New Yorkers Don't Let a Few Laws Get in the Way

"I wouldn't say New York's as cool as the old stoner days, uh-uh," says Gone, who works as a bike messenger and "world-change activist." "But you need a little weed? Maybe the cops have become a little more understanding."

Now, in truth, much has become pasteurized in New York. Chain stores and banks proliferate like urban kudzu (Manhattan has 25 percent more banks and 80 percent more national pizza chains than it had five years ago). Surveillance cameras are everywhere, and cops conduct bag checks in subways and handed out 1,697 jaywalking citations last year, up from 59 in 1995.

Bloomberg has his own crusades, including a not-noticeably-successful charge against noise. Citations for excessive noise jumped from 4,866 in 2000 to 19,234 in 2005, but a reporter suspended two interviews for this article as a quartet of jackhammers and a car radio with a very insistent bass line threatened his eardrums with implosion. Of late, the mayor has tangled with public school parents, as his officials have wheeled portable scanners into middle schools to search children for cellphones.

"The whole crackdown approach to policing has carried over to more and more aspects of life in the city, even routine school discipline," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Then there's the mayor's crackdown on smokers in bars, which was effective but perhaps with unintended side effects. "The police are too busy going after the cigarette smokers," said Patrick Markee, who works with Coalition for the Homeless. "It's a boon for pot smokers."

Some New Yorkers, perhaps even a majority, actually seem to enjoy a vaguely quieter, slightly more law-abiding city. And it's possible that the cumulative effect of all this legal tightening of screws allows for some loosening.

"I know this is a very strange concept for New Yorkers, but there's been an increase in civility," said Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an influential conservative think tank. "Some specific initiatives and crackdowns might fall away or lose their sense of urgency as the city settles down."

Still, the notion of a settled-down New York City strikes many of its more hard-core partisans as oxymoronic. You want to wait at a red light? Move to Los Angeles. New York's a step-into-traffic sort of place.

"The worst of Rudy's prudery has passed, but large areas of Manhattan became very vapid," says Bill Dobbs, a longtime downtown resident and confirmed New York partisan. "If that kept up, New York City was going to be as dull as D.C."