the city and I don't need to say what city is incredibly expensive and the people are often arrogant for good reason.
for example:
metropolitan museum of art
whitney
guggenheim
museum of modern art
(four of the top 20 museums in the country, probably, and then hundreds of others, more non-tourist art galleries than any other city in the country, the center of the art world)
center of magazine publishing, best newspaper in the country (times), best free weekly (voice), best magazines in the country, center of advertising, financial, television, and on and on.
best restaurants in the country (other than san francisco, but much more variety). only place you can have your choice of, say, guinean restaurants (brooklyn/harlem) or four varieties of thai cuisine (say, woodside and jackson heights, queens) or burmese food (jackson heights, qns) or a district of korean restaurants (midtown), or kazakh food (brooklyn), or a dozen places with a real claim to the best pizza in the country (e.g. nick's qns, patty's, totonno's coney island, ...).
then the night life, the majority women, central park to run and races every week, cheap fares around the world, ...
it's a joke to even try to justify the city, because it is by far the greatest (not the most beautiful--sf) american city.
among the worst, there are dozens of smaller cities and obvious choices, such as gary, baltimore (does have a nice harbor and some parks), newark, yonkers, bridgeport, detroit, ...
but among the less obvious, what I saw of dallas in downtown and around, from running at night, was pretty damn hideous, empty, dirty and dangerous. atlanta convention center area was the most racially polarized city I've seen next to Cincinnati all the way from the hill beyond the university of cincinnati to the downtown and across the river beyond the stadiums. in both places, the only people on the street were poor, black men, as if women and whites were afraid to walk on the street.