What a week. Andy Warhol’s “Green Car Crash” sold for $71.7 million at Christie’s and Mark Rothko’s “White Center” for $72.84 million at Sotheby’s, including buyer’s premiums. An apartment in the Plaza hotel building sold for a reported $50 million, and, at the other corner of Central Park South, our Gabrielle Birkner reports at page one today, condominiums at 15 Central Park West have sold for a total of $1.8 billion, with one unit going for $45 million and prices reaching more than $3,000 a square foot. And it isn’t just the uptown real estate market that is booming. Even apartments on the Bowery, a street once known for its bums, are renting for $8,500 a month, our Michael Stoler reported last week.

Not only are the art and real estate markets booming, but so is the stock market. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal carried the headline “The Dow Hits Its 46th High Since October.” A subheadline said “Record-Breaking Streak Could Extend Further, Previous Runs Suggest.” The story reported that the Standard & Poor’s 500 index is now near a record of its own.

The cash sloshing around the city is such that, earlier this month, the Robin Hood Foundation raised $72 million from 4,000 in attendance at one dinner in the Javits Center. And that state and city tax coffers are overflowing with surpluses. The unemployment rate in New York City in April of 2007 was 4.2%, according to the state Department of Labor. That is lower than in any April in the past 21 years except for 1988, the height of the Reagan boom, when the number was also 4.2%, but the city’s workforce was smaller by half a million persons.

There are those who will greet all this news as a sign that a bust is coming, that a bubble is about to burst, that a bear market is on the way. There are others who will greet it by bemoaning the poverty that persists amid the wealth. And there are others who will complain that Warhol’s artistry or Rothko’s don’t justify the price.

For our part we are inclined to celebrate this moment in this city’s history. New York has been through lots of hard times, from the Great Depression to the flight and crime and near-bankruptcy of the 1970s to the destruction and death wrought by the attacks of September 11, 2001. There were, after all, times in New York, not that long ago, when the big concern was whether people would still want to come to the city or whether all the businesses and residents would move out to the South, the West, or the suburbs. Now the big debate is congestion pricing to handle the rush of Americans who want to be in New York City. It’s a good problem to have.

Whatever has brought on the city’s prosperity — and we credit the crime control and business-friendly approaches of the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, the end of the Cuomo tax as well as the Bush tax cuts — it sure beats the alternative. New York is the art and financial capital of America, and real estate sells for more in Manhattan than almost anywhere else in the country. It’s our city that is booming, and while it’s nice to be the one buying the trophy art or apartment, the wealth and energy of the city at this moment has a way of benefiting all New Yorkers, infusing the city with a vibrancy and dynamism and sense of optimism that is becoming its trademark.