New York - A Documentary Film

On Tuesday night I watched the 8th and final episode of New York - A Documentary Film. I can't say enough about the amazing story that Ric Burns (brother of Docu-King Ken Burns) painstakingly put together.

The documentary starts in 1602 and concluded in 1999. An additional 3 hour episode was added after 9/11, and was probably one of the hardest things I've watched in years.

The pictures, the footage, the quotes, and the soliloquies are breathtaking. What you take away from it is that New York is the tale of America. As they say "New York , more than any other city in the United States, tells the story of America to itself." It makes me love the city more than I already did, and makes me long to walk it's golden streets in the silence of night once again.

I could watch this film over and over. I especially liked former Governor Cuomo's quote on 9/11. "We had this fantastic contradiction of people who hated you so much, they were willing to give up their life to take yours- and people who loved humanity so much, that they were willing to run into the damn building, in the smoke and flame, just to save the life of somebody they never met." Never has the madness that was 9/11 been stated so eloquently.

And then of course there was the soliloquy that gave me that tingling feeling on the back of my neck....but you all know I'm a F. Scott fan.

"From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it has been a tradition of mine to climb the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood....everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city, it's Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits....from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

God I wish I could write like that!!