Reasons to Love New York

At the end of 2020, when hardly anybody had yet gotten even the first dose of a vaccine and the subways weren't running overnight and the sidewalks of midtown were so empty you could text and walk safely and there was no place to go dancing or see music or very easily get a martini and burger at midnight, our annual "Reasons to Love New York" issue was written in the past tense: "Reasons We've Loved New York."

- By Carl Swanson. Ilustration by Bráulio Amado

It was a wake for a traumatized commercial metropolis on pause, bruised and boarded up and unsure of when it would get going again or what would be left of it when it did. We wrote tributes for 500 businesses that had shut down forever during the pandemic: go-to diners, late-night party spots, boxing gyms, Bushwick art galleries, and one luxury department store that had recently arrived from Texas. The places where we lived our city lives.

Two years later, this city, a little banged up and wild-eyed, is possibly more brazenly itself than it has been in decades. Does anybody under 20 not jump the subway turnstile these days? People are smoking indoors and having sex in the bathroom at the bar while you bang on the door. There is a defiant, down-for-whatever disorderliness that can feel threatening, liberating, or both at once.

But it's not all Joker-like retro-punk dysfunction: A tuned-up David Geffen Hall faces off across Lincoln Center with David Koch Theater. The city is suddenly awash in new restaurants, many spangled in Michelin stars, and the streeteries spilleth over. Even Rockefeller Center, which before the pandemic had begun to feel like a Vegas simulacrum of itself, has restaurants that you-as a New Yorker, not a tourist-wouldn't mind eating at again and that reward your sense of why you live here. And for all the talk about the death of midtown, when Saks closed Fifth Avenue this holiday season so Elton John could sing "Your Song" as its windows were lit up-"I hope you don't mind/I hope you don't mind”-it had to be done quick, because people, well, honk, honk, honk, lots of people minded.