New York City

So Cathie Black had to resign. Thank Heavens. Next, please, please, Janette Sadik-Khan. The problem with people like Mayor Bloomberg is that they are not New Yorkers. They view Manhattan as an Emerald City on top of the hill, encrusted with jewels, and not to be tarnished with the vagaries of everyday living. There are real native New Yorkers who grow up here, and know the streets as their home town. New Yorkers don't see it as the place where they come to make their fortune, but rather the place where they have walked to school and to the playground as children. They take the subway without it being a photo opportunity and cause for self-congratulation. Their families live locally, and are--surprise!--also native New Yorkers. Mayor Bloomberg and his cohorts, who come to the City later in life, try to reshape it as a playground for the rich, and they fail to see or appreciate the nitty-gritty aspects. When they do see anything approaching quotidien reality, they try to eradicate it. They need to be reminded at some point in the proceedings that there are other boroughs which comprise the city of New York. A Danish friend of mine turned to me one evening at a dinner in Manhattan a few years ago and said: "Kathy, where are you from?"

"Here," I answered.

"No, I mean, where are you from before?"

"Here," I answered again.

"No, I mean, before you came here," he persisted.

"I was born here," I explained.

"You were?" He was dumbfounded. "You are a New Yorker?!"

"Yes."

"I don't think I've ever met one! I didn't know there were any!" He was really taken aback. Some rich irony in that he lived here for many years and never met a native New Yorker. Rich irony, too, in that he hails from Copenhagen. Our esteemed DOT commissioner is laboring mightily to remake NYC into Copenhagen, being as she vacationed there once and was struck by the beauty and quaintness of the Danish capital--not to mention its preponderance of bicycle traffic. I doubt that Copenhagen would care to be remolded into Manhattan, but for reasons which remain unfathomable to anyone but Ms. Sadik-Khan, she envisions the shaping of our five boroughs into a quaint European capital. Likewise Mr. Dictator, who rode roughshod over term limits, and does not wish anyone to be able to travel in a gas-guzzling black fancy SUV unobstructed through the City streets except for, of course, Himself. He does not know the City the way people who grew up there do. The way I think of New York is more the way Willa Cather closed the novel Lucy Gayheart: "What was a man's "home town" anyway, but the place where he had had disappointments, and had learned to bear them?" If Michael Bloomberg and his dilettante Ladies-Who-Lunch accomplices knew the City in that way, they would never be trying to perpetrate these affronts to the character of the City.