Couldn't there be something between the muck of 1970's New York and the glossy, rich-guy's playground of today? (By the way, gentrification had been going full-blast since the 1960's--Leona Helmsley met her husband while forcing the tenants in the apartments that he owned to either buy them or get out). If there was something close to a better time in Manhattan, it would have been the 40's and 50's, before the real urban rot began to set it, when there really was a middle and working-class population and they weren't under continuous siege. Couldn't we have something like that again?