New York water is famously some of the best and purest water of any major world city. It’s all piped in directly from the Catskills or somewhere.
I have to say the nineties, because that’s when I lived there. I wasn’t a fan of Rudy Giuliani, though. I voted against him twice. I could spend a whole weekend day or day off during the week walking around exploring. I’d do things like walking the Grand Concourse from its terminus in the North Bronx to my wife’s workplace near Yankee Stadium. I met the love of my life there at a Brooklyn keg party in 1995, and witnessed my daughter’s birth at St. Luke Roosevelt in 1998. It was clear then we couldn’t stay, because there was no way we could raise a family of librarian salaries.
But in some places it goes thru some very old pipes.
My favorite time was when NY was New Amsterdam.
It was also briefly (for about seven months) called New Orange.
Then it became the Big Apple instead.
As I was skimming the thread I read that as New Cringe. Which would be a really cool name, or nickname, for a city.
In my theme (Discourse-classic) the background is white, the regular text is black, and link text is a too-light blue that invites misreading. 
Which is why I personally bold and underline all the links I put in my posts. Like this New Orange not this New Orange.
Why’d they change it? I can’t say – people just like it better that way.
Few of my brushes with NYC pierce the bubble of JFK, so my opinion is almost entirely based on pop culture. So it’s naturally going to be the 1970s. The New York of Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, the Ramones, Patti Smith, and Andy Warhol. Despite (or maybe because of) the garbage strikes, mob killings, muggers, dirty subways, municipal bankruptcy, heroin dens, and Son of Sam, NYC in the 1970s sounds like one of the most exciting places to be in History.
Based only on the movies (On The Town e.g.), I’d say the 1930s and 40s were a pleasingly bustling and excitingly modern place to be. No doubt the reality was different, but the Deco architecture had to be pretty cool, anyway.
I enjoyed walking down Grand Concourse and looking at the art deco apartment buildings. I remember thing that lots of Yankee players probably lived in those buildings
Mid-80s for me. My brother was living in Queens and working as a film archivist at the Met and I visited a couple of times. We hit all the major tourist attractions and had a fantastic time. It was a major plus having a local as a “tour guide”.
Ask Tom Hanks about it, he visited that era of NYC recently.
Multiple people have written books and articles and social media in the last 10 years about how New York City may, for the first time, be becoming a bit boring or bland or energyless.
There’s the Vanishing New York blog which also published a book, there’s The Fall of a Great American City, and this Harper’s magazine article.
Now that many have shared about their best time in New York City, I’ll get more specific: What’s your favorite decade or year in New York City since (and including) 1996? Even more specific: what were the early 00s like compared to the mid to late 00s or the 2020s we’re in now? Favorite time and locations and events and experiences from that specific more recent period?
How was 2003 Manhattan superior to 2026 Manhattan?
It’s hard to make a comparison as I was 31 and dating my future wife living in an East Village studio in 2003 while now I’m 53 with two kids (same wife) living in Hoboken and spending much of our weekends and summers in the Poconos. But I’m still working 3 days a week in Midtown.
I mean I can’t blame New York that I’m not out until 4am anymore hanging out with 20 and 30 somethings every other night.
I think what is happening in NYC is similar to the gentrification that is happening on my side of the river in Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken. You have a lot of these modern apartment buildings going up with concierge service, self contained amenities, usually some commercial space on the ground level. They tend to be big, occupying most, if not the entire block. You basically never have to leave. And they tend to displace old walkups, hole in the wall restaurants, diners, bars or whatever used to be there. So what you sort of end up with is less of a bustling neighborhood in favor of a monolithic glass citadel with a Starbucks and an Anthropologie in the lobby.
A prime example would be the Hudson Yards complex. It’s like this giant mixed-use shopping mall / office tower complex where an evil corporation in the not-too-distant future would market cyborgs.
I’ve only been in NYC in the early 1980s and throughout the 1990s. I enjoyed NYC much more in the 1990s - I was in my 20s, and we went to NYC about once every 2 months, for touristy things, shopping, visit with friends, to see a show, or even to work. My husband grew up closer to NYC, but had never visited the Statue of Liberty or seen a Broadway show, so for me, it was a place to go because we were nearby and could go. It was almost magical to go in the city at Christmas time and go to the tree and visit FAO Schwartz and look at the department store windows. I went to experience it. Maybe took a few photos, but didn’t spend the entire time looking at a screen.
Visiting anyway is so much easier, now that there’s internet everywhere. So it’s lost some of the mystery. But that’s the downside. Go to any major city, and find the same shops. But there’s a lot more people visiting such places, so that they can get their views. If the tourists outnumber the locals, and the chains outnumber the local shops, the place loses some of its mystery.
It’s not just with you. I live in an older neighborhood in the Tel Aviv metro area. My building is one of the few on our block with an elevator; most of the others are 4-story walkups with independent shops and restaurants on the ground floor. Our municipality just announced an urban renewal project for my block, with a legal framework that requires developers to offer condo owners (which is all of us) larger, better apartments in newer, much taller buildings. On the one hand, I’ll get a nicer, more valuable new place for free; on the other hand, it will destroy my neighborhood and replace it with something more generic. I’ll probably still sign on, but I’m not crazy about it.
As I noted earlier, I survived 9/11 and the blackout of 2003. I have no favorite experiences from that time as they are all traumatic.
I understand everything you say in the last paragraph except this first line- how does ubiquitous internet make “visiting easier?”
Sounds like somebody’s tryin’ to replace your good Old Testament with a shiny New Testament, eh? 
If you don’t know how to use the subway, there’s an app for that. If you don’t know which subway line to take to get to MOMA, Google Maps knows. If you want a good Greek restaurant within walking distance of your hotel, Yelp knows that too. What shows can I get tickets to for tonight? Some site on the web knows, and you don’t even need to know which sites(s) those are cuz Google knows which site(s) those are for you.
Ubiquitous internet (“UI”) makes any city much more approachable. NYC is not unique in that. But a lot of the nature of NYC makes it an especially valuable addition there. You might even say that UI gives the complicated city a simplified UI. 
With the caveat that the street grid makes Manhattan easier to navigate by foot, unassisted, than most other cities. I’d have been lost in Rome or Amsterdam, for instance, without Google Maps.
The apartment I was brought home to from the hospital had a manually operated elevator. You had to pull back a lever to call it to your floor, then turn a handle to open the door, first the outer, then the inside door. Once inside, you had to remember to close the outside door (!!!) then the inside door, then press a very big button for your floor, then pull another lever to send the elevator car to another floor.
I was born in Manhattan in 1967. I have to say that’s my favorite year.
My favorite decade is the 1970s. I was a kid, and I just hung around with the other neighborhood kids. We weren’t helicoptered by adults back then, and all ages hung out together, so if it seems dangerous to send your 3-yr-old outside to play alone, she was very soon meeting up with the gang that included kids up through about 12, maybe 13. Once they were in high school, they stayed with other high schoolers, and some of the 13-yr-olds hung out with them, because, teenagers.
We played stoop ball, and dodge ball, kick the can, just in the street or alley. If a car came, we got to the sidewalks very fast, and it was mostly local traffic who knew to watch for kids. I don’t remember anyone ever getting hurt playing in the street, but once a girl broke her arm falling off a swing at the playground at a school (not during school-- on a weekend; there were no fences back then).
We pooled any money anyone had, and bought candy from newstands, or if we had enough money, then candy, soda, and caps for rockets and pistols from bodegas-- sometimes fresh fruit in the summer. In the summer, also things from the ice cream trucks.
When there would be a kids’ movie playing someplace, most of our parents gave us money for a ticket and a snack, and bus fare. No one complained about a bunch of kids on the bus, because we behaved ourselves. The older kids either stood, or let the littler kids sit on their laps. I distinctly remember being 5, and tall for my age, and sitting on a bus, when an old woman got on, and a bigger kid, about 10 tells me “Hey! get up!” So I hopped up to let the elderly woman sit, and felt glorious about being inducted in to the “old enough to stand” crowd.
Sometimes we walked to the movies, though. Anytime the theater was close enough, we pooled bus fare to get tickets for kids whose parents wouldn’t give them ticket money. (Usually because they wanted them outside running around, not sitting down for 90 minutes; not because they couldn’t afford it.)
We played with old tires, and built forts from the debris from construction sites. I think it was the last decade in the US that kids got to play with stuff like that. The 80s ushered in the sanitized toys, and everything planned ahead of time.
But for the first time, egalitarianism was encouraged-- encouraged by parents, and adopted by kids. Girls could play with anything, and be leaders, and boys could be nurturers.
The 1970s was a transitional period where I really think we got the best of the old and the new. We had vaccinations, but could still play in the mud. There was much reduced stigma on children born to unmarried parents, but we didn’t have every moment scrutinized. We still had lots of independence, but we also had cable TV.
The leader of the gang when I was little was a girl named Michelle. I thought she was the greatest person in the world, and did things to curry her favor. When she started high school, a boy named John took over. John, I could actually see was a flawed human, and I remembered when he was younger, but he was good at the job too. I didn’t suck up to him, though.
When I was 9, we moved to Queens, and the “magic” part of my childhood ended.
Wow-- I did go on. Thanks to everyone who read this far!