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?

"Couldn't there be something between the muck of 1970's New York and the glossy, rich-guy's playground of today?"

Yes. It was the 80s. Between the grubbieness and the greediness we had NY in the 80s. It was perhaps one of those 'best of both worlds' times where NY was still dangerous but also finding or re-finding itself and it's place in the world. I remember loving it, wanting to live there all the time (I lived on Long Island at the time). The contrasts were still stark but interesting. Then came Giuliani and right one could feel the air going out of the place.