Once again, New York City is “over.”

The changing face of “the city” -- safer, mall-friendly -- means it's now difficult to differentiate locals from tourists, since the latest crop of "locals" behave like tourists. It's confounding when national media go on about a New York "type" -- feisty, in-your-face, with a thick broad accent -- when that type disappeared from everyday experience about fifteen years ago.

For today's young, ahistorical New Yorker, it's about status quo comfort and name-brand shopping. Eating at Subway or Quizno's is no longer un-cool. There was no protest when the giant Little Caesar's opened on 14th or when the Chipotle and Supercuts opened on St. Mark's Place. Best Buy, K-Mart, Office Depot -- it's all good. When Faux Foods opened on Union Square, it was like the Beatles playing Shea Stadium.

Which begs a question: If what you really want is what you can get anywhere else in America -- and at a cheaper price, with less hassle -- why pay New York rents? A few more ethnic restaurants, a tad more indie film houses, some world class mega-museums you never go to anyway, does not make a compelling case for a city.

Of course, a middle-aged curmudgeon might fantasize that New York's omnipresent realtors are in for a wakeup call once the fourth wave hipsters of the East Village, Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Bushwick, et. al., realize their pricey bohemianism is just another marketing ploy of the New York surreal-estate matrix. Especially once the kids realize there's nothing uniquely "New York" about their rote drinking, dancing and fornicating that can't be experienced just as well in Omaha, Kansas City or Tucson for one- third the price.

But realtors who prey on distressed neighborhoods -- such as the botoxed freakazoids at the Corcoran Group -- have nothing to worry about. There are no genuine troublemakers to protest rent increases here anymore. Renters simply move on, making way for the next cycle of spendy rubberneckers.

Soon -- next year?, next month? -- the diaspora will include moi. In May, 2003, despite serious misgivings -- first elucidated in a 1995 urban jeremiad entitled "Here Comes Everybody" -- I decided to give the city, and, by extension, America, a final shot. My mother passed away the previous Christmas. My politics, my heart, my very DNA were pulling me either across the Atlantic. But before I made that final move, I wanted to test whether I was as prescient as I thought.

I realize now that my premonitions from 2003 were as "on the money" as my predictions of 1995. Because it is unequivocally about money here now. Always was, of course, but in 1980s New York money-grubbing was deftly concealed beneath layers of genuine street life, community, risk, and -- that prized character trait bequeathed to the city by the likes of Plimpton, Capote and Crisp -- wit.

Ever since 1995, the city has not only lost its wit, but its raison d'être (except for those with strong family connections or deep pockets). Most of the innovators that have wound their way into my daily life here -- Apple, Craigs List, Google -- are headquartered in the Bay Area, not New York. Who can honestly say that New York is "the world capital" of anything original anymore. Like Italy's Venice, New York is a postcard of its former self, canonized in TV shows ("Sex and the City," "Seinfeld"), theater ("Rent") and film series (such as a recent New Museum showcase of early 80s films about the East Village art scene entitled "East Village USA"). The more New York becomes egregiously unaffordable for its long-term inhabitants, the more it's reified in mass culture. Paris ("Amelie") knows the drill.

9/11 was merely a pothole in the path of the gentrification bandwagon. It created a pause in the New York hustle. A rare moment of reflection. And hope for civic rebirth. But then the blame was externalized, the pain denied, and New York went on luxury development autopilot.

An arrow had been shot through the city's heart. But instead of questioning the rush towards gentrification, and rekindling economic diversity, historic preservation, and organic community, the Bloomberg-stoked development machine went full bore into killing off all that made the city magical, affordable, and good.

Critical Mass hangs on by a spoke, but the Mayor will eventually litigate it into marginality. Though formerly affordable Williamsburg -- through its eco-friendly Community Plan and protests by the grandstanding Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping -- fights to preserve the neighborhood's light-industrial, ethnically diverse "character," Mayor Mike -- who's never found a pricey development he couldn't embrace -- will eventually get his view-annihilating hi-rises on the East River, producing a privatized, gated, waterfront like you find in Malibu, Palm Beach, or wherever tanned multi-billionaires get their heartless gaudy inspiration.

Lesson learned: Never fall for a CEO-politician who eschews a salary (he's getting plenty of compensation on the back end), nor investment banker lieutenants -- such as Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and Economic Development president Andrew Alper -- who eschew the same. A Mayor CEO, like a President-CEO, is like a fox guarding the hen house: the people lose an essential bulwark against unabashed greed.

Though it isn't totally Bloomer's fault either. The Mayor's predecessor Rudy Giuliani -- for all his pioneering work on crime prevention -- tried to pawn the city's community gardens off to developers, introduced the cabaret license fiasco, and went so far beyond his mandate -- as Republicans invariably do -- that he nearly sucked the marrow out of the metropolis. Bloomberg, with his Street Furniture Initiative, and others like it, is extending the reach of the already overreaching Giuliani "quality of life" campaign by selling off -- or selling ad space on -- prime New York public assets, from underground subway walls to bus shelters to newsstands to lampposts to garbage cans to public clocks to telephone booths, and, soon, J-Lo's prodigious assets. It's nearly impossible to find relief from the advertising overkill, except by cocooning inside one's extortionate rat hole.

Bloomberg has been so successful in suburbanizing and corporatizing New York that you could walk for days in this city and never see a door holder at an ATM machine, never be propositioned for spare change, never walk more than a block to find a chain store, never have someone try to sell you drugs, never see an illegal card game, never see a squeegee guy, a graffer, or a squatter, never hear a car alarm, never see anyone smoke in a bar, or camp in a park, or speak in some uncouth "New York accent." It's paradise, right?

You want to know the telltale signs of a great city? It's a place where you can take time to read a long book, partake in a leisurely stroll, or choose a career you truly enjoy, without a nagging voice inside reminding you of the cost of your monthly rent. It's a place where there’s hint of chaos, more than a hint of irony, and a surfeit of surprise that can't be packaged, pigeonholed, or sold.

Still, with the inimitable, if irascible, Giuliani, one felt that the untamed spirit of Old New York could at least breathe, if not thrive. Under wrinkle-free corporate shill Michael Bloomberg, Giuliani's "quality of life" mandate has morphed into an amoral imperative to raze and build upon all that is not safely, predictably, and manageably mainstream. Under Bloomberg, there's no more shame, no more compassion in the naked city. You got the money, you get what you want. Screw the commonweal.

You might say that in this one aspect the terrorists won. They killed the openhearted New York. In the current climate of permanent homeland insecurity, it's impossible to turn back, should we even muster the will to slow the real estate speculation monster proceeding inexorably like a pavement profiler over all that is bumpy, gnarly, and true.

Then again, maybe I'm just another one of those middle aged cranks (a Luc Sante of the Heartland), as out-of-place and out-of-time as the remaining longhairs spaced out along feverishly gentrifying St. Mark's Place, longing for a mythical era when reasonable rents and cheap eats fostered an edgy livability; an era when history, diversity and culture were as valued as property. After all, my "How It Was To Be Young Then" fantasy neglects that rose-colored anarchy is invariably accompanied by rampant substance abuse, out-of-control homelessness, murder, rape, and infrastructure meltdown. If you lived near Tompkins Square's "tent city," as I did in 1989, you know what I mean.

Maybe it's a Hobson's choice. Maybe it's impossible to marry safety and diversity, quality and community, originality and comfort. Maybe rent control is the problem. Maybe rent control is the solution. Maybe there's a solution in between. These are questions worth pondering, but they are getting buried amidst the frenetic high-rent development proposed in the city right now, and the pricey one-of-a-kind boutiques -- Japanese rice pudding!; Australian ice cream!; hand-made chocolate made by real Nicaraguans! -- spreading like preposterous dotcoms throughout downtown.

Maybe it's time this two-bit Omaha preacher gets off his high horse and accepts that the glory days of Old New York are gone. Maybe I need to stop fighting the new mercenary Manhattan and become a developer myself -- perhaps the only way to cryonically preserve history on my terms -- and, like the investment bankers who ushered in this shallow age of avarice, blow my wad on some aptly named DUMBO condo.

Then I can gouge my own rental robots. And wryly watch them hanker for the same renegade metropolis just over the horizon, just past that new hi-rise, over there past the Ikea, where they used to weld oil tanks, where they used to manufacture war munitions, where they used to shoot dope. Over there, yes, over there.

And, then, as I hike the rent year after year, and put the squeeze on rent control hold-outs, I can track their age-old despair, the crushing archetypal realization that all poses have been tried, sold, and found wanting. The dark realization that it was always about money in the end. And nothing more. And sit back in my hand-made Italian furniture, and read their bitter screeds about the good old days of "Old New York" circa 2005.