NEW YORK REDUXING

The reawakening of New York has been nothing if not miraculous. Pre-Giuliani it bottomed out both economically and socially. And then over the next few decades something surprising happened. The trends slowly faltered, reversed and improved with surprising speed. From a hellhole far deeper and more worrisome than even the most depressed Londoners could conjure today, New York emerged in only a couple of decades as a different place altogether.
These days, even in the terrifying wake of 9/11, New York City boasts record low crime rates, a solid economy, rising educational standards, less racial tension and lower and lower levels of illegitimacy and domestic violence. In fact, much of what was once an edgy, terrifying, almost gothic Gotham now seems bathed in a near-narcotic calm, a bourgeois suburban theme-park from midtown south. If you want a good investment, try buying some housing stock in Harlem — yes, Harlem — the latest piece of former ghetto to become an impending upscale urban oasis.
New York was one of the more exceptional points of light in a two-decade upswing of social improvement. But much of America experienced the same beneficent trends: the reconstitution of the family, the decline of illegitimate births, the collapse of crime, the reinvention and expansion of work.
The revival baffled the pessimists. The social collapse of the “decadent” West had been hailed regularly for years — and the era after the sexual revolution seemed like the final twist downward. The younger generation had been going to the lower recesses of post-everything nihilism since Elvis.