In what way does New York City affect the characters in The Great Gatsby?

There is a definite distinction in the novel between
Manhattan, "the city," and Long Island, the site of small villages (like East Egg and
West Egg) and extraordinary mansions (like those inhabited by Gatsby and the Buchanans).
Also located on Long Island is the impoverished industrial area where George and Myrtle
Wilson live above their gas station's garage, as well as the small gardener's cottage
where Nick lives on the estate adjacent to Gatsby's. These are the settings in the
novel, with the characters moving  between and among the various
locations.

It is interesting that during the course of the
novel, each of the main characters spends time in the city, but only two of them seem to
be strongly impacted by it: Nick Carraway and Myrtle
Wilson.

After he arrives in the East, Nick spends a great
deal of time in New York. He travels to the city each day from Long Island to pursue his
new career in the heart of New York's financial
district:

Most
of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried
down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity
Trust.'

After his usual
dinner at the Yale Club, Nick often walks through the
city,

I
strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel and over Thirty-third Street
to the Pennsylvania
Station.

He develops definite
feelings about New York:

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I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous
feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and
machines gives to the restless
eye.

For Nick, New York is a
far cry from his home in the Midwest, a place that seemed to him like "the ragged edge
of the universe" when he came home from World War I. The contrast appeals to him a great
deal.

After witnessing Tom and Daisy's amoral behavior and
Gatsby's destruction at their hands, however, Nick leaves the East forever. During his
final weeks in West Egg, New York exists for Nick only as a refuge, a place to escape
his memories of Gatsby's "gleaming, dazzling parties."

For
Myrtle Wilson, New York City is always a refuge. The beauty and excitement of it offer
an escape from the ugliness, poverty, and boredom of her life with George on Long
Island. When she experiences New York as Tom Buchanan's mistress, Myrtle enjoys for a
little while the kind of life she hungers for, one filled with a Fifth-Avenue apartment,
pretty clothes, new taxi cabs, drunken parties, and
adventure.

Myrtle's memory of why she married George
reveals a great deal about her:

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I married him because I thought he was a
gentleman . . . I thought he knew something about breeding but he wasn't fit to lick my
shoe.

By "breeding," Myrtle
means money and sophistication, both of which she finds in Tom Buchanan and in New York
City. After living with George Wilson for eleven years over a gas station garage, the
city is irresistible in its affluence and romantic allure.