In Popular Culture
New York City Hall has played a central role in several films and television series.
- Spin City (1996–2002), set in City Hall, starred Michael J. Fox as a Deputy Mayor making efforts to stop the dim-witted Mayor from embarrassing himself in front of the media and voters.
- City Hall (1996) starred Al Pacino as an idealistic Mayor and John Cusack as his Deputy Mayor, who leads an investigation with unexpectedly far-reaching consequences into an accidental shooting.
- In the 1984 movie Ghostbusters the Mayor summons the protagonists to City Hall to discuss the impending end of the world.
- City Hall is also referred to in the folk song "The Irish Rover" as performed by The Clancy Brothers, The Pogues and The Dubliners:
In the year of our Lord, eighteen hundred and six,
We set sail from the Coal Quay of Cork
We were sailing away with a cargo of bricks
For the grand City Hall in New York
- Although the dates match those of City Hall, there is no recorded usage of Irish bricks in the building's construction. However the song mentions "The Irish Rover" never actually arrived in New York, but "struck a rock" and sank instead.
Read more about this topic: New York City Hall
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you’re anxious for to shine in the high esthetic line as a man
of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant
them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your
complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a
transcendental kind.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)