Over the past five years, New York City’s status as America’s cultural and business capital appeared to be in doubt. Some 400,000 people—including many high-income earners—fled the city as crime and taxes surged and quality of life plummeted. Meanwhile, South Florida beat a steady march in various financial sectors and experienced an artistic renaissance.

Beginning this year, however, New York is showing signs of vitality once again. According to an NYPD report released last month, crime rates are down across seven major categories, with shootings at their lowest level on record. Policing is stronger, with teams of cops now a common sight on streets and underground. Murders are down 34 percent and subway crime has fallen 18 percent, with (as of April) no killings reported on the transit system since the beginning of 2025—a first since 2018.

Two recent performances at Carnegie Hall give us reason to hope there is something of substance behind these statistics.

After years of declining quality, audience, and receipts, the superb Swedish singer Nina Stemme, a soprano whose voice has darkened into the mezzo-soprano and contralto ranges in recent years, sang a completely haunting rendition of Edward Elgar’s Sea Pictures, a rarely performed selection of songs based on ocean-themed verses by English poets of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning. After some jazzier songs by Kurt Weill, she followed with her iconic Wagner singing, coursing through the artful Wesendonck Lieder, a song cycle Richard Wagner wrote for the wife of his patron, who may or may not have been the composer’s mistress. No matter the truth of their relationship, the scandal was bad enough that Wagner had to flee her proximity for Venice, where he finished his opera Tristan und Isolde, the archetypical medieval story of unrequited love. Stemme boomed out that opera’s finale death scene—the “love-death” or Liebestod—before indulging the audience with a soulful Sibelius song as an encore.

Conspicuously dressed in evening clothes for a later social event, I fled into the night and stayed out until 4 a.m. —once a virtual impossibility in a city that had suddenly started to sleep—with no difficulty other than the next morning’s hangover. But I was back at Carnegie Hall Sunday afternoon to hear another nearly sold-out rarity, Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt), performed on 18^th-century instruments by the English Concert ensemble, led by the celebrated conductor Harry Bicket. As aria after aria poured gorgeously forth from the stage, telling the story of Caesar’s pursuit of the rebellious general Pompey to Egypt and seduction by Cleopatra to install her as queen, it made me wonder whether New York may yet return as a kind of modern Rome.

To sustain culture on these levels, a city must have secure fundamentals. It must be safe, affordable, and affluent enough to afford such entertainments and distractions. With a mayor running for reelection as an independent on a law-and-order platform, the Big Apple may just make it.