Around 1900, writers for "Harper's", "Century", and other magazines took middle-class Americans on "safari" through Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side. Later, at the dawn of the talkies, one of the most popular genres was the gangster film, through which the city was often portrayed as a powerful force that sent poor souls to their doom. With the urban disturbances of the 1960s, popular culture took another look at the city and decided that from Detroit to Watts to Harlem, the problem had a different face. Filmmakers offered a more nuanced view of the city, with Scorsese and Coppola paying homage to an old neighborhood of wise guys and goodfellas, and Woody Allen offering the city as a home of urban aesthetes.On television, crime shows (from "The Streets of San Francisco" to "NYPD Blue", "Cops", and all the "CSI" programs) have for decades rooted their separate identities in the crime-ridden city. Yesterday's foreign threat to the body politic is today's jaded suburbanite, and this work considers the current development of the "cyber-city" where urban exiles use their computers to re-imagine the cities of their youth as safe, warm places where "we never locked our doors." The "City" continues to thrill and repulse, and even the Internet once again reduces the "mean streets" to a titillating story arc.