[We have been through booms and busts before. And this being the city it is, the ups and downs seem more extreme and operatic than elsewhere. We are drama queens. “Poor dear reckless New York,” Henry James wrote a century ago. But the city also, in its gimlet-eyed, show-must-go-on way, makes do and muddles through. James: “Its mission would appear to be, exactly, to gild the temporary, with its gold, as many inches thick as may be, and then, with a fresh shrug, a shrug of its splendid cynicism for its freshly detected inability to convince, give up its actual work, however exorbitant, as the merest of stop-gaps.”
What has given and (knock wood) will continue giving New York the ability to recover and regenerate? The subway system. The compactness. The fact that it’s headquarters for not just one but several of the Ur-modern industries—finance as well as fashion as well as marketing as well as media as well as art. The routine difficulty of day-to-day life that makes the city a sort of perpetually toughening boot camp. And the unstoppable inflows of variously dreamy and eager emigrants, from the rest of America and abroad, who keep coming because of the self-consciously thrilling, muscular, glamorous, universally familiar idea of New York City. This is Oz.]
