This was supposed to be L.A.’s time. But with events like the Knicks title and Taylor wedding, Gotham is showing it up.
Timothée Chalamet celebrates with Mikal Bridges #25 of the New York Knicks after the victory against the San Antonio Spurs in Game Five of the 2026 NBA Finals at Frost Bank Center on June 13, 2026 in San Antonio, Texasand Katy Perry, or Claude and ChatGPT.
One party spends a lot more time thinking about it than the other, like the ex you tell all your friends you’re over even as the ex can barely remember you dated. The Lakers started and ended the 2010’s with titles; the Kings won a pair too. Tech companies flourished on Silicon Beach. Art galleries moved west in search of cheaper rents.
Hollywood buzzed with the excitement of streamers, money pouring in and quality coming out at an unprecedented rate. The International Olympic Committee said L.A. could host the Summer Olympics for the first time in 44 years. Downtown — — my former employer — thrummed with Pulitzer Prizes, for news writing, for feature writing, for investigative writing.
L.A. supremacy was suddenly about a lot more than the sun shining, as it always has done, as it always will continue to do, or the Dodgers beating an East Coast team in the World Series, as they have always done, as they will always continue to do. It was about a city that, after years of saying it was the new New York City, actually having a reason to think it was. The sight this weekend of the Knicks — the Knicks! — breezing through the NBA Finals like vintage Showtime only reinforced what we all knew.
Jalen Brunson ballhandling at the point, lifting up his team and then crying on the court like he was Magic Johnson, a giddy city and the whole basketball world in his thrall, put the symbolic topper on what was already a pretty tall wedding cake.. Yes, as of several months ago New York got the first big-city mayor with major Millennial appeal and social-media buzz and a plan for the future. Los Angeles has that guy from .
But its best hope for a counter, from the progressive Nithya Raman, can feel a little Mamdani Lite. And if current trends hold she may not even win, losing to an incumbent the city was ready to run out of town a year ago. , but that pairing seems wrong, like bagels and peanut butter, and it only reminds of what’s right, like the To be clear, neither city is a bastion of equality or prosperity in these post-Covid years.
In both places homelessness and mental-health challenges are woefully under-addressed, housing costs are sky-high, ICE is always threatening, wealth gaps are untenable, and crime, though lowered, is still too severe. L.A.
, though, is tragically contending with As NY approaches the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the lowest moment in its history, it has also rebounded in some unimaginable ways — with the now-happy communion brought on by the Knicks, with a Tribeca Festival these past ten days that drew And do we need to get into Hollywood production exits? Those streamers that once flooded Los Angeles with productions are spending less every year, and what they do shoot now goes elsewhere — to London, to Atlanta, to .
A TV writer told me he was lucky that he bought and paid off his small Los Feliz house just before the crash — everyone who came after is taking on that roommate in Glendale. Don’t even ask how physical-crew members are getting by. I’ve lived in both Los Angeles and New York and enjoy each for different reasons. But I can’t remember the rivalry more lopsided.
Then the insult to all injury: Taylor Swift. She and Travis Kelce will apparently spend July 4th weekend tying the knot at Madison Square Garden right in the middle of midtown Manhattan, just a few weeks after the Knicks’ magical run at the place. Yes, America’s version of the Royal Wedding won’t be at the Hammer or the Hollywood Bowl or a beachside villa in Malibu — it will be at the building that sits above Penn Station.
The biggest music star in the country, after jumping and cheering on the floor for the Knicks , will return to that floor to say I do, shunning what could have been a West Coast get-back moment. L.A. knows this this story all too well. And couldn’t have conceived it in its wildest dreams.
That floor this basketball postseason, btw, has also been a one-man show for the biggest movie star in the country, New Yorker, who kept showing up in new street fashions with Josh Safdie, his very New York director from their very New York movie , which they made history with thanks to A24, their very New York distributor, just a few months before another outsized hit, the very New York the biggestFinal, before so much else. While L.A. worries about who it can elect to restore its mojo or whether it should re-sign Austin Reaves.
Talk about a cruel summer. Green Table Cafeto turn it around. New York needs a foil. The Knicks playing the third-biggest Texas metro area in the Finals just isn’t right.
They should be playing the Lakers, like in those 1970’s Finals. Also, evenwould admit the Knicks have a way to go to catch up to the Dodgers and their six years/three titles. The World Cup has been an equalizer, big matches in both cities, like the thrilling U.S.-Paraguay matchup at SoFi Friday and Brazil-Morocco at Met Life Saturday .
And I’m expecting the 2028 Summer Games to be a banger, with triumphant athletes standing on podiums across the city and the Coliseum and SoFi hosting kick-ass ceremonies. I mean come on, we can’t lose to
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