Excerpt from Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about gentrification and “Gothamitis”:

By a city we don’t mean, or just mean, a place where many people live; we mean a place where many kinds of people live, all more or less on top of each other. Though Mrs. Astor knew nothing of the Lower East Side, and the Lower East Side could only dream of Mrs. Astor, they were still nodes on one grid. In the course of any even semiconscious wandering through the city—much less the kind of conscious wondering that marks the city’s poetry and literature from Walt Whitman to Alfred Kazin and beyond—each group bumped visually and tangibly into the other. Only twenty-five years ago, a walk from Tribeca to SoHo and the Lower East Side would show as many kinds and classes—rich, aspiring, immigrant—as it had a century before; now that walk is likely to show only the same six stores and the same two banks and the same one shopper.

Join Gopnik and fellow New Yorker staff writer Patricia Marx for a discussion on what they love—and hate—about living in New York next week at the Y.

[Adam Gopnik and Patricia Marx: At Home in New York: 1/23/07]

Related: Podcast of Nextbook’s Adam Gopnik interview with Sara Ivry. Also, check out their favorite audio segments of 2006.