It feels a bit like Los Angeles here in New York these days. It was bad enough when people started getting Botox injections. Then Monica Lewinsky moved here. Lawyers and bankers stopped wearing neckties to work. The next thing you know, Mayor Bloomberg made a pitch for the Big Apple to host the Academy Awards, a symbol if ever there was one of the star-obsessed culture of the City of Angels. He’s also trying to lure the Democratic National Convention, which was in Los Angeles the last time around. Now, our mayor is trying to import L.A.’s health fanaticism to the city that never sleeps by outlawing smoking in our bars and restaurants. And here, we’ve always thought that one of the joys of living in New York — whose residents are likely to prefer hot dogs and pizza to any fruit other than the Big Apple — was the ability to enjoy a near total disregard for our own health and the health of others. Suddenly, however, one feels out of place in the city without a stock of mineral water and a health-club membership. At least if we get the convention, the nomination won’t be decided in any smoke-filled rooms.

A compliant City Council seems likely to give Dr. Bloomberg the smoking ban he wants. This leaves us to ponder what he will prescribe for the city next. If he keeps looking to Los Angeles for ideas on civic innovation, the next step will be to ban smoking in city parks, as that city is in the process of doing. If Mr. Bloomberg must borrow, however, there are several aspects of Los Angeles that we’d be happier to see imported. Cheap and easily available off-street parking, for starters. Or decent Mexican food. Or, more seriously, the Los Angeles tax structure, which is less confiscatory than is New York’s. For a while, it was the City of Angels that was aping New York, going so far as to build a subway of its own and to open an outpost of the Sturgeon King known to Upper West Siders as Barney Greengrass.

No doubt these comparisons — Washington versus New York, Silicon Valley versus New York, Boston versus New York, Los Angeles versus New York — are more obsessed over by those forced by circumstance to live in other cities. New Yorkers tend to be less worried about how we measure up. The city has more reason to be confident now than at any time in recent memory. For one of the best ways to judge a city is by the numbers of persons that choose to live there. New York City’s population is more than twice L.A.’s. According to demographia.com’s analysis of federal census numbers, something remarkable happened between 1990 and 2000. For the first time since the 1860 to 1870 census period, Los Angeles’s rate of population growth was outpaced by New York’s. And this in a decade in which it was perfectly legal to smoke in a New York saloon.