What the hell happened to New York City?

In February, a visitor to New York would have found a thriving, prosperous metropolis, almost the cliché of the perfect city. More than 4 million people, a record, went to work in the city’s private sector every day, packing into crowded subways, buses, and commuter rail to do so. Crime was near record lows; 319 people were murdered last year, compared to 2,262 three decades previously. The earliest arrivals of the year’s likely 70 million tourists, another record, were snapping pictures of each other in Rockefeller Center’s iconic Channel Gardens. What could go wrong?