Manhattan skyline

Photo credit: Corbis

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.

-- E. B. White, Here Is New York

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. In a way, New Yorkers have short attention spans. A restaurant, show, club, or store might be the hottest thing; a couple months later another has opened or been discovered and that once hot spot quickly becomes passé.

But not everything has to be new and hot for New Yorkers. We don't always appreciate change because that means we might have lost something we had come to love. New Yorkers respect the city's standards, the institutions that have been essential New York. What would we do without that reassuring sight of the Lady in the harbor; or the gleaming spire of the Empire State Building? Or the perfect pizza? Or a Sunday in Central Park? Or the rumbling of the trains beneath the earth? Or the sounds of jazz from a Village club? So while New York is ever-changing, its core remains the same. And we wouldn't have it any other way.

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