The New York City taxicab is almost as famous as the city it serves, having been immortalized in film, literature and music throughout its relatively brief existence. Scroll down for a few examples.

Taxis in Literature

Taxis have also been the focus of many books and poems. Taxis have made appearances in books such as The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. Poems have also been written to express the effects taxis have on people and society. Scroll down for two examples from poets Mary Ann Waters and David Baker.

TAXI AFTER AN EVENING SHOWER
by David Baker

This man saying no no. This man moaning jesus christ. He's got his forehead sealed on the fogged side window in profile to the back seat and us. He's broken. His face, one shade from beautiful, wears the look of weeping though it's dry - the front of the cab glows blue, large as a cheap, cluttered room. His friend is driving, broken down, black stone.

But there are lights in the walls of the numinous sky. But there are people in overcoats, dodging. The rain has roughed up and polished the city - blur of a blur of a blur. And so we are rushing tight against the curb down the terminal streets, block after block, beneath stone walls and windows and glitter. There is only one sadness, one speed.

TAXI
by Mary Ann Waters

"An experience isn't complete
until it becomes a memory."
-C.S. Lewis

Once I felt like a philosopher, everything charged with meaning. I'd pause to watch the shadow of a 727 crawl across the highway thinking this is the essence. not the plane, gilded by sunlight, nor the shadow moving like an immortal finger, but the highway. The highway just after the shadow has passed. And once, in a second hand store in Wyoming. I found a kimono, lavender, lined in red silk, and the kimono was elegant when we left it

on the black sweep of lawn to swim in the dark pool, and the fireflies rose into constellations of stars, erased, made believable, by the moon. And once, in the city, you hailed the convenient taxi, and then you turned to say goodbye, but I do not exactly remember your face, nor what must have been resignation. I remember, instead, the remarkable way the door closed, silently. the sudden space by the curb. The torn piece of newsprint, dampened, pulpy.