Marcus Samuelsson Quotes

Urban America is like a foreign country in a sense.

I lived in Park Slope, which is probably one of the most homogenized areas of Brooklyn. No offense to Park Slope.

In my own young black life, I have done my part to gentrify a half-dozen mixed neighborhoods ranging from Spanish Harlem to Fort Greene to the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Many of my well-educated black, Latino, Asian and Arab friends have done the same.

I've always loved Harlem and its communities.

Cleveland has a very bad reputation, but there's a lot of stuff that's left over from when there were very wealthy people - the Art Museum and a world class symphony that's still world class.

In addition to public housing, South Williamsburg is home to shabby artists' lofts like mine, apartments of Hasidic Jews, and one extremely tall, high-priced condo.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

I used to live in the Bronx, then I lived uptown on 106th St. and Broadway, and finally I moved to Harlem right before it became gentrified. I lived on 120th St. between Fifth and Lenox Aves. in a little brownstone. I knew the neighborhood was changing when they started putting trees in the middle of the block.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

The way to reduce pollution in Detroit is to make automobile company executives drive in non-air-conditioned cars during summer rush hours. The way to get business to join the war on poverty is to make corporate executives drive through Harlem every day instead of going home on air-conditioned trains drinking martinis.

New York has changed amazingly; it's gentrified everywhere, and it's a much gentler place.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.

I come from nowhere Brooklyn, New York. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. These days Williamsburg is kind of a hip area, but when I grew up there, the taxi drivers wouldn't even go over the bridge, it was so dangerous.

I want to take Negroes out of the ghetto and put them in good neighborhoods in good houses.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

New York is a much more bourgeois city, more of a tourist attraction than a muscular metropolis. It's lost moxie and a rough energy, while gaining grace and friendliness. I love both versions of the city, but I wish the prosperous Manhattan would become a little easier for young people to afford.

I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

America will continue paying a high price in civil and ethnic unrest unless the nation commits itself to help the urban poor lead productive and respectable lives.

A ghetto can be improved in only one way; out of existence.

We all got driven out of Manhattan. It was a very conducive place for artists when I was growing up, and now it's definitely not. The city has been completely taken over by the rich.

A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden.

Liberals want to live downtown. All over America - in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown - there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.