East side, west side, all around etc.

Saw a guy in a T-shirt that said, I Miss the Old New York.

Not sure which one he's talking about. The old New York that built a wall at Wall Street as a fortification between the white settlers and the natives? The old New York of the Gilded Age, with its Astors and Coopers and big hotels and elevated trains?

This one?

One suspects that he and others like him mean the old darker, grittier one where everything was falling apart and everyone was broke and Times Square was packed with XXX movie theaters. I was a kid back then, but even I knew that you could pick up venereal disease just following Broadway up through Times Square in those days. The New York from the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

If that's what they miss, they're in luck! The city's rookie mayor is cut of the same cloth as previous New York politicians who have let crime run rampant, instituted confiscatory taxes, and used the whip of social engineering to drive businesses and the middle class out of the city. When you have no middle class, you have to suck up to the rich, because they're the only ones left with any serious dough. When you have no middle class, and you have nothing to offer the rich, you have to get money out the poor, and the easiest way to do that is by appealing to the lowest possible motivations---booze, drugs, sex, violence.

A lot of people hate the prettied-up chain-store-driven Times Square. A lot of people have short memories.