Basement Parking Quotes

Alaska was full of fringe-ists. People who believed in weirdo things and prayed to exclusionary Gods and filled their basements with equal measures of guns and Bibles. If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn’t care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge on your porch, Alaska was the state for you.

So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.

At the end of the day, we supported globalization because we wanted to be able to buy cheaper computers, cheaper vehicles, cheaper clothes and cheaper furniture. Wal-Mart parking lots were jammed with North American workers buying bargain-basement-priced goods made in China even if in the process they were shopping themselves right out of their own jobs.

Paris. Bright miracle. But behind every bright thing creeps its shadows. The moon had its shadows and Paris had hers.They lurked in her back streets and back alleys, in parks and in basements.

When Elisa arrives at McDonald’s, the manager unlocks the door and lets her in. Sometimes the husband-and-wife cleaning crew are just finishing up. More often, it’s just Elisa and the manager in the restaurant, surrounded by an empty parking lot. For the next hour or so, the two of them get everything ready. They turn on the ovens and grills. They go downstairs into the basement and get food and supplies for the morning shift. They get the paper cups, wrappers, cardboard containers, and packets of condiments. They step into the big freezer and get the frozen bacon, the frozen pancakes, and the frozen cinnamon rolls. They get the frozen hash browns, the frozen biscuits, the frozen McMuffins. They get the cartons of scrambled egg mix and orange juice mix. They bring the food upstairs and start preparing it before any customers appear, thawing some things in the microwave and cooking other things on the grill. They put the cooked food in special cabinets to keep it warm.

You’re my baby, my sweet baby, my darling, and I need your help. You’re scared, but if you let me out, we’ll be together forever, Tana, you and me and Pearl. We’ll go to the park and eat ice cream and feed the squirrels. We’ll dig for worms in the garden. We’ll be happy again. You’ll get the key, won’t you? Get the key. Please get the key. Please, Tana, please. Get the key. Get the key. Tana would sit near the door to the basement with her fingers in her ears, tears and snot running down her face as she cried and cried and cried. And little Pearl would toddle up, crying, too. They cried while they ate their cereal, cried while they watched cartoons, and cried themselves to sleep at night, huddled together in Tana’s little bed. Make her stop, Pearl said, but Tana couldn’t.

In modern church life, we often leave the nave to have "fellowship" with one another at social functions in the basement, and we are sometimes invited to "fun and fellowship" at games nights or congregational picnics. These are inappropriate usages of the word "fellowship" (which translates the New Testament κοινωνία), for the human interaction that takes place in church basements and public parks can be shared without a qualm with Christians of other confession and even with the irreligious and pagans. True κοινωνία begins with baptismal admission into the church (δι' οὗ ἐκλήθητε εἰς κοινωνίαν τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ 'Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν, 1 Cor 1:9) and culminates in the fellowship granted through common partaking of the holy things; as such, it is entirely distinct from all Adamic-earthly gatherings, being the supernatural product of divine monergism.

Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955. Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She carries herself erectly, despite having spent the day bent over an ironing board in a dingy basement tailor shop at the Montgomery Fair department store. Her feet are swollen, her shoulders ache. She sits in the first row of the Colored section and watches quietly as the bus fills with riders. Until the driver orders her to give her seat to a white passenger. The woman utters a single word that ignites one of the most important civil rights protests of the twentieth century, one word that helps America find its better self. The word is “No.” The driver threatens to have her arrested. “You may do that,” says Rosa Parks. A police officer arrives. He asks Parks why she won’t move. “Why do you all push us around?” she answers simply. “I don’t know,” he says. “But the law is the law, and you’re under arrest.” On the afternoon of her trial and conviction for disorderly conduct, the Montgomery Improvement Association holds a rally for Parks at the Holt Street Baptist Church, in the poorest section of town. Five thousand gather to support Parks’s lonely act of courage. They squeeze inside the church until its pews can hold no more. The rest wait patiently outside, listening through loudspeakers. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd. “There comes a time that people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he tells them. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November.” He praises Parks’s bravery and hugs her. She stands silently, her mere presence enough to galvanize the crowd. The association launches a citywide bus boycott that lasts 381 days. The people trudge miles to work. They carpool with strangers. They change the course of American history.

You should buy a potted plant.” I laugh at that as I sit on the wooden picnic table at the park in the dark, listening to Jack ramble through the speakerphone beside me. “A plant.” “Seriously, hear me out—you get a plant. You nurture it, keep it alive, and wham-bam, that’s how you know you’re ready for this whole thing.” “That’s stupid.” “No, it’s not. It’s a real thing. I saw it in that movie 28 Days.” “The zombie one?” “Nah, man, the Sandra Bullock one. You’re thinking about 28 Days Later.” “You steal your advice from Sandra Bullock movies?” “Oh, don’t you fucking judge me. It’s a hell of a lot better than that shit you keep making. And besides, it’s good advice.” “Buy a plant.” “Yes.” “Did you buy one?” “What?” “A plant,” I say. “Did you buy yourself a plant to prove you’re ready for a relationship?” “No,” he says. “Why not?” “Because I don’t need a plant to tell me what I already know,” he says. “I’m wearing a pair of emoji boxers and eating hot Cheetos in my basement apartment. Pretty sure the signs are all there.” “Emoji boxers?” I laugh. “Talk about a stereotypical internet troll.” “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” he says. “This isn’t about me, though. We’re talking about you.” “I’m tired of talking about me.” “Holy shit, seriously? Didn’t think that was possible!” “Funny.” “Remember that interview you did on The Late Show two years ago?” “I don’t want to talk about it.” “You were stoned out of your mind, kept referring to yourself in third person.” “Fuck off.” “Pretty sure that guy would never be tired of talking about himself.” “You’re an asshole.” He laughs. “True.” “You get on my nerves.” “You’re welcome.” Sighing, I shake my head. “Thank you.” “Now go buy yourself a plant,” he says. “I was in the middle of a game of Call of Duty when you called, so I’m going to get back to it.” “Yeah, okay.” “Oh, and Cunning? I’m glad you haven’t drowned yourself in a bottle of whiskey.” “Why? Would you miss me?” “More like your fangirls might murder me if I let you destroy yourself,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re crazy. Have you seen some of their fan art? It’s insane.” “Goodbye, Jack,” I say, pressing the button on my phone to end the call

Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D

The town , wrapped in red and green, greeted him, welcome him home as he drove down familiar streets. Driving his old truck filled Hunter with pleasure. He didn't have to look for IEDs on the side of the road. He grinned all the way to the apartment, enjoying the ride, the peace of the nigh, the old brick buildings on Main Street, the holiday finery, the palpable presence of town spirit. He parked his truck in front of the apartment building that Ethan owned as a side business, and suddenly couldn't wait another second. He hurried up the front stairs, down the inside styaircase, then just about ran down the hallway to his basement-level unit. He had his key in his hand, but the doorknob turned easily as he put his hand on it. Cindy had left the door open for him. He grinned like a fool as he walked in. The loose floorboard in the middle of the living room creaked a familiar welcome as he passed his army duffel bag on the floor where he'd dumped it earlier. Cindy's little pink purse sat on his brown leather couch like a cupcake on a tray. "Cindy?" He strode toward the bedroom in the back, his smile spreading as he anticipated a private party. If she was waiting for him naked in bed, the proposal would have to wait a litt. "Honey?" But she wasn't waiting for him naked. She was waiting for him dead.

Ten feet under the parking lot that separated Jonathan’s firehouse home from the basement of St. Katherine’s Catholic Church, Jonathan and Boxers worked together in the twenty-five- by twenty-five-foot armory, selecting the weapons and tools they might reasonably need to meet the requirements of the upcoming 0300 mission. Built of reinforced concrete, and accessed by an enormous steel door that was originally designed for a bank vault, the armory was a place of solitude for Jonathan. Something about the combined smells of Hoppe’s solvent, gun oil, and the hints of isocyanates from the explosives brought him comfort.

Osgood darted from behind an azalea bush and stuck him in the neck with the syringe. When Fiasco flattened his nose on the sidewalk, Osgood chuckled with sadistic glee. He quickly produced the wheelbarrow he concealed in the shrubs, loaded the hefty man into it, and wheeled him to his van parked in the shadows. After transferring the bloated professor into the back, loading the wheelbarrow inside, he drove home and wheeled him into his basement where he could have him all to himself. When Fiasco came out of the stupor, he found himself strapped to a table inside a large glass enclosure. He tried desperately to escape but to no avail. Lifting his head and peering into the shadows outside the bright enclosure, he recognized Peabody seated in a chair with a bag of popcorn in his lap and a pint bottle of Pepsi. Shielding his eyes from the blinding lights, he called out, "Is that you, Osgood?" “Yes, Maximilian. I'm here, and I have a little surprise for you. I decided to use you in my latest experiment.

I had my eye on the street when an SUV pulled up outside. With a flash of long, tanned thighs, a brunette in a black cocktail dress slid out. The major-domo held the door for her and I heard him promise to have the vehicle safely parked in the basement. It seemed she had driven in alone. That was unusual for anyone of any means in Luanda. The woman came inside. She was tall and slim, hardly more than thirty years old. Her long hair was tied back in a chignon. She tossed her head and smiled at the doorman. The look softened the strong lines of her oval face. He snapped his fingers at a hostess who stepped forward with a clipboard. “Madame?” “Fabienne de Valence”, I heard the woman say with a noticeable accent. The hostess checked the guest list, nodded and gestured towards the lifts. I decided it was time to join the reception. There weren’t that many seriously attractive women in Luanda.

The Headquarters of the CPP, Jerusalem   The dark sedan pulled into the basement parking area and parked near the elevator. The driver got out and came around to the right side rear passenger door. He and the man who had been holding the gun on Ellie pulled her from the car. The two of them carried her to the elevator, one holding her feet, the other her shoulders. One punched the elevator button and the car arrived quickly. Once inside, the button for the basement was pushed, and because his fingerprint was on file, the car began to descend. The quick ride to the basement ended and the door opened.

In 2014—one year after Dasani competed in a track competition at the Pratt Institute—Spike Lee stood onstage there during Black History Month, delivering a rant against gentrification. “Then comes motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome,” fumed Lee. “You can’t discover this! We been here.” He went on to compare Fort Greene Park to the Westminster Dog Show, “with twenty thousand dogs running around,” while lamenting how his father, a jazz musician who had purchased his home in 1968, was playing acoustic bass when his new neighbors, in 2013, called the police. “You just can’t come in where people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here?” The same forces are reshaping Bed-Stuy, the historic neighborhood where Dasani’s great-grandfather June first landed and where her teacher, Miss Hester, still lives. Around the corner from her basement rental, a trendy café now sells $4 espressos. Miss Hester resents the neighborhood’s white transplants, walking around “as if I am the outsider, and I’m like, ‘Excuse me I was born here!’ 

I’D HAD A SLIP from my A.A. program the previous year. The causes aren’t important now, but the consequence was the worst bender I ever went on—a two-day blackout that left me on the edges of delirium tremens and with the very real conviction I had committed a homicide. The damage I did to myself was of the kind that alcoholics sometimes do not recover from—the kind when you burn the cables on your elevator and punch a hole in the basement and keep right on going. But I went back to meetings and pumped iron and ran in the park, and relearned one of the basic tenets of A.A.—that there is no possession more valuable than a sober sunrise, and any drunk who demands more out of life than that will probably not have it. Unfortunately the nocturnal hours were never good to me. In my dreams I would be drunk again, loathsome even unto myself, a public spectacle whom people treated with either pity or contempt. I would wake from the dream, my throat parched, and walk off balance into the kitchen for a glass of water, unable to extract myself from memories about people and places that I had thought no longer belonged to my life. But the feelings released from my unconscious by the dream would not leave me. It’s like blood splatter on the soul. You

AM: My father had arrived in New York all alone, from the middle of Poland, before his seventh birthday… He arrived in New York, his parents were too busy to pick him up at Castle Garden and sent his next eldest brother Abe, going on 10, to find him, get him through immigration and bring him home to Stanton Street and the tenement where in two rooms the eight of them lived and worked, sewing the great long, many-buttoned cloaks that were the fashion then. They sent him to school for about six months, figuring he had enough. He never learned how to spell, he never learned how to figure. Then he went right back into the shop. By the time he was 12 he was employing two other boys to sew sleeves on coats alongside him in some basement workshop. KM: He went on the road when he was about 16 I think… selling clothes at a wholesale level. AM: He ended up being the support of the entire family because he started the business in 1921 or something. The Miltex Coat Company, which turned out to be one of the largest manufacturers in this country. See we lived in Manhattan then, on 110th Street facing the Park. It was beautiful apartment up on the sixth floor. KM: We had a chauffeur driven car. The family was wealthy. AM: It was the twenties and I remember our mother and father going to a show every weekend. And coming back Sunday morning and she would be playing the sheet music of the musicals. JM: It was an arranged marriage. But a woman of her ability to be married off to a man who couldn’t read or write… I think Gussie taught him how to read and to sign his name. AM: She knew she was being wasted, I think. But she respected him a lot. And that made up for a little. Until he really crashed, economically. And then she got angry with him. First the chauffeur was let go, then the summer bungalow was discarded, the last of her jewellery had to be pawned or sold. And then another step down - the move to Brooklyn. Not just in the case of my father but every boy I knew. I used to pal around with half a dozen guys and all their fathers were simply blown out of the water. I could not avoid awareness of my mother’s anger at this waning of his powers. A certain sneering contempt for him that filtered through her voice. RM: So how did the way you saw your father change when he lost his money? AM: Terrible… pity for him. Because so much of his authority sprang from the fact that he was a very successful businessman. And he always knew what he as doing. And suddenly: nothin’. He didn’t know where he was. It was absolutely not his fault, it was the Great Crash of the ‘29, ‘30, ‘31 period. So from that I always, I think, contracted the idea that we’re very deeply immersed in political and economic life of the country, of the world. And that these forces end up in the bedroom and they end up in the father and son and father and daughter arrangements. In Death of a Salesman what I was interested in there was what his world and what his life had left him with. What that had done to him? Y’know a guy can’t make a living, he loses his dignity. He loses his male force. And so you tend to make up for it by telling him he's OK anyway. Or else you turn your back on him and leave. All of which helps create integrated plays, incidentally. Where you begin to look: well, its a personality here but what part is being played by impersonal forces?

I’m in love with her.” “Tom!” I yell a bit and I’m sure the whites around my eyes are showing. “Does she know?” His face pulls in a weird way. “We kissed.” My face goes slack. “Tom!” I can’t believe it. I’m staring at him like he’s told me he’s got a slave labour camp in his basement. I’m blinking a lot.

Why are you still here?” she whispered. Because I made an impossible promise to your mother the night that she died. Because you’d never believe that I saw her. But he said, “Because you’re worth it, kiddo.” They stood there, in the basement of that parking lot, just an uncle and his niece, two humans, both awkward and broken in their own ways.

I parked in the basement, then took an elevator to the lobby where I went through a metal detector and gave my name to a guy who looked like he ate a Pontiac for breakfast. Then I took another elevator up to seventeen.

Dear FBI, There will be a terrorist attack in the basement of the World Trade Center. Which tower, North or South, I’m not sure. They will drive in a vehicle with a homemade bomb in it. This will occur in February or March of 1993. I am sorry I cannot give you more information, but I suggest you set up monitoring of any access to the basement parking facilities of either tower. The terrorists will be Arabic in origin. Sincerely, The Prophetic Horseman.

Tuesday and Wednesday flew by. Dylan from 5B came over on Thursday. I didn’t smoke any pot, but I let him hotbox my apartment so I was even more completely stoned than I was the time before, except this time my eyebrows remained intact. We watched three episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and laughed our asses off. Dylan was actually pretty cute. He was tall and skinny and pale with buzzed hair, but he had these really blue eyes. That night he helped me carry my laundry to the basement. “Hey Kate, you wanna go to the skate park with me tomorrow night?” “I can’t, I have a date with a lesbian.” His eyes shot open. “Oh, cool.” “It’s not what you think.” He smiled and shrugged. “It’s your business. Aren’t you still dating that douche wad in 9A?” “Stephen? No, he dumped me last week. He’s dating someone else already.” “His loss.” He said it so quickly and nonchalantly that I almost believed him. We got to the basement door. Dylan pushed it open and walked in but paused in front of me. I leaned around his body and saw Stephen making out with a different girl than he had been with earlier that week. At first I didn’t recognize her, and then I saw her token pink scrunchie bobbing above her head. It was the bimbo from the sixth floor. Every time I saw her she was with a different guy. Stephen turned and spotted me. “Kate, I thought you did your laundry on Mondays?” I contemplated sharing my thoughts on women in their thirties who still wear colorful hair pretties, but I chose to take the high road. Anyway, one or both of them would undoubtedly have a venereal disease by the end of the week, and that was my silver lining. “Don’t talk to me, Stephen.” I coughed and mumbled, “Pencil dick” at the same time. Dylan stayed near the door. Everyone in the room watched me as I emptied my laundry bag into a washer. I added soap, stuck some quarters in, closed the lid, and turned to walk out. Just as I reached the opening, Dylan pushed me against the doorjamb and kissed me like he had just come back from war. I let him put on a full show until he moved his hand up and cupped my breast. I very discreetly said, “Uh-uh” through our mouths, and he pulled his hand away and slowed the kiss. When we pulled apart, I turned toward Stephen and the bimbo and shot them an ear-splitting smile. “Hey, Steve”—I’d never called him Steve—“Will you text me when the washer is done? I’ll be busy in my apartment for a while.” He nodded, still looking stunned. I grabbed Dylan’s hand and pulled him into the elevator. Once the doors were closed, we both burst into laughter. “You didn’t have to do that,” I said. “I wanted to. That asshole had it coming.” “Well, thank you. You live with your mom, right?” “Yeah.” “Please don’t tell her about this. I can’t imagine what she would think of me.” “I’m not that much younger than you, Kate.” He jabbed me in the arm playfully and smirked. “You need to lighten up. Anyway, my mom would be cool with it.” “Well, I hope I didn’t give you the wrong idea.” “Nah. We’re buddies, I get it. I’m kind of in love with that Ashley chick from the fourth floor. I just have to wait until next month when she turns eighteen, you know?” He wiggled his eyebrows. I laughed. “You two would make a cute couple.” If only it were that simple.

When Bush—code-named Timberwolf—was vice president, agent William Albracht was on the midnight shift at the vice president’s residence. While agents refer to the President’s Protective Detail as the Show, they call the Vice President’s Protective Detail the Little Show with Free Parking. That’s because, unlike the White House, the vice president’s residence provides parking for agents. Albracht was new to the post, and Agent Dowling filled him in. “Well, Bill, every day the stewards bake the cookies, and that is their job, and that is their responsibility,” Dowling told him. “And then our responsibility on midnights is to find those cookies or those left from the previous day and eat as many of them as possible.” Assigned to the basement post around 3 A.M., Albracht was getting hungry. “We never had permission to take food from the kitchen, but sometimes you get very hungry on midnights,” Albracht says. “I walked into the kitchen that was located in the basement and opened up the refrigerator. I’m hoping that there are some leftover snacks from that day’s reception,” the former agent says. “It was slim pickin’s. All of a sudden, there’s a voice over my shoulder.” “Hey, anything good in there to eat?” the man asked. “No, looks like they cleaned it out,” Albracht said. “I turned around to see George Bush off my right shoulder,” Albracht says. “After I get over the shock of who it was, Bush says, ‘Hey, I was really hoping there would be something to eat.’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, every day the stewards bake cookies, but every night they hide them from us.’ With a wink of his eye he says, ‘Let’s find ’em.’ So we tore the kitchen apart, and sure enough we did find them. He took a stack of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk and went back up to bed, and I took a stack and a glass of milk and went back to the basement post.” When Albracht returned to the post, Dowling asked, “Who the hell were you in there talking to?” Albracht told him what had happened. “Oh yeah, sure, right,” Dowling said. When

Shake Shack- The now multinational, publicly traded fast-food chain was inspired by the roadside burger stands from Danny's youth in the Midwest and serves burgers, dogs, and concretes- frozen custard blended with mix-ins, including Mast Brothers chocolate and Four & Twenty Blackbirds pie, depending on the location. Blue Smoke- Another nod to Danny's upbringing in the Midwest, this Murray Hill barbecue joint features all manner of pit from chargrilled oysters to fried chicken to seven-pepper brisket, along with a jazz club in the basement. Maialino- This warm and rustic Roman-style trattoria with its garganelli and braised rabbit and suckling pig with rosemary potatoes is the antidote to the fancy-pants Gramercy Park Hotel, in which it resides. Untitled- When the Whitney Museum moved from the Upper East Side to the Meatpacking District, the in-house coffee shop was reincarnated as a fine dining restaurant, with none other than Chef Michael Anthony running the kitchen, serving the likes of duck liver paté, parsnip and potato chowder, and a triple chocolate chunk cookie served with a shot of milk. Union Square Café- As of late 2016, this New York classic has a new home on Park Avenue South. But it has the same style, soul, and classic menu- Anson Mills polenta, ricotta gnocchi, New York strip steak- as it first did when Danny opened the restaurant back in 1985. The Modern- Overlooking the Miró, Matisse, and Picasso sculptures in MoMA's Sculpture Garden, the dishes here are appropriately refined and artistic. Think cauliflower roasted in crab butter, sautéed foie gras, and crispy Long Island duck.

Consider how often you see young men in knots of perhaps half a dozen in lounging attitudes rudely obstructing the sidewalks, chiefly led in their little conversation by the suggestions given to their minds by what or whom they see passing in the street, men, women, or children, whom they do not know, and for whom they have no respect of sympathy. There is nothing among them of about them which is adopted to bring into play a spark of admiration, of delicacy, manliness, or tenderness. You see them presently descend in search of physical comfort to a brilliantly lighted basement, where they find others of their sort, see, hear, smell, drink and eat all manner of vile things.