New York is a weekly magazine concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of
New York City. Founded by
Milton Glaser and
Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to
The New Yorker, it offers less national news and more gossipy, tabloid-like stories, but has also published noteworthy articles on city and state politics and culture over the years. It was one of the first "
lifestyle" magazines, and its format and style have been copied by other American regional city publications, such as
Philadelphia,
New Jersey Monthly and others, although
New York is the only weekly among them and therefore contains more immediate coverage. Its 2005 paid circulation was 437,181, with 94.6% of that coming from subscriptions. The website receives visits from 1.1 million users monthly.
Within a year, Felker had assembled a team of contributors who would come to define the magazine's voice. Breslin became a regular, as did Gloria Steinem, who wrote the city-politics column, and Gail Sheehy. (Sheehy would eventually marry Felker, in 1984.) Harold Clurman was hired as the theater critic. Judith Crist wrote movie reviews. Alan Rich covered the classical-music scene. Barbara Goldsmith was a Founding Editor of New York magazine and the author of the widely-imitated series, “The Creative Environment,” in which she interviewed such subjects as Marcel Breuer, I. M. Pei, George Balanchine, and Pablo Picasso about their creative process. She even persuaded Picasso to donate his three-story statue, "Sylvette," to New York University. Gael Greene, writing under the rubric "The Insatiable Critic," reviewed restaurants, cultivating a baroque writing style that leaned heavily on sexual metaphor. Woody Allen contributed a few stories for the magazine in its early years. The magazine's regional focus and innovative illustrations inspired numerous imitators across the country.[1]
Wolfe, a regular contributor, to the magazine, wrote a story in 1970 that for many defined the magazine (if not the age) "Radical Chic That Party at Lenny's". The article described a benefit party for the Black Panthers, held in Leonard Bernstein's apartment, in a collision of high culture and low that paralleled New York magazine's ethos. In 1972, New York also launched Ms. magazine, which began as a special issue.[1] New West, a sister magazine on New York's model that covered California life, was also published for a few years in the 1970s. Later columnists writing for the magazine included Michael Tomasky (city politics), John Simon (replacing Clurman on theater), David Denby (film), James Atlas, Marilyn Stasio, and John Leonard (books).
Well into the 1970s, Felker continued to broaden the magazine's palette, covering Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal closely. In 1976, journalist Nik Cohn contributed a story called "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," about a young man in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood who, once a week, went to a local disco called Odyssey 2001; the story was a sensation and served as the basis for the film Saturday Night Fever. Twenty years later, Cohn admitted (in a story in New York) that he'd done no more than drive by Odyssey's door, and that he'd made the rest up.[citation needed] It was a recurring problem of what Wolfe, in 1972, had labeled "The New Journalism."
