Loving and Hating New York
Thomas Griffith
1 Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple, those T-shirts with a heart
design proclaiming 鈥淚 love New York,鈥?nbsp;are signs, pathetic in their desperation, of
how the mighty has fallen. New York City used to leave the bragging to others, for
bragging was 鈥渂ush鈥?nbsp;Being unique, the biggest and the best, New York didn鈥檛
have to assert how special it was.
2 It isn鈥檛 the top anymore, at least if the top is measured by who begets the
styles and sets the trends. Nowadays New York is out of phase with American taste
as often as it is out of step with American politics. Once it was the nation鈥檚
undisputed fashion authority, but it too long resisted the incoming casual style
and lost its monopoly. No longer so looked up to or copied, New York even prides
itself on being a holdout from prevailing American trends, a place to escape
Common Denominator Land.
3 Its deficiencies as a pacesetter are more and more evident. A dozen other
cities have buildings more inspired architecturally than any built in New York City
in the past twenty years. The giant Manhattan television studios where
Toscanini鈥檚 NBC Symphony once played now sit empty most of the time, while
sitcoms cloned and canned in Hollywood, and the Johnny Carson show live,
preempt the airways from California. Tin Pan Alley has moved to Nashville and
Hollywood. Vegas casinos routinely pay heavy sums to singers and entertainers