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After Harold Hayes (with some help from Felker) made Esquire the king of hip in the '60's, Felker duplicated that achievement in the '70's—and simultaneously invented the modern city magazine.

He loved the right writers, and the right writers loved him: Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Aaron Latham, Nick Pileggi, Dick Reeves, Dick Schaap, Andy Tobias, Mimi Sheraton, John Simon, Judith Crist, and many more. Before anyone had heard of Woodward or Bernstein, these were the bylines which convinced kids like me that writing just might be the best profession you could aspire to.

For a brief moment nothing mattered more in Manhattan than a cover story in New York magazine—especially if it was Tom Wolfe skewering the Bernsteins as the "spic and span" employment agency (because they knew how to find white servants for their friends), or Gloria Steinem getting Pat Nixon to declare that Mamie Eisenhower was the woman she most wanted to emulate—"because she captured the imagination of America's youth."

Felker loved stylish stories—especially the ones that made fun of cultural icons—and the irony that permeated his magazine was quickly imitated by scores of other dailies, weeklies, and monthlies. And after Abe Rosenthal re-invented the New York Times as a four section paper, with "Weekend," "Living," "Home" et al—he bragged that he had stolen every good idea Felker had ever had.

Felker created his version of the New Journalism when the original New York became the hip Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune in 1964. It was the polar opposite of the Times and the New Yorker, and Wolfe skewered the latter in a piece that was hilarious, although the debate about Wolfe's devotion to actual facts in that article continues to this very day.

That was a common problem with the less-talented new journalists inspired by the New York model—the ones who loved the new freedom to write unexpected sentences, but never understood that the exercise failed if it wasn't bolstered by equally imaginative (and stringent) reporting. Many of these imitators also tended to forget that it is often possible to find a subject to write about that is even more interesting than yourself.

After the Trib died Felker brought New York back as a stand-alone glossy. Milton Glaser was his essential collaborator, giving the magazine great covers, a clean typeface, and a powerful design. Felker understood how much the tiny things mattered. Therefore, every story with a cover line got a different couplet in the table of contents, and then a different deck above the piece: nothing was ever repeated. This was a beautiful way to draw the reader in, even before you had read the opening sentence of the piece.

It was a terrible day in Manhattan when Rupert Murdoch managed to steal Felker's creation away from him in January, 1977. Since then New York magazine has had its good moments and its bad moments, but never again would it matter as much as it did for a brief, shining moment under Clay.