New York from an insider’s point of view

Crown Restaurant (Adam Golfer for WSJ)

Sure, the city’s too clean, too green, too smoke-free, for some native tastes. It’s more expensive than ever to live here, but there’s a reason—make that many—that those little town blues are melting away. Again.

Russ & Daughters (Adam Golfer for WSJ)

With the tourist hordes gone, it’s a perfect time to bundle up and roll with the locals.

Insider’s Guide to New York City (WSJ)  

“It was the old New York way…the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than “scenes”, except those who gave rise to them. ”

~ Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

(photo: via NYU archives)

Comptoir de l’Image (via The Sartorialist)