Amazon on the Hudson

Adare to the other cities of North America: Just try to beat New York City’s case to host Amazon’s second headquarters, submitted last week and celebrated with an orange glow on the city skyline. Come on, put your best and brightest minds to it. Not possible.

First, lest there be any doubt, the nation’s most densely packed city has plenty of room to spare, offering not one but four possible locations for the asked-for half-million square feet of office space in the short term and room for 8 million more in the long, from the hoity-toity high end on Manhattan’s booming far West Side to the relatively affordable new frontier of Long Island City, a stone’s throw from the new Cornell Tech campus.

Either burgeoning downtown Brooklyn — with Governors Island on the menu as a side dish — or the resurgent World Trade Center, both served with ample mass transit, rival any available sites in the nation.

But what can be replicated nowhere else in America, really nowhere else, period, is the depth and breadth of talent that converges here in field after field — advertising, and law, and finance, and, you bet, tech. (We even have a few writers; doesn’t Amazon still sell books?)

In the connected world Amazon hopes to conquer, New Yorkers’ globe of languages spoken and cultures understood speak to human capital that — sorry, Philly, sorry, Boston, sorry all the rest of you also-rans — no place on the planet can match.