I think I'm suffering from New York envy: the city really contrasts with the suburbs, so how can you blame me? New York's just a mass of people who've come on its reputation, they've heard that they can find their place in the Big (Formerly Rotten) Apple, since it got cleaned up. The big initial influx of tragedy (you-know) has been passed over, and now it's business as usual, minus the tourists.
Of course, the tourists are just part of the mystique, two-thirds of New York's de facto population that still do very little but gawk at the big noisy crowd of other tourists while the city's more indigenous inhabitants are twelve stories above them writing screenplays and novels and emerging to find a cheap cup of coffee, which is (needless to say) impossible due to the increased prices that two-thirds of the city can be charged without complaint.
If not Manhattan, I'd live on Roosevelt Island, New York's ridiculous waterlogged suburb, where I'm told that there are no cars allowed. Not that cars are welcomed by New York's population at large, no sir -- if there's one issue that everyone in the city can agree on, it's pedestrian right-of-way, and don't you forget it. On Roosevelt they probably spit on the bicycles.
Roosevelt's very existence goes to show that everyone in New York has some unique vision, from the tourist traps to the CNN tower, and they're doing their best to carve out their own little piece of the urban sprawl which could not be contained by however-many little islands and county lines and administrators and (pshaw) state governments. You can't fight New York, you can only give in to the burgeoning emblem of the New American Dream that punches all of us in the gut at some point, if only to wake us up.