“As they sped downtown past 59th Street, they began to see pepole in multitudes, they began to see a sea of heads weaving underneath lights unlike the lights they had already seen. These lights were a blazing daytime in themselves, a magical universe of lights sparkling and throbbing with the intensity of a flash explosion. They were white like the hard white light of a blowtorch, they were the Great White Way itself.”

—Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.