This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. In the eyes of its many critics, New York City has always been both too American and not American enough. It’s the place where the pursuit of profit curdles into greed—where hustlers, financiers, and real-estate speculators conjure fortunes out of thin air. Just as often, it’s dismissed as too crowded, too diverse, and too entangled with the wider world to fit the vi