September in New York City is not a transition. It is an arrival.

The city that spent July and August in a kind of pleasant suspended animation — restaurants half-full on Thursday nights, offices running on skeleton crews, the Hamptons traffic moving in both directions — flips a switch the Tuesday after Labor Day and becomes itself again. Offices fill up. Dinner reservations get harder. The park fills with runners and cyclists and people who simply want to be outside because the weather has finally earned it.

According to National Weather Service climate data for Central Park, the average September high is 76 degrees and the average low is 62. That is not a statistic. That is a permission slip. It is warm enough to eat outside, sit on a rooftop, walk 30 blocks because the alternative feels like a waste of the day, and still cool enough to actually enjoy doing it. It is summer without the suffering.

The cultural calendar reflects it. The U.S. Open runs through mid-September and has become as much a social event as a sporting one — celebrity sightings, cocktails, serious tennis if you look for it, and a genuinely festive atmosphere at Flushing Meadows that rewards a first visit. Fashion Week arrives and the people-watching in downtown Manhattan reaches a level that has no peer. Broadway begins its new season. This September brings School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, The Imaginary Invalid with Bill Irwin, and Other Desert Cities with a cast that includes Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery, and Lily Rabe. The restaurant openings accelerate too. Elder, a British Indian chophouse in Hudson Yards. Cospa Ramen in Flatiron. The return of Mary’s Fish Camp in the West Village. Hommali, a new Thai restaurant also in the Village. The city’s appetite, literal and otherwise, is back.

And then there is real estate, which has its own September reset.

Post-Labor Day is traditionally the beginning of the fall market in Manhattan, and it behaves not unlike a second January — minus the cold and the regret. Sellers who spent August preparing their apartments begin listing them. Buyers who put their searches on hold for the summer return with renewed focus. New inventory comes to market. The psychological shift is real and it matters: people come back to the city ready to make decisions, not just to look.

The fall market is not simply a busier version of August. It is a different market with different dynamics, different seller motivations, and different opportunities for buyers who are paying attention. More on that in the weeks ahead.

For now, September deserves to be appreciated for what it is. New York at its most livable, most energized, and most itself. The city has gotten its mojo back, and it is about to get very busy.

So enjoy the weather, book the theater tickets, make the restaurant reservations, and call your broker.

Fall in New York waits for no one.