If, as Lewis Mumford wrote, cities were created as "a means of bringing heaven down to earth" and "a symbol of the possible," New York is the epitome of those dreams. No other city's skyline thrusts so aggressively toward the heavens, pulling down the clouds like a monarch shrugging into a cloak. No other city's history so embodies the idea of innovation and achievement in such a dazzling range of human endeavors. "There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride and exultancy," novelist Thomas Wolfe rhapsodized in 1935. "It lays its hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die."
That is why New York was for more than two centuries -- and still is -- a beacon for the best, brightest and bravest people from all over the U.S. and all around the world. They come to test themselves against the toughest competition, to make a buck, to reinvent lives that seem stale in any other setting. As the song that has become the city's unofficial anthem puts it, "If I can make it there, I'd make it anywhere."
In virtually every category, New York has the best, the biggest, the most -- except for civility, of which it has the least. With a flood of new arrivals from Europe, the Soviet Union and the Third World, New York's population has rebounded from its 1980 low of 7 million to an estimated 8 million, more than twice as many as runner-up Los Angeles. Washington may be the home of Congress and the President, but New York is the financial capital of the world. Even with the rise of Japan and Germany, the New York Stock Exchange remains the world's most prestigious financial market, on which stocks worth trillions of dollars are traded.
In culture too, New York remains a pacesetter. Other cities would be proud to have one world-class performing troupe. New York has dozens, including the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the American Ballet Theater, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Manhattan Theater Club. As a showcase for theater, Broadway has few rivals -- unless they are the city's own off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions. Its collection of museums is a gallery in itself.
But just as the sheer size of New York's population makes possible a dazzling smorgasbord of urban delights, it also magnifies a myriad of social ills. Only about 1 of every 100 New Yorkers is homeless, but that adds up to 90,000 people huddling in shelters or eking out a life of not-so-quiet desperation on the street. A mere 1 in 300 New Yorkers may be a victim of AIDS, but that totals 27,000 people, a staggering 19% of all confirmed cases in the U.S. Says Paul Grogan, president of the Local Initiatives Support Corp., a nonprofit housing-development organization: "New York is the same as every place -- only more so."