From COVID  to The Queen’s Gambit: How a New York institution has weathered our strange days

“Oh yeah, he fed her to the homeless,” says Hank, who lives on East 5th Street. “A few days after it happened, before it hit the pa­pers, while the rumors started spreading around the Village, the homeless in the park were going, ‘Yeah, Dan did give us soup yesterday.’ They were goofing on it but they were pretty much grossed out.”

“As in a colony, the Bronx's leadership positions are all held by outsiders (who are also white males), including the office of Democratic county leader, the borough presidency, the office of the district attorney, the Surrogate, and the majority of seats on the Democratic County Exec­utive Committee”

"Folk music is being challenged by a creative cadre of insurgents, all city intellectuals and almost all in their early or mid 20s, who write and sing topical songs characterized by radicalism, wit, immediacy, and poetry."

According to Frank, Brooklyn Italians hate Long Island Ital­ians, Long Island Italians hate Jersey Italians, and they all hate Staten Island Italians

I am a brown-skinned descendant of enslaved Africans, holocausted Chero­kees, and invisible Europeans, and I am despised and feared and envied the world over.

Some of the best white supremacist rhetoric is couched in the language of self-defense

“I thought he was just going to point the gun and scare the guy. But everything turned out different.”

“Where is that whole happy tormented crowd I used to know? Driven from the Village to the Lower East Side too ... where? Where are they? Or maybe the question should be: where am I?”

“One of my supreme ambitions is to live to be 120 years old and be able to say I never set foot inside Bloomingdale's”