Your New York, and Mine

What I remember above all from the late, lamented Charlie Rose show, which ran on PBS from 1991 to 2017, is what a relentless booster Rose (a North Carolina native) was for New York City. “Don’t you just love New York?” he would ask, irrepressibly, of his guests, often luminaries in the arts and media.  “Well, yes,” I would find myself thinking, as I watched. “And also, no.” I have always felt that ambivalence is the only honest attitude to a city as various and demanding as New York. To say simply that one loves it seems to me as reactionary as the claim sometimes made by Midwesterners and Southerners of my acquaintance that they hate the city.