Have you heard? The recession is over! We’re all gonna be rich! America is BACK, baby!

Sure, things looked gloomy there for a while, and maybe most of the new wealth is only happening on Wall Street, but if there’s one thing we know for certain, New Yorkers never gave up hope during the darkest days. Through terrorist attacks and financial detonations and even rising seas, there was no dimming the spirit of this hard-as-nails town.

But along the way, as the rest of the country made its own struggle with recent events, we couldn’t help noticing a new patriotic fervor spreading through flyover country. People in backwater states have kept up a harangue about “taking back” the country (from whom, it wasn’t clear). What was clear, at least to us, was that in this heated rhetoric, New York City seemed to be held up by these neo-patriots as an example of all that was wrong with this country.

We were too liberal, too cosmopolitan, too immigrant, and too out of touch with the rest of the country. Embodied in such candidates as Carl Paladino, this rural groundswell gives the distinct sense that if it were to take power, it would just as soon give Manhattan back to the Dutch.

Well, that’s all bunk. In this special Best Of NYC issue, we’ve set out to show just how All-American this greatest of American cities is. In these pages, you’ll find the restaurants, people, places, sports figures, sex joints, watering holes, and nightclubs that make this the most red-white-and-blue city of them all. And now that we’ve raised the flag, we hope you’ll salute it!

Best of NYC Essays