In a week that finally saw the city’s trees fully enrobed in leafy verdure, New Yorkers heard Mayor Bloomberg declare, in an odd accent that struck some ears as slightly Castilian, “Lo mejor está por venir.” Bold words for a campaign ad! Yet Bloomberg was upstaged by Donald Trump, who thrust himself into the ground-zero farce by unveiling his own model of a bigger and better pair of Twin Towers for the site. “I’m someone who believes strongly in great architecture,” Trump said. (Parody is disarmed before such candor.) In more benign developments, The Paris Review, under its estimable new editor, Philip Gourevitch, completed its move from George Plimpton’s house on the Upper East Side to a loft in Tribeca, and Plimpton himself was posthumously honored by the bestowal of the name Cacosternum plimptoni on a newly discovered species of African frog. On 14th Street, two stagecoach horses named Hero and Princess escaped their harnesses and ran amok in traffic before being corralled by cops. In a seeming aftershock from the previous week’s upper-Manhattan landslide, a seven-foot bookshelf in a Brooklyn Judaica store suddenly collapsed, burying a customer in religious texts. (He survived.) Woody Allen spent the week in Cannes, where his Match Point, set in London with a mostly British cast, was rapturously received. Its critical success—in contrast with recent duds like Melinda and Melinda—raises a disturbing thought: What if Woody Allen has exhausted New York as a subject? But this thought must be ruthlessly suppressed. The city is inexhaustible. We have to believe that—as the mayor would say—porque somos nuyorquinos.

Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Articles by Jim Holt
• Table of Contents: May 30, 2005 issue of New York | Subscribe!