"Manhattan, the new Brooklyn?" asked Time Out New York in 2002, putting their hipster finger on the pulse of one of the most remarkable transformations in American history. Somehow the neighborhoods of Brooklyn have evolved in half a century from squalid residential and industrial slums into the nation's most celebrated urban enclaves. Their very names -- Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill -- now invoke romantic images of lawyers, bankers, artists and journalists living side-by-side, all working for the public good and higher real estate values.  In the late 1960s, their residents successfully halted the bulldozer. They battled the immense, modernist, slum-clearance and rebuilding projects funded from Washington, and preserved instead their local historic buildings, streets and parks. Even the Brooklyn extremes -- fragile neighborhoods like Gowanus and prosperous ones like Brooklyn Heights -- share in the new zeitgeist. Like writer Truman Capote, they say, "I live in Brooklyn, by choice."

Opponents of development have come up with a new way to abuse the city's land marking laws: A landmarked building now may be not just a one-two punch against development, but have a follow-up knockout blow.

New York University just canceled construction of a 40-story hotel/condo tower in Greenwich Village on a landmarked site that had originally called for a similar tower -- and will have a fight on its hands to get anything built, even nearby.

The building was to go up by Silver Towers -- a Modernist residential development designed by architect I.M. Pei and built in the mid-1960s. Pei's original plan called for four towers, but only three exposed-concrete 30-story buildings actually got built -- two for NYU faculty, the third an affordable cooperative for neighborhood residents.

Despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg's eloquent efforts, the controversies aren't going away about the building of a mosque and community center near Ground Zero in New York City -- or in the many other cities where mosques are proposed.

And maybe they shouldn't.

After all, when the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, they meant to maim the world's financial capital. But what they really undermined was the liberal foundation of the world's most open-minded and welcoming city in what is probably still the world's most tolerant country. New Yorkers were shaken to their core by the realization that so much of what they stood for and cherished -- freedom, openness, acceptance of differences -- helped provoke the attack.

Now New Yorkers are being asked for more lenience, and quite a few are questioning the rationale of being generous toward any group or individuals associated with Islam, in whose name the terrorists acted.

Has Coney Island finally been saved from decades of dereliction? From the crowds mobbing the beach for the Fourth of July festivities you'd certainly think so. Coney's beguiling combination of participatory fun (such as Nathan's hot-dog eating contest) and old-time spectacle (like the Burlesque Circus) is unmatched anywhere else in New York.

Its real showpiece is the gorgeous beach. Manhattan artist Simon Levenson, who has been painting and photographing Coney for several years, points out that "if you remove the beach from the neighborhood, it becomes the visual equal of Santa Barbara's or East Hampton's."

Yet while the beach is breathtaking, most of its nearby man-made structures are small, gloomy and ramshackle. What is to be done? Some Coney Island advocates thought they had a solution: Landmark as much of the neighborhood as possible to restore Coney's essence.

In 1965, as pieces of New York history fell without mercy to the wrecking ball, Mayor Robert F. Wagner created the Landmarks Preservation Commission to stop the destruction. Controversial at the time -- conservative commentator Roger Starr once called it "accountable to no one" -- protecting the city's iconic buildings became more popular as the decades passed.

Indeed, 45 years later, Paul Goldberger, the New School's Joseph Urban professor of design and architecture, says we're living in the "Landmarks Era," and that no one any longer has to make the case for the basic value of preservation.

But now we may face the opposite problem: Is too much of the city going to end up landmarked?

This year alone, the commission is considering seven new historic districts or extensions, and 52 individual buildings. Dozens more are being studied. The Bloomberg administration has landmarked more property than any other mayor -- 3,515 structures plus hundreds of buildings in 21 historic districts and four historic district extensions.