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New York City Information
New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.
New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities.
Novelist and essayist E. B. White wrote the words above more than 50 years ago, but his characterization of New York remains accurate today. And though the grandeur and importance of New York has not changed, the city is in a constant state of flux. Restaurants and nightclubs become trendy overnight, and then die under the weight of their own popularity. (Yogi Berra had the perfect comment for that very phenomenon: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.") Broadway shows, exercise fads, city politics, and even neighborhoods are all subject to the same Big Apple fickleness.
But within this ebb and flow lies the answer to why we New Yorkers persist in loving our city so much, despite the high rents, the noise, the crowds, the cab drivers who don't know Lincoln Center from the Lower East Side, and the more stark realities of high-security-alert days and living in the shadow of great tragedy. Nowhere else is the challenge so tough, the pace so relentless, the stimuli so ever-changing and insistent -- and the payoff so rewarding. It is why we go on; it is why we proudly persist in living our vibrant lives here.
Come witness New York's astonishing resilience for yourself -- it's reason enough to visit.
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