Welcome to New York City--the only city on the planet brazen enough to call itself "The Capital of the World." New York has never been subtle, self-effacing, or coy. This is the Muhammad Ali of cities: We Are the Greatest!
It's precisely this kind of urban machismo that makes people either love New York or hate it--or both. Either you'll be enthralled by the tempo, glamour, and sheer excitement of it all, or you'll be stunned by the noise, the intimate mingling of inhuman poverty and unimaginable wealth, the smog, and the callousness that's an everyday occurrence on these city streets. If your emotional metronome swings back and forth from one moment to the next, take heart: We New Yorkers have a never-ending love-hate relationship with this awful, wonderful town. We talk endlessly about escaping for the weekend, commiserate about subways that arrive late, and bemoan the noise, the rents, the crowds, the cab drivers who don't seem to know Lincoln Center from the Lower East Side. Yet still we stay.
The questions beg to be asked: Why do we stay? And what is it about New York City that makes you, dear reader, want to join us?
Any attempt to define New York today recalls the Zen wisdom that you can't step in the same stream twice. The city is so mutable, so constantly changing, that it's almost impossible to get a fix on. Restaurants and nightclubs become trendy overnight, then die under the weight of their own popularity. (Yogi Berra, of course, had the perfect phrase for that very phenomenon: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.") Fashions, almost by definition, change in the time it takes to try on a pair of vinyl pants. Broadway shows, exercise fads, even neighborhoods are all subject to the same Big Apple fickleness. But within this ebb and flow lies the answer: No other place keeps any of us on our toes quite like New York City. Nowhere else is the challenge so tough, the pace so relentless, the stimuli so everchanging and insistent--and the payoff so rewarding. Simply put, New York never gets boring. Anything can happen here.
The city has a special magnetism--a charisma, if you will--that pulls in the intelligent, the creative, the determined, the overbearing, and the overblown from all over the world. Just about any language and any dialect is spoken here, from Mandarin to Brooklynese; no other dot on the map is quite so ethnically, culturally, and socially diverse. This is the nerve center of world finance and trade. The international hub of advertising, publishing, entertainment, and fashion. The creative core for the arts. The top showcase for pure celebrity. And, now as never before, a huge magnet for travelers from all over the country and around the globe, in search of a brief glimpse of it all.
