New York City Is Quite Alive
You can keep your nostalgia. The nation’s greatest metropolis is a bigger, busier, healthier, safer, better place.
Something is going right here.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Harper’s Magazine ran a cover story in July on the “The Death of a Great American City.” Which American city? Well, the cover photo was of midtown Manhattan — with the “cigarette building,” the super-skinny new skyscraper for the super-rich at 432 Park Avenue, at its center — so that was easy enough to figure out.
The article, by veteran New York writer and Harper’s contributing editor Kevin Baker, is an extended gripe about “the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here.” I agreed with a few of the arguments, but the relentlessly dour overall tone nagged at me, and as I was checking out the New York City employment data for July released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last week, I realized that I ought to respond in the way I know best — with charts!