New York’s Coming Back, Baby, But What Will It Be?

A couple of weeks ago, Robert Altucher published an article in Newsweek claiming that “NYC is dead forever,” a grim, plodding argument that because he and his friends had moved to Florida, everyone else was going to move to Florida too. The picture he painted, of a city bereft of business and by extension culture by the pandemic-induced rise in remote work and the existence of high-speed internet, makes sense on the surface; New York has been the center of global commerce for almost a century, where the biggest companies in the world had their headquarters. It’s a city with streets that conferred prestige: Wall Street, Park Avenue, Madison Avenue. And if businesses don’t need to be headquartered there—if they don’t need the huge office taking up six floors of a hundred-story skyscraper—then, the argument goes, nobody will want to move here.