A few weeks ago, The New York Times used the phrase "stoic commuters" to describe how New Yorkers reacted to maddening three- to four-hour delays in their morning schlep to work. The foul-ups highlighted the Mayor’s inability—three years after 9/11 and one year after the great blackout—to come up with an emergency plan to deal with natural or man-made disasters.

As you know from reading the newspapers, busy spinning the excuse du jour of the Pataki-Bloomberg appointees to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the cause of this fiasco was rain.

Yes, plain old rain—as distinguished from an earthquake, a hurricane with 150 mile-per-hour winds, a tornado or a mudslide. Rain that had been predicted for three days. And rain that has fallen on a regular basis since the subway opened in 1904, with trains that ran faster than they do today.

Which brings us to the core of the problem.

An M.T.A. flack spun the story that many of the subway’s pumps are 70 years old and were not designed to handle so much rain. He told half the story. According to sources in the M.T.A., some of the pumps are actually 100 years old. Try to imagine Bloomberg L.P. using typewriters built in 1904. But that was only part of a problem that accounted for a $95 million hit on the city’s economy—a figure described by an unnamed city official (one guess) as "paltry." The other dirty little secret of the bean-counters in City Hall is that the Mayor’s underlings cut back the number of sewer drains cleaned every year, which is why you saw photos of flooded streets in Soho, not far from the Mayor’s proposed football stadium for the rich.

Welcome to Olympic Village.

The ancient pumps that did work—we will leave aside those that didn’t—were actually sending water into clogged sewers. There was nowhere for the water to go except back down to the subway tracks.

The Mayor was impatient, as always, with whining New Yorkers. (They must have momentarily forgotten that they are Stoics.) "The delays were 10 minutes at best," he lectured. Clearly, he had not taken his beloved No. 6 train that day or peered out a City Hall window at the Brooklyn Bridge, which was swamped with "commuters" walking to work. Later, he was forced to say that his previous statement was inoperable, but no one in the press corps asked him why he hadn’t gone on television to tell us just how bad it was.

And it wasn’t just the subways. Outer-borough workers sat on buses for up to three hours on highways that were gridlocked; there were no M.T.A. bosses to tell drivers to take the buses off the highway. The cops who arrested bicycle riders to placate visiting Republicans were nowhere to be found directing traffic, closing off streets or rerouting behemoth tractor trailers. Manhattan workers watched one empty bus after another traverse cross-town streets while overloaded downtown buses just kept passing them by. There were no announcements on the trains except that perfectly modulated voice apologizing for the "unavoidable delay."

City Hall management, anyone? Yes, you Stoics—in the Orwellian double speak of government these days, every delay is "unavoidable." But the chief bean-counter actually crowed last week about his management style: His minions hassled us with a record 9,997,000 parking tickets!

Those 70-year-old pumps were installed in the IND subway line, which opened in 1932—a mere seven years after construction began. In all likelihood, they were built by some benefactor of Mayor Jimmy Walker, the rascal Tammany sachem who admitted to spending $2 million on himself and his sycophants over seven years. He wrote songs, once asked his lawyer if he thought Diogenes "was on the level," gave us Sunday baseball, battled the Prohibitionists (who in those days targeted drinkers, not smokers) and made the town laugh. That is, until the October 1929 Wall Street crash, when we discovered the ramifications of unbridled corporate (not municipal) greed.

But walk around the city and you will see our globetrotting Mayor’s name, James J. Walker, on plaques attached to firehouses and schools and courthouses—but not to baseball or football stadiums.

You are free to remember that he was the last Mayor who actually built a subway line with pumps that still work.

And free to think about the difference between being a Stoic and a non-complaining mope. Call 311.

In the early 1970's, Governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed a special prosecutor, Maurice Nadjari, who was on to something major with crooked judges but wound up abusing his position. He sure had a lot of political bosses running scared, however; I recall a top official in the Beame administration who was reduced to "walk-and-talks" in the City Hall parking lot for fear his phone had been tapped. His favorite audible sound was "Shhhhhhh!"

During the Jimmy Walker administration, from 1926 to 1932, it was common knowledge that an appointment to the State Supreme Court was worth one year's salary. Walker's gang was following the pattern set by another Tammany boss, Richard Croker, who upon his death in 1922 left an estate worth over $5 million.

Croker told a state investigative committee that he decided all city nominations, and that judicial candidates had to pay up to $25,000 in exchange for the party's endorsement. Another Tammany leader, George Washington Plunkitt, told his biographer: "A Supreme Court Judge in New York County gets $17,500 a year, and he's expected, when nominated, to help along the good cause with a year's salary. Why not?"

This cozy relationship began to unravel temporarily when Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed a special prosecutor to probe the Magistrate's Court, which dispensed "justice" mainly on the basis of which district leader held sway.

This led to one of the most famous-and still unsolved-missing-person case in the city's history: the disappearance of a sitting judge, Joseph Force Crater, in August 1930. The honorable judge had withdrawn nearly $22,000 from his bank account three months before he disappeared. That happened to be one year's salary for a judge. There were rumors that he was involved in a blackmail scheme, but his bank withdrawal suggests that he bribed someone for his black robes and probably feared exposure.

Crater was last seen leaving a Manhattan bistro on Aug. 6, but his disappearance didn't make headlines until nearly three weeks later, when friends became concerned and called the police.

Another of Walker's cronies was Justice James McQuade, who had a part-time job as an owner of the New York Giants baseball team. He benefited mightily when Walker, then serving in the State Senate, passed a bill lifting the ban on Sunday baseball. McQuade often sat in the owner's box seat with New York luminaries, including the gangster Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series.

F.D.R.'s probe ultimately got rid of Walker, but things got back to normal when the sainted crime-buster Fiorello LaGuardia occupied City Hall. The mobster Frank Costello was overheard on a wiretap assuring a newly elected judge: "When I tell you something's in the bag, you can be rest assured."

While the source of the current problem seems to be money laundered though the Brooklyn Democratic machine, ostensibly for a get-out-the-vote operation, it wasn't always thus. (By the way, nobody has ever explained why you need to get out the vote in a borough that has never had a functioning Republican Party). In the late 1930's, a Brooklyn district leader, Hymie Schoenstein, was confronted by a candidate for judge who was concerned that the party wasn't spending any money to "get out the vote."

The impatient Schoenstein lectured the candidate and made a maritime reference to drive home his point: "Did you ever see the Staten Island ferry pull into the dock with all the chewing-gum wrappers and hot-dog rolls and newspapers in its wake? Well, we have Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the top of our ticket and he is going to pull in everyone in his wake, including you. So stop worrying, F.D.R. is your Staten Island ferry."

Of course, there are bribes paid in cash and others paid in the currency of delegates to political conventions. No one has ever proven there was a quid pro quo when Earl Warren, the governor of California in 1952, made a deal to deliver the state's G.O.P. delegates to Dwight Eisenhower, but it sure helped his "credentials" when he was interviewed for his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Then there was the jurist who handed down a harsh sentence to the client of a Tammany lawyer. The barrister stormed into the judge's chambers and told him that he was supposed to be lenient. "You owe us!" cried the lawyer. "We put you on the bench-you are forgetting your friends!"

When the irate lawyer calmed down, the judge confidently answered: "I owe you and the boys nothing. I paid cash on the barrelhead."

Terry Golway will return next week.

When Jimmy Walker discovered that it was one thing to live the good life before the Great Depression, and quite another thing to do so afterward, he gathered his showgirl mistress, quit his office and set up shop in a first-class cabin bound for Europe. He skulked off, and is remembered today as a rogue and a lightweight.

In his desperate hour, Rudolph Giuliani will have to choose between Andrew Jackson and Jimmy Walker. And, as he contemplates his options, it is hard to imagine that he would embrace a strategy recalling the spats-wearing libertine whose malfeasance led directly to the election of Mr. Giuliani's hero, the roly-poly reformer, Fiorello La Guardia. He seemed to indicate as much on May 15 when, speaking about the Senate campaign, he told supporters at a fund-raiser that "I'm very much inclined to do this."

Elliot Cuker, the businessman who doubles as Mr. Giuliani's personal confidant, indicated that the Mayor understood the implications of his decision. "Great men at a crossroads in their lives come up with decisions which either prove them to be great or prove them to be not great," Mr. Cuker told The Observer in a rare public comment about his friend. "Rudy happens to be a great man, and I feel … that whatever decision he comes to will [display] his greatness."

The only Republican with the star status to take Mr. Giuliani's place, Governor George Pataki, is not so inclined. In fact, Mr. Pataki has begun talking about a third term, if only-perhaps-to box in the Mayor, who is not the Governor's favorite Republican. According to Pataki adviser Kieran Mahoney, the Governor isn't necessarily looking for new worlds to conquer. "He's already slain the dragon," Mr. Mahoney said, referring to the Governor's defeat of Mario Cuomo in 1994. "I don't remember St. George the double dragon-slayer."

Nevertheless, almost a year ago the Governor toyed briefly with the idea of running for the U.S. Senate. So why not now?

"They went around that block last year," said a friend of Mr. Pataki. "They decided no, for many reasons, and nothing has changed. Just because the party's in a pickle because of Rudy doesn't mean he's going to jump in and save somebody's bacon."

Attorney Edward Hayes, a law-school classmate of Mr. Pataki's, asserted that those who don't understand Mr. Pataki's reluctance simply don't understand the man, or his environs. "This guy doesn't want to go too far from the Hudson River," Mr. Hayes said. "He needs to be able to stick his toes in it."

So if Mr. Giuliani is to remain a formidable force in city and state politics, it's clear that his political options are not nearly as complex as the choices he must make for his cancer treatment. If he doesn't run, he will have left the state Republicans-the party he betrayed in 1994 to support Mr. Cuomo's doomed re-election bid-without a high-profile candidate in the most-watched Senate race in the nation on the eve of their nominating convention. It would be fair to assume that Republicans will be somewhat less than eager to place their trust in him in some future race, like, say, the gubernatorial campaign of 2002. A sense of how Republicans would view a Giuliani withdrawal was evident in Fred Dicker's column in the New York Post on May 16. Mr. Dicker noted that without Mr. Giuliani as a candidate, the state Republicans could lose the seat itself, their control over the State Senate, two congressional seats and a chance to help presidential candidate George W. Bush. "Judas Giuliani indeed!" Mr. Dicker concluded.

It is one thing to be branded a traitor. Indeed, in Mr. Giuliani's world, such a label is tantamount to ratifying his self-image as a maverick wedded to nothing but the truth. It is quite another thing, however, to be thought of as yesterday's news, to be an only child no longer at the center of the universe. Should he choose to remain in City Hall, he will be regarded as a spent force during the last 18 months of his lame-duck term, a Shakespearean ending for a man who believed he could change a great metropolis by force of will alone. Mr. Giuliani delights in the notion that whether he is loved or hated, he cannot be ignored. But he can be, and will be, if he drops out of the Senate race to become a full-time lame duck. By 2001, when the meter runs out on the Giuliani administration, Mr. Giuliani will know exactly how Al Smith felt in 1928. At 55, his career was over, and he was an impotent witness to the success of men and women who had served him.

It is history, not his life, that could yet spin out of Mr. Giuliani's tight control. His much-coveted place in the mayoral pantheon is not quite as secure as his supporters seem to believe. At the moment, he could well be portrayed as a one-term wonder whose hubris and infidelity tainted his second term and cost him a chance to break the hex that has spoiled the ambitions of every New York City Mayor since the long-forgotten John T. Hoffman, the Reconstruction-era Mayor who became Governor in 1869. He risks, for the remainder of his time in office, becoming the butt of a thousand nudge-nudge jokes. (Some are already in circulation: The Mayor has endorsed the placement of the Nine Commandments in public schools; Deni Green, wife of Public Advocate Mark Green, has been appointed First Lady to fill the vacancy left by Donna Hanover.) One can hardly imagine a more humiliating end for a man convinced of his own righteousness, a man who believes that he has saved the city from its moral and civic corruptions.

By choosing to continue his campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton (assuming that his cancer is, in fact, as routine as such things can be), he would achieve for himself what Scrooge asked of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come: He would expunge the writing on his gravestone. He would be remembered not as a latter-day Walker, linked forever to tabloid headlines and tales of illicit love, but as a solitary, Jacksonian figure who rowed willingly into an unforgiving sea, at which point his victory or defeat are almost besides the point, for the admiration of future observers will be assured.

Particularly in an age that values personality above all, lasting images of politicians are not of legislation signed or programs initiated, but of personal traits that either served or betrayed in moments of crises. Mario Cuomo may be best remembered for what might have been. Grover Cleveland persevered in 1884 when the country learned that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. Winston Churchill survived his wilderness years to become ... Winston Churchill. Ed Muskie could not control his rage in the snows of New Hampshire.

Concern for his legacy, for how others will view him in 50 years, should compel Mr. Giuliani to stand and fight, particularly since so many, wishing him well or ill politically, believe he has no choice but to fold. Mr. Giuliani has made a career of insisting that he spurns the wisdom of keepers of accepted truths. To play it safe now would be to admit that, in fact, they are correct.

Meanwhile, Republicans and mayoral allies-not understanding Mr. Giuliani in the least-have been doing everything possible to force a decision by leaking stories designed to push him one way or the other. To no avail, of course.

As night fell around City Hall one evening, two reporters lurked outside of City Hall's press room, Room 9, and peeked into the room at a lone reporter who was staying late, his face illuminated by the glare of his computer screen.

"What's he got?" one of the reporters anxiously asked, even as the two reassured each other that it was probably nothing important.

Without diminishing the gravity of the health choice that awaits him, it is impossible not to notice the relish with which he is holding reporters, the public, his opponent and his would-be successors is suspense. The Mayor seems to be content to surprise even his closest advisers, never mind his wife, as he lives out a midlife crisis in public. According to an associate of the Mayor, Giuliani campaign manager Bruce Teitelbaum was, like Ms. Hanover, caught by surprise when the Mayor announced his pending separation from his wife at a routine press conference in Bryant Park on May 10.

It was entirely predictable that his May 15 news conference would consist of nothing. Hadn't Newsweek reported that he would drop out the race? Weren't the newspapers and airwaves filled with blather about his imminent withdrawal? So, of course, he used the occasion to say that no decision has been reached, and that when such a decision has, in fact, been made, we will hear about it from him. And only him. At a time when the thoughts of others might turn to fears of impotence, Mr. Giuliani is flaunting his omnipotence. He is in charge of events. He controlled what words Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton used to address the Democratic state convention in Albany on May 16. And he will control when and how the next stage of his personal narrative will be written.

Additional reporting by Andrea Bernstein

It seems hard to believe: Once upon a time in New York, there was a man who burned with ambition but who seemed a little too light, a little too pleasant, ever to amount to anything. And then that man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, found himself presiding over the political fate of a fun-loving, nightclub-hopping, charismatic Mayor of New York named James J. Walker.

The year was 1932. Like 1945, it has a false air of historical inevitability about it: Peering back at the now-expired 20th century, we assume that the Allied victory in World War II was inevitable; similarly, we assume that destiny was on Roosevelt's side in 1932. But historians like the extraordinary Herbert Mitgang are here to show us that few things in the past should be dismissed as inevitable. Take, for example, Roosevelt's all-but-forgotten dilemma as he prepared to campaign for the Presidency in mid-Depression America. He was a one-term governor who had yet to escape the shadow of his illustrious predecessor, Alfred E. Smith. Compared with Smith's gritty, streets-of-New York persona, Squire Franklin Roosevelt of the Hyde Park Roosevelts seemed like a Hudson Valley dilettante who was simply building on Smith's extraordinary record. Will Rogers summed up the chattering classes' expectations when he said of Roosevelt: "If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, 'Well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.'" And the great sage of the age, Walter Lippmann, reflected conventional wisdom when he famously described Roosevelt as "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President."

So he did. But Jimmy Walker posed a problem. And in this, Mr. Mitgang's 19th book, Roosevelt's dilemma is brought to life with vivid storytelling, terrific interviews and a great sense of a vanished New York. As Roosevelt prepared his Presidential campaign in early 1932, Walker, a fellow Democrat and a onetime colleague of Roosevelt's in the State Senate, found himself answering questions about his personal finances and about the arrangements his cronies had made at the height of Jazz Age New York-an era the Mayor, with his hundreds of suits, taste for illegal booze and love of nightlife, personified. An independent investigator with presidential ambitions of his own, Judge Samuel Seabury, concluded that the Walker administration was rife with corruption.

And so, as New York City became a national symbol of municipal corruption and Roaring Twenties excess, Gov. Franklin Roosevelt found himself compelled to do something about Jimmy Walker … but what? Under New York's state constitution, the Governor can remove a duly elected mayor. And yet if he dismissed Walker, Roosevelt risked losing Tammany Hall's support for the Democratic nomination-at a time when his main challenger was none other than Al Smith, a child of Tammany who represented the machine's forgotten commitment to social welfare. If Roosevelt did nothing about Walker, or let the increasingly tainted mayor off with a wrist slap, the national press would likely dismiss the Governor as the lightweight he seemed to be.

"Suddenly," Mr. Mitgang writes, "Governor Roosevelt found himself facing down the kingmakers and corrupters within his own party in the City of New York. Would Roosevelt show that he was capable of independent behavior-or would he cave in for political expediency?"

Incredibly, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, Roosevelt found himself convening an informal trial of the Mayor of New York, with Walker as the star witness. Half of Mr. Mitgang's wonderful, rollicking book leads to the following scene, a description of the first day of Walker's trial: "The packed Executive Chamber in the Hall of Governors in Albany … suddenly fell silent.… A hush fell over the chamber as the tall erect figure of Governor Roosevelt appeared, framed in the doorway… As he moved through the dead silence, the creak of his leg braces could be distinctly heard.… When he finally reached the desk, his powerful hands gripped the arms of the high-backed leather chair. He tried to lower himself quietly, but his frail limbs, encased in the braces that were concealed beneath his trousers, demanded a long moment's adjustment so he could unsnap the knee locks and get into a seated position." Watching this drama unfold was the spats-wearing dandy, Jimmy Walker, who had once dismissed Fiorello La Guardia's criticism of a mayoral pay raise from $25,000 to $40,000 per year by saying: "Why, that's cheap! Think what it would cost if I worked full time!"

In an instant, as he snapped his knee braces into place and ordered the proceedings to begin, Franklin Roosevelt became a political heavyweight, a man of personal and political substance confronting a man who just as suddenly seemed silly and frivolous, a living, breathing human hangover from the nonsensical party of the 1920's.

Herbert Mitgang, whose legendary career at The New York Times spanned 45 years, has given us a wonderful bit of popular history about a time, and a battle, that we only dimly recall, if we recall it at all. And yet, what characters filled this little drama! Not just Roosevelt and Walker, but Smith, La Guardia, Samuel Seabury, crusading journalist Lincoln Steffens and the gangster Arnold Rothstein (the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, and the model for Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby ). We also meet an obscure woman named Vivian Gordon.

Mrs. Gordon was an important witness in the Seabury investigation: She told investigators that police officers regularly arrested women for prostitution on false or trumped-up charges as a means of increasing their take-home pay. Then she was found strangled to death in Van Cortlandt Park. When her 16-year-old daughter heard the news, she committed suicide. Mr. Mitgang makes an important point in introducing us to Mrs. Gordon: Her terrible fate demonstrated to New Yorkers that political corruption has a human face, and can take a very human toll. It is easy to laugh about some of the outrages Mr. Mitgang describes-the $8,500-a-year sheriff who, in trying to explain how he came to accumulate nearly a half-million dollars, testified to the magical powers of a tin box he kept in a safe. And revisionists like myself point out that Tammany Hall's operatives achieved great social good during the corrupt 1920's. But then we run up against Mrs. Gordon and her 16-year-old daughter, their lives cut short because corrupt officials were afraid of the law's avenging angels. Mr. Mitgang writes: "The fact that the murder had been committed in a neighborhood park, the reformers said, was a horrifying example of the cavalier attitude of criminals toward the Walker administration's law-enforcement machinery."

Mr. Mitgang actually begins this tale of political combat with another murder, that of Arnold Rothstein "on a star-kissed night in the autumn of 1928." And here, Mr. Mitgang shows not only his knack for anecdote, but his talent for sweeping narrative. At first glance, Rothstein's murder would seem to have little to do with the duel between Roosevelt and Walker. But Mr. Mitgang aims to re-create the New York that Walker symbolized-a "boozy era" that "succeeded in turning ordinary citizens into lawbreakers," which led to a general corrosion of civic life. Rothstein, the all-powerful gangster, was as much a part of Jimmy Walker's New York as the new Yankee Stadium, Lindy's and Broadway. His murder, in the dying months of the Jazz Age, marked the beginning of Walker's end.

Mr. Mitgang's slender volume reminds us of how compelling well-written history can be. I would take issue with a few small points: He could have made a clearer distinction between Tammany boss Charles Francis Murphy, the man who threw the machine behind Al Smith's social welfare program, and his crooked predecessors like Richard Croker. And I think he could have dwelled a bit longer on the political machine's complexity: Yes, it produced thieves and scoundrels, but, as Mr. Mitgang notes, Franklin Roosevelt certainly appreciated the progressive, inclusive views of such machine-style pols as James Farley (for whom the General Post Office on Eighth Avenue is named) and Edward Flynn, the boss of the Bronx.

But those are minor quibbles. Mr. Mitgang has produced a popular history that reads like a thriller-and yet is bolstered by the scholarship and authority of a veteran journalist and historian.

As it is, under trading hours now in force, New York is on its way to becoming a kind of gigantic Indian reservation, a vast casino upon which countless people, who would otherwise have no source of income, depend for their sustenance. Wall Street gaming sets the tone and content for the city's life just as there is no getting away from the green-felt tables and the slots if you're in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. As Wall Street has moved from being part of the city economy to being the city's economy, the importance of everything else has shrunk. Fifty years ago, New York was the largest manufacturing center in the United States with a million factory jobs. There are now barely 300,000 such jobs.

You may chalk up the changes to the service economy or atrophy at the top, but there are services and there are other services. Airlines and fast food are services. But fast money is faster than fast food. Granted, getting money invested in the right places and getting it disinvested from the wrong places is a useful and necessary service, but what's going on here is closer to the entertainment industry than it is to serious finance. What they're doing on Wall Street doesn't resemble investment so much as it does chemin de fer.

The Bay Area has Silicon Valley; New York has Silicon Alley. Alley, valley, valley, alley. From valleys, you can see high prospects; in alleys, you see ashcans. New York has missed out on being the center or even an important secondary center of any of the new industries of the last half-century. Electronics, biotech, medtech, the Internet came to life and greatness elsewhere. Wall Street and its greasy handmaidens, the lawyers, the public relations illusionists and the rest of the sleight-of-hand occupations, have taken up the space vacated by departing enterprises and the enterprises that never came to lodge themselves here. The money game is the only game.

In the end, of course, the only winners are croupiers, who don't really earn a living as much as they steal one. The city is full of suddenly rich croupiers, people you might once have said have money to burn, but they are too much without joy for that expression. Instead, let's just say that the city is full of people with money to spend in their dull, though lavish, ways. Their riches are devoted to a pedestrian excess that doesn't shock the conscience so much as it discourages the better spirits that occasionally touch our species.

The city has the grim atmosphere of the casino-people feeding coins into slots, maxillary joints clamped and bulging. The molecules in our air are tight and hard and jammed together, not like the bubbles of the 1920's, the happy, splurge decade of the 20th century. We're richer, so much richer, so incomparably richer now than they were but ours isn't "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." That moment still belongs to Gatsby. The difference is the difference between Jimmy Walker and Rudy Giuliani, between the Tin Pan Alley songwriter made the Jazz Age Mayor (1926-1932) by the Sachems of Tammany Hall and the hard-mouthed prosecutor made Mayor by a metropolis of people looking for a nice little deal or a cute little angle.

New York is a city of 80,000 multimillionaires and 8 million body servants, retainers, personal trainers, personal pilots, personal chefs, personal security guys, personal flatterers, personal shoppers and personal closet organizers. Hello to you, New York, city of busboys, headwaiters, consultants, coat holders, panders and maître d's. City of doormen, tour guides, pickpockets, corporate yeggs and investment bankers. City of bowers, city of scrapers.

In terms of human ecology, New York today is what pre-Castro Havana must have been like 50 years ago. At the top limo-ing back and forth from their helicopter pads are those 80,000; another 80,000 younger multimillionaires-in-waiting are standing around in their cigar shops and sharing summer rentals in the Hamptons. There being no other way of making a living, the rest of the population provides those 160,000 with body care and comfort. The boys grow up to be waiters and their sisters prostitutes. As it must have been once in old Havana, you can't tell the business people from the gangsters, the crooked lawyers, the gamblers and the swindlers, which sounds exciting, but New York's colorful characters have been drained of their polychrome. The place is sick with money, but the condition doesn't produce anything much. Nothing shocking, nothing millennial, nothing awful, either.

Not that New York is teetering on anything revolutionary as Havana was. Though the standard of living in this city is markedly lower and life markedly less pleasant than elsewhere in the United States, there's money enough and more to go around. Havana just before it fell to Castro may have been seething. New York isn't. Nothing is crowding the edges of the stage here waiting to get on.

There wasn't much of public life in semi-colonial Havana. There is hardly any public life in democratic New York. Public discourse is dominated by the likes of Christine Quinn, whose enemies are accusing the trash-talking lesbian City Council member of being a closet hetero. Who's a hetero, who's a homo? That's New York's public life-squabbles about the nature of what politicians do with whom; squabbles, it should be added, that few pay attention to in a place where the focus on making and spending money crowds out any larger interests and grander concerns.

In the noon of their prosperity, Athens, Rome, Paris, Madrid, London and Venice put some of the wealth to great public use. Not New York, not now. New York in the 1920's put some of the money to good purpose. Under the administration of Beau James, as Jimmy Walker was often called, the Sanitation Department was organized, the hospital system reformed, work on the Triborough Bridge, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the West Side Highway and the Eighth and Sixth Avenue subway was conceived and begun.

Crotch politics aside, New York has little to show for its prosperity save having crawled back in its crime statistics to the levels of 30 years ago. With a little more luck, we can progress back to 1900. What an odd thing to say of New York of all places, but it is a city without ambition, without a dream.