Loving and Hating New York Thomas Griffith 1 Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple, those T-shirts with a heart design proclaiming “I love New York,” 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 “bush” Being unique, the biggest and the best, New York didn’t have to assert how special it was. 2 It isn’t 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’s 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’s 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 whom no nightspot in Manhattan can afford to hire. In sports, the bigger superdomes, the more exciting teams, the most enthusiastic fans, are often found elsewhere. 4 New York was never a good convention city – being regarded as unfriendly, unsafe, overcrowded, an...
