“Over centuries of development, New York has produced a series of climax forms, architectures that have reached an effective state of perfection. Like the squares of Georgian London, the canals of Venice, or the boulevards of Paris, the nineteenth-century brownstone rows of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the stepped skyscrapers of the Twenties and Thirties, and the apartment bluffs overlooking central Park or the Hudson River are our native achievements, the result of singular processes of development and the outcome of the specific social, historical, cultural, and creative character of New York.”

Michael Sorkin, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan