Tyler Anbinder

“Dickens’s visit to Five Points made it fashionable for well-to-do New Yorkers to go “slumming,” visiting Five Points as Dickens had done, with a police escort, to marvel at its poverty and gawk at its displays of vice. Indeed, the term “slumming” may have been coined there to describe such tours.”
― Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood

“Life magazine acknowledged the city’s hypnotic hold on dreamers the world over more than one hundred years ago, in words that ring as true today as when they were written in 1909: “New York is the metropolis of America, the mouth of the republic, the tongue of the nation, the eye of the continent, a pocket edition of Babel, a digest of the United States, with fewer Americans and more Americanism than any spot between Calais, Me., and the Kingdom of Heaven.” To people all over the globe, “New York is the promised land, looking green, fat, luscious and joyous from the outside deserts; the promised land flowing with milk and honey . . . where the flesh pots smell savory, where the labels are better than the bottles, where the bricks are gold and the goods are green . . . Every race on earth claims New York,” because it epitomizes all they dream of achieving. To generations past, present, and future, “New York is It. No man will ever see its finish.”38”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York