Time Alone Doesn’t Make You A Real New Yorker

“I walk around in love,” says my best friend, about living in New York City. ‘I’m a city bird,” another dear friend wrote to me recently, “I feel whole there.”

I’ve been here for 25 years. As a NYC college student in the early 1990s, I used to wander around Chinatown with a camera or climb up on rooftops to read the zig-zaggy lines of water towers across the horizon. I rented a room in…