40 Years of New York

I'm not one to rave about magazines or books or shows or music
because I find it kind of pretentious to be writing about how good/bad
something is when I'm not even out there creating anything of worth
myself. That said, I know I'm kind of a hypocrite and love to rate
movies, but I allow myself this one indiscretion, particularly because
I think I'm pretty even-handed and I respect even movies I find
unwatchable because, hey, someone go their shit together and made a
movie.

But I have to break with convention to highly
recommend that you pic up the latest issue of New York Mag. It's a 40th
Anniversary issue and it covers NY over the last 40 years - where it's
been, where it is, and where it's going. There's a great article about
Rudy Giuliani, who, love him or hate him, you have to admit cleaned the
hell out of this place. There's a great article about the New York Jew
and how he has changed over the last 40 years. There's a ridiculously
amazing set of photos of NY actors, wrinkles and all.

I
tend to love New York Mag, even while I sometimes roll my eyes at its
clear-left-leaning agenda (considering myself more a centrist), but
they've really outdone themselves here. Awesome, awesome issue. Let me
put this in context - I've been excited to come home to read it for the
last two days. I haven't been excited to read anything since, like, a
year ago when I was reading "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." I
think that says something. I know it says something.

As
far as I'm concerned, New York is the greatest freaking city in the
world. Yes I have plenty of complaints that start with a lot of the
people you find here, extend to how pretentious a lot of the City has
gotten, and proceed towards housing costs. Yet all those things aside,
there is no other place like this on earth. Fine, so I haven't seen all
of the earth, but I've seen some pretty impressive places and they just
don't do it for me like NY does. It's kind of amazing to be reading
about what happened over the 30 years before I got here in 1999 and
seeing how much of NY I just never got to see and will never fully
understand. Like, I knew about the crime from the 70s-early 90s, but it
was a foreign idea to me. I was just a kid in Queens who didn't totally
understand the implications of the crack house across the street or the
fact that my dad would carry a steel rod with him whenever we'd go play
in the snow after dark. Then while in Long Island for middle school and
high school, NY was as far away as any other place in the world. I
think from 1992-1999 when I lived in the burbs, I came into Manhattan
maybe 20 times. Even when I came out with my mom that fall day in 1998
to visit NYU as a possible place to go to school, I remember how amazed
I was with the City. I took an actual subway! If I went there I'd be
going to college in Manhattan! NYU - my safety school - quickly became
my top choice. In 1999 it was already a different place and yet my
entire family still had major reservations about whether I'd be safe to
go to school there. I had little idea about what they could be stuck on.

I
come from a generation who pretty much only know NY for what it is
today - a place where Central Park is a clean, runner-friendly retreat;
where NYU is the most popular school in the nation if not the world;
where most of Brooklyn has turned into hipster heaven. I think about my
generation, and sometimes it disgusts me how much they take for
granted, both about NY and America in general. Really, it wasn't always
like this.

Probably what I love most is that the issue
puts things into perspective, something a lot of people could use.
We're worried about this latest financial crisis, and we hear people
talking of recession and the collapse of the American economy, and New
York becoming second fiddle to London and Hong Kong and wherever else
you can point to in the world that's surpassing New York in some way.
But you know what? We've been through a lot of shit, and somehow we're
still here. Yeah things will probably go from bad to worse, but I kind
of feel that eventually, they'll get better again. The only thing I got
to witness for myself was 9/11, and I remember what that was like. I
remember speaking to a guy on the street who, with real pain in his
voice, sighed and blurted out to no one in particular, "shit, just when
we were on top of the world, this had to go and happen." Hey, so maybe
the WTC site is still a hole in the ground with construction plans now
five years behind schedule, but damned if you're going to tell me that
today's NY hasn't one-upped the pre-9/11 NY.

There's just
something about NY and us as NYers that doesn't apply to most of the
rest of the world. We're passionate, entrepreneurial, opinionated,
complicated, rough around the edges. We're dreamers and creators. We've
transformed the world through literature and art and film and culture.
NY is the best and the worst that America has to offer, and I hope
that's something I can always say about this place. Someway or other,
we'll always find a way to stand back up after we're knocked over. And
if I know anything about NY, we always manage to stand a little taller
than we did before. Sometimes a little challenge is exactly what we
need to show how we get things done in this town.