Michael Gross

“Fifteen—it’s spelled out in the building’s custom-designed logo—was something completely different from the buildings before it. Like its logo, the neoclassical über-condo was a throwback to the golden age of Manhattan apartment houses, which are called prewars though they were mostly built between 1912 and 1930, as well as a gauntlet before the remains of what, for half a century, had passed as American Society.”
― Michael Gross, House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address

“All that notwithstanding, “the original colonies did not exude universal piety,” according to a statistical study conducted in 1988. “In colonial America, no more than ten to twenty percent of the population actually belonged to a church congregation.”
― Michael Gross, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class