On my desk is a small reproduction of a picture called ““Winter Scene in Brooklyn,’’ painted by one Peter Gay between 1817 and 1820. The work is a direct imitation of Pieter Brueghel’s paintings of village life in the Low Countries, complete with stacks of logs, horse-drawn sleighs, chickens pecking at a few seeds of corn and–nice Brueghelian touch–a young boy, flat on his back with his legs in the air, having slipped on the ice. Squint a little, imagine a hunting party and a stack of pies on a tray, and you could be back in Brueghel’s Flanders.

Which, of course, is the point. The distance between early-19th-century New York and 16th-century Amsterdam is not as great as you might think. New York is an old town. It was founded as a European settlement within the lifetime of Pieter Brueghel’s sons (painters themselves) and by the time it fell to the British in 1664 was a thriving, cosmopolitan place. The Dutch influence extended well into the 19th century; at the very time that Gay was copying Brueghel, Washington Irving was writing the tale of Rip van Winkle, the great folk story of Dutch New York. And if you drive around New York, or wander up the Hudson, you can still see places named by or for the Dutch everywhere–Harlem, the Bronx, Peekskill, Yonkers, the Catskills and so on.

Not that New York–even old New York–was ever just a Dutch town that the British took over. There were African and Jewish families in the city from the 1650s, while in lower Westchester County, my neck of the woods, French Huguenots founded their own town–New Rochelle–in 1687. (Details of all this, including Gay’s painting, can be found in a superb new book, ““Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,’’ by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace.) So long, long before enormous waves of immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Britain began pouring into the city between the 1830s and 1850s, New York was a city of the world.

Hell, why be modest? Not a city of the world; the city of world. For New Yorkers, the idea that globalization is a new and unsettling phenomenon makes no sense. This has always been a place that lived by its ability to take people and goods from everywhere else, polish them up and send them on their way to conquer new territories. New York is the best proof imaginable that men and women can swirl turbulently around the world, and yet still hang on to what it is that defines their sense of self. (On a newsstand in my suburb, The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold, familiar in the city since the 1850s, nestles alongside the Daily Mail, indispensable helpmeet for today’s British nannies in the neighborhood.) For true New Yorkers, the shrunken world holds no terrors. It’s familiar.

In fact, here in New York, if you’ll allow another bit of immodesty–and if you won’t, tough–we’re feeling rather good about ourselves. The city is prosperous, crime is dropping fast, neighborhoods echo to the happy sound (even in winter) of hammer on nail, as everyone spends their bonuses on home improvement. We enjoy the fact that Madison Avenue has become one of the great shopping strips of the world; we rejoice (at least, some of us do) that the miserable, tawdry streets around Times Square are being cleaned up. We hold our noses at the awful smell coming from Washington, D.C., and try our best to ignore it. We tell everyone who asks that our two senators, Pat Moynihan and Chuck Schumer, are just about the only people who talk any sense down there. We know today’s mood won’t last; even when there’s money about, there are plenty of neighborhoods in the city and its suburbs whose conditions would shock, say, the Dutch descendants of those adventurers who first landed here. But (if you don’t mind my speaking on behalf of a few million souls) we think this is a pretty good time to live, work and raise children in New York.

One thing we’ve always known: New York is a great place to base an international news magazine. Everyone admits (that bad smell from the Potomac again . . .) that politics, national or international, helps to shape the world. But none of us lives by politics alone. In the shrunken, globalized world, economics and finance, art and theater, science and technology provide the ties that bind us together. New York is, if you like, the knot at the center of those ties–a city that has always been a financial and artistic center, and which in the last five years has seen something of a boom in new technology, too. The euro, e-commerce and Nicole Kidman–we’ve got ’em all. Besides, if you’re in the global media business, New York is pretty much the only place to be. ““Most of the world’s top media companies,’’ wrote Emma Duncan in The Economist last year, ““operate from a rectangle 20 blocks south of New York’s Central Park and four blocks across.''

We’re just at the northwest corner of that rectangle, sitting above a quirky bookshop (old New York) and a computer store (new New York). But if you never come anywhere near Gotham, you can at least let us know what you think of the job that we do. Any time, but especially at the start of a new year, ““only connect’’ is a principle from which all of us can benefit. We love to hear from our readers about our performance, and how we can make it better. Mail is fine; e-mail (my address follows) is even better. On to a terrific 1999 for all, in New York or out of it.