I walked around Soho, Tribeca and the World Trade Center yesterday.

Soho is still enormously crowded with shopping, tourists and black leather jacketed Long Islanders with frosted hair. There are some unique stores. But many other retailers are just international chains, with enomous loft showrooms, such as Apple and Patagonia.

Compared to atomized Los Angeles (why bother comparing?) the streets are vibrant and stimulating. You don’t know what you will find when you turn a corner. There are hidden jewels in every corner: Bakeries, gelati, cheese shops, bars, galleries.

In Tribeca, more high end shopping and pristinely elegant modernism. Architecture is moving beyond mere contextualism and actually building in the present tense. But these are for very wealthy people. It’s a neighborhood of young money, older money, celebrity money, modeling money, finance money, legal money, trust fund money, divorce settlement money. But it’s the brightest, cleanest, and most historic section of Manhattan, the most interesting example of taking old industrial buildings and putting them to newer, more lucrative uses.

The World Trade Center area is more crowded with tourists than before 9/11. Before the attack, this section was dominated by the windy, bleak and brutalist twin towers. There was no life on weekends. Now there are thousands who come here to see the site of the tragedy. Business is returning to “normal” but imagine that one walks in the shadows of the event that precipitated our newest war. Thousands died in one day from the actions of maniacs, now tens of thousands have died from the false reasoning that led to our invasion of Iraq.