From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

While heading downtown to interview Mayor David Dinkins for this week's story on New York City, bureau chief Joelle Attinger walked to a subway stop four blocks from the Time & Life Building. As she approached the subway entrance, a police car screeched up beside it, followed by two more. Drawing his gun, one cop dashed down the stairs, while another warned passersby not to enter. Attinger took a taxi.

In two years of covering stories in and around New York City, that was the closest Attinger has come to the random, violent crime that so disturbs the people who live and visit here. "I've never been mugged or anything, and the city doesn't frighten me," she says. "But I'm careful when I'm out in the streets. I'm aware of who is near me, and I never bump anyone. Always being so on guard can become oppressive."

Even so, Attinger most often uses the word great to describe New York. "Its greatness comes from its diversity, its excitement, its extremes," she says. "Millions of people with immense social, racial and cultural differences are living together -- and in collision. It's a long-running experiment."

Born in Switzerland, Attinger came to the U.S. with her parents in 1953 and grew up near Philadelphia. Since joining TIME in 1973, she has been based in Paris, Washington and Boston. She welcomed her transfer to New York in 1988, she says, because "I felt the need for something bigger." Attinger is not defensive about the fact that she, her husband Bernard Cohen and their two daughters, Celia, 6, and Abigail, 3, live across the Hudson River in New Jersey. "Not only is it too expensive to live in Manhattan, but everything is too big and tall for small children," she says. Whenever they can, however, she and her family take advantage of New York's theaters, museums and zoos, those "good things" about the city that native New Yorkers brag about -- but are often too busy to enjoy.

The dramatic black-and-white picture essay accompanying the story is the work of Kenneth Jarecke, who spent two weeks photographing the city. "I always thought I knew how bad New York was," says Jarecke, a resident of Manhattan's Tribeca area, "but I didn't really know until I started working on the streets. You see the garbage and the homeless everywhere you go."