As The New York Sun begins today its sixth year of publication, we find ourselves thinking of the morning on which the newspaper was originally set to be capitalized. A meeting had been set for September 11, 2001. As we were setting out for the law offices at which this event was to take place, our cell phone rang. It was the company’s confidential secretary, Patricia Kabo, calling from her car on the New Jersey Turnpike to tell us that if we were thinking of going downtown, we should avoid it. An airplane had just struck the World Trade Center. In the desperate hours that followed, we realized that one of the many casualties of that terrible day might be the dream of a new newspaper that would make a priority of New York City itself.

And then an inspiring thing happened. A city that had just taken a blow to its heart like no American city had ever taken began to pull itself together. In the ensuing weeks, it became clear that the group that had come together to undertake the Sun was summoning its spirit in the way millions of other New Yorkers were doing at the dawn of a new war. The Sun was capitalized on October 1, 2001, and on April 16, 2002, our adventure began. The city was even then reeling from the attacks and from the bursting of the stock-market bubble that was the signature of the end of the 1990s. Unemployment in the state was at 7.7%, and the city’s budget would soon be facing a gap of billions of dollars. The average sale price of a Manhattan co-op apartment was about $700,000. Foreign tourism to New York had plunged to a mere 5.1 million visitors.

What a story it has been since then, a story of the true grit of New Yorkers, of the dynamism of a city and of its growth. Unemployment statewide is down to 4.9%, a historic building boom is in progress, the average sale price of a Manhattan coop is about $1.1 million, a new subway line is under construction, and the city’s tourism agency projects 7 million foreign visitors. The big question facing city and state governments is how to allocate multibillion-dollar surpluses. Government — personified by such leaders as, among others, Mayor Bloomberg, Governors Pataki and Spitzer, and President Bush — deserves credit for some of the success, but behind the remarkable resurgence of New York City in the past five years are also a series of decisions by private businesses, individuals, and institutions.

On April 16, 2002, there was not a single Apple retail store in the city; now there are two, on Fifth Avenue and in SoHo. Over the same five-year period, the retailer Target opened stores in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx, all places it had no stores five years ago. Whole Foods, which had one store in Chelsea five years ago, has opened three more, in Columbus Circle, Union Square, and on the Lower East Side. A Starbucks fan Web site reports that even that chain, which seemed to be everywhere, has opened about a dozen new locations in the city. Fifty years ago not one of those brands — Target, Starbucks, Apple, Whole Foods — even existed. It isn’t only chain stores driving the city’s growth: Think of all the one-of-a-kind top restaurants that now seem part of the city’s fabric — Per Se, Lever House, Megu, Telepan — but did not exist five years ago.

In an editorial like this, one can name but examples. The city’s cultural institutions and their private backers have advanced with the times as well. The past five years have seen the opening of the $72 million Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall and the opening of an expanded and renovated Museum of Modern Art, which was an $858 million project. A new gallery of Greek and Roman art is about to open at the Metropolitan Museum. Hospitals have been building, too. The past five years saw Memorial Sloan-Kettering open the 23-story Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center, while New York Presbyterian opened its Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. They were part of a building boom that included Seven World Trade Center and the Bloomberg building.

New York is now the theater of the only full-scale newspaper war in America, with two broadsheets – a goliath, the Times, and our David — two tabloids, the News and the Post, two free tabloids, AMNewYork and New York Metro, along with the Wall Street Journal. The New York Sun may be the smallest of the papers contending in this marvelous fray, but we have won a magnificent audience and are experiencing the fastest growth in the city, with advertising revenues in the first quarter of this year up more than 50%, which is on top of a 50% increase in 2006. The Sun is now a two-section paper every day, with much more arts, sports, business, and real estate coverage than at the launch, and its reach rapidly extending to a national audience via the World Wide Web.

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There is much work to be done, including journalistically, for not everything has changed in five years and the principles for which this newspaper stands – economic growth, modest and limited government, public policies that protect individual choice, standards in education and culture, freedom of religion and peaceable assembly, a strong foreign policy – are in need of an exuberant defense. Today, as it did five years ago, the city has one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the nation, a point worth remembering this tax filing week. The education system, while improved by mayoral control, nonetheless denies parents genuine choice and traps too many pupils in failing schools. While America has advanced in the war abroad, it is increasingly clear that we face a determined and bitter foe. For our part, we have no doubt of the Free World’s cause or its capacity to win.

We thank all who have contributed to this newspaper’s success over the past half-decade. Your editors are hoping the next five years in this city are as dynamic as the last, and we are looking forward both to chronicling the city’s progress and growth and to highlighting the obstacles that occasionally stand in the way. We feel fortunate to live at a time and place that is such a great story. We approach our assignment with humility, recognizing that the Sun is a work in progress. We feel indebted to our readers and grateful to our advertisers, and if the past five years have done anything it is to confirm the optimism with which we began.