The values of New York come from Wall Street, which sets the tone for the rest of industry there. The attitude that everything has its price is responsible for the bad reputation that New York and New Yorkers have in the rest of the country.
If you live in New York, in some sense you aren't a citizen of the United States: your residency means that you have a passport to enter the "real" United States.
Another thing about New York: it clearly isn't known for science. The Science Museum in Oakland California would be impossibly out of place in New York. The two main categories of industry in New York are finance and media, broadly conceived (including the arts, television, publishing, fashion, advertising and so on).
As I recall, the Oakland Science Museum is focused on technology. The American Museum of Natural History is a better museum in many ways, but its focus is entirely different. The Hall of Science seems like a leftover from the World's Fair--I'm probably completely mistaken.
I associate the Hall of Science with cranky aging amateur radio operators on account of the annual hamfests they hold in the vicinity. Those hams seem as if their wives ordered them not to come home until they sell off their old equipment. That's the impression of science and technology you get from the Hall of Science. That impression might be a little hard to convey, so try comparing the discussions on eHam with those on hacker news.
Columbia, NYU, and Cooper Union are excellent schools. If they were located anywhere but in the center of the world's media and financial system, they would define that place as an unparalleled academic center.
The problem is that Columbia is situated so far away from the other two, and from the "heart" of the city, that the university simply cannot have the same overarching influence on society that other schools that are better integrated with their surroundings do (like Harvard and MIT with Cambridge).
In addition, it's a matter of pure density- Cambridge and Boston, to a lesser extent, is seen as a college town because of the density of college students living in that area. In New York, college students compose such a tiny percentage of the overall population, and exert such a small influence on everyone else, that they are hardly given a second thought when determining the dominant themes in a city's ideology.
If you live in New York, in some sense you aren't a citizen of the United States: your residency means that you have a passport to enter the "real" United States.
Another thing about New York: it clearly isn't known for science. The Science Museum in Oakland California would be impossibly out of place in New York. The two main categories of industry in New York are finance and media, broadly conceived (including the arts, television, publishing, fashion, advertising and so on).