GOTHAMITIS.(The Talk of the Town)

It is a sign of the times--which, a Greenwich Village bard once told us, change--that two former mayors of New York may run for President next year, and no one thinks that either candidacy is even slightly a joke. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is thinking of running, as a Republican, and current Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who will be a former by then, may run as a None of the Above. This isn't just news; it's news. When, in the early nineteen-seventies, Mayor John Lindsay ran for the Presidency, his candidacy had about all the credibility that George W. Bush's would have today if he ran for mayor of Baghdad-on-the-Hudson (or Baghdad-on-the-Euphrates, for that matter).

What makes the idea of ascending from City Hall to the White House possible is the transformation of New York in the past twenty years--one of the largest civic transformations in American history, and certainly the most unexpected. (Theories credit everything from bright new waves of immigrants to grim forced marches of incarceration, and the sociologists can't decide which is right.) Just a few weeks ago, Mayor Bloomberg went out to the site of the 1964 World's Fair and made a peppy speech to introduce a new plan for the city, and what it ought to be like in 2030. He recited the roster of accomplishments that are by now as familiar as the stops on the No. 6 train: unemployment is the lowest it has been in years, the streets have never been cleaner, crime has never, or rarely, been rarer, and the city, which was shrinking, is growing--there will be about nine million New Yorkers a quarter century from now. More kids are graduating from high school, affordable housing is being built--not enough, but more than anywhere else in the country. The city's bond rating is up, and the money we get from it is going down into a new subway.

It is hard for people who don't know what the city was like in the seventies or the early eighties to understand not only how different it seemed then but how tragically insoluble its problems were believed to be. (Lindsay's biography was called "The Ungovernable City.") As Bloomberg said in his speech, New York's decline and fall was for a long while taken for granted, as a fact of nature--and it is a useful reminder to pious liberals of the limits of liberal pieties that the unobtainable cure turned out to be a lot less hard to find than those pieties claimed. A series of booms, better policing, an insistence that the city's problems were things to be solved rather than fled: all this helped the transformation. Despite even 9/11--which turned out to change almost nothing in the city's interplay of money and manners--New York is in good shape, and getting better.

Most of the new plan for the future is admirable, and a lot of it is unexpectedly far-seeing and enlightened. The Mayor believes not just in growth but in green growth: the city will now have a Sustainability Advisory Board. We are already cleaning up the pipes that bring water to town from the reservoir, and are fooling around in Queens with soybean-based biofuels to warm our apartments organically. Of the perils of global warming, Bloomberg said, "It's called global warming, but the impact can be local," and he detailed a scheme to keep us from being washed away by another Katrina.

What seemed a little odd about the plan, and the speech, though, is that the one thing that leaves many New Yorkers worried, or at least uneasy, was nowhere ...