New York - Donald Albrecht sees New York -- a place where driving across town is the answer to the question of how slow can you go, and where drivers don't stop on a dime but park in spaces the size of one - as a motor city whose car culture is central to the identity of the automobile itself.

Yes, New York. Where the word gridlock is said to have been coined. Where bathtub-size potholes are storied local landmarks. And where parking regulations are rendered in language that only a lawyer with time on the meter could decipher.

Albrecht is the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York and a co-curator of "Cars, Culture and the City," an exhibition the museum says is the first to explore the complexities of the city's role in the history of the automobile and the car's role in shaping the New York landscape. The show opens on March 25 at the museum, 1220 Fifth Ave. at East 103rd Street, and runs through Aug. 1.

Albrecht maintains that New York manufactured the magic, if not the cars. It gave the auto industry a stylishness it could not have found anywhere else - not in Detroit, where mass production was perfected, and not even in Los Angeles, where cars were elevated to status symbols.

A strong case for New York's having led the way in popularizing the image of the automobile is presented in the book that accompanies the exhibition: "New York hosted the spectacles, built the glittering showrooms, created the sexy images and provided the urban settings that sold America the car." The book was written by Albrecht and his co-curator, Phil Patton, a contributor of design criticism to The New York Times.

Its pages are a reminder that New York had showrooms that lined block after block on Broadway for nearly half a century, turning window-shopping into entertainment. The cars were not the only attractions; celebrity architects like Frank Lloyd Wright were commissioned to design showrooms and to work on other projects that would not have been necessary without the automobile. John Russell Pope, architect of the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, designed local parkway tollbooths.

"You walked along and looked at the new cars, and it was almost like Broadway theater writ in three dimensions on the street," Albrecht said. "And the showroom became as modern as the car. When the car became a streamlined product, you got streamlined architecture, huge windows, curving forms and backlit illumination."

The exhibition pays homage to another element of automobile culture: the auto show, from its beginnings when the 20th century was new to the years after World War II, when cars wore so much chrome that women applying lipstick could use the front grilles as mirrors, to the 1980s and '90s, when the automakers' most exciting prospects were fanciful dream cars made to be seen, but not necessarily mass-produced.

How different that was from a photo in the museum show's brochure of a Madison Square Garden exhibition in 1900 that highlighted the newfangled horseless carriages. Corralled in the center ring were brands that have long since expired, like Waverley, Riker and Winton _ and Orient, whose sign informed shoppers that John Wanamaker was its sales agent.

"When you think about what the industry was like in 1910 and the kinds of the cars and infrastructure and the complexity of it all that came along, it's mind-boggling," said Mark Schienberg, president of the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association, which organizes the New York International Auto Show and is celebrating its 100th anniversary by sponsoring the exhibition.

"Taking a look at what Park Avenue looked like with the horse and buggies, the car really transformed a lot, and you realize there's this amazing love affair with freedom of mobility _ and the car really gave that to the average person," Schienberg said.

But the book by Albrecht and Patton makes clear that the automobile caught on first with upper-crust types. "And since a lot of rich people lived in New York, the car was a New York thing," Albrecht said.

He said that of the 8,000 cars in the United States in 1900, nearly a third were owned by New Yorkers. They raced them at City Hall Park and built getaway roads. William K. Vanderbilt II, a great-grandson of the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, built a parkway on Long Island.

New Yorkers also built cars. More than 50 companies set up shop in New York between 1900 and 1920, and some, like Ardsley, bragged about being "made in New York by New Yorkers for New Yorkers." Albrecht said the most famous New York brand was probably the Simplex, built on 83rd Street and priced for the wealthiest drivers _ the equivalent of a six-figure Mercedes today.

"The cars that were made in New York were made almost like couture dresses," Albrecht said. "You bought a chassis and, separately, put a body on top of it. Then what happened is Detroit. People in Detroit like Henry Ford _ who was the most famous but there are others _ said there's a middle-class market for this contraption; it's not just the plaything of the wealthy."

So, as the car was democratized and became a commodity, New York faded as a manufacturing center. But that was by no means the end of the relationship between the car and the city.

"That was when New York really begins to promote the automobile with things like the glamorous showrooms at the base of the Chrysler Building, the two World's Fairs in 1939 and 1964 and all the advertising campaigns," Albrecht said.

"The World's Fairs were showing off new inventions, and in many ways the new invention was the car," he said.

For the 1964 World's Fair, Chrysler built a pavilion that looked like a huge car engine, with an outsize radiator fan and roof that had giant spark plugs poking through it. But something perhaps more important to automotive history happened there: Ford introduced the Mustang. "That's the high-water mark for this kind of enthusiasm," Albrecht said.

Perhaps the high-water mark for design had come 25 years earlier, when Norman Bel Geddes created the Futurama exhibit for General Motors' pavilion at the '39 World's Fair. He intended Futurama as a model of what the American city might be by 1960.

"This really is an alluring image in New York City of the future of an autocentric America," Albrecht said. "The World's Fair is really selling an idea of an America designed around the car. And you look at that model, it really does come true. It looks like Houston in 1970."

The museum exhibition also touches on what Albrecht called the challenges of the automobile _ traffic fatalities and expressways that carved up neighborhoods, for example. "People saw it as a mixed blessing," he said. "They were worried about horses and disease. They simply abandoned dead horses on the street, and there were 15,000 corpses a year, so at first the car was seen as this great thing to clean up a problem.

"But with the car came issues of congestion and fatalities, so this invention that's going to solve problems brings problems of its own: pollution, crowding, ruining of neighborhoods," he said.

He added: "What is surprising is the many different levels that the relationship takes place on, how many different frequencies the story can be told on."