John Tierney writes the Big City column for this magazine.
The classic New York Answer to the question is, of course, the world, but these days it sounds a little dated. When I hear it, I think of Dick Falk, who used to work in a dingy office above Times Square and billed himself as Broadway's greatest press agent. He loved to boast that he was the model for Sidney Falco, the 1950's P.R. man played by Tony Curtis in "Sweet Smell of Success," and it was hard to decide which was more endearing: that he wanted to associate himself with one of the most reptilian characters in the history of film, or that his boast was a blatant lie.
When I met him, three years ago, he was 79 and his business had dwindled to a few clients, among them a "psychic to the stars" and an actress named Suzie Sunshine. One afternoon, as he was in the process of being evicted from his office, he sat at his desk in front of his manual typewriter showing off yellowed Walter Winchell columns and explaining his world view.
"To me, 42d Street is the most beautiful street in the world!" he declared with a booming voice and a straight face. "It's the center of the earth, and I'm it! I'm actually 42d Street!"
At first I dismissed this as preposterous even by Falk's standards, but later a more frightening possibility occurred to me. Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he was 42d Street. Maybe Dick Falk, sitting there reminiscing, was the essence of New York in the 1990's: short on money, living on old glories, stuck with obsolete technology, oblivious to the local decay and blind to the forces elsewhere that are killing the city's traditional industries.
The port that created the city and became the world's busiest now handles less freight than Houston or the Port of South Louisiana. Tokyo has far surpassed New York as the home of the world's largest corporations. Most of the factories that made New York the manufacturing capital of America have closed. The country's richest businessman operates from Seattle, and Los Angeles has as many writers and musicians as New York does. People around the world get much of their news from Washington and Atlanta; when the information highway arrives, they'll get even more entertainment from Hollywood and Silicon Valley than they do now. New York is trying to lure the masses back to 42d Street -- the city has been reduced to virtually bribing Disney to open an outpost -- but for now, Dick Falk's beautiful street is a strip of porn shops, vacant storefronts and empty theaters. This he called the center of the earth?
No, it doesn't look like the capital of the world anymore -- until you consider the alternatives. What other landmark could another city's publicist point to as the planet's hub? The Tokyo Stock Exchange? CNN Center? The intersection of the Hollywood and Santa Monica Freeways? That would take even more gall than Dick Falk had. Some people argue that the concept of a capital is obsolete in the age of Internet and Federal Express -- that new communication and transportation technology is replacing the old hierarchies with diffuse networks. But that argument ignores the history of urban civilization. Long before modems and airplanes, there were technologies that revolutionized the flow of information and goods to the provinces: the Roman Empire's roads, the printing press, postal services, the telegraph, railroads, the telephone. Yet the capital cities just kept getting bigger and more important. In the 1980's, despite the personal computer, more workers than ever crowded into the central business districts of New York, Los Angeles, Frankfurt and London.
These workers complained about the crowding -- urban dwellers always have -- but it was the crowding that brought them there. New York's congestion makes possible what economists call "agglomeration," a process that concentrates talent in the most densely populated cities. Thanks to its density, even a decaying New York has remained the national or world capital of, among other things, advertising, art, book publishing, classical music, dance, diamonds, fashion, finance, foundations, law, magazines and newspapers, management consulting, media conglomerates, museums, opera, restaurants, corporate takeovers and theater. Manhattan's infrastructure may be crumbling, but it still has the buildings and the subways to sustain a population density that no other American city will ever be able to match. On a typical weekday, 3.4 million people occupy the 10 square miles between 61st Street and the Battery.
You could call New York the capital of crowding, but that term suggests forced unpleasantness, when in fact New Yorkers willingly pay a premium to work and live in densely populated neighborhoods. They know that more people means more possibilities as well as more problems. A better term would be one that connotes the salutary effects of having people and places close to one another: the capital of propinquity.
Propinquity, manifest in the world's most famous skyline, remains New York's greatest asset, but it's not enough to guarantee the city's future. Hong Kong, Tokyo, Lagos and Bombay are crammed with people and buildings, yet none of these cities have the international influence of New York. These cities, as well as past world capitals like Rome, Paris and London, lack the other great asset of New York -- a quality that made the city grow and will have to be revived if New York is to sustain itself. The best way to understand this quality is to go back to its origin, three centuries ago. It was then that Manhattan achieved its first distinction -- as the capital of profanity.
In 1654, a group of 20 Jewish refugees from Portuguese Brazil sought shelter on Manhattan, much to the displeasure of the colony's leader, the Calvinist Peter Stuyvesant. It was bad enough that the island already had Lutherans. Now, he complained, there were "blasphemers of the name of Christ" whose "customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians" threatened to "infect and trouble this new colony." He sent word back to Amsterdam asking for permission to banish the Jews. But there was a problem.
New Amsterdam, unlike Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, was not founded by religious visionaries. The Dutch West India Company did not send its ships on a sacred mission to establish a city upon a hill. It was financed by private subscribers with a profane motive. The guiding principle was that a colony should "tend to the benefit of the subscribers," and some of those subscribers in Europe happened to be Jewish. They reminded the company directors in Amsterdam of the "immense and great capital" they had sunk into the company's shares. The Protestant directors listened to their investors, considered the possible revenue to be gained from additional settlers in the colony and denied Stuyvesant's request. In fact, they informed him, they were sending more Jews to settle Manhattan. "The message was clear," Oliver E. Allen writes in his history, " New York, New York. " "Commerce took precedence over conformity, profits had priority over vague and disputable moral principles. Money was the ultimate measure."
The Dutch lost control of the island the following decade, but New York's essential profanity endured. In the 1690's, it became the capital of piracy, thanks to a corrupt British governor's willingness to let pirates bring booty from around the world to sell to the town's cooperative merchants. (Captain Kidd had a mansion on Pearl Street.) Moral orthodoxy was impossible to impose on a diverse population with no homogenous upper class. New Amsterdam had been cosmopolitan from the start -- in 1643, a visiting missionary reported that the 500 settlers spoke 18 languages -- and the conquest by the British produced longstanding tensions between the Dutch merchants and the new rulers. One result was the first newspaper war. Opponents of the governor, upset by the official newspaper's biased coverage, started a rival paper that mocked the authorities. Its publisher, John Peter Zenger, was prosecuted for libel, and his acquittal in
1735 was the world's first major court decision affirming freedom of the press. New York was becoming the capital of free speech, and not only in print. The infamous New York street talk was also taking shape, as John Adams noted during a visit in 1774.
"They talk loud, very fast, and all together," Adams wrote in his diary. "If they ask you a Question, before you can utter 3 Words of your Answer, they will break out upon you, again -- and talk away." He complained that "with all the Opulence and Splendor of this City, there is very little good Breeding to be found," a common lament among the upper classes of Boston and Philadelphia. They could comfortably look down on New Yorkers as unruly, money-grubbing provincials during the 18th century, when Boston and Philadelphia were the largest and most sophisticated cities.
But New York did have its own advantages: an enormous harbor and the commercial instinct to take advantage of it. In 1818, a shipping line revolutionized transportation by introducing America's first regularly scheduled service to Europe, and in 1825 the Erie Canal linked the port with the heartland. The year before the canal opened, Gov. De Witt Clinton predicted that the city "will in the course of time become the Granary of the western world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufacture, the focus of great moneyed operations and the concentrating point of vast, disposable and accumulating capital. " Except for the part about the granary, he wasn't wrong.
The port was profanity (and propinquity) at its finest: next to the docks, along South Street, were the offices of merchants, who continually spotted opportunities nearby for what we now call synergy. They used the profits from shipping to establish banks and insurance companies. They constructed and provisioned their own ships, making New York the capital of shipbuilding and meatpacking. New Yorkers dominated the cotton trade by offering loans to Southern plantations, and as the cotton passed through New York they used it to manufacture cheap clothes for sailors and slaves, thereby establishing the garment industry. The ships brought Europe's news to New York before anyplace else, so New York became the capital of the industry that relayed the news to the rest of the country.
New York was the nation's financial capital by the 1830's, and the manufacturing capital by the 1860's, which served only to reinforce its standing as the capital of bad taste. As Mark Twain summed up the reputations of the nation's leading cities: "In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?" New York's old money tried to maintain standards, but new money triumphed, both in Edith Wharton's novels (the old guard was forced to socialize with the nouveau riche) and in real life.
The defining moment for New York society came in 1883. Mrs. Astor, the socialite who determined New York society's 400 members, decreed the Vanderbilts ineligible for her annual ball because they were new railroad money.
Mrs. Vanderbilt retaliated by planning a larger ball in her larger mansion, shrewdly using a new social weapon: media buzz. Advance publicity in the newspapers made the ball an event every young woman in New York, including Mrs. Astor's daughter, wanted to attend. Mother made the ultimate sacrifice: Mrs. Astor went up Fifth Avenue in her carriage and sent her coachman into the Vanderbilt mansion with her calling card, and society was permanently profaned.
New York became the home of cafe society, its membership determined by gossip columnists, nightclub owners and fashion designers. Money or celebrity was enough to qualify any newcomer for the aristocracy. With new money eventually came culture, too. When the Vanderbilts were excluded from boxes at the Academy of Music, they and their friends built the Metropolitan Opera. (Andrew Carnegie built his own hall.) The shift in the nation's cultural capital was personified by William Dean Howells, the country's leading man of letters. In the 1880's, he left the Atlantic in Boston to write for Harper's in New York, and he wrote a novel, "A Hazard of New Fortunes," about this experience. In it, a crude, swaggering New York publisher sadly shakes his head when an erudite New Englander proposes editing a national magazine from Boston. "Wouldn't do," the New Yorker says. "You might as well say St. Louis or Cincinnati. There's only one city that belongs to the whole country, and that's New York."
New York was a new kind of cultural capital, one not dominated by universities or by the national institutions of European capitals. It was run by commercial interests that catered to popular tastes across the country. It was open to any new idea that turned a profit: new kinds of vaudeville and Broadway shows, new music from Tin Pan Alley, new magazines like Time and new media like radio and television. The city itself offered artists proximity to one another along with a large, rich, cosmopolitan audience that welcomed innovation. New York was one of the first cities in the world to embrace Wagner's operas. When modern art was shunned by the old guard at the Metropolitan Museum, it was championed by commercial galleries and by millionaires who built rival museums.
After World War II, with Europe in ruins and America ascendant, even a nonpublicist could comfortably call New York the world capital. It lacked the physical charm of Paris and London, but it offered propinquity; it lacked their social graces, but its profanity welcomed newcomers. In the early 1960's, Tom Wolfe visited London and reported on a new phenomenon he called the mid-Atlantic man. Ambitious New Yorkers had traditionally learned sophistication by going to the old-world capital, but now the process was being reversed. Ambitious Londoners were aping New York manners and embracing the city's vulgarity in order to escape the provincial snobbishness of Britain's class system. These mid-Atlantic men would go to horrendously expensive lunches at the Four Seasons, emerge onto 52d Street and marvel at the hideous new office towers: "Not a good building in the lot, but jaysus, the sheer incredible yah! -- we've-got-it money and power it represents. The Rome of the twentieth century -- and, because wealth and power are here, everything else follows, and it is useless for old England to continue to harp on form. The platter of the world's goodie sweets tilts . . . to New York. "
In retrospect, that moment looks a lot like New York's zenith. Thirty years later, if you go to the Four Seasons for lunch you will find New York's publishing elite complaining about the city's decay, moaning about the death of the book, marveling at the money and power of Hollywood. But before you take their laments too seriously, before you write New York off as a capital, you should consider a question: Why are they still paying horrendous prices to have lunch here?
When Technophiles envision the death of capital cities, a future in which urban dwellers flee to the Rockies and happily telecommute to a small central office in an Atlanta suburb, they're describing a possibility that has pretty much existed for decades in the book-publishing industry. There is no longer any technological requirement for publishing to be in New York. The industry originally flourished here because New York was a manufacturing center and a transportation hub. Harper & Brothers became the country's leading publisher in the last century after the Erie Canal reduced shipping costs and enabled the firm to undersell regional publishers. But eventually, thanks to other forms of transportation and rural printing plants, New York's publishers found it cheaper to print books elsewhere. They could have economized long ago by moving their headquarters and letting editors rely on a perfectly adequate information highway for transmitting manuscripts: the postal service.
Yet today, New York is still home to 6 of the 10 biggest American book publishers, and New York publishers generate nearly half of the industry's revenue. The reason is to be found at the Four Seasons or at Michael's on West 55th Street, where literary agents and editors convene at lunchtime to see who is eating with whom. Technology may make it possible to process digital information in the Rockies, but there is more to business than digital information. Editors want to do more than process manuscripts. They want to gossip and hear new ideas and demonstrate that they have the expense accounts and the status to merit good tables. New Yorkers make fun of articles about power lunches and diagrams of who sits where at restaurants -- but they read them.
New York is the capital of lunch, and leaving the capital can be risky, as William H. Whyte discovered. Whyte, the author of "The Organization Man" and "City: Rediscovering the Center," spent 16 years on city streets watching and filming urban propinquity -- analyzing, for instance, the way business lunches would end with the participants loitering outside the restaurant, idly chatting with one another and with acquaintances who strolled by. He wondered how much economic sense it made to sacrifice that kind of spontaneous interaction. Over the past two decades, he looked at 38 companies that had fled New York, and he made two interesting discoveries.
One was that the firms' new suburban locations, supposedly chosen purely for the economic benefit of the company, nearly always happened to be conveniently close to the chief executive officer's home. The other discovery was that these firms' economic performance in the decade after the move was significantly worse than that of comparable firms remaining in New York. The companies had found bigger offices in the suburbs, Whyte concludes, but had lost something more valuable: word of mouth.
"Increased communications and travel have not obviated face-to-face interchange; they have stimulated it," Whyte observes, citing the growing number of business conferences and workshops being organized. "Many meetings are convened at airport motels, which shows you how far people will go to be face to face. But the city is still the prime place. It is so because of the great likelihood of unplanned, informal encounters." To maintain urban spontaneity, Whyte believes that a city sidewalk needs at least 1,000 pedestrians per hour -- a density that many older American cities' downtowns can no longer sustain. But New York still has sidewalks that attract 10,000 pedestrians per hour.
"Talented people want to be near other talented people, and the miracle of New York is that it has the physical compactness to make that possible," says Peter D. Salins, the director of Hunter College's urban-planning program and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. "We've inherited an incredible physical endowment that's not going to go away. There's a well-established economic literature on what's called central-place theory, which explains why the leading businesses and most talented people are concentrated in the city with the greatest density. There are exceptions -- the oil industry is in Houston and movies are in Los Angeles to be near the production centers -- but once a city becomes the core, it's hard for people to secede. They can't suddenly decide that Houston is the new accounting capital or Atlanta is the new advertising capital. "
Cities in the South and the West have eroded New York's dominance of many industries and professions, and companies have for years been shifting manufacturing and back-office work out of the city, but New York remains a capital for those who depend on getting information first and making deals. The nation's 3 biggest media companies are in the city, and 9 of the top 15 are in the New York area. New York has two of the three largest newspapers, and it generates nearly half of the magazine industry's sales revenues. The city is home to the three leading television networks and to new cable networks like MTV, USA, Lifetime and A&E. The media need to be near Madison Avenue, the world's advertising capital, which has 4 of the world's top 10 agencies and generates more than 40 percent of America's advertising.
New York has 5 of the Big Six accounting firms, 7 of the nation's top 10 management-consulting firms and more lawyers employed at leading law firms than any other city. Wall Street handles nearly half of all the securities traded publicly in the world. New York is no longer the home of the world's biggest banks -- most of them are in Tokyo -- but its bankers are the world leaders in innovation. The hostile takeovers of the 1980's were examples of the city's vintage profane style: the triumph of upstart bankers and lawyers from the wrong schools whose ungentlemanly tactics offended the traditional white-shoe firms.
All of this commerce has produced the country's greatest concentration of wealth -- the city's 30 richest people have a combined worth of more than $45 billion -- and the wealth continues to buy culture and glamour. New York has displaced Paris as the capital of the art and fashion worlds. It is the international creative center for dancers and choreographers. As an opera capital, New York ranks with Milan and Vienna. The Metropolitan Opera, like Broadway and other New York cultural institutions, is continually criticized for being too conservative; it's true that much of the innovation in the performing arts takes place in the provinces. But the innovators who want to be certified still have to come to New York to be properly judged. New York has the biggest audiences, the most influential critics and the most demanding standards. As a city crammed with striving neurotics trying to be noticed and willing to excoriate any rival, it is the capital of attitude.
To an out-of-towner, this often translates as the capital of obnoxiousness -- or at least the co- capital with Paris. But New Yorkers, unlike Parisians, have traditionally promised newcomers a chance at full citizenship rights: anyone with talent can have just as much attitude as the natives. That promise is why the city has attracted the terminally ambitious -- why Madonna, when she wanted more than Michigan had to offer, bought a one-way ticket to New York and told the cabdriver who picked her up at the airport, "Take me to the middle of everything." (True to Dick Falk's cosmology, he dropped her off on 42d Street.)
This isn't the unconditional promise on the Statue of Liberty about welcoming the huddled masses. A better symbol for New York would be a statue of a bouncer in an Armani suit standing outside a nightclub, surveying the huddled masses behind the velvet rope and deciding who has the style to be admitted.
The night brings out the primal urges for society and glamour that draw people to cities. During the day they might be happy alone with a computer in the Rockies, but a night of celebration is by definition a night on the town. It requires lights and crowds, which is why couples pay for the view from the Rainbow Room, why masses endure the horrors of Times Square on New Year's Eve and why New York is still the international capital of 1 A.M.
Unfortunately, you can also be sure that when it's 1 A.M. in New York, there are people here who want to be anywhere else. They are lying awake listening to car alarms and wondering if the panhandler at the corner takes home more pay than they do. They are thinking that New York has become the capital of aggravation. They are considering joining the hordes of New Yorkers who during the past decades have left the city in disgust. During the 1980's, only the enormous number of immigrants kept the city's population from shrinking.
The exodus from New York has been blamed on the same problems that have been hurting other old cities: highways in the suburbs, the international shift in manufacturing jobs and national social problems like drugs and crime. Certainly, these factors have hurt. But New York is not just another city. It has lost factories, but it's still the center of some of the fastest-growing industries in the world. It still has flourishing businesses and affluent citizens who want to stay in the center. Detroit can blame others for its plight, but the capital of the world created its own problems. Three centuries after Peter Stuyvesant, New York finally got religion.
The city's spiritual regeneration began with Fiorello La Guardia, the Mayor who enjoyed attacking slot machines with a sledgehammer. He was elected in 1933 to rid the city of Tammany Hall and the likes of Jimmy Walker, the genial gambler and adulterer who had recently resigned as Mayor during a municipal graft scandal. Mayor Walker had been a believer in laissez-faire government. He often didn't get to the office until noon, and he dismissed criticism of his high salary by explaining: "That's cheap! Think what it would cost if I worked full time." La Guardia never stopped working to promote his moral agenda, his vision of the city upon a hill: "I dream! But my dreams rest me. Sometimes I see the City of Tomorrow. . . . I see a city with no slums and little poverty. It will be a reality someday."
His city was not the emporium of commerce celebrated in the 19th century -- La Guardia disdained the city's greedy capitalists. The City of Tomorrow required selfless public servants. La Guardia built the nation's first housing project, took over the subways from private companies and established welfare programs and job programs. To pay for a budget deficit and the expanded municipal work force, he instituted a sales tax -- just 2 percent, but a tradition was born. Over the next five decades, his vision became the city's moral orthodoxy: where there is darkness, let there be government. The capital of profanity became the capital of civic piety.
Large numbers of the nation's poorest and least employable were attracted by the offerings of this capital, and these new New Yorkers were tended to by a new priestly class that went on expanding even after the city stopped growing. New York's population today is lower than it was in 1960, but the number of municipal employees has nearly doubled, and they are so busy doing social work and enforcing regulations that they have had to cut back on details like cleaning streets and educating children. The national perception of New York as the epitome of urban problems isn't entirely accurate -- its crime rate, for instance, is lower than many other cities'. But New York has earned its reputation as a capital of high taxes, generous welfare benefits, public-housing expenditures, elevated union wages, unrepaired bridges, abandoned and dilapidated buildings, neglected parks and corporate flight. In the past three decades, as the tax burden has nearly doubled, the number of Fortune 500 headquarters here has shrunk from 130 to 30. Business executives are becoming reluctant even to visit New York. The city is a logical place for national business gatherings, but the number of conventions has been plummeting because of high hotel taxes.
For many people, the city has become the capital of inhospitality. Just like Peter Stuyvesant, today's moral guardians have an innate bias against anyone new and unfamiliar. The city offers subsidies to big established businesses that threaten to leave, but it taxes small new ones to the hilt and discourages entrepreneurs with mandarin regulations. It guarantees cheap housing to longtime residents but leaves newcomers to fend for themselves in a housing market ruined by price controls. Rent regulation is the quintessence of modern New York piety -- social justice through the outlawing of greed -- and it has been the greatest physical disaster in the city's history.
Before such regulation was instituted in 1943 -- at La Guardia's urging -- New York's housing stock had been among the world's finest, built and maintained by landlords who often had to compete fiercely for tenants. After rent regulation, they stopped building, stopped taking care of their buildings and walked away from 500,000 apartments. As a result, neighborhoods have been ruined and there has been a perpetual housing shortage, which economists cite as a textbook case of stupidity. "Next to bombing," says Assar Lindbeck, the chairman of the Nobel Prize committee for economics, "rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities, as the housing situation in New York City demonstrates."
But give New York credit: It is still somehow standing. It has had the astonishing capacity to survive its own good intentions. Most other welfare states have collapsed. For all that its government has done to discourage newcomers, the city still attracted more legal immigrants last year than any city in the country. True, many of them came here because they had little choice -- the quality of life and the taxes were even worse in their native countries -- but their arrival keeps New York's profane tradition alive. Immigrants not only shake up the old guard with their new ideas, they export New York's culture home. They turn New York into a capital of salsa and Zairian music, and they create a market in other countries for New York's fashion and media industries. These are the kinds of links that will be crucial if the city is to remain a world capital.
In some ways, New York's prospects today are just as promising as they were when the Erie Canal was built. Then, when Europe was dominant, it prospered by being the most European city in America; now, when the buzzword is global markets, it is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. Then it dominated crucial industries of the industrial age; now it dominates crucial industries of the information age. Then it was an upstart city trying to lure talent away from established capitals; now all it has to do is persuade them to stay. Then its inhabitants were renowned for their boorish ingenuity; now, despite all the economic growth and innovation on the West Coast, New York's reputation for hustling is still intact. The difference between the coasts was summed up in a lament from Waylon Jennings: "Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for L.A."
At the moment, Los Angeles is the only city with the potential to replace New York as the world capital. It has the entertainment industry and its proximity to Asia's burgeoning economies. But Los Angeles's growth is slowing -- economists now doubt an earlier projection that it would eventually surpass New York in population -- and California's taxes and regulations are threatening to make it an even more righteous place than New York. Then there are the earthquakes. And even its car culture has become less fashionable. Los Angeles's television producers have returned to New York for the setting of 6 of the country's top-rated dramas and situation comedies. The most popular attraction in Los Angeles now is a shopping promenade designed with the revolutionary look of . . . a city street!
New York already has plenty of those streets, and if they weren't so unpleasant and expensive most people would probably prefer them to the imitation. Today, the idea of restoring basic amenities to New York can seem more utopian than La Guardia's vision, because the city has to contend with so many entrenched interests: the people hired for the City of Tomorrow are not about to give up their jobs easily. But today's politicians are at least promising to make radical changes, and it would be a mistake to underestimate New York's resilience. In 1972, when Johnny Carson moved the "Tonight" show to Burbank, he said that new technology was rendering New York's appeal obsolete:
"People are so much more sophisticated. They get live programs from all over the world, by satellite. So you're not going to impress them by broadcasting from New York. Those days are over." Three years later, one of the most successful shows in television history began with the announcement, "Live from New York, it's 'Saturday Night'!"
And 20 years later, the "Tonight" show itself was relegated to second place by a show broadcast from Manhattan. David Letterman's persona obviously had something to do with his victory, but it probably helps that he's broadcasting a few blocks from Dick Falk's old office. It really does look like the center of the earth some nights -- or at least a lot closer to it than Jay Leno ever gets.
Letterman sits in front of the New York skyline; Leno sits in front of a vista of glass buildings promising all the glamour and romance of a suburban office park at night. Letterman can walk out the door to find a crowd on Broadway; Leno can walk out to a parking lot. New York will never be the capital of convenient parking, nor will it ever be the City of Tomorrow, but it will always be the kind of place where a native of Indiana can prosper by finding himself next door to two enterprising merchants from Bangladesh. Propinquity and profanity, thy names are Sirajul and Mujibur.
