Yesterday was the day that, each year, I look forward to and celebrate as avidly as most people do Christmas or Thanksgiving, as avidly indeed, as any pagan dancing about a maypole. For it signaled the blessed return of daylight-saving time. We lost an hour of sleep, and we gained a world – or, at the very least, reclaimed a city. Now, after an interminable winter, New York is open for business once again.

Yes, I know that Gotham is never less than a hive of activity, in all seasons and in all weather. But it is one thing to use the city and its amenities and quite another thing to truly inhabit the place. In the first case you leave your domicile to duck into a taxi or the subway only to reemerge half an hour later in your workplace or a theater or bar. In the second instance, however, you live at least part of the day in the city itself, in its parks, its plazas, and its streets.

No longer is the external city, the public part of the city, the city part of the city, a zone as hostile to human inhabitation as the ocean or outer space. Suddenly it welcomes us as though we were meant to be there. There are few moments in the year as choice and delicious as that first instant – it has not yet come, but it will soon – when you step out of your apartment, reflexively bracing yourself against the alien element, only to discover that the temperature outside is the same as inside, that the entire city has become an extension of your living room!

There are two New Yorks, the New York of winter and the New York of summer. Because of the temperate zone we inhabit, 16.5 degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer, our year is evenly divided between the two. Each is the inversion of the other, and each is nearly inconceivable during the reign of the other.

New Yorkers tend not to appreciate the degree to which the city changes over the year. It goes far beyond leaves on the trees or snow on the ground. The city sounds different in summer, in the sense that – unless you keep your windows shut for the sake of air-conditioning, as I don’t – you hear the clamor and the stirrings of the street, which, in winter, reach your ears as muffled rumors. Because windows are flung open, the free air is always entering and passing through apartments; there is a sense of movement and changefulness in everything.

The great achievement of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates was to reclaim Central Park, however briefly, from the clutches of winter. At the time of year when the fewest people visit the park, this couple brought in more visitors than had ever been seen there before. But it is really only in the months from mid-April (if we are lucky) to mid-October (if we are lucky) that the parks and public places of the city become our opulent playgrounds.

It is then that there are outdoor concerts and movies, dances, protests, and circuses. It is then that the annual yoga be-in is held smack in the middle of Times Square, marking the Summer Solstice. It is then that the Mermaid Parade takes place on Coney Island and the Million Marijuana March stretches from Washington Square down to Bowling Green.

Perhaps most importantly, the very manner in which we walk in summer is different from the way we walk in winter – freer, happier, more at ease. In winter we rush through the alien element, encumbered by a carapace of layering. In summer we take out time, we stroll, we own the place.

Two years ago, when the American Podiatric Medical Association issued its first list of the 10 “best walking cities” in America, New York quite properly was placed first. In the organization’s newly released assessment, however, we have fallen to seventh place, behind Arlington, Va., which came in first, and even behind Boston!

This is sheer folly. Even if New York has few of the grand boulevards that transformed Paris into a spectacle city, there is something grandiose all the same about the way our avenues unfurl to the point of visual infinity.

The general consistency of Manhattan’s urban fabric, with few abrupt changes, is far more pleasing than the grotesque irregularity of Boston, where it is hard to walk down any avenue for more than five blocks without shifting from residences to high-rises to parks to urban blight. Our streets are generally level, with none of the taxing hills of San Francisco nor any of the suburban sprawl that makes a monstrosity out of Los Angeles.

I am someone who, both by profession and by inclination, walks through the city constantly. Now with the tentative return of fair weather, begins the season of long walks, from my apartment in the east 80s down to the Battery or up to the northern tip of Harlem. Such is the pace of change in the city that the spectacle is always changing. And such is the variety of avenues and cross-streets that I need never take the same walk twice.

I fully understand not everyone shares my affection for warm weather, for cities or for walking. But I do believe cities in general, and New York especially, are never more truly or magnificently urban than on a warm summer’s day.