"Survival Guide To New York City"

Introduction

New York is the most infuriating, frustrating, enervating, baffling, maddening, mystifying, aggravating, unfathomable, threatening, soul-crushing, wonderful city in the world and we would never want to live anywhere else.

There is no other city in the world where it is better to be rich or poor. Rich because there is nowhere else you can find so many other rich people to play with or more things and people you can buy with your money. Poor because nowhere else is there a municipal government that provides so many things to those who have not. It's partly because of the huge number of people at either extreme of the economic spectrum that New York has developed much of its dynamic tension, vibrancy, and, at times, danger.

The sense of fear that New York engenders in people is directly proportional to the distance of their birthplaces from the Big Apple. If you come from Picawa, Wisconsin, a walk down a New York street at 10 P.M. is a lesson in terror. To those lucky--or unlucky--enough to be born here, it is a case of what psychologists call "habituation." Translated into a New York idiom: "If you live next to the Third Avenue E long enough, after a while you don't hear it at all." Or perhaps the indifference is genetic, derived from an in utero infusion of traffic fumes and the smell of newly baked bagels with the symphony if street sounds that rise up to your window like the sidewalk heat n a blistering August morning in a half-forgotten memory of childhood.

The sense of wonder that the city engenders is also directly proportional to the distance of one's birthplace from New York. In Spokane, Washington, New York glitters with all the romance and excitement of a first date with a high school football hero. To a typist in Brooklyn, it is a place to spend another day that begins by battling pressing bodies on the IRT and ends by fending off offending hands in the hallway after a movie date.