Having lived in NYC, I have not had a real bagel since leaving there in 1985.
I’ve had lots of dinner rolls with a hole in the center. But no bagel.
Even the bagels in NY are not bagels anymore. Some get maybe 80percent there and by contrast seem” good”.
Baking is a craft and the products produced must adhere to the craft definition of what it is. This is good business sense since it guarantees that quality will be maintained. When bagels were being produced in NY by only three large commercial bakers serving the entire NY Metro they were cheap (3 cents a copy in the early sixties) and amazingly dense and chewy. They hefted heavy for their smaller size and were dark as mahogany and had a high almost mirror shine. This was the bagel that Lenders imitated in looks when they began selling their six to a pack frozen bagels in grocery stores.
Alas the bagel as a result became very popular to the point that corner shops sprang up every five hundred yards. These shops were not staffed by craftsmen but by slobs who couldn’t give a crap about what they produced. You can still find world class craft breads out there still being produced exactly like a century ago but the bagel of yore is gone. The original process being too long and expensive without the economies of scale enjoyed by those three old mega factories.