scene without Reed. The street is lit from the right hand side, while the photos of Reed are all lit from the left. Photography is credited to Waring Abbott. The album design was done by Spencer Drate, Judith Salavetz, and Sylvia Reed. Critical reception Reviewing New York for Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis described the album's songs as "fierce, poetic journalism" and found that Reed shows a newfound "political outlook that grounds his work and lessens his characteristic detachment", concluding that "whenever anyone wants to hear the sound of the Eighties collapsing into the Nineties in the city of dreams, New York is where they'll have to go." NME critic Gavin Martin said that the album's simple rock and roll sound complements Reed's "often condemnatory" lyrics, which Martin felt displayed "personal insight, invective and, most telling, a profound compassion for his characters and their place in the scheme of things." New York was voted the third best album of the year in The Village Voices annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll for 1989. "Whether or not you buy Reed's line about New York being a single integrated experience 'like a book or a movie'," remarked Q in its end-of-year round-up, "this is indisputably one of the landmark albums of an inconsistently brilliant career." In a 1995 reappraisal, Qs Bill Prince noted that New York "signalled the beginning of the defrosting of Reed's Velvet Underground past that has so far marked out his '90s." Mark Deming wrote in his review for AllMusic that "New York is a masterpiece of literate, adult rock & roll, and the finest album of Reed's solo career." In a retrospective overview of Reed's discography for Spin, David Marchese stated that the album had a "mix of sharp detail, righteous anger, and razor-wire rock" and "was Reed's best of the decade." Writing in 2020 for Pitchfork, Daniel Felsenthal called New York "a record of unmistakable conviction, one so direct and literary, erudite and rageful that it resembles no protest music written before or since." Felsenthal stated, "The city of his birth becomes his Yoknapatawpha County, a location for synecdoches that encompass large swatches of experience. Like much great fiction, Reed's handling of his themes—a depleted environment, indigenous persecution, pro-lifers, police killings, racial violence—has aged into greater relevance today." In 1989, Rolling Stone ranked New York the 19th best album of the 1980s. In 2006, Q listed it as