Will New York Return To Its Glory Days?

KAITLIN PHILLIPS KAITLIN PHILLIPS IS A WRITER AND PUBLICIST LIVING IN NEW YORK CITY WHO HAS WRITTEN FOR N+1, ARTFORUM, BOOKFORUM, VOGUE, THE CUT, AND SPIKE. ARTWORK BY GREER LANKTON No matter how expensive, how gentrified, how decadent, how past-it the city is always declared to be, people keep coming to live here. No one from South Dakota, but people from just about everywhere else. (Ontario, Latvia, whatever.) What other city has spawned a genre of essays about leaving it — songs of the defeated — resigned to an easier life in more forgiving precincts, where life is less punishing and therefore less real? Perhaps under the mistaken impression that the city couldn’t get along without them. “You never wanted to be decent and live like a human being,” a man says to his fiancé in His Girl Friday, as he realizes she won’t come with him to live with…