Sublime

Up New York’s Sixth Avenue with its series of seven sculptures to Latin American leaders, culminating at Central Park with magnificent statues of Bolívar, Martí and San Martín. To Washington Square Park, where they will find the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi, while his more republican counterpart, Mazzini, resides along West Drive not very far

America had once been an archipelago of small towns in which hierarchy commanded deference and local opinion bounded behavior. But the country’s extraordinary social and geographic mobility was creating a horizontal society. When every man or woman is free to constantly recreate himself or herself, one never knows who one should be or, just as

East Tremont was a feeling of being known—in

And beyond questions of parks and transportation, the Mayor had for some time been becoming progressively more aware of the question that a later generation would call “priorities.” By 1938, he was acutely aware that the great strides made in parks and parkways were not being matched in any other areas of public works—not even in areas like schools

Someday very soon this will all be midtown, as one by one the sorrowful dark brickwork, the Section 8 housing, the old miniature apartment buildings with fancy Anglo names and classical columns flanking their narrow stoops, and arch-shaped window openings and elaborate wrought-iron fire escapes rapidly going to rust, are demolished and bulldozed

Lately a few planners, notably Reginald Isaacs of Harvard, have daringly begun to question whether the conception of neighborhood in big cities has any meaning at all. Isaacs points out that city people are mobile. They can and do pick and choose from the entire city (and beyond) for everything from a job, a dentist, recreation, or friends, to

To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its

In All that is Solid Melts into Air, the late American philosopher and socialist Marshall Berman’s classic celebration of fizzing, thrusting, transfiguring, luminous, contradictory modernity (and paean to his beloved New York), he describes the modern condition perfectly: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us