Soho New York Quotes

We always just miss New York. I watched it with this neighborhood. When I moved here everyone was mourning SoHo of the seventies, Tribeca of the eighties, and already ringing the death knell for the East Village. Now people romanticize the Alphabet City of Jonathan Larson. We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared.

Robert Hughes, Time magazines's art critic, told him on the phone that after he saw the planes flying over SoHo he had walked around in shock. On his way home he had stopped by a bakery and found the shelves cleaned out. Not a loaf remained, not a bagel, and the old baker standing amid the emptiness spread his arms and said, 'Should happen every day.

Kee Li Tong was one of my favorite chocolatiers in New York. Years earlier, I had a fleeting addiction to her otherworldly crème brûlée truffle, a dainty yet dangerous homemade bonbon that you have to pop into your mouth whole, or suffer the consequences of squirting eggy custard all over your blouse. Now, I discovered, she was handcrafting macarons in wild and wonderful flavors like blood orange, sesame, and rose. How did she create her recipes? What inspired her expanded repertoire? And how did hers compare to Paris's best? Emboldened as I was by my new French history lessons, I asked Kee in her Soho boutique: why macarons? "Because they're so pretty!" Kee laughed. "They're so dainty. I think it's the colors." And, standing as we were above the glass display case, I had to agree. Her blueberry macarons were as bright as the September sky. The lotus flower was the kind of soft pink that's the perfect shade of blush. Kee's favorite flavor, passion fruit, was a snappy corn husk yellow. These were surrounded by greens (lulo and jasmine green tea) and purples (lavender, which was dotted with purple sugar crystals) and some neutral shades as well (white truffle oil and mint mocha).

Such risk aversion breeds its own failure. So deeply rooted is gentrification that Richard Florida has now modified his widely acclaimed thesis about the rise of the creative classes. Cities are becoming too successful for their own good. Until recently, he believed they would be the engine rooms of the new economy, embracing the diversity necessary to attract talent. That has certainly happened. Gay pride parades seem to get larger every year. A thousand multicultural flowers are blooming. Yet in squeezing out income diversity, the new urban economies are also shutting off the scope for serendipity. The West’s global cities are like tropical islands surrounded by oceans of resentment. Florida’s latest book is called The New Urban Crisis. Rather than being shaped by those who live there full-time, the characters of our biggest cities are increasingly driven by the global super-rich as a place to park their money. Many of the creative classes are being edged out. Urban downtowns have turned into ‘deadened trophy districts’. New York’s once-bohemian SoHo is now better known for its high-end boutiques than its artists’ studios. SoHo could nowadays be found in any big city in the world. ‘Superstar cities and tech hubs will become so expensive that they will turn into gilded and gated communities,’ Florida predicts.51 ‘Their innovative and creative sparks will eventually fade.’ Karl Marx was wrong: it is the rich who are losing their nation, not the proletariat. The gap between global cities and their national anchors is already a metaphor for our times. By contrast, the rise of the robot economy has only half lodged itself in our expectations. It is easy to dismiss some of Silicon Valley’s wilder talk as the stuff of science-fiction movies. But the gap between sci-fi and reality is closing.

Raised in privilege, Robert Moses was always cushioned from real life; from the age of nine, he slept in a custom-made bed and was served dinner prepared by the family’s cook on fine china. As Parks Commissioner, he swindled Long Island farmers and homeowners out of their land to build his parkways—essentially cattle chutes that skirted the properties of the rich, allowing those well-off enough to own a car to get to beaches disfigured by vast parking lots. He cut the city off from its waterfront with expressways built to the river’s edge, and the parks he built were covered with concrete rather than grass, leaving the city grayer, not greener, than it had been before. The ambient racism of the time hardly excuses his shocking contempt for minorities: of the 255 new playgrounds he built in the 1930s, only one was in Harlem. (Physically separated from the city by wrought-iron monkeys.) In the decade after the Second World War, he caused 320,000 people to be evicted from their homes; his cheap, sterile projects became vertical ghettos that fomented civic decay for decades. If some of his more insane schemes had been realized—a highway through the sixth floor of the Empire State Building, the Lower Manhattan Expressway through today’s SoHo, the Battery Bridge whose approaches would have eliminated Castle Clinton and Battery Park—New York as we know it would be nearly uninhabitable. There is a name for what Robert Moses was engaged in: class warfare, waged not with armored vehicles and napalm, but with bulldozers and concrete.

Reading a SoHo restaurant review in the New York Times for me is like reading Fifty Shades of Gravy. By the end of it, you're drooling and fully turned on for more." Kim Lee The Big Apple Took a Bite Of Me Available on Amazon Books and Kindle

Reading a SoHo restaurant review in the New York Times for me is like reading Fifty Shades of Gravy. By the end of it, you're drooling and fully turned on for more. - (done) It wasn’t always pretty in SoHo. When the moon clocked in for its night shift, the homeless community got cozy with their couture cardboard beds sprawled across the cobblestone catwalk.

It wasn’t always pretty in SoHo. When the moon clocked in for its night shift, the homeless community got cozy with their couture cardboard beds sprawled across the cobblestone catwalk.

Positano hotel into the GPS, and they drove away on schedule. They left the city and got onto the autostrada, headed south. The weather was sunny and warm, and traffic moved freely. “Where do you live in New York?” Stone asked. “I have a loft in SoHo. I live and work there. Do you know the area?” “Sort of. I get a nosebleed if I go below Forty-second Street, so I don’t hang out downtown.” “Where do you live?” “In Turtle Bay. Do you know it?” “I once went to see Katharine Hepburn there,” she said. “I was supposed to paint her for Vanity Fair, but she didn’t like my preliminary sketches, and they replaced me with Annie Leibovitz. Ms. Hepburn preferred photographs. Nice neighborhood, though.” “Ms. Hepburn was a neighbor, sort of. I didn’t know her, but I saw her

My colleague Sylvia Boorstein tells of Phil, a Buddhist practitioner in New York who had worked with loving-kindness practice for years. One evening on a small side street in SoHo, a disheveled man with a scraggly beard and dirty blond hair accosted Phil, pointed a gun at him, and demanded his money. Phil was carrying more than six hundred dollars in his wallet and he handed it all over. The mugger shook his gun and demanded more. Stalling for time, Phil gave him his credit cards and then the whole wallet. Looking dazed and high on some drug, the mugger said, “I’m gonna shoot you.” Phil responded, “No, wait, here’s my watch—it’s an expensive one.” Disoriented, the mugger took the watch, waved the gun, and said again, “I’m gonna shoot you.” Somehow Phil managed to look at him with loving-kindness and said, “You don’t have to shoot me. You did good. Look, you got nearly seven hundred dollars; you got credit cards and an expensive watch. You don’t have to shoot me. You did really good.” The mugger, confused, lowered the gun slowly. “I did good?” he asked. “You did really good. Go and tell your friends, you did good.” Dazed, the mugger wandered off, saying softly to himself, “I did good.” Whenever our goodness is seen, it is a blessing.

Whack rules in New York. Everyone has to be wild, outrageous, excessive- anything to be different from everyone else. And that includes our hot cocoa. Every February, for example, Maury Rubin hosts the Hot Chocolate Festival at City Bakery with a special flavor featured each day, from spicy fig to bourbon to tropical. I still haven't gotten through all the flavors but can wholeheartedly vouch for City Bakery's out-of-this-world classic cocoa, served year-round. Opt for the giant homemade marshmallow floating on top to sweeten things up even more. Another fancy favorite is the white hot chocolate with lemon myrtle and lavender at Vosges Haut-chocolat in Soho. I really do think Angelina's chocolat chaud is the creamiest and dreamiest in Paris. But I also would never say no to a pitcher at Jacques Genin in the Marais or Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain, both sinfully thick and delicious ways to get your choco-fix. For something approaching New York's adventures in fun flavors, head to the second-level tearoom of Jean-Paul Hévin for decadent raspberry-, matcha-, or ginger-flavored cocoa.