New York Revival

Most publications that die in New York stay dead. But a few, or parts of them, are coming back to life this week. New York magazine, which used to supplement the New York Herald Tribune and later the World Journal Tribune, is reviving as an independent weekly. A TIME-sized 40-c- magazine on glossy paper, its first issue contains 136 pages, with 64 pages of advertising, including the much-prized Fifth Avenue retailers. After an inventive promotion campaign offering winners such awards as a dinner with Mayor Lindsay or a personal bench in Central Park, an encouraging 60,000 people have subscribed. Editor Clay Felker hopes that newsstand sales will boost circulation to more than 100,000.

Laid out along the handsome, professional lines of such city magazines as Philadelphia and Seattle, the first issue of New York captures the excitement of the city in a way that few other publications have. It obviously relishes the city's vivacity and variety--and for that reason the reader does too. From the witty random notes at the beginning to the theater, book and movie reviews at the end, the publication is sharply written, crisply edited Tom Wolfe examines the confusion of accents in the city and how they unfailingly give away the speaker's social status. Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder visit "one of the last remaining Old World markers" under the elevated in East Harlem. Gloria Steinem re-creates the years that Ho Chi Minh spent in New York, when he worked as a waiter and laundryman. And a freelance reviewer, Clare Boothe Luce, discovers that John Kenneth Galbraith is a better economist than novelist when she reviews his first novel Triumph, about U.S. fumbling in a Latin American country.

Besides the New York crowd, a horde of columnists disappeared from the New York scene with the World Journal Tribune. Most of them return to the city this week, along with some new ones, in the New York Daily Column, a tabloid devoted entirely to columns and features. Running to 24 pages and costing 10-c-, it will carry such columnists as Joseph Alsop, Joseph Kraft, Ralph McGill, William S. White and Walter Winchell, as well as Cartoonists Paul Conrad and Bill Mauldin. Published by Jerry Finkelstein, a longtime dabbler in local Democratic politics who also puts out the New York Law Journal and the Civil Service Leader, the Column plans an initial press run of 150,000.

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