New York City is like a magician performing sleights of hand. Turn a corner and you'd swear you're in a movie. Walk along further and you're on a corner so despairing you forget that beauty ever existed. Walk from the United Nations to the Met and gradually, almost imperceptibly, the city becomes a series of tiny wealthy kingdoms guarded by uniformed door men. The little dogs wear hooded rain coats and the lobbies of buildings are decorated like dowager's salons. The undesirable people patrolling the commercial avenues are nowhere to be seen. The streets are quiet on this part of Fifth, and there is a timelessness to the buildings that seem untouched by the last half-century. Across the street the Park watches over everything like a leafy chaperone.