Quote

I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a 70s cop movie location when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types.

Peter York

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter York
Age: 82
Born: 1943
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Anything
York
Owners
Canal
Whole
Looked
Cash
Canals
Like
Streets
Area
Dash
Type
Originals
Downtown
Movie
Artistic
Risky
Stills
Original
Cop
Remember
Street
Location
Still
Areas
Types
Loft

More quotes by Peter York

Image
Kate Middleton's a pretty girl who sounds nice.
Peter York
Image
When I hear about something allegedly happening in the world I always ask: who is doing it? Trends break out because they're based on real demographics, like there being fewer nuclear families or more people living alone. If 10 people in Shoreditch are doing it, it's a 10-minute fad.
Peter York
Image
Selling scent is a key job for celebrities. At any one time, there'll be hundreds of them at it, going on the world's talk shows, doing photo-shoots, providing employment for thousands. Celebrities are instant brands.
Peter York
Image
The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way.
Peter York
Image
In the 1940s, cigarettes would be shown in classy situations, endorsed by celebrities - real A-list Hollywood stars in America - the ads would make claims about tobacco quality or manufacturing science and, bizarrely, some brands had what almost amounted to health claims.
Peter York
Image
For me, wearing a tie is a pleasure, a recherche one but a pleasure nonetheless. You could say that I'm avoiding tie avoidance. My own gorgeous collection runs into hundreds and I buy them the way I buy books - I simply can't pass a shop. I have loved them since I could spend my own money on them.
Peter York
Image
The White Company offers its loyalists an altogether better, whiter world. The White people have edited out any colours that aren't white, off-white, milk chocolate, grey, taupe or black. They can't be doing with Johnnie Boden's cheery Sloane jokes, his spots and stripes, his occasional 'if it's me, it's U' loud colours.
Peter York
Image
My friends adore 'TOWIE' - the TV documentary series, 'The Only Way is Essex.' They like it, I'm afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a 'can you believe those people?' way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill.
Peter York
Image
It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.
Peter York
Image
The library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house - and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important thing was to have the books, not actually read them.
Peter York
Image
Haagen-Dazs (a clever Scandi-sounding name invented by Americans in 1961) was bought for its Euro-sounding sophistication by the kind of Americans who first bought those Mercs and Beemers, while Ben & Jerry's (now owned by Unilever) brought a post-hippy sensibility to bear. Buyers saw the brand as saying 'all-natural, organic and Fairtrade.
Peter York
Image
Fashion people think that the careful Nice companies are boring beyond measure. (Nice people think fashionistas look silly and should Get A Life).
Peter York
Image
If beauty isn't genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.
Peter York
Image
George Bush is by American standards rabidly Upper Class - Eastern, Socially Attractive, WASP, 19th-century money, several generations of Andover and Yale (and, while we're at it, his father, George H. W. 'Poppy' Bush, was a former president and his grandfather was the Nazis' U.S. banker in the 1930s).
Peter York
Image
Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred - Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them.
Peter York
Image
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.
Peter York
Image
There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.
Peter York
Image
I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.
Peter York
Image
Stephen Jones' hats are what we used to call 'creations' extravagant, odd things for extravagant, odd people like Madonna or Lady Gaga. They're worn in a parallel universe.
Peter York
Image
Decorators never quite saw the point of massing books. Books brought colour to a room and filled it up, but shelves bearing just one thing struck them as a decorative display opportunity tragically lost.
Peter York