Dangerous, filthy and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble: New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next 30-plus years, though, it became a different place --- kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been. NEW YORK, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, Thomas Dyja’s sweeping account of this metamorphosis, shows it wasn’t the work of a single policy, mastermind or economic theory, nor was it a morality tale of gentrification or crime. Instead, three New Yorks evolved in turn.