With Or Without Amazon, The Tech Makeover Is Coming To New York

The tech business will remake New York even without Amazon.

- Justin Davidson

If an instrument could measure the level of New Yorkers’ complaints about their city, it would probably register a constant, four century-long roar increasing with the population. Vocal discontent is an unreliable indicator of how we actually live. Say, then, that a computer could grind through the city’s history, compiling photographs, newspapers, art, and piles of data into a quotient that measured the richness of urban life. When, precisely, would that number have peaked? In 1999, when crime had plummeted from its highest point a decade earlier but the words Times Square were regularly hitched to Disneyfied? In 1979, when the city had emptied out into the suburbs but a rebellious creativity broke out amid broken glass and empty lots? In 1959, when the middle class took center stage but black and Latino neighborhoods were being bulldozed for the sake of opera and ballet? In every era, some people’s vision of the future conflicts with another group’s experience of the present and with a third cohort’s nostalgia: “You should have seen it back when …” But maybe if you could run all those waves of happiness and discontent through a wisely formulated (aye, there’s the rub) algorithm, you could determine on which date New York was at its finest and why that was so. Wouldn’t it be shocking to discover that the peak is actually today?