Party Time. Excellent.

I’m going to butcher this quote but I think I’ve got the sentiment right: some wag (underused word) once said something like, “New York City always feels like the party ended just before you arrived.” Having periodically arrived and left New York many times over the last forty years, I can attest to the accuracy of that statement. My sketch comedy troupe, The State, is in town for a run of shows over the next few days, and now that I no longer regularly visit this town, I’m more apt to notice changes that may have gone unnoticed during the years when my relationship with the city was more familial. So, what’s different?

For one thing, it feels like the party just ended. I’m joking but not. What that old-timey wag got right is that New York is always in flux. It’s not that the party ended. It simply up and moved. The party is still the party, but it’s somewhere else. Maybe Queens. Maybe the South Bronx. But not Staten Island. Never Staten Island.

Wherever the party landed, however, safe to say that you’re not invited. It’s not that New York is exclusive – it’s actually the opposite. People from everywhere come here to become anybody. The nightlife they create is swirling and grandiose and all-inclusive. Look at old pictures of Studio 54. There’s rich and poor, highbrow and lowbrow. That’s the New York spirit, and I don’t think it ever really goes anyway. It just moves around. When you arrive, it takes a while to pick it up. And when you leave, it lets you go without a thought. That’s ok.

My early years in New York were the mid 80’s, when I used to take train in on weekends for acting class. I was fifteen and the city was just starting to recover from its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” era, when the city was bankrupt and Ed Koch was running around asking everybody how’z he doin’? The city’s most famous neighborhood, Times Square, was a maze of third-run movie houses and porno shops. Prostitutes roamed 42^nd St like their own private Jurassic Park. It was as if the powers that be decided to terraform Times Square into the 3am scene at the Port Authority bus terminal.  Needless to say, one walked those streets with some caution.

The Times Square of my youth. Fun, right?

It was also the area of ascendant hip-hop, Madonna, CBGBs, the Limelight, and the mountain of cocaine that fell on Wall St. The city had a hedonistic vibe that has become much more muted in the years since, the price of the AIDS crisis and the tough citywide hangover of the Giuliani years, followed by 9/11, and the blandly corporate Bloomberg administrations when Manhattan’s wealth exploded to gobsmacking levels, pushing all the cool people to the outer boroughs. First to Brooklyn, then to Queens, and the Bronx. But not Staten Island. Never Staten Island.

A few years later, I moved to New York for college. Like everybody else who has ever arrived from some distant shore (in my case, the shores of landlocked Hillsborough, New Jersey), I eventually found my people with The State. Our New York was concentrated in the West Village. Blues Traveler shows and late nights at Barrow Street Ale House and middle-of-the-night cheeseburgers at Corner Grill. Maybe the party had just left before we arrived but we made our own. Which is always true here. People remember the New York of their youths with outsized fondness, crediting the city with something more than setting the scene, when they should be crediting their youth. It’s not that the city changed, it’s that you grew old.

And that’s ok, too.

One unfortunate change is the new eructation of super-thin, super-tall skyscrapers that popped up over the last decade or so. These are the buildings of the so-called “Billionaire’s Row,” a stretch of Central Park South now dominated by ultra-luxurious glass toothpicks. The problem with the buildings is that they are ungainly and out-of-proportion. Worse, they are unoccupied. These are investment properties for oligarchs and their minions looking to park ill-gotten gains in the relative security of one of the world’s wealthiest real estate markets. The buildings surely generate a lot of tax income, but they also act like colossal energy sucks, hoovering up the fun of New York and replacing it with armored SUVs and whisper-quiet shops catering to the needs of the Venezuelan ex-pat set. Gross.

Also, the current mayor, Eric Adams, seems like a boob. So did the last guy. The irony of liberal New York City is that New York’s most effective modern administrations have come at the hands of Republicans – at least until those Republicans wore out their welcomes by imposing Republican social policies: stop-and-frisk, for example. Then the Hitler posters go up and the protests start and somebody new comes along to screw things up in an entirely novel way. It’s a big city, and while it might not be exactly ungovernable, it refuses to stay tamed for long. From where I sit, it looks like any mayor would be lucky to get out with their reputations relatively intact. Again, kudos to Giuliani for managing to do that until he decided to destroy everything he build up with equal measures of booze and hair dye. These days, America’s mayor can’t even show his face in his hometown without being on the receiving end of a good, old-fashioned Bronx raspberry. Good. The crook.

Reports of the city’s demise have been exaggerated since the Dutch set up an outpost at the interchange of the Hudson and East River. That’s what happens, I guess, when a place’s entire reason for existing is dynamism. Things get built up and torn down and thrown away for no reason, only to be picked up and recycled and built back up again. The restaurants and nightclubs that close will be replaced with restaurants and nightclubs that will mean just as much to the new generation of New York immigrants as the old ones did to you. But the energy - the dynamism - will remain for as long as people still come here to make themselves into themselves. New York’s party ended for me decades ago but for the next generation, the night is just getting started.