The City: Undimmed beacon for dreamers
Katie Wright-Mead wants to act. And so, last October, with the 16-acre scar of ground zero still smoldering, the teenager with long lashes and ringlets in her red hair drove from Fryeburg, Maine, to New York to claim her coveted place in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
"When I realized that I still wanted to go to New York just as badly [after Sept. 11]. I couldn't stay home or go anywhere else," she says.
New York is still New York.
For the newcomer from Fryeburg or Fort Wayne the one who arrives at Grand Central or LaGuardia Airport with determination and dreams New York has always been the place to make it big. It's the stuff of short stories and old movies. It's about the kids who line up for theater auditions along the back streets off-Broadway. About the MBA headed for Wall Street wealth. About the writer, typing away on a Mac late into the night at a cafe. About the dancer whose neighbor below raps on the ceiling as she practices the same moves time and again. And about the new immigrant who wants to open a restaurant in America's most open-armed metropolis.
This is where the best come to compete where the strongest survive and, despite tough times, thrive. Even for the ambitious, it's always been intimidating.
Yet they've always come.
Despite 9/11 in some cases, because of it they continue to stream in.
"We've seen a new love affair with New York post-9/11," boasts real-estate broker Scott Durkin of the Corcoran Group. He sees that love affair in the numbers: Out-of-towners buying residential property in Manhattan doubled in the past year to one-quarter of the company's sales.
Still, it's a tougher place to love than a year ago. Sept. 11 is a somber presence not just in the warrens of lower Manhattan but in the landscape of thought, littered with scary weekly conjecture that some "true believer" would be willing to scatter radioactive debris for blocks around.
Add to that the financial tab of Sept. 11: The city comptroller last week released estimates that the toll by 2004 will be $95 billion economic woes that can be measured in $5 billion city budget holes, long unemployment lines, slumping book and Broadway box-office sales, lagging brokerage commissions, and increasing bankruptcies.
Still, hard times have never stopped people from dreaming with New York City as stage. The current cast of undeterred dreamers includes Ms. Wright-Mead. She's 19 and driven to succeed in New York City. The shock of Sept. 11 continued to reverberate from Manhattan to Main Street, USA last fall, but she kept packing her bags for school. "I knew I'd risk failure if I went anywhere else."
She's got a lot of company from Broadway to Wall Street to New York's ethnic enclaves.
Producers and casting agents say that other than immediately following 9/11, casting calls are drawing as many hopefuls as ever. "We're still dealing with people who come in from D.C., Philadelphia, and all over," says Jaclyn Brodscky of the Bernard Telsey Casting agency. More than 1,000 actors showed up earlier this year for an audition for "Hairspray."
New York's draw in other arts is still strong: The Juilliard School, the nation's premier musical training ground, received 3,700 applications this year, a record number, for fewer than 350 slots. At New York University's creative-writing program, 800 aspiring Fitzgeralds applied for 40 openings, 30 percent more than last year.
Newly minted MBAs seeking their fortunes continue to flood downtown financial firms with applications. The prestigious Wharton School of business reports that close to 25 percent of this year's graduating class headed here. That's about the usual amount despite the fact that financial firms such as Goldman Sachs are contemplating leaving lower Manhattan, despite the wounded Dow and the corporate scandals.
And for immigrants, too, "the streets may be covered with ash, but they're still paved with gold," says Jim Malley, executive director of Esperanza, an immigrant-education center. "[9/11] really hasn't tarnished the image at all and it's still so much better than where they're coming from."
