Love Quote by Arthur Schwartz

Brooklyn gets praised all the time now, but Schwartz’s line lands with the older, sharper affection of someone who’s noticed where real culture actually happens: not in monuments, but in the “little joints” that keep a neighborhood fed, loud, and alive. The phrasing is doing quiet work. He doesn’t say “restaurants,” “venues,” or “institutions.” “Joints” is democratic and slightly gritty, a word that treats the corner spot as a legitimate stage. Coming from a composer, it doubles as an aesthetic argument: the best material isn’t always in the grand hall; it’s in the rooms where people gather without ceremony.

The superpower of the sentence is its scale. Schwartz doesn’t romanticize Brooklyn as a myth; he loves it because it’s dense with options, a borough built on proximity and repetition. “More… than anywhere” isn’t data, it’s a way of insisting that Brooklyn’s abundance is experiential - you feel it as you move through it. That’s also the subtext: belonging is measured in how many small places recognize you, not how many big places impress you.

Context matters. Schwartz’s lifespan runs from the era of immigrant Brooklyn through mid-century New York’s churn, when local shops, clubs, diners, and social halls were cultural engines. The line reads like a defense of the everyday city against the glamour economy of Manhattan: the claim that creativity and pleasure are distributed, improvised, and stubbornly neighborhood-sized.