“Even if it weren’t raining, with subway pumps stilled, that [flooding of subway lines] would take no more than a couple of days, they estimate. At that point, water would start sluicing away soil under the pavement. Before lone, streets start to crater. With no one unclogging sewers, some new watercourses form on the surface. Others appear suddenly as waterlogged steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s 4, 5, and 6 trains corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river” (Weisman 30).

“A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest, and you cannot go in the front door and out the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a house guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, -in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance” (Thoreau 266).