Today I celebrate 21 years in New York City--so grand you have to say it twice--and what a ride it has been. Can NYC wear thin? Sure, but hard to imagine life elsewhere--and what an honor to memorialize the transformation of Lower Manhattan and the financial district, currently running in CL's brother magazines, Trader Monthly and Dealmaker.

My favorite Gotham taxonomy comes from E.B. White's 1948 classic "Here Is New York," in which he classifies "roughly three New Yorks":

"There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal."

Of my myriad Gotham intrigues has always been how the first and third sets come to excel in enterprise. How outsiders make the same mark as the one-time kids who grew up tough on Arthur Avenue, or on the Lower East Side, or in Astoria, or in just about any part of Brooklyn.

Short-listing the first group, there's Bronx-born Calvin Klein, who always dreamed of grander things, and Brooklyn's David Geffen, whose $62 million bail-out saw Klein through a rough patch. Malcolm Forbes and Alan Greenspan. Cornelius Vanderbilt and Donald Trump. All those Brooklynites and Staten Islanders who worked the Street before being supplanted by blue-chip MBA'ers.

In the third group--"settlers who give it passion, embracing New York with the intense excitement of first love"--founding father Alexander Hamilton, West Indies; Robert Moses and JP Morgan, Connecticut; John Jacob Astor, Germany; Michael Bloomberg, Boston.

What is your New York story?

Jeff Heilman

6/19/08