Sorry L.A., but your rivalry with New York has always been a little one-sided, like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, or Claude and ChatGPT. One party spends a lot more time thinking about it than the other, like the ex you tell all your friends you’re over even as the ex can barely remember you dated.

Still, for a while — a decade, even — Los Angeles competed. Held its own. Showed out. The Lakers started and ended the 2010’s with titles; the Kings won a pair too. Tech companies flourished on Silicon Beach. Art galleries moved west in search of cheaper rents. Hollywood buzzed with the excitement of streamers, money pouring in and quality coming out at an unprecedented rate. The International Olympic Committee said L.A. could host the Summer Olympics for the first time in 44 years. Downtown — downtown! — became cool.

The Los Angeles Times — my former employer — thrummed with Pulitzer Prizes, for news writing, for feature writing, for investigative writing. L.A. supremacy was suddenly about a lot more than the sun shining, as it always has done, as it always will continue to do, or the Dodgers beating an East Coast team in the World Series, as they have always done, as they will always continue to do. (Actually they didn’t do it at all from 1988 to 2020 but have since made up for lost time.) It was about a city that, after years of saying it was the new New York City, actually having a reason to think it was.

Not anymore.

The sight this weekend of the Knicks — the Knicks! — breezing through the NBA Finals like vintage Showtime only reinforced what we all knew. Jalen Brunson ballhandling at the point, lifting up his team and then crying on the court like he was Magic Johnson, a giddy city and the whole basketball world in his thrall, put the symbolic topper on what was already a pretty tall wedding cake.

Cheering on the team and calling their win “HISTORY” was Zohran Mamdani. Yes, as of several months ago New York got the first big-city mayor with major Millennial appeal and social-media buzz and a plan for the future. Los Angeles has that guy from The Hills. OK, had that guy from The Hills. Still, its best hope to that progressive zeitgeist now is Nithya Raman, who could be considered Mamdani Lite. And, if current trends hold, Raman may not even win, losing to an incumbent the city was ready to run out of town a year ago. 

As for those newspapers, The New York Times is more dominant than ever, while The Los Angeles Times struggles. There is the California Post, but that pairing seems wrong, like bagels and peanut butter, and it only reminds of what’s right, like the New York Post.

Even New York’s most notorious political son isn’t around much, hosting birthday parties with UFC fighters on a lawn that blissfully isn’t Central Park when he isn’t getting roundly booed at Madison Square Garden.

To be clear, neither city is a bastion of equality or prosperity in these post-Covid years. In both places homelessness and mental-health challenges are woefully under-addressed, housing costs are sky-high, ICE is always threatening, wealth gaps are untenable, and crime, though lowered, is still too severe. L.A., though, is tragically contending with even greater odds  of more climate catastrophe, adding to the problems.

As NY approaches the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the lowest moment in its history, it has also rebounded in some unimaginable ways — with the now-happy communion brought on by the Knicks, with a Tribeca Festival these past ten days that drew one boldfaced name after another, the festival De Niro co-founded to pick up the city post-Towers still kicking.

And do we need to get into Hollywood production exits? Those streamers that once flooded Los Angeles with productions are spending less every year, and what they do shoot now goes elsewhere — to London, to Atlanta, to New York. A TV writer told me he was lucky that he bought and paid off his small Los Feliz house just before the crash — everyone who came after is taking on that roommate in Glendale. Don’t even ask how physical-crew members are getting by.

I’ve lived in both Los Angeles and New York and enjoy each for different reasons. But I can’t remember the rivalry more lopsided.

Then the insult to all injury: Taylor Swift. She and Travis Kelce will apparently spend July 4th weekend tying the knot at Madison Square Garden right in the middle of midtown Manhattan, just a few weeks after the Knicks’ magical run at the place. Yes, America’s version of the Royal Wedding won’t be at the Hammer or the Hollywood Bowl or a beachside villa in Malibu — it will be at the building that sits above Penn Station. The biggest music star in the country, after jumping and cheering  on the floor for the Knicks (with two of the L.A.-raised Haim sisters, the horror), will return to that floor to say I do, shunning what could have been a West Coast get-back moment. L.A. knows this this story all too well. And couldn’t have conceived it in its wildest dreams.

That floor this basketball postseason, btw, has also been a one-man show for the biggest movie star in the country, New Yorker Timothee Chalamet, who kept showing up in new street fashions with Josh Safdie, his very New York director from their very New York movie Marty Supreme, which they made history with thanks to A24, their very New York distributor, just a few months before another outsized hit, the very New York Devil Wears Prada 2, did the same with the very New York Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway.

I don’t want to say L.A. and its big-budget studio entertainment no longer matter; Disclosure Day just marked the biggest original-movie opening ever in the career of Steven Spielberg. Oh wait, he just moved to New York too.

What about the Olympics, you ask. Surely, this is a mark in L.A.’s column. It was — until it mainly became known for weekly headlines about whether its chair will resign over an Epstein scandal.

This Thursday New York will hold its victory parade for the Knicks, just before its Taylor wedding, before its World Cup Final, before so much else. While L.A. worries about who it can elect to restore its mojo or whether it should re-sign Austin Reaves. Talk about a cruel summer.

But I haven’t lost all hope. L.A., you’ve got DiCaprio and Denzel and Dylan (when he’s not doing ten states in nineteen days); you’ve got the Geffen Galleries, Green Table Cafe and a gaggle of Kardashians. Soon you’ll have the Lucas Museum, which looks like a banger. You can turn it around. You need to turn it around. New York needs a foil. The Knicks playing the third-biggest Texas metro area in the Finals just isn’t right. They should be playing the Lakers, like in those 1970’s Finals. Also, even Spike Lee himself would admit the Knicks have a long way to go to catch up to the Dodgers and their three titles in six years.

The World Cup has been an equalizer, big matches in both cities, like the thrilling U.S.-Paraguay matchup at SoFi this weekend, and the Finals headed for Met Life next month.

And we can expect the 2028 Summer Games to be a banger, with California athletes standing on podiums across the city and the Coliseum and SoFi hosting kick-ass ceremonies. I mean come on, we can’t lose to Paris.