It can be easy to focus on the glossy residential towers by name-brand architects and the continued presence of $3,000 pumps at Barneys and imagine that the city has been largely buffered from the economic hardships siphoning the spirit of so much of the country. For most of this year, the unemployment rate for New York has sat below the national average. Tourists have come (close to 49 million of them last year). Economists have evinced surprise at what is considered to be a recession of shorter duration and less penetration here.

But as with so much of the business of interpreting New York, the affluent world of Manhattan and its satellites appear misleadingly to represent the whole. The August unemployment statistics, announced Thursday, put the city’s rate at 8.7 percent — again slightly below the country’s rate. In Manhattan in July, the figure stood at 7.1 percent, but in the Bronx the same month, the number remained in the double digits at 12.3 percent. For every month this year, unemployment in the Bronx has hovered more than three percentage points above the city average. (Bronx County has the highest rate of unemployment in the state.) In Brooklyn, New York’s most populous borough, unemployment has not succeeded in falling below 9 percent this year.

And then there is the pronounced and endlessly dispiriting racial discrepancy in the numbers. For the 12-month period beginning in August 2010 and ending in July, black unemployment rates in New York averaged 12.8 percent, more than five points higher than those of whites, while Hispanic rates were close to four points higher than those of whites. The gap between blacks and whites has narrowed since the earliest days of the recession, but only because white unemployment has jumped; ultimately, the recession has just widened the divide.

In the country, New York ranks third behind Washington and Atlanta as a city with a population over 250,000 with the highest income inequality. Manhattan on its own, however, leaves all of its competitors far behind. At $837,668, the average household income (a 2009 figure) of those Manhattanites in the top 5 percent is 81 times as much as the average income of those in the bottom 20 percent ($10,328). Among the lowest quintile living in the Bronx, the figure is even lower: $6,692.