Moreover, Grand Central Terminal, which is in the heart of East Midtown and handles a large portion of the city’s commuter traffic, could accommodate dozens more trains. For example, on a typical weekday at 3 p.m., its 67 tracks and 44 platforms send only 10 trains an hour to the suburbs. Tourists do stop and stare at the station’s world-famous 128-foot ceiling, but part of the attraction is the dense human symphony on the concourse.

Third, while the historic preservation achievements of the past half century have been remarkable, the local effort has moved well beyond its original purpose. Landmark designation now covers more than 31,000 properties across the city. Its goal seems to be to preserve anything that will maintain the streetscape, whether or not the individual structures have significance. Entire blocks are frozen on the logic that the first buildings ever put there are also the best that could ever be imagined there.

Landmark West, a preservation group on the Upper West Side that has helped increase the area’s buildings designated as historic from 337 in 1985 to almost 3,000 today, is frank about its objective to designate more buildings as landmarks and more neighborhoods as historic districts. Presumably, its leaders would be happy to stop any change at all between 59th Street and 125th Street.

New York has long had its opponents of change. The Woolworth Building, one of the first modern skyscrapers, broke with tradition when it opened in 1913, starting a new race to the sky. But excessive height frightened some people, so in 1926, the Municipal Art Society and the City Club collaborated on a plan to restrict new buildings to 10 stories or fewer.

Had they succeeded, we would never have seen the Lever House or the Chrysler, Empire State or Seagram Buildings. Rockefeller Center obliterated its streetscape and required the demolition of hundreds of individual brownstones. Few cared. New York was going where no other city had ever been.

Is New York still the wonder city, the place that celebrates the future, the city that once defined modernism? Or should it follow the paths of Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and Savannah in emphasizing its human scale, its gracious streets and its fine, historic houses?

The answer for a metropolis competing on a global scale must be no, because a vital city is a growing city, and a growing city is a changing city. When Henry James returned to New York in 1904 after a long absence in Europe, he discovered that the city of his youth had “vanished from the earth.” But in its place a powerful new metropolis was emerging, with a skyline unequaled at the time.

That was the nature of New York then, and it remains so today. Those who oppose changes like the East Midtown plan may love New York, but they don’t understand that they are compromising its future as the world’s greatest city.