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I stumbled upon Plaza Garibaldi, the rowdy nocturnal soul of the city. Squadrons of musicians, mostly mariachis in skintight, tin- studded black suits, trawled for customers willing to pay a few pesos for a melody. When they found temporary patrons, throngs gathered, and the most boisterous revelers sang along. It was a crowded Friday night, and the result was the most singular cacophony I'd ever heard.

In Garibaldi's most humble cantina, La Hermosa Hortensia— which dispenses pulque, a fermented cactus beverage created by the Aztecs—a staggeringly drunken man offered me his wife. She demonstrated her eagerness to consummate the proposition with a squeeze of my thigh and a smile, the seductiveness of which was undercut by the absence of several crucial teeth. I refused with as much courtesy as possible, after which the man removed from his neck, and gave me, a string that held an emblem of Mexico's patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Before I went to bed, half-drunk in the wee hours, I watched a lonely group of soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms on drill in the otherwise empty zócalo. Unfortunately, I had to leave the next day. I had been utterly seduced by the constant sensations of contrast, surprise, even tumult. Within three years I would be living there.

That Mexico City was such a beguiling place came as a complete surprise. The 1980s were surely the worst moment in its history. Three million autos, the thin air of its 7,300-foot altitude, and the thirteen thousand factories that ringed the valley in which it is situated created an ecological nightmare with toxic levels of pollution.

The pumping of a billion gallons of water per day from as far away as fifty miles caused the city to sink 3.5 inches a year, and the lack of adequate plumbing and drainage made it a nightmare for many of its residents.

Said to be the biggest city in the world, by the early 1980s Mexico City had a population of seventeen million, and the government predicted that there would be thirty-six million by the year 2000. Most of the new inhabitants were squatters, streaming in from the impoverished countryside at a rate of a couple of thousand per day, creating slapdash shantytowns on the ever-expanding outskirts.

In the immediate aftermath of a devastating earthquake in 1985 the government seemed to disappear into thin air, and it was up to the citizens to rescue one another from under the rubble. Not only was there a lack of viable leadership, but politicians and police chiefs were noted more for how much they stole from the public trough than for any constructive projects they carried out.

If Mexico City today is still a challenging and sometimes exhausting place to live, with permanent service problems (principally in drainage, water pumping, and distribution) and a continued resistance to urban planning, it is worth pointing out that the worst predictions from the 1980s did not come to pass.

While pollution levels may still be unacceptably high, the situation is no longer a noxious horror. Since 1991, all new cars here have come with catalytic converters, and although four million or so make traffic a nightmare, they are not causing as much lethal damage as they did twenty years ago. Most of the factories in the valley have closed down, making way for a greater service economy and cleaner air. Plumbing has reached virtually 100 percent of the city, even in the most impoverished outskirts.

Mexico's is the second most dynamic economy in Latin America, after Brazil's, but its wealth is scandalously distributed. While Mexico City's gross domestic product is over seventeen thousand dollars U.S. per capita, half of the capital's residents live at or near the poverty level, and about 15 percent beneath it. At the same time, virtually everyone has a roof over his or her head, electricity, running water, and a TV set. More than half have cell phones. If someone starves to death in the capital, it is an anomaly. (This is in contrast to other parts of Mexico, mainly rural, that the United Nations has compared to Africa for their destitution.)

That effectively everyone in Mexico City eats goes a long way in explaining why the population has held fairly steady since the early 1990s, increasing by only a few million souls. Word finally reached those rural Mexicans who flooded the city for decades that the capital was no longer providing survival or sustenance as it had before. Those same Mexicans began to stream across the border into the United States, and continue to do so, despite mounting political pressure from the U.S. government to stop their flow.

It is no longer "the biggest city on earth," if it ever could have been accurately counted as such. Others such as Los Angeles have a far greater land mass, and several years ago the Tokyo-Yokahama corridor replaced Mexico City as the world's most populous metropolis. Numerous other cities, although with fewer residents, have far greater population density. Mexico City has eighty-four hundred people per square kilometer, while Mumbai, Lagos, Karachi, and Seoul have more than double that figure. Bogotá, Shanghai, Lima, and Taipei also are significantly more jam-packed.

If Mexico City is a demanding place to live, it is also an extremely rewarding one. The hypercity, the ur-urb of the American continent, it is improving all the time as a cultural capital, with offerings more along the lines of First World cities than any other in Latin America. Its scores of museums and galleries have produced artists who exhibit around the world. On any given night there is an extensive selection of theater (classical, contemporary, experimental), film (mostly from Hollywood, but also from France, Japan, Romania, or Argentina), music (from the local symphony orchestra, to an avant-garde jazz combo from New York, to touring rappers from Beirut), and public presentations of just-published books.

There are limitless choices of food and drink. Mexican cuisine is unique; its play of colors, textures, temperatures, and flavors makes it the culinary jewel of the continent. One can sit in the cocoon of an elegant restaurant (choices include not only Mexican food, but the cookery of Poland, Lebanon, Japan, France, or Catalonia) or else be tempted by the open air; in Mexico City there is a complex street theater to the food stalls, enticing passersby with assorted aromas and hues.

Paradoxically, given its population of twenty million, there are many tree-lined neighborhoods with the quiet sociability of small towns, while others have the generic international-hip vibe one finds around the Bastille in Paris, Williamsburg in New York, or Soho in Hong Kong. Its citizens may be savages when behind the wheels of their cars, but on the street there is a level of courtesy today found in few cities in prosperous countries. In the capital, waiters in cantinas shake hands with their familiar customers, and after your food has been served at a restaurant, people at the next table are likely to say buen provecho (the local equivalent to bon appétit). People hold doors open for each other, say good morning when they walk into an elevator, kiss each other's cheeks when they are introduced. If you sneeze in public, a chorus of voices says salud. It sometimes takes five minutes to get out of a taxi until all of the ritual phrases of "At your service" and "Have a good day" and "Take care of yourself" have been exchanged.