I'm about four skyscrapers behind.
The truth is I don't really know where my own interest in tall buildings really comes from. It cannot come from my hometown because there were no tall buildings there!
What an incredibly beautiful city at night Chicago is. Absolutely beautiful.
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.
The views from Waterloo Bridge are amazing - you can see so much of London.
When I came to New York and I opened the window of the thirty-fifth-floor apartment, there's light pollution and fog, and I couldn't see my star. So I drew it on my wrist with a pen, but it kept washing away. Then I went to a tattoo parlor on Second Avenue and had it done.
I actually enjoy having the Capitol view. We started referring to it as the trillion dollar view.
Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
I remember, many years ago, coming over the Brooklyn Bridge in the night and seeing the skyline of Manhattan, with the Twin Towers. This was, for me, a kind of religious experience.
With so much sky and so much river, you couldn't help seeing the big picture. It was what you already knew, but crowding into the subway or rushing to a movie, you only saw it for a second, and close up. Now I took a good long look. I'd always heard you couldn't see stars in Manhattan because of all the lights. But here they all were. Here was my night in shining armor.
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.
Who knows if the moon's / a balloon, coming out of a keen city / in the sky - filled with pretty people?
My favourite view is just up the road from my house where, if you look one way, you can see Alexandra Palace, and if you turn the other, you get a panoramic view of the whole of London, including the Gherkin and Canary Wharf.
The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.
Right after 9/11 it looked as if the idea of a huge skyscraper might be considered obsolete. It came back, but I think that's more closely connected to the rise of Asian and Middle Eastern cities in the world economy (Dubai, Shanghai, Taipei, etc.) than anything else.
The Hudson River lay flat and black like a lost evening glove. The clouds parted overhead as the distant moon threw a single, bright beam over lower Manhattan as though it were looking for its other half.
