My family reluctantly left NYC in early 1964 to go to a hick town in the deep South to follow my father's job. For a dozen years we mourned our misfortune. "How could anyone raise children in rural small town?" we asked ourselves.

We missed the NYC public schools -- the best in the nation. We missed the subway system by which any 12-year old child could wander the city on her own, visiting the dozens of world-class museums to supplement that excellent education. We mourned the loss of a first-class university that a brilliant-but-lower-middle-cla­ss student could attend for free while living at home. I missed Forest Park in Queens, where parents pushed todlers in strollers with helium balloons attached, going to the merry-go-round and the pony rides.

My father was transferred back to NYC in 1977. We discovered that the public schools had since become nonfunctioning and dangerous. City College's new open-admissions policy had turned a school that was once academically superior to the Ivy League into a laughingstock -- no better than our hick-town junior college. Everywhere we went we had to look behind ourselves to see whether a mugger might be sneaking up on us. Apartment doors requires half-a-dozen deadbolt locks. Nobody went to Forest Park unless they were hoping to score some drugs. Property taxes were higher than my hick town's rents, and my second year out of college taxes took 50% of my cost-of-living raise.

NYC had plenty enough "grit" in the 1950s and early '60s in Greenwich Village. What NYC was in the 1970s is something that I would only wish on my worst enemies.