Ron Cephas Jones Quotes

Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It's got students of all colors. It's got old people who keep history and tell tall tales.

I think the Lower East Side inspires me. That whole neighborhood, a lot of the people that I worked with, seeing what we've gone through in life, being given an opportunity to understand who I am; my identity, my culture, and my roots.

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

I'm from Harlem, born and raised there.

I'm very connected to my neighbourhood. If I could, I'd take the entire Peri Garden neighbourhood to form a Jardim Peri in Manchester.

I'm from Queensbridge. It's the largest housing project in New York. And growing up in Queens, it was different because I wasn't really experienced in traveling to the City. I never really got used to the City.

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.

New Orleans has a unique history as a great melting pot of all kinds of cultures, and that manifests itself now through the food, the music, and the kinds of people who live there.

Urban America is like a foreign country in a sense.

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

I had seen the photographs of Harlem in its glory days, stylish men in bespoke suits, women so well dressed that they'd put the models in 'Vogue' to shame. I knew that Harlemites loved to dance, to pray, and to eat.

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.

I love Brooklyn; it's a part of who you are.

I've lived all over the world, but Harlem is very special to me, and when I decided to open a restaurant near my home, I didn't want it to be business as usual.

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

I grew up in East Flatbush in Brooklyn which was an intense neighbourhood filled with different West Indian cultures.

Jazz at Lincoln Center is something that is very necessary for the creative process. There's a couple of brothers running around New York, trying to buy up the cultural places, who shall remain nameless. Well, there's a lot of brothers - pick any two. Pin the tail on the... they want to buy up stuff and steer the country a certain way.

Orkney has the kind of landscape that sort of lends itself to a relationship with the people. I think that relationship is intensified because of its remoteness and the long periods of time when there was no interaction with other cultures.

I want Baltimore to be the coolest city in the world.

Compton is my city.

Since the '80s, Harlem has the place to go. Before the '80s, just as far as hip-hop go, Harlem has always been a strong point, fashion-wise, music-wise, all of that.

'Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.

I love Brooklyn so much. Everything I do I try to do in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is my home base.

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