Loving and Hating New YorkThomas Griffith1 Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple, those T-shirts with a heart design proclaiming “I love New York,” are signs, pathetic in their desperation, of how the mighty has fallen. New York City used to leave the bragging to others, for bragging was “bush” Being unique, the biggest and the best, New York didnt have to assert how special it was.2 It isnt the top anymore, at least if the top is measured by who begets the styles and sets the trends. Nowadays New York is out of phase with American taste as often as it is out of step with American politics. Once it was the nations undisputed fashion authority, but it too long resisted the incoming casual style and lost its monopoly. No longer so looked up to or copied, New York even prides itself on being a holdout from prevailing American trends, a place to escape Common Denominator Land.3 Its deficiencies as a pacesetter are more and more evident. A dozen other cities have buildings more inspired architecturally than any built in New York City in the past twenty years. The giant Manhattan television studios where Toscaninis NBC Symphony once played now sit empty most of the time, while sitcoms cloned and canned in Hollywood, and the Johnny Carson show live, preempt the airways from California. Tin Pan Alley has moved to Nashville and Hollywood. Vegas casinos routinely pay heavy sums to singers and entertainers whom no nightspot in Manhattan can afford to hire. In sports, the bigger superdomes, the more exciting teams, the most enthusiastic fans, are often found elsewhere.4 New York was never a good convention city being regarded as unfriendly, unsafe, overcrowded, and expensive but it is making something of a comeback as a tourist attraction. Even so, most Americans would probably rate New Orleans, San Francisco, Washington, or Disneyland higher. A dozen other cities, including my hometown of Seattle, are widely considered better cities to live in.5 Why, then, do many Europeans call New York their favorite city? They take more readily than do most Americans to its cosmopolitan complexities, its surviving, aloof, European standards, its alien mixtures. Perhaps some of these Europeans are reassured by the sight, on the twin fashion avenues of Madison and Fifth, of all those familiar international names the jewelers, shoe stores, and designer shops that exist to flatter and bilk the frivolous rich. But no; what most excites Europeans is the citys charged , nervous atmosphere, its vulgar dynamism .6 New York is about energy, contention, and striving. And since it contains its share of articulate losers, it is also about mockery, the put-down , the losers shrug (“whaddya gonna do?”). It is about constant battles for subway seats, for a cabdrivers or a clerks or a waiters attention, for a foothold , a chance, a better address, a larger billing. To win in New York is to be uneasy; to lose is to live in jostling proximity to the frustrated majority.7 New York was never Mecca to me. And though I have lived there more than half my life, you wont find me wearing an “I Love New York” T-shirt. But all in all, I can, t think of many places in the world Id rather li, ve. It, s not easy to define why.8 Natures pleasures are much qualified in N, ew York, . You never see a star-filled sky; the citys bright glow arrogantly obscures the heavens. Sunsets can be spectacular: oranges and reds tinting the sky over the Jersey meadows and gaudily reflected in a thousand windows on Manhattans jagged skyline. Nature constantly yields to man in New York: witness those fragile sidewalk trees gamely struggling against encroaching cement and petrol fumes. Central Park, which Frederick Law Olmsted designed as lungs for the citys poor, is in places grassless and filled with trash, no longer pristine yet lively with the noise and vivacity of people, largely youths, blacks, and Puerto Ricans, enjoying themselves. On park benches sit older people, mostly white, looking displaced. It has become less a tranquil park than an untidy carnival.9 Not the glamour of the city, which never beckoned to me from a distance, but its opportunity to practice the kind of journalism I wanted drew me to New York. I wasnt even sure how Id measure up against others who had been more soundly educated at Ivy League schools, or whether I could compete against that tough local breed, those intellectual sons of immigrants, so highly motivated and single-minded, such as Alfred Kazin, who for diversion (for heavent sake!) played Bachs Unaccompanied Partitas on the violin.10 A testing of oneself, a fear of giving in to the most banal and marketable of ones talents, still draws many of the young to New York. That and, as always, the company of others fleeing something constricting where they came from. Together these young share a freedom, a community of inexpensive amusements, a casual living, and some rough times. It cant be