Citizens are the energy of Seoul.
The heart of a city Is the soul of a man It winds like a river Through the heart of the land They can tear down a building They can tear down a park They can strike at a symbol But they can't strike the heart.
Movement was the essence of Manhattan. It had always been so, and now its sense of flow, energy, openness, elasticity as Charles Dickens had called it, was headier than ever. Half the city’s skill and aspirations seemed to go into the propagation of motion.
It's all about connectivity - not just technical connectivity but geographic connectivity. That's what makes a city go.
The city keeps reinventing itself. And each generation thinks, as they enter it, that they've missed the best of it, and then they become the authors of the next "best." And so it goes on and on and on. And New York keeps redefining itself and reinventing itself, and then you look at it and it's pretty much the way it was back in the 1920's., or in the 1930's. Something stylistically different in some ways, but it's still got the same vitality.
Whatever New York loses, if you go to other cities around the world, or around the country, New York still has a kind of energy level you find nowhere else. Paris doesn't have it, London doesn't have it, San Francisco, a great city, doesn't have it.
Cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour.
I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.
But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die
Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.
Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now, The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even the sight of the wounded,) Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.