The next time you are in New York City you may be interested to know that you can hire an armored car at a moment's notice, get rid of a half dozen tired neckties by mailing them to an outfit that sends you (for $1) six different ones in return, be taken care of at midnight at the "Dawn Patrol Beauty Salon," or rent a psychoanalytical motion picture to help you understand yourself.

This not necessarily pertinent information is a fragment of the mountainous residue of facts left over from The Big Bonanza, TIME'S cover story on Mayor O'Dwyer and his New York City in the June 7 issue. All of us here at TIME who have to live and work in the city and its environs were very much interested in what the story had to say and, judging from the volume of incoming mail, so were a great many TIME readers elsewhere.

A sampling of your remarks appears in this issue's Letters section, and a further refinement of them varies from outright detractors ("Phooey on New York!") to those who composed toasts to the city they admire. The State Department's Voice Of America has asked permission to use the story in a broadcast to overseas listeners. Park Commissioner Robert Moses, who has his own special view of the city, paused in his labors long enough to declare that the TIME story did not express the community spirit of New York sufficiently. A surprising number of TIME-reading residents, however, sent in a quiet plug for their particular "dignified street in Flatbush," thus suggesting that, large as it is, New York City does have a communal spirit.

One native New Yorker who feels that way about it is TIME'S Terry Drucker, who researched the story. Her faith was somewhat shaken, however, by paragraphs like the following one, in which the writer left the facts for her to fill in: "In a single day New York uses KOMING gallons of water, imports KOMING tons of food, spews out KOMING gallons of sewage and KOMING tons of garbage. In winter it needs KOMING gallons of fuel oil. KOMING million people travel daily on its KOMING miles of subway . . ."

As a result of her labors, TIME'S morgue is now the repository for a mound of such neat notations as this one: "12,000 city street cleaners daily sweep up, pick up and otherwise put out of sight about 5,000 cubic yards of stuff ranging from dead cats to a load of TNT, and including wallets, personal mail, laundry bundles and an occasional keg of beer, as well as the more routine paper and just plain dirt (an average 112 tons of soot cover a square mile of the city each month)."

National Affairs writer Paul O'Neil, a native of Seattle, Wash., was assigned to write the story, and Correspondent Louis Banks, lately of Los Angeles, to do some of the leg work.

O'Neil supplemented his impressions of four years' residence in the city ("Like most Westerners, I'm surprised at how much I do like it") by visiting sections he had missed. One of Banks's assignments was to accompany O'Dwyer through a mayor's typical day. He joined the Mayor at the executive mansion bright and early (9 a.m.) one morning and crept away to bed 15 hours later. At that juncture O'Dwyer had settled down to read a book on traffic congestion in 2nd Century Rome.

O'Neil and Mrs. Drucker also spent an evening with O'Dwyer at Gracie Mansion, which was being redecorated (one room, according to O'Dwyer, looked "like a carload of false teeth"), and when they left at midnight the Mayor uttered the words from which the story's cover caption was taken. Said he: "Do whatever you like with me in your story, but give New York a break. I love it. It's a hell of a town."

Cordially,

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