The New York Marathon. The effect it has on the city, at least on the Upper East and West Sides is: everything is quieter because it’s harder to get around. East End Avenue, for example was devoid of traffic at the top of the day. Walking the dogs over to the groomer (Tomy Mauceri on East 81st and York), there was NO traffic. From the vantage point of the dog salon, (this was at 11:30 a.m.) I could see masses of runners running up First Avenue down at the end of the block. Miraculous to this sedentary, occasional stroller.

Just to enjoy the novelty of NO traffic on a street in a city of 8 million people, having dropped the dogs off, I walked back up the center of East End Avenue just like we do on those rare snow days when there are blizzard conditions and no moving vehicles.

It was a perfect day for a marathon. Thinking about history: there is now a whole generation of New Yorkers who’ve never known there NOT to be a marathon. Yet the very first one occurred on September 13th in 1970. 127 runners each paid a buck to enter. Do you realize what a big deal the marathon was NOT in 1970? New Yorkers out for a walk in Central Park that day were practically the only ones aware of it. The course was basically four times around the Park. Fifty-five finished and there were about a hundred people present at the finish line.

Marathons, even running and/or jogging were very new activities even for us hyperkinetic ones. As were athletic shoes, or sneakers as we used to call them. Kids wore sneakers. Tennis players wore sneakers. Your mother gardening wore sneakers.

In 1976, the marathon had so many entrants that they expanded the course to the five boroughs. That year the Men’s winner Bill Rodgers turned in the fastest time in the world and the Women’s winner Miki Gorman set course and race records. By then (maybe before) the winner received the Samuel Rudin Award, a gift of the Rudin family in memory their patriarch who himself was a runner in his youth. By then, the finish line was quite the place to be for prominent New Yorkers, guests of the Rudin family and the city and marathon officials. The marathon had become a feather of good will and public relations in the cap of the city which was at that time suffering economically. It reflected the “we can do it” attitude that community leadership had taken up.

In 1977, there were almost 5000 entrants, the largest in the world. Rodgers and Gorman repeated their victories. The number of finishers increased to 3,885, more than twice the year before. By 1979 the field had grown to over 10,000. Twenty years later, there were more than 30,000 finishers. It is the largest Marathon in the world.

The Marathon was borne out of a time when the country’s political leadership was mired in the deeply divisive Viet Nam War and the nation’s economy was faltering, with the city in very tentative shape. Things did not improve much or quickly for several years but there was, nevertheless this groundswell of popular energy that could only be described as optimistic. Ultimately interest in the marathon sparked the enormous growth in the interest in running so that now the Park’s roads are closed to automobile traffic a good part of the time for the benefit of runner, cyclists and roller-bladers.

Last Friday night I went with my friend Charlie Scheips down to the Pace Wildenstein Gallery on West 22nd Street between 10th and 11th for the opening of painter Fiona Rae’s show “You Are the Young and the Hopeless.” I asked Ms. Rae, a very pleasant lady what she meant by the title. “Well, the world is winding down, don’t you think?” she answered/asked. Coincidentally only hours before I’d read the interview with Al Gore in the Weekend Lunch Interview in the FT. I’ve already mentioned to readers the piece in the New York Review of Books by Bill McKibben (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19596) which makes Mr. Gore look almost like a Pollyana. Ms. Rae hadn’t read McKibben’s piece.

Anyway, it was an interesting juxtaposition: a beautiful Friday night in New York in this sleek, super-duper late post industrial age in the hip and well-heeled Manhattan of these times, and this pretty woman telling me, very matter-of-factly, as if I already knew this, that the world is winding down. And David Geffen has recently sold (only) three paintings from his huge collection for almost $250 million.

I don’t get down to gallery openings very much and maybe that’s why everything about them is fresh. I am very much the tourist (having a good time looking/ogling). Charlie Scheips who does the Art Set column on the NYSD goes to openings all the time. And everywhere -- nationally, internationally. It’s a world onto itself.

The Pace Wildenstein is the result of the merging of the downtown Pace which was founded by the Glimchers and Wildenstein’s downtown position. In the scheme of things, the Two are two of the most important art dealers in the world merged for the contemporary market. Even I know that an exhibition at the Pace-Wildenstein is a very prestigious and important event for an artist.

I saw very few people that I knew from the uptown scene. There were dealers there, curators, some collectors and the crowd that follows the P-W events. Different galleries have different coteries. To the outsider (me), it seems/feels like one big cocktail party in an enormous space. The crowd at all the galleries, downtown or uptown have a decided contingent of the “artistic” looking types. The kind who look like they’ve just come from their studio and their work. Whether or not these are authentic identities doesn’t matter; it’s a look and a feel.

Nightime New York. From the Pace Wildenstein gallery, Charlie and I walked down to the Meatpacking district about eight blocks to the south to a dinner for the artist at a private club called Double 7. This whole part of town not that many years ago was totally abandoned at night except for the few diehards at work in their little lofts-factory spaces or the inhabitants who paid very cheap rents for their outta-the-way addresses. Cheap no more; now making the UES a bargain.

Walking down 9th, off to the right, amidst the whole warehouses and brick garages is the new Frank Gehry- designed office building which still on 11th (and the West Side Highway) going up for Barry Diller’s company. Everything old is new again: still industrial looking, on 14th between 10th and 9th Avenues there are several very expensive women’s boutiques including the now famous “Jeffrey’s” which caters to the moneyed crowd.

Restoration Shabby Chic. I don’t know what else to call it. Whatever it is you’re well aware that you’re in a very popular part of town. By the junction of 14th and 9th Avenue the cobbled streets are flooded with cabs (that you can find uptown at the same hour), arriving and waiting for fares; and people -- mainly the young, the chic and the shameless, not to mention the hip and the restless -- crowd the thoroughfare.

Interior designers Scott Salvator and Michael Zabriskie threw open the doors of the Upper East Side offices for the kick-off cocktail for Lenox Hill Neighborhood House's upcoming 19th Annual Holiday Bazaar Preview Party which will take place next Saturday, November 18th at Sotheby's from 6 to 9 pm.