Okay, maybe Fernando Ferrer, the Democratic mayoral candidate who served as president of the Bronx, is right. There are “two New Yorks.” One New York, of which Mr. Ferrer is a part, thinks that there are two New Yorks, and that this is a problem. Another New York, of which we are a part, thinks there is one New York, and that Mr. Ferrer’s rhetoric is both inaccurate and divisive.

Follow that? Here’s what Mr. Ferrer had to say on Tuesday: “I’ve spoken in the past about two New Yorks. Let me be clear: I am still committed to solving this problem. We don’t want a city that’s an island of the vastly rich surrounded by a struggling mass of working poor desperately trying to get into the economic and social mainstream.”

With all due respect to Mr. Ferrer, of whom we are fond, we don’t recognize the city, or the problem, that he is talking about. The vastly rich in New York aren’t an island. The island where most of them live, New York, is also inhabited, uptown and in housing projects sprinkled throughout the island, with many poor and middle-class people. Many of the vastly rich are engaged with the working poor through philanthropy and through the kind of everyday social and business interactions that knit the city together into one New York – a ride in a taxicab, a morning hello to the doorman, sitting next to a stranger in the movie theater.

What’s more, many of the city’s vastly rich – including Mayor Bloomberg, whose job Mr. Ferrer wants – grew up poor or middle class themselves. Or have parents or grandparents who did. The very “working” and desperate “struggle to get into the economic and social mainstream” that Mr. Ferrer describes is a sign that there is one New York. It’s the one New York at which so many immigrant strivers have chosen to arrive. Many of them have seen their grandchildren emerge, perhaps vastly rich, perhaps with merely a college degree and an apartment.

But most of all with a chance to be part of a city whose greatness is partly that, much as Mr. Ferrer may deny it, the moguls and tycoons walk the same sidewalks as the rest of the city’s residents and that most of us who aren’t running for office recognize that we are one New York.