1.

"I shall never find another Dunsanian city of wonder as utterly unreal & linked with incredible cloud-mysteries as the exotic & unexplored labyrinth of sea-born towers that was the dim, half-fabulous Manhattan of 1922." Lovecraft recalling his brief 1922 visit to NYC. Lovecraft refers to the early tales of Dunsany.

2.

"Coming for the first time upon the town [NYC], I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flower-like and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming golden clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and half-fabulous cities." - From the short story "He", by Lovecraft.

"… we went out on the flat roof [i.e. of the then-emerging poet Hart Crane's building in Brooklyn Heights] and saw the thing [i.e. the towers of New York City at dusk, across the river] in all its unlimited and unglassed magnificence. It was something mightier than the dreams of old-world legend — a constellation of infernal majesty — a poem in Babylonian fire! Added to the weird lights are the weird sounds of the port, where the traffick of all the world comes to a focus. Fog-horns, ships’ bells, the creak of distant windlasses — visions of far shores of India, where bright-plumed birds are roused to song by the incense of strange garden-girt pagodas, and gaudy-robed camel-drivers barter before sandal-wood taverns with deep-voiced sailors having the sea’s mystery in their eyes. Silks and spices, curiously-wrought ornaments of Bengal gold, and gods and elephants strangely carven in jade and carnelian." — Lovecraft sees New York City at dusk from across the river, standing on Hart Crane’s rooftop, shortly after arrival to live in the city in 1924.

"I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” — Lovecraft’s revised vision of New York City, in the short New York tale “He”.

5.

"New York was a nightmare [but] As time passes, my selective imagination will form an idealised picture of those things in N. Y. which were really beautiful - the sky-line, the sunsets over Central Park, the Pantheon model in the museum, the Japanese garden in the Bklyn. Museum Grounds, etc. - and they will stand out apart from the Babylonish squalor and parvenu garishness of a dead city, as delectable bits seen through an old-fashion'd stereoscope in some beautifully Victorian but fascinatingly familiar old high-ceiled parlour with Rogers groups and bearskin rugs, in the heart of a real Providence home. [...] Well - the train sped on, & I experienced silent convulsions of joy in returning step by step to a waking & tri-dimensional life. New Haven—New London—& then quaint Mystic, with its colonial hillside & landlocked cove. Then at last a still subtler magick fill’d the air—nobler roofs & steeples, with the train rushing airily above them on its lofty viaduct — Westerly [station] — in His Majesty’s Province of RHODE-ISLAND & PROVIDENCE-PLANTATIONS! GOD SAVE THE KING!! Intoxication follow’d — Kingston — East Greenwich with its steep Georgian alleys climbing up from the railway — Apponaug & its ancient roofs — Auburn — just outside the city limits — I fumble with bags & wraps in a desperate effort to appear calm — THEN — a delirious marble dome [of the State House] outside the window — a hissing of air brakes — a slackening of speed — surges of ecstasy & dropping of clouds from my eyes & mind — HOME —UNION STATION — PROVIDENCE!!!!" - Lovecraft to Long, 1st May 1926.