The Editors of New York Magazine - The Encyclopedia of New York

The first sketch of the INY logo, made on the back of an envelope during a New York City taxicab ride.

DRAWING BY MILTON GLASER, 1976

EVERY CITY HAS A FOUNDATION STORY, and a lot of those stories foretell the future. Romulus slew his brother, Remus, and subsequently founded Rome upon the latters burial place, framing the imperial rapaciousness and bloodshed to come. Chicagos earliest speculators bet on its future as a transit hub, and two centuries later, we still all change planes at OHare. A mobster built Las Vegas out of thin desert air, aided by a huge federal subsidy in the form of Hoover Dam, to separate people from their paychecks while letting them think theyd had a great time: a con made manifest.

And New York? From its beginnings as part of New Netherland, it was fundamentally mercantile, effectively an arm of the Dutch West India Company. Even before that, when in 1609 Henry Hudson came up the river that now bears his name, he made landfall, met a few native Lenape people, and headed back to England with a small cargo of furs. Indigenous New Yorkers had encountered a European for the first time, and already theyd made an export deal.

At first, the citys product came mostly from the landbeaver pelts, lumberbut within a few generations, New Amsterdam, and then New York, established itself as a manufacturing town. Take a walk downtown, and you can still see that physical city. Those little brick buildings in the South Street Seaport? To modern eyes they may look like townhouses, but in fact many were warehouses for dry goods and chandlery, feeding the eighteenth centurys global trade. The cast-iron buildings of Soho were once factories; before the widespread use of electricity, their high ceilings and huge windows admitted more light for the underwear-makers and Linotypers working within. Even those buildings faades were themselves made here, in foundries nearby. Until the 1960s, nearly every piece of store-bought clothing in America came from New Yorks cutting tables and sergers. Early in the twentieth century, there was a car factory in Times Square.

As the scale of the worlds appetites grew, most of that kind of heavy manufacturing shifted to places that fronted on highways instead of narrow streets, with big truck bays instead of cramped elevators, where the real estate wasnt so precious and the rents didnt eat up everyones margins. (The last heavy industry in Times Squarethe basement pressroom of the New York Timesclosed in 1997.) As the sewing machines stopped whirring and the forges cooled, another and even larger export came to dominate: intellectual property. In parallel with the decline of the manufacturing city grew an equally robust production line for movements and ideas. Manhattan as laboratory, as the architect-philosopher Rem Koolhaas called it, is a factory of man-made experience. Even if an idea does not strictly start here, New York is, disproportionately often, the place where it is dropped off, trimmed to size, matted and framed, and displayed to everyone with an explanatory wall text.

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, authors and academics came here to live and write, more than ever before. Even those who didnt still published through New York. So had the music business. So had the art galleries, the fashion houses. (Sometimes this creative work took place in the very same loft buildings, spiffed up, that had housed the underwear factories.) Those products were marketed through New York ad agencies, which invented new tricks and wrote jingles and taglines to sell the toothpaste and cars manufactured elsewhere. If we were no longer makers of everything, we could become those makers amplification system, and that was a giant business. The ads in turn supported the national mediamagazines, then radio, then television, now digitalthat were and are nearly all based here, and their stories shaped everyones understanding of everything.

All those businesses are undergirded by loans and investors, and the money comes from here too. From the eighteenth century, New York established itself as the financial hub of the United States, and as the country became a superpower, its banking center became the worlds. Aside from the fact that New York had the money itselfthe Fed, the stock exchange, a gold reserve, dealmaking propinquityit had a lot of people who wanted to make more of it. In the 1960s, when the stock exchange grew to the point where its paper-based methods were overwhelmed, people figured out how to build computerized trading systems. When, a few years after that, traders craved more and more data, Michael Bloomberg devised and rented them terminals bursting with information and made himself $60 billion or so. When the hedge fund became a way of managing wealth, the administrators feestypically 2 percent of each trade and 20 percent of profitmade billionaires of them too. Riding the market up made money; so did shorting it. Wall Street always finds innovative ways to skim a little off.

Why did this majestic confluence of creativity appear here? Some of the explanation can be put to New Yorks sheer size: Big ideas are magnetic, and in a big town rather than a small one, you can gather enough Trotskyites or avant-garde poets at an event to make waves. Certainly, the presence of Columbia University, New York University, and CUNY in one tight cluster gave various movements a boostproximity to great research universities fosters innovation, as Stanford and Berkeley, adjacent to Silicon Valley, continue to show. Theres a self-fulfillingness to these things too: Self-confidence begets self-confidence, and centrality draws people who want to be at the center, which makes the center bigger. Its worth mentioning that concentrations of talent also work off the clock. Artists sitting around a bar deep into the night, taking stock and one-upping and arguingPollock and Rothko at the Cedar Tavern, Basquiat and Haring at some dive in the East Village, name your scene of choicefeed off each others brains and creativity, not to mention competitiveness. Having investors and media nearby to support them helps as well.