quote from Lanzillotto's show,  "New York has a destiny of glitter.  We're built on it.  Born of it.  Born of glitter.  You see this?  This is Manhattan Schist.

This is why we can build high into the sky.  This is why cranes thread the sky, hoisting steel beams up into clouds.  Here on The Bowery its 260 feet below the earth's crust.  It comes up at Ground Zero to about 18 feet below the crust, and dives down again under the village and where we stand today and comes up in midtown and dives down again and up at 120th and Madison bursts through the earth's surface and is three stories above ground like a whale breaking the flat as sea surface of the earth.  450 million years ago the East Coast slammed into the Atlantic Sea Floor, and the sand and clay dove nine miles down into the very alive marrow of this earth.  Hot Marrow.  And the sand and clay mixed with quartz and felspar and mica and hornblende.  Mica, from the Latin, MICARE:  To Glitter....."