BRILLIANT CORNERS - Come Hell or High Water

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city," John Steinbeck wrote in 1953. "But there is one thing about it-once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough." Decades later, the novelist's insight about this appalling, incomparable city still feels true.

- ALEX HALBERSTADT

New Yorkers love to complain about the summers, with their wafting miasma of hot garbage and urine; about the superannuated subway system, which only sometimes resembles a psilocybin trip gone really wrong; about the purgatorial agony of finding an apartment; about the affronts of existing shoulder-to-shoulder with the stupendously rich.

New York will never make onto a "most livable cities" list, and it attracts a particular kind of person. Despite the influx of suburban corporate workers that has transformed it over the past three decades, the city remains a haven for the strange and those drawn to strangeness, for artists and obsessives, for people hooked on the pursuit of more than ample parking space and an affordable breakfast burrito.

This situation is alluded to in the title of Waylon Jennings's 1992 album Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for L.A. and also by the odd fact that John Waters, the filmmaker responsible for underground art-trash classics like Pink Flamingos, once attended New York University. "I didn't go to class," Waters recalled. "I went to Times Square every day and saw movies. I stole books from their bookshop and sold them back the next day to make money. I took drugs. I probably should've been thrown out." Waters was eventually expelled, after getting arrested with a quantity of marijuana. I think about him every time I teach a class at NYU.