By Adam Gopnik, from over a year ago in The New Yorker.

It is the sense that the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular.  The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face.  This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens.  For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier.  Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence.  These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

Read the full piece here.