Just to provide a 3rd party reaction here: it sounds like you've circularly reasoned yourself into a trap of your own making. You don't want to live anywhere else because you like NYC. Because no other city is exactly like NYC, you aren't interested in living anywhere else. The reason it's "circular" is because there are cities with good transit, good arts, great food, have a tech scene, and even have financial districts and you'd be surprised to find out how well diverse cultures get along in a log of smaller towns across the US (far fewer racial/cultural over/under-tones) and how safe they are (safer than NYC). Yeah, no other place is the center for any of these things save SF being the tech nexus and maybe having better renditions of some types of cuisine. So if you have to be in the center of the world, then yeah, you're not going to find other centers of the world.

For me, personally, I'm disappointed by how few world cities the US has. NYC and Chicago are really it. My silly benchmark for what makes a city a world city is that it operates 24hrs a day (at least parts of it). Chicago barely does but I think it counts. Everywhere else in the US just dies past 10pm and especially past 2am.