New York is as vibrant and loaded with tourists as it always has been
ENLARGE
I was happily reminiscing with someone not long ago about the 1970s in New York City. To hear it told, those years existed in the long shadow of crime and impending fiscal doom.
But we didn’t remember it that way. To us, the city seemed as magical and bursting with promise as it had before or since.
How to account for the disparity between our recollections and the historical record?
If all politics is local, as the saying goes, then encounters with the city are ultimately personal.
I suppose that’s a long-winded way of saying each of us undoubtedly has his or her own perspective about whether 2015 was good, bad or indifferent for the city.
However, I think it’s safe to assert that—no matter the epoch—we associate this town with whoever happens to be mayor at the time. And, today, that would be Bill de Blasio.
Politics isn’t my beat so I feel underqualified to judge his tenure so far, not that that’s ever stopped the proverbial cabdriver from doing so. Though, come to think of it, my interaction with cabbies, as I sit in the back seat, has become increasingly cryptic.
I suspect most of it has to do with the fact that both of us are usually on our mobile devices. Then there’s also the cacophony of taxi TV, which often seems to resist all efforts to mute it.
A language barrier might also explain the diminished bonhomie: One of 2015’s more harrowing moments came when I joked with a livery car driver who spoke no English, causing him to stop dead in the passing lane of the New Jersey Turnpike, before I successfully begged him to hit the gas.
Perhaps he thought I was criticizing his driving or the route suggested by the Chinese language GPS he was following to our destination.
But back to the mayor. If the city is on a downward slide, as I’ve heard suggested, the slippage seems to be occurring at a glacial pace. New York is as vibrant and loaded with tourists as it always has.
If I had any bone to pick with Mr. de Blasio in 2015, it was over his deeply misguided, if fleeting, urge to turn Times Square’s pedestrian plaza back into traffic lanes—this while his Vision Zero campaign was trying to reduce traffic deaths.
And all to thwart a bunch of photogenic cartoon characters from shaking down tourists for tips.
I’ve heard people criticize traffic enforcement agents for having nothing better to do than wield those new illuminated red traffic wands, which just goes to show people will criticize anything.
The year started with epic amounts of snow and a plane skidding off the runway at La Guardia Airport amid a wintry mix. But spring and summer couldn’t have been lovelier.
FAO Schwarz closed in July. But the Whitney Museum reopened in the Meatpacking District a couple of months earlier. Not that anything can compensate for the loss of the legendary toy store.
The pope’s visit in September went off without a hitch, proving the city still knows how to throw a party. In fact, what seemed like several parties and parades on successive days.
I realize NASA’s Pluto flyby in July wasn’t a strictly local event. But if you happened to be at the American Museum of Natural History experiencing the excitement at the moment it happened, you could be forgiven for believing it was.
Both a shop devoted solely to pencils and a carousel with luminescent fishes opened this year, which I take as a barometer of the city’s rosy prospects.
Two of New York’s top lawmakers, Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos, went down in scandal. But the Mets made it to the World Series.
I’m not sure what either says about the state of the city. Except that 2016 promises to be even better than 2015 was, with prison reform perhaps gaining a couple of powerful advocates, and the Mets—maybe—going all the way.
—ralph.gardner@wsj.com