By the 1970s, Richard Sennett points out, anti-urban bias is not only observable in the right-wing, but on the revolutionary left, in the writings of Franz Fanon, and in Mao-Tse Tung and Fidel Castro's celebration of peasantry. Fanon held that "the necessity for bureacracy in a city an dthe anonymous character of human contacts were bound to destroy the feeling of closeness in men... these dense places would frighten men into pursuing safe routines where they knew they would not be overwhelmed. They would thus be pushed into private circles of security and eventually lost as revolutionaries" (Sennett, xv, Uses of Disorder - paraphrasing Fanon)

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“You horrify me!”

“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”

– The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, page 2

Robert Smithson wrote an essay in the early 1970s entitled "Fredrick Law Olmsted's Dialectical Landscape," which considers the design of Central Park, it's naturalistic aesthetic lineage within 18th and 19th C. ideas about the picturesque, and contemporary uses of the park by hoods, homosexuals, graffiti writers and the like. Sounds very promising. Found here:

Smithson, Robert (1996), Flam, Jack D., ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press,

UCLA Film & Television library has some episodes of the ABC television series "N.Y.P.D." that can be viewed on site. A series running from 1966-69, the show was filmed in New York, apparently in that "gritty documentary" style. Starred Jack Warden, Al Pacino was in one episode. 

This series paints a tough, realistic portrait of the work of the New York City Police Department. Filmed on location, N.Y.P.D. utilizes the highly mobile hand-held camera and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Tonight: Lt. Mike Haines and his two partners, Dets. Jeff Ward and Johnny Corso, investigate a blackmailing ring that specializes in extorting money from homosexuals"--TV guide, September 5, 1967.

UCLA record: 

http://cinema.library.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=2&ti=1,2&Search%5FArg=N%2EY%2EP%2ED%2E&SL=None&Search%5FCode=FTIT&CNT=50&PID=1Mo0rGFfvsH4HgTJvewnZhMjxo7kTbs&SEQ=20091209142653&SID=1

Mathematician Yuri  I. Manin has a wide ranging book of essays entitled Mathematics as Metaphor. One essay, "The Empty City Archetype" considers the empty city in Jungian terms, for its relation to the collective unconscious. May be interesting for quotes, leads. He invokes Pierre Mac Orlan's "Ville Morte." 

Another image for the series. This one is featured in the "brainwashing" montage sequence of The Parallax View.

This famous picture of JFK in the oval office was taken by New York Times Photographer George Tames in 1961 and is titled "The Loneliest Job in the World." Tames on the photograph:

More info is available/sources are available at the George Tames wikipedia entry. 

President Kennedy's back was broken during the war, when that torpedo boat of his was hit by the Japanese destroyer. As a result of that injury he wore a brace on his back most of his life. Quite a few people didn't realize that. Also he could never sit for any length of time, more than thirty or forty minutes in a chair without having to get up and walk around. Particularly when it felt bad he had a habit, in the House, and the Senate, and into the presidency, of carrying his weight on his shoulders, literally, by leaning over a desk, putting down his palms out flat, and leaning over and carrying the weight of his upper body by his shoulder muscles, and sort of stretching or easing his back. He would read and work that way, which was something I had seen him do many times. When I saw him doing that, I walked in, stood by his rocking chair, and then I looked down and framed him between the two windows, and I shot that picture.¹

More info is available/sources are available at the George Tames wikipedia entry. 

A Idea to get back to:

In my introduction, a history of the thriller is maybe necessary -- if only in order to offset the negativity of my issues with noir. This discussion could revolve around Chesterton, Todorov, and Martin Rubin. Rereading Rubin just now I am seeing that he argues, following Chesterton's idea about the mythic within the detective story, that the nature of the thriller's urbanity is to redeem the mundane and banal elements of modern life, to revivify them. I'm not quite sure I agree with this though. Isn't this even maybe a bourgeois kind of neo-flaneur position? As in: "I'm so bored with the city that I need a thriller to help me imagine that there's something sublime in city life." I'm not sure how strict he is about this, but it neglects the epistemological bent of urban thriller narratives, the way the provide knowledge about the city. No?