i want to be a part of it?

I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, which I’d been dying to read. It was romantic and star-studded and captured 1970’s NYC in an enviable way, and I got pretty wrapped up in the day-to-day details of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and the lives of two talented people on the verge of something great that they couldn’t quite picture yet. But I didn’t love it as much as I thought I would; it felt a little heavy-handed (if in a way that was sort of authentically Patti Smith). I wish I’d counted how many references there were to pieces of ribbon and lengths of exotic cloth; it started to feel like she must have been swimming in fabric remnants all the time. Still, it was definitely worth reading, if only for the casual way Smith writes about all sorts of notorious New York figures: She’s always running into Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Alan Ginsberg, and Andy Warhol is always lurking somewhere. That New York is such a looming, mythic abstraction, it’s a little shocking to read such a blasé account of what it was like at the time. Of the drag artists Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, she writes movingly, “Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn’t live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.”

At first I thought New York magazine’s issue on “The Greatest New York Ever” was just another drooling lovefest detailing why this city is TheBestEverOMG, or another mostly pointless exercise in figuring out the absolute best of everything in a given genre. But it was a little more interesting than that. Trying to determine the greatest ever may be silly, but it has the benefit of forcing people to look back in time. So the argument isn’t about whether Black Swan is a greater New York movie than a contemporary like…I dunno, Date Night (I know that’s a random and terrible comparison, but I do love the fact that there is a Wikipedia page for “List of films set in New York City,”which includes a separate category for films that show the city being destroyed). Instead, the argument is about whether Bonfire of the Vanities captures or represents the city better than The Age of Innocence, Sweet Smell of Success better than Working Girl, the New Museum building better than the Chrysler Building, A Chorus Line better than West Side Story—and in the most literal encapsulation of this, whether 1898 was a better time to live here than 1978. The magazine is pitting years and historical moments and aging reference points against each other, and seeing what comes out on top. It’s an unusually literal war of competing nostalgia (as well as, yes, another bit of somewhat redundant self love, and ultimately kind of meaningless).

And so Philip Lopate champions 1898: “Of course, there was vast misery in the tenements and sweatshops; tuberculosis, syphilis, and alcoholism were rampant, the rivers polluted with sewage. But even this gave rise to the reformist activism of Emma Goldman and Jacob Riis.”

Daniel Okrent advocates for 1947: “New York is never perfect…But the Wonder City, as some contemporaries called it, had never been, nor ever again would be, quite as wonderful as it was in that postwar dawn. Penn Station still soared. Harold Ross still edited The New Yorker. And one of that magazine’s treasures, E.?B. White, would soon write, ‘No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.’ In 1947, the luck was here for the taking.”

Francine Prose argues for 1963: “New York was feeling the revved-up heat of something just beginning, spiked by the thrill of watching the past recede in the rearview mirror. A vapor trail of postwar optimism lingered. The Dodgers had left us, but the Mets had arrived, and even if they were a joke, you knew they’d step up. The city was changing, growing up, getting sleeker and cooler but, like a child with a blanket scrap, clutching onto its grubby past…. New York was beautiful in a way that a city can be only when no one’s thinking how quickly the moment will pass.”

Making a case for 1978 is Kevin Baker: “It was a terrific interval. The preoccupation with the suburbs had peaked, and people were flowing back into the city—often young, creative, interesting people. It was possible to have entire conversations that did not involve real estate or bedbugs. The fiscal crisis was just past, recreational drugs were easy to get, and everyone was having sex all the time.”

And because someone has to, Michael Cunningham talks up 2011 with his own list of reasons why the city is more extraordinary than ever, topped off by the fact that it’s simply our own era. “You could be time’s widow. You could grow old insisting to younger people that they should have been there then. When you breezed into Studio 54 in a pink mohawk. When you headbanged at CBGB. When people could still afford a goddamned apartment. The past is made up of golden ages….Reminiscence, however, is never a good idea here. If you don’t welcome the new, you miss the point of New York.”

(That’s very sweet, but New York is basically built on the act of reminiscing, regardless of whether it’s a good idea.)

All of these writers point out specific things to love about their chosen year, while admitting that there were drawbacks even in their ideal frozen moment. Their entries get less nostalgic as their arguments get more specific. Things get blurry and simplified the further away we get, but choosing an ideal year requires you to take a real position and defend it, rather than resting only on feelings and fleeting, fading impressions. Maybe if someone went through the issue and figured out the year every artwork and event and idea that’s held up as superlative belonged to, we could get to a real verdict—one arrived at collectively, by way of several dozen highly contested individual choices. Or we could decide that these gestures at decisiveness we already have are enough.