ABSTRACT
By selecting Manhattan for its permanent home in 1945, the United Nations (U.N.) officially made New York the world’s preeminent city. It was already considered world class but, with all the major European cities devastated by World War II, Gotham stood out as the sole intact Western center of power, wealth, culture, and hope. In 1949, the writer E. B. White pointed out how ironic it was that, although the capitol of neither a state nor a country, New York City was fast “becoming the capital of the world.”1
