In a 2003 television advertisement being shown in a loop with other commercials at the exhibition 'Cars, Culture and the City,' a black Lamborghini curls through the streets of New York, inspiring fantasies in anyone lucky enough to gaze at its sleek body and slick maneuvers. The video could also be a portrayal of the car's fantasies about the perfect city: empty rain-washed streets, roads curving into urban canyons, majestic nocturnal geometry. It is as if New York were this creature's natural habitat. And when the car comes across traffic or crowds, it is more at home than those who get in its way; it is the master while everyone else are just spectators. Anyone who has ever driven in the city unencumbered -- during, say, a midsummer weekend morning -- might identify with this fantasy. But as for the harsh reality, which this charming exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York also touches on, it involves more than just potholes and cryptic 'No Parking' signs. It can be sampled at Park Circle, the southwest corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn: an active traffic circle that has recently been turned into an obstacle course by new concrete islands and tight constraints that shunt cars into choked channels, almost as if rigidity and awkwardness were the punishing point, at least for drivers. That isn't an unlikely speculation given some of the city's planning documents. And after all, could anything seem more intrusive for pedestrians and bicyclists than these exhaust-puffing, overpowered, metal-clad combustion engines clogging our streets? Wouldn't life be simpler in a city without cars? The exhibition, which closes on Aug. 8, doesn't give a full enough picture of this controversy but it does reveal just how central the car has been to New York's evolution. New York, it suggests, as much as Detroit or Los Angeles, has been shaped by the automobile. The show was organized by Donald Albrecht, the museum's curator of architecture and design, and a guest co-curator, Phil Patton, who writes about automobile design for The New York Times. The displays gather commercial ephemera and art, planning sketches and memorabilia, utopian and dystopian imaginings; the portrait is filled out in a generously illustrated catalog. A 1952 Oldsmobile repair manual is displayed (with a rocket ship next to the engine on the cover) as is a 1923 photograph of a full-sized mockup of a cross section of the Holland Tunnel (one of the first tunnels designed for automobiles). A 1909 book, 'Street Traffic Regulation,' is by William Phelps Eno, who also we are told wrote the world's first city traffic code, for New York, in 1903 and is credited with the invention of the stop sign, the crosswalk, the one-way street and the taxi stand. There are mementos from the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs (both of which treated the automobile as a harbinger of innovative design and technological transformation). And there are videos made by a contemporary advocacy group imagining how some of the city's major thoroughfares might look if the recently created (and, frankly, artificial and bizarre) pedestrian mall in Times Square were to inspire the transformation of many New York streets into multi-use boulevards. At any rate, the histories of the car and the city, the exhibition shows, are inseparable. In 1900, there were only 8,000 cars in the United States but 2,500 of them were owned by New Yorkers. The Sheepshead Bay Speedway, pictured here in a grand panoramic photograph from 1915, was only one of the city arenas used for car racing; a 1905 photo shows a race in front of City Hall. The nation's first road for high-speed cars, we learn, was the Long Island Motor Parkway, designed in 1908. The nation's first course of study in automobile design was in New York City, in the 1890s. Before Detroit became the manufacturing center for the mass-market automobile, New York was the manufacturing center for luxury models. One of the most famous early manufacturers, Crane-Simplex, made a car owned by John D. Rockefeller; its literature proudly declared: 'Made in New York.' By 1924, when cars had become more affordable, New York had about 800,000 (though manufacturing had shifted to Detroit). 'Automobile Row' developed, with dealer showrooms extending over a mile of Broadway from the West 40s to the 70s. One 1950s-era photo of Broadway shows neon signs announcing Buick, Olds, Studebaker and Used Cars. Similar rows developed in the outer boroughs. In fact, it is impossible to separate the development of modern New York from the automobile's evolution. The city and the car were both expressions of the technological hopes of early modernism. They reflected a wide-ranging sense of possibility, in which speed, ease and power would seemingly become available to all (and heralded in the thrusting radiance of the Chrysler Building). We can see that utopian spirit at the exhibition, too, in 20th-century imaginings of the city's future, with hovering skyways and voluptuous roads sliding into and out of buildings. The car was also a comfortable complement to the city; it was mass produced but (like a high-rise apartment) a fundamentally private space. It was compatible with the city, yet it allowed a wide range of freedom. The automobile was an instrument of mobility, both social and physical. It allowed escape. It mocked the boundaries of neighborhood (a source of its destructive power). It encouraged fantasy -- one of the main tropes of advertising campaigns. And New York also became the media center for automobile promotion. There is almost a physical affinity between the car and the city. In one photograph here, 'Italian Kitchen' (1949) by Benn Mitchell, an auto's glossy surface is a liquid transmutation of the sinuous neon signs surrounding it. The car is not an alien presence; it is part of the urban fabric. If the culture and character of some cities are closely associated with modes of transportation (gondolas in Venice, bicycles in Amsterdam), the automobile may be the defining force in New York, not because it decreed the layout of streets or because it is essential (as in Los Angeles), but because its assertion of individuality and enterprise and its readiness to expand beyond assigned boundaries had so much to do with the city's spirit. During the last half-century, though, this understanding has gradually been turned on its head. At the extreme, the car is not an instrument of liberation, but an enslaver. Its traffic clogs the arteries and poisons the air. Its highways rupture communities. This shift began with the downfall of Robert Moses and his plan to create a highway running through Greenwich Village and SoHo, which was opposed by Jane Jacobs, with her emphasis on the pedestrian streetscape. The exhibition points out that a 1968 city plan marked an attempt to 'temper enthusiasm' for the car. The Bloomberg administration goes much further, as can be seen in its Street Design Manual , a copy of which is on display here; the city's long-range plan is even more detailed. Now, the new city's ambitions are explicit: It is to be 'green,' pre-industrial and, perhaps, pre-modern. The city seems determined to constrain the car, and, ultimately, to diminish its power. At the exhibition, a series of 'Streetfilms' produced by the Livable Streets Initiative depict how particular streets in New York might be redesigned, creating 'walkable and bikable streets.' The show ends without exploring the consequences of these notions, but outside the museum, you don't need to harbor Lamborghini fantasies to see that the result is not always felicitous. Yes, of course, the car can have deleterious effects on the urban fabric, and yes, it makes sense to assess its influence. And New York's contemporary pre-modern romance has many virtues: Cars are rightly superfluous to the city's stunning new waterfront parks. The bicycle path that stretches along West Street is one of the city's great recreational offerings. But at worst, another kind of unyielding grid is being imposed. The city boasts of 200 new miles of bike paths, but many have been laid down without clear rationale, constricting commerce or creating confusion. The bike path that is supposed to lead down the East Side, which I have used, is perilous, awkward, even unnecessary. And as minor contortions like the new Park Circle and major contusions like the pedantic Times Square pedestrian mall remind us, there are many cases of excess zeal, making it seem less like the greening of New York than its denaturing. The epic tale of the car and the city told in this exhibition, beginning as a celebration of initiative and possibility, can even seem to be hobbling to an inglorious end, the car's promises stymied by the hortatory constrictions of an aggressive streetscape. 