In the end, nobody can truly know New York. It is too large, too various, too layered, too dense. Even the oldest New Yorker knows that it is a fool’s game to claim to know the city. I was born in New York and have lived here most of my life. I don’t pretend to fully understand its mysterious shifts, its evolving myths, its complex, brave people. Better to surrender to New York on a bright morning and go for a walk. Better to stroll on Fifth Avenue and watch the elegant women moving in and out of shops, or heading for lunch, or finding their way to museums. Better to plunge into the bazaar of Canal Street, with its shops selling CDs and combat boots, boomboxes and art supplies. Better to find a bench at South Street Seaport and put your feet up on a railing and watch the boats on the East River and the seagulls making violent swoops for food. Forget schedules, appointments, itineraries: go out into this city made for walking, and know it for those hours, on that day, and maybe then you will have it forever..

In the mornings, I often walk through a Manhattan neighborhood where the 19th century lives in its buildings. The real estate operators call it Tribeca; to me it is simply downtown. On the corner of Chambers Street, just north of City Hall, a large white building is emerging from a mask of grime and scaffolding after years of work.. This is the Marble Palace, built in 1846 by an Irish immigrant named A.T. Stewart. It was the first New York department store, the first store to arrange dry goods in bins, to establish fixed prices, and it made Stewart one of the richest men in 19th century America. The visionary Stewart, now forgotten, believed that women would be his most important customers and so he hired as his clerks six hundred of the handsomest young men in New York. The business boomed. I stand before it now, in the New York present, and imagine a New York past, with horses clopping on the streets and gaslamps burning in the chill winter night, and am cheered to know that the Marble Palace will be part of New York long after I’m gone.

One block away, on Warren Street, immense mounds of unsorted clothes are sold in brightly lighted stores by immigrants from Africa. Socks for one dollar! Shirts for two dollars! Suits for $19! The city’s poor flock to these shops and it is no accident that the name of one such store is “Great Expectations”. It evokes the name of Charles Dickens, of course, but also the hopes of poor women who might find a two-dollar shirt that will please their husbands, or socks that will fit their children. All of this can be seen on a street with a fine bookstore specializing in computers, one of the best downtown cigar shops, a Chinese-Dominican restaurant and sidewalks upon which Herman Melville once walked, dreaming of Moby Dick.

You could spend a year trying to understand Warren Street; how long then would it take to understand New York? The city itself is a series of hamlets, each neighborhood carrying its own legends, lore, hierarchies and institutions. You can enter them, and gaze at their various wonders, but only time allows you to truly know them. No human being can live long enough to know them all.

“I love New York”, says the stranger, gazing at Times Square or the Battery or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the old New Yorker replies, “Which one?”

To be sure, many things do bind us together: the subways, the rivers, the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, the figure of the mayor, the New York Knicks, the tabloid newspapers. But there are other factors that are common to New Yorkers, and can be seen in many guises by the stranger: energy, humor, an anarchic sense of style. The energy is obvious. New Yorkers do not move casually through their city; they hurry, always racing the clock, frustrated by delays, driven by urgencies. They hurry to business meetings; they hurry to lunch; they hurry towards romance. Time is money. Time has limits. Time is your enemy, or your friend. The lights in many New York offices burn all night. If possible, many New Yorkers would invent a 36-hour day. And still be short of time. And still be in a rush, too busy even for stress.

The New York sense of humor is based on irony, a gift from the Jews, who knew too well the difference between what is promised and what is delivered. That humor can be cruel and biting. It can be dark and sardonic. But it is always present, one of the strategies that evolve when too many people live in too small a space. It is often a humor of frustration, directed at bosses, bureaucracies, politicians and the pompous. A New Yorker watches Godzilla, and the destruction of New York, and says: “That does it. I’m through with Giuliani.” A crane falls and kills three people, and the New Yorker says: “There goes the neighborhood.” A taxi crashes into a car and the car into a bus and the bus into the window of a drugstore, and my Indian immigrant neighbor smiles at me, and says, now a true New Yorker: “God bless America!” It is a humor of release from pressure, or of confrontation with disaster. If New Yorkers did not learn to laugh when young – to laugh at fate, cruelty, inequity and incompetence -- they would explode.

The peculiar, surprising sense of New York style is evident everywhere, and has absolutely no consistency. Fashion kings cannot dictate to the people of New York; nobody can. But there is one common quality: New Yorkers sense that when they leave home, they are entering a kind of theater. A vast, surprising, urban theater, where the players have no script, and the audience is made up of absolute strangers. They dress accordingly, to express what they want the stranger to believe about them. That they are powerful, sexy, smart, tough, but never vulnerable. That they are available or they are not. That they takes risks, or they don’t. So you can see members of one whole tribe that dresses for power, wearing clothes made for boardrooms. Another, much younger tribe dresses to inspire fear, donning fatboy down jackets as if they were suits of armor, walking pigeon-toed in unlaced Timberland shoes, their eyes masked by sunglasses at midnight. In Chelsea or the East Village, you come across old hippies, still wearing tie-died shirts and leather sandals, their pupils scoured by time, but acting as if the music and rain of Woodstock had not yet ended. In Washington Heights, you see young Dominican women adorned with the colors of the Caribbean, red ceramic earrings, tight white blouses bursting with the engineering of the Wonderbra, skirts that seem to have been sprayed on, and high spiked red heels: heading for church on a Sunday morning.. On Madison Avenue, you see older women in tweeds and sensible shoes looking as if they were heading for lunch in Sussex, where English butlers will bring them sherry. On the Lower East Side, on a sunny afternoon in early summer, all the young Puerto Rican women are baring their stomachs, jeans slung low, and there are earrings pierced through some navels and some bellies garish with tattoos that vanish below the waistline. The messages are almost always mixed: “get back, man” is constantly at war with, “Get over here, man.” I see the erotic curves of the tattoos and wonder how they will explain them when they are grandmothers.

These are wonderful days in New York. After too many years of siege, the sense of menace has lifted from the city. Like millions of other New Yorkers, I walk at night now without looking over my shoulders. Crime and danger have not vanished, but the worst years seem behind us (in six years, for example, the number of annual murders has dropped from 2300 to about 550). And so New Yorkers are once more discovering the great places of their own city: the museums, night places, libraries, theaters. Every week, a new restaurant seems to open. Brooklyn neighborhoods that had plunged into desolation are being revived by immigrants from Mexico and Russia. The Koreans have become a great stabilizing force, publishing newspapers, inventing television channels, building banks, creating businesses that go far beyond the simple grocery stores of twenty years ago. There are now three Chinatowns – the old one in Manhattan, the newer ones in Brooklyn and Queens – and they are bursting with New York energy and New York vitality. The most elite public high school in New York is called Stuyvesant; thirty years ago, the majority of the students would have been Jewish or Irish. Today, 52 percent of the students are Asian. The American children of Asian immigrants. New Yorkers to the core.

Those New Immigrants are adding in other ways to the energy and style of New York. Young American women wear the clothes of Japanese designers, or the fabrics of India, or blouses from Mexico. Young Korean-Americans are clothed by the Gap or Old Navy. Students at the Fashion Institute of Technology or the School of Visual Arts are absorbing the folk styles carried to New York by the immigrants and transforming them onto styles that are fresh and original. If food is essential to understanding a culture (and New York is now erupting with “ethnic” restaurants), and music is crucial (there is also a boom in Latin music) , so are the clothes people wear. New York has a long tradition of absorbing all that is new, putting it through a kind of artistic and psychic grinder, and making it even newer. Here, synthesis is essential. Here, eclecticism is part of one’s identity as a New Yorker. And you can see the results in the streets and the subways.

To experience New York, of course, is not to know it. That task is impossible. We are one of the few American cities with a long history; the serious study of that history could take a lifetime. But even a sketchy knowledge of the city’s history will help those who are curious; they will get to understand its layers, the marks put upon it by generations of strangers going back to the 17th century Dutch. It is, like most cities, a place where nightmares do take place, where brutality is always possible, where things might not turn out the way one hoped. Even among the immigrants -- those of a hundred years ago and those who are arriving now -- there are defeats and disappointments; some return to where they came from, broken by New York.

But for most of those who stay, dreams eventually do come true. If not for themselves, for their children. They all learn that another essential quality for a New York is stoicism. New York can be celebrated; New York can be marvelous; but New York often must be endured. As a result, the best New Yorkers are also very tough. I don’t mean physically hard, or capable of violence; often the most dangerous citizens are the most cowardly. I mean those who have adopted a stoic attitude, who know that there are many things that must be suffered in silence, but who accept that fate and use laughter to defeat it. You can fool them once; you can never fool them twice. Every morning, as I walk through the streets of the city, in heat waves or blizzards, I see those people. They are in a hurry. They are late. They glance at wristwatches and move on, and when they see a familiar face, they say something, and then laugh. They are living in the New York present. They carry with them the New York past. They are hurrying along, into the New York future.