Bear Stearns and New York City Cranes: Synchronized Collapse, Deeper Metaphor

The timing couldn't be more remarkable or suggestive:

• On March 15th, the first Manhattan crane came down, at 303 East 51st Street, killing seven people and injuring 24.

• The very next day, March 16th, Bear Stearns crashed. The company that didn't lay off a soul during the depression signed a merger agreement with JP Morgan Chase for $2/share.

Flash forward to last week.

• On Friday, May 30th, a second crane collapsed. On that same day, the crash of Bear Stearns was inscribed into the annals of Wall Street catastrophe, as the acquisition was completed.

If you live in New York City, and are willing - and able - to look beyond the myth of indomitability, the literal and tumbling firmament should be enough to make you really nervous.

Though we are often described as cynical and skeptical, I find New Yorkers to be dwelling in a co-op'd, condo'd (and now condop'd) den of denial.

Having survived 9/11, and seen real estate bounce to new heights since then - including the downtown area where it was predicted that few would want to live - we cruise around the city with a combination of a teen-age sense of immortality, and our own special brand of ironic arrogance.

We're convinced that real estate prices won't come down - it will just "take longer for something to sell." The very forest of cranes that lost two of its brethren is visual reinforcement that a lot of theoretically smart developers feel the same way. Our belief in the strength of our real estate market is starting to remind me of Saddam's confidence in his Republican Guard.

We're relying on wealthy foreigners to keep buying our apartments and our real estate, and supporting our retailers, hotels and restaurants. We are riding on the exhaust fumes of a decelerating US economy and a declining U.S. dollar, but we are still partying like our buoyancy has something to do with our own accomplishments. We're as puffed up as the over-praised children who attend private schools where "gifted and talented" is spread on as thick as the impasto at our over-praised and over-priced Chelsea galleries.

We continue to allow ourselves to be caught up in our "Sex and the City" mythology - that New York's place in the narrative ensures its continued appeal and potency, that everything will be okay as long as we have our friends and fierce fashion to fall back on, that (supposedly) snappy dialogue is an economic engine as powerful as anything India and China can grind out.

We don't seem to care that we're becoming a theme park city like Paris or Venice or Colonial Williamsburg. Of course, being New York, our Disneyland isn't just about the past; just look at our very own Williamsburg colonizers, who are creating a different kind of tableau vivant theme park in Brooklyn. At the same time, though, any genuinely local, Jane Jacobs-like sense of place is vanishing from our streets as quickly as Beijing's hutongs; our uniqueness is being chain-stored and chain-sawed away from us.

We forget how dangerously over-reliant we are on Wall Street. Virtually all the economic growth of New York - described glowingly, and with reckless disregard for the kinahurra, by Mayor Bloomberg last summer in the quote below - came from the finance sector.

"By virtually every measure, our economy is firing on all cylinders, " Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently told the State Financial Control Board, which has overseen city finances since the 1970s fiscal crisis. Certainly, the city's "fiscal economy" is in peak form, boosting tax revenues by $16 billion, or 75 percent, in the last five years -- most of that the result of economic growth. This has enabled the city's budget to go from a $5 billion deficit in 2003 to a $5 billion surplus in the fiscal year that ended June 30.

We haven't diversified our economic portfolio. We have no high-tech sector to speak up. We're the eventual victims of a dangerous dearth of entrepreneurial start-ups, any one of which could become the next Google or YouTube. We've ceded that to the West Coast, and I would have thought a business-oriented Mayor, who made his fortune in technology, would have done something about it. We're losing energy, revenue, a magnet for attracting talent, the future.

And that's not all. Manhattan is becoming a place for the wealthy and the wealthy alone; Dubai with subways. Our health care system is a mess; just ask anyone who's been in a hospital in New York, Los Angeles or Houston.

So when cranes and Wall Street institutions fall from the sky, it's time to stop drinking whatever passes for Kool-Aid amongst New York's hippest mixologists. It's time to start paying less attention to our cage- and antibiotic-free chickens, and more to Chicken Little.