(FORTUNE Magazine) – Amazing town, New York. Has everything. Best theater, most tycoons, friendliest bookies, action-oriented individuals everyplace you look. (MAN SHOOTS WAY OUT OF JAMMED SUBWAY was a local headline the other day.) Well, almost everything. Truth to tell, we still don't have a highway alongside the Hudson River that a person could drive on from midtown to Wall Street. You cannot now make that drive without passing through local traffic, where you risk getting concussed from potholes and may end up paying baksheesh to the felons who put soap on your windshield if you stop and then wipe it off for a fee after tense negotiations. Of course, we Gothamites are also famous for our bleeding hearts, and that is why we have these traffic problems. We had half a mind to develop a super- duper project called Westway and actually spent over a decade studying its deeper meaning but finally gave up after endless wrangling about the damage it might do to little fishies in the Hudson. The ''juvenile striped bass'' could be adversely affected, nobly ruled federal Judge Thomas Griesa in a landmark decision instantly entitling him to profile status in the New York Times. In brief, we forewent Westway to protect our finny friends. Big, eh? Possibly some heartlanders will think we are inventing these details, but no. If you have a computer and a Nexis machine, you could spend all day retrieving news stories about bass protection here in the Big Apple. A highlight was the prolonged argument about significance. It seems that the Army Corps of Engineers initially produced a ''draft environmental impact statement'' where somebody said the project would have a significant impact on the bass. In the final version of the statement, the Corps said the impact would be minor. It then argued that the first time around it had been using ''significant'' only in the statistical sense, meaning it was describing phenomena that were measurable but not necessarily major, but of course by this time the bass brigade was tooting tunes about cover-up and Judge Griesa sang along. Question: why is the present writer raising this subject at the present moment? Answer: he is just free associating. Those arguments about juvenile bass and significance began swirling around in his cortex the other day when he picked up a Times and read that commercial fishing for striped bass in New York may be banned because they tend to contain unsafe levels of suspected carcinogens called PCBs. ''Striped bass are especially vulnerable to polychlorinated biphenyls,'' the paper learnedly explained, ''because they spawn in the Hudson River and stay there longer than other fish.'' They sound even more dangerous than potholes.