Hilary Hinds Kitasei travels to the pinnacle of the New World Economy to find out if the big bucks have made the Big Apple turn sweet or sour?

Climb the Statue of Liberty for a panorama of the city... if you can! (Photos courtesy of New York Department of Economic Development)

A class economy
You exploited Asia' battered currencies on the beaches of Bali, Cebu, and Penang last winter. This summer complete the picture of fin-de-siecle, fin-de-millennium global capitalism by travelling to its vortex: New York City.

Strapped into the Continental economy class seat beside me (JY47,000 round-trip, about half the fare to Bali) is a soon-to-retire Japanese civil servant travelling with his wife. In our thirteen hours airborne together, he shares the mission that has lured them on this first trip across the ocean: an appointment with Citibank's personal banking department (minimum cash requirement $300,000).

I'm putting everything into Sumitomo Bank bonds paying ten percent. You can only buy them in the US. He rouses himself hourly to ask me again if the American economy really is sugoi. Somewhere over Alaska I pull out my laptop. Am I going to trade on-line now, he asks. It's a thought. After all, this brand new Boeing 777 boasts a telephone in every arm rest which I can use to call the ground, but also to any other seat on the aircraft. I consider ringing up a stranger in business class to ask for some investment advice.

Knowing that "aggressive" is the explicit requirement of half the jobs listed in the classified section of the New York Times, I am naturally afraid of being eaten alive there. My fears turn out to be groundless. The natives assembled to greet us at Newark Airport have no interest in us. Tremendous women in uniforms cruise aimlessly in go-carts around the airport. Inspectors sigh heavily and have trouble lifting their rubber stamps. No one I see could catch a vole for supper.

Continental flies into Newark, New York City's cheapest and most convenient airport for getting into downtown Manhattan. For $8, the Olympia Airport Express Bus carries me across the New Jersey meadowlands-once notorious for the unbelievable stench of offal from its meat packing plants, but now protected wetlands-toward the glittering skyline of Gotham.

Bull markets and bathrobes
The bus brings me right to the entrance of the World Trade Center, the very parking garage into where Islamic terrorists drove car bombs seven years ago. But if they rocked the foundation of the two 107-story towers, they only fortified the self-confidence of the financiers forced to grope their way down the black stairwells.

The Marriott Hotel is actually in the World Trade Center, thus affording the full experience of being in command control central of the New World Economy. Stroll through the lobby in your bathrobe in the morning and mingle with the masters of the universe: currency speculators and options analysts, hedge funders and trust fundees, arbitrageurs, old-fashioned equity traders and bond salesmen. Pick out the newly-minted lawyers and accountants who make more than the president of the United States and wear suits that cost as much as the kind of cars I buy. Spot the information-anythings who can wear sneakers and tank tops and get signing bonuses every time they jump jobs because they're so in demand. Twenty-nine year-olds anxious because they haven't taken their first company public. Good luck finding anyone clerical. They've all been shipped to data warehouses in the outer suburbs or call centers in South Dakota. Here a marriage is a merger. Everyone's looking for partners but no one needs a spouse.

Zoom 110 stories to the "Top of the World" in 58 seconds for the best view of the city short of a helicopter. Walk over to the New York Stock Exchange and ask what you have to do to be the one to clang the opening or closing bell and wave to your mother on all the financial news networks. Ask what happens to the bell when the exchange is open 24-hours a day. Wander down the old, narrow streets around Wall Street, whose now-outmoded buildings house the people who are either so rich they don't need three feet of floor space and ceiling space for computer cables, or so marginal they don't get it. Have a drink at Fraunces Tavern and wander around the crooked gravestones of the old church yard. This is as old as New York gets.

But then marvel at the World Financial Center and newer buildings that were created in anticipation of this great era. Admire the remnants of an earlier energy-conscious era, just one decade ago, like lights in offices that go on when their sensors detect the warmth of bodies. (A friend who works at American Express complains that because she is so thin, when she's the only one left in the office she has to keep leaping up and doing jumping jacks to keep the lights on.)

Walk west to the Hudson River promenade, the southernmost section of the serpentine riverfront park that now stretches almost unbroken from the tip of Manhattan all the way to Albany. This is Battery Park City, a hygienic new development of apartment buildings and amenities that deliberately replicates suburbia for financial workers without the time to commute there.

The Taj Mahal at the north end of the park is Stuyvesant High School of Science, a conspicuous jewel in a New York City public school system which is otherwise decrepit and crumbling. Stuyvesant's students are selected by city-wide examination. They typically represent the most ambitious children of the most ambitious immigrants, and regularly sweep the most prestigious national awards. The school was relocated here only recently, the decision of some forward-thinkers who understood the benefit of exposing students to the what could be theirs by leapfrogging to the top of the new knowledge-based economy. What they didn't anticipate was that these kids would be spinning Internet companies before the end of their freshman year.

Mergers and acquisitions
The best place to shop in New York is also in the neighborhood: Century 21, aka "New York's Best Kept Secret," facing the east side of the World Trade Center. It is a discount emporium packed with Europeans, South Americans, Arabs and Japanese snapping up thousand-dollar men's Italian jackets for $50 and such. But to really experience unfettered American consumption, take the hourly free shuttle from the Port Authority to Ikea in New Jersey. Stake out the parking lot and watch registered Democrats load monster mini-vans and sports vehicles with the output of the Asian economies. Share their pain over the cost of gas this summer ($1.25/gallon). Thank them for keeping the rest of us afloat.

The best places to eat in New York are within a radius of fifteen blocks that encompasses Tribeca, Soho, Chinatown, Little Italy, the South Street Seaport, and the Lower East Side. The cheapest and best this summer are Vietnamese joints in Chinatown-anything starting with Pho. Just look for a line and get in it. Go out of your way to find the one outside Saint's Alp Teahouse at 51 Mott Street in Chinatown. Hoping to knock Starbucks out of the water, and perhaps cash in on Monica, this Taiwanese tea house has developed tea-based drinks that are, well, startling. Thick straws deliver warm mouthfuls of huge pearl tapioca.

Little Italy has been virtually swallowed by Chinatown now. In his relentless campaign to drive crime from New York, Mayor Giuliani even closed down the colorful but notorious rip-off, the San Genniero Festival, that was Little Italy's last stand. But there are still enough restaurants and bakeries with Italian cooks and waitresses who drive in from Long Island that you get the idea. Orchard and Delancey Streets are the remains of the Jewish neighborhood (now the hottest club scene at night) where you can buy a hot dog with sauerkraut or pastrami on rye at Katz's. Don't ask for a shrimp salad sandwich.

Public floatations
Catch the ferry from South Street out to the Statue of Liberty and don't skip climbing it. The excitement is not the view but the panic created when someone gets wedged in the narrow upper reaches of the single lane staircase with no way out. The obvious solution would be to have a frame at the bottom like the one for carry-on luggage when you check in at an airport: "If your ass doesn't fit through here, it won't make it through the stairway beyond the 250th step." But that would kill the fun.

Take another boat to Ward's Island, where for most of America's history its immigrants were deloused, renamed, and herded like cattle. The processing center has been restored as a museum, with a computer archive that lets you punch in your name to trace any relatives who may have passed through.

The World Trade Center, shrine to the New World Economy.

While there is really no need to go above Canal Street for a trip of less than a week, you might want to rent roller blades and head uptown. Stop at last year's hot spot, Krispy Kreme on 8th St. and wait for a doughnut so fresh it burns your mouth. Skate on up to 42nd St., once the tenderloin and symbol of the city's most abject depravity, but now thoroughly Disneyfied. The line to look for here is at the TKTS booth in the island north of Times Square, where you can buy half-price Broadway tickets the day of the show. (Even cheaper standing-room tickets are sold by some of the theatres an hour or so before curtain time.) If you're the type who never pays retail in the other direction, you can pay $400 to a broker for a ticket to The Lion King.

For more culture, keep going north to Central Park. All of the major museums are on or near it. The Natural History Museum is my favorite; the Metropolitan seems to be everyone else's. All of the museums have a free day or evening, and that's when you'll meet the most interesting people. Farther on up, you hit Harlem. Gutted buildings there now cost more than a condo in Roppongi.

At the close of trading
The Continental return flight on Sunday is curiously empty. Not even my Citibank Personal Banking friends show up. Were they offered jobs, as I was every time I turned around? Or did they just want to feel that old bubbly feeling for a few more days? Back in economy, I have all three seats to stretch out in. I can even call myself on the phone.

If the Marriott is not your style, try this gem: Bed & Breakfast in a Chinatown loft run by a couple named Claire and Sam Shaw (she used to be Jimi Hendrix's cook). Clean, air conditioned private room with bathroom and kitchenette. $135 a night. Contact them by phone or fax at (212) 966-6866 or email and tell them you came through Tokyo Classified so they know you're both hip and reputable!