New York is built, from 1850 to 1933, in a single spurt of imagination and energy. The first prototype of the modern metropolis, Manhattan is turned into a laboratory to test the potential of modern life in a radical, collective experiment. A free-form coalition of developers, visionaries, writers, architects, and journalists intersects with popular expectations to make the city an extreme and exhilarating democratic machine, one that is able to process all newcomers into New Yorkers.

Its genius is to create a universe parallel to sober and abstract European modernism -�to imagine life in the metropolis as a deeply irrational experience that uses sparkling-new technologies to exacerbate desire.

From 1913 to 1932, the speed of building is convulsive: Woolworth, Chrysler, Empire State, and finally Rockefeller Center. New York's instruments are not necessarily architectural masterpieces, but apparatuses for reinventing city life. They create both a density that astronomically expands the repertoire of programs, events, and overlappings and a smoothness that urban life has never before known.

The Depression slows this regime of architectural delirium. In 1933, King Kong's agony on top of the Empire State Building is a provisional climax: New York's revolutionary moment is over by the time of the talkies.

1950s-'60s

After World War II, buildings become "important." Each is the work of an individual architect rather than a collective. In the next 20 years, only a handful are realized: Lever ('52), UN ('53), Seagram ('58), Pan Am ('63). At the same time, Robert Moses' highways, bridges, and tunnels allow the populations accumulated by previous generations to escape to the burbs. He also organizes the 1964 World's Fair. The results appear lackluster, like a fair that could have been held anywhere.

1970s

In 1972 (president: Nixon; mayor: Lindsay), the World Trade Center is finished. No one likes it. The towers are abstract and structurally daring; their interiors entirely column-free, 10 million square feet of real estate carried on two cores and two envelopes. The towers dominate Manhattan's skyline but don't participate in it – twinning is their only genius.

1972 is a turning point: The towers are delivered at the exact moment New York's passion for the new is spent. Along with the Concorde, they are modernism's apotheosis and its letdown at the same time – unreal perfection that can never be equaled.

New York is not doing well. It is old now. It has a long past; it doesn't want to be a machine anymore. It worries about context and humanism. Hung over from the '60s – Malcolm X killed in '65, Andy Warhol shot in '68 – the city is basking in an aura of danger. It can no longer be governed; only the forbidden is well organized. Its repertoire is reduced to extremes. New York becomes a hunting ground. Separate crises – financial, social, drugs – merge into a cocktail that only hedonists enjoy. In 1973, Governor Rockefeller introduces draconian drug laws. McDonald's opens its first Manhattan franchise. In 1974: the first Gap. Plato's Retreat opens in '75; Studio 54 follows in '77 and acts as Manhattan's epicenter – the splendors and miseries of a metropolis compressed to the scale of a disco. Also, the city almost goes bankrupt.

1977 (presidents: Ford/Carter; mayor: Beame) is New York's annus horribilis: the blackout, the Son of Sam summer, a helicopter rotor blade crashes into the streets from the top of the Pan Am. But it is also the year of its definitive comeback: A blast of self-love pulls the city out of its doldrums. New York is rescued by a double whammy of denial, a heroic non sequitur: the "I ♥ NY" campaign (created by Wells Rich Greene with Milton Glaser) and Liza Minnelli's "New York, New York" (composed by Kander and Ebb). The campaign mobilizes disbelief to fight disbelief; the song overpowers urban anxiety through loudness, introduces the high kick as a euphoric goose step.

"I ♥ NY" is a prison. Its logo, like a brand, diminishes the virtual space of the city. New York's shrinkage is reinforced by the regime of Ed Koch, the new mayor. His "How'm I doin'?" reflects a city that obsessively measures its own pulse. Danger becomes vibrancy. A global city turns "world class."

In this state of narcissism, Manhattan's architects and developers begin to clone and rip off the most obvious features of the city's pre-WWII architecture. Boxes sprout spires; art deco becomes the new new. A tectonic pornography – over-dimensioned displays of excitement, each relentlessly pursuing its own release, an architecture of money shots.

An ecology of lawyers, dealmakers, zoning experts, and enablers grotesquely inflate the arcane complexities of "getting things done" and intimidate any outsider into helpless surrender to their intricate cynicism. "Union or nonunion?" That is the question. A Mafioso Hamlet.

1980s-'90s

The popular press and the US government turn against the United Nations -�depicted as an accumulation of shady foreign diplomats running up millions in unpaid parking tickets, molesting call girls with impunity, protesting innocence behind dark glasses. In 1984, like a slumlord, Washington stops paying the UN's maintenance fees; the cornerstone of New York cosmopolitanism becomes a political punching bag.

In a neat lockstep with Reaganomics, what is not brutalized from the outside is eroded from the inside. The art system, with its voracious appetite for authenticity (and, later, "edginess") consumes whole districts, leaving acres of gallery space that can effortlessly morph into shopping districts or university precincts.

What determines art's size? If the average painting was 6 square feet in 1940, by the '80s it has expanded to 40. Sculptures inflate at the same rate. Installations are measured in rooms, even entire buildings. What already exists is more sexy than what is recently made. The greater the (New York) architect, the smaller the conversion. Architects' fragile egos are boosted by a corpocultural axis that intimately unites the art world's sincerity with the corporate world's integrity in a very contemporary marriage.

In 1982, the world's first billboard-sized crotch shot triggers the emasculation of Times Square: white briefs against filth. The idea of the first cleanup is hatched. The 42nd Street Development Project follows in 1985. A master plan by Philip Johnson lingers, but in 1993 (president: Clinton; mayor: Dinkins), four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the idea returns as "42nd Street Now!" Disney announces the restoration of the New Amsterdam Theater.

Giuliani becomes mayor in 1994. He presides over the Wall Street bubble, the media bubble, the Internet bubble, and the art bubble, and he instigates a law bubble of his own. Giuliani's is a regime of enforced quality of life. The police become a cadre of roving, computerized flaneur, ridding the streets of surprise to deny criminals access to victims. The city becomes safer for some, more dangerous for many others. "Zero tolerance" is a deadly mantra for a metropolis: What is a city if not a space of maximum license?

In 1996, a new zoning law orders the removal of sex-related businesses from Times Square. Comfort has become an essential human right, security a Faustian gambit – surrender freedoms to gain the illusion of certainty. Liberals condone the suburbanization of New York.

9/11

From now on, the most important city in the world is dominated by the tower from which first dangled an ape. What is the connection between zero tolerance and the cult of Ground Zero? In any case, the disaster resurrects Giuliani's depleted persona.

New Yorkers surrender to empathy. The tragedy of 9/11 inspires a mood of collective tenderness that is almost exhilarating, almost a relief: Hype's spell has been broken and the city can recover its own reality principle, emerge with new thinking from the unthinkable. But politics interfere. In spite of Bloomberg's pragmatic sobriety, the transnational metropolis is enlisted in a national crusade. New York becomes a city (re)captured by Washington. Through the alchemy of 9/11, the authoritarian morphs imperceptibly into the totalitarian. A competition for rebuilding Ground Zero is held, not to restore the city's vitality or shift its center of gravity, but to create a monument at a scale that monuments have never existed (except under Stalin).

On March 17, at 9:30 am, the winning architect rings the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. At 8 pm, the president issues his ultimatum to Saddam, the "displaced" author of the WTC disappearance. At midnight on March 20, the war starts. At 8 am, at a breakfast meeting in lower Manhattan, the "Master Design Architect," an immigrant, movingly recounts his first encounter with liberty.

Instead of the two towers – the sublime – the city will live with five towers, wounded by a single scything movement of the architect, surrounding two black holes. New York will be marked by a massive representation of hurt that projects only the overbearing self-pity of the powerful. Instead of the confident beginning of the next chapter, it captures the stumped fundamentalism of the superpower. Call it closure.