Bright Lights, Big City

As a city predicated on novelty--not once but twice--New York, nee Nieuw Amsterdam, has understandably played a rather anxious host to history. The favored mythos is of a convulsively rejuvenating metropolis, feeding on the flow of money, goods, information and the talent and spirit of the young, always fixed on the arrival of the next ship, the next season, the next artistic movement. The past is yesterday’s tabloid newspaper, blowing down some side street or clinging to a fence, its headline half-visible to the random eye.

This shunning of history has provoked two quintessentially New York reactions: obstinate (if often tongue-in-cheek) pride and hand-wringing neurosis. Native A.J. Liebling noted that his hometown “is one of the oldest places in the United States, but doesn’t live in retrospect like the professionally picturesque provinces.” Any city can have its one high period, Liebling wryly observed, “but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.” The city’s attendant woe over its historical myopia is, appropriately enough, a deeply historical phenomenon. In 1856, Harper’s Monthly asked of New York: “Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years together. A man born in New York 40 years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.” Eleven years earlier, former mayor and prolific chronicler Philip None despaired that “the very bones of our ancestors are not permitted to lie quiet a quarter of a century,” and the New York Mirror concluded that New York was a “modern city of ruins,” where “no sooner is a fine building put up than it is torn down.”

This historical irreverence, like the nation’s legendary ambivalence toward the city, has become ingrained as a founding myth and thus is truer in spirit than in fact. Despite the 1962 demolition of Pennsylvania Station and other lapses in judgment, the city skyline pulses as much with age as with modernity (a second-rate Sun Belt city looks newer than New York these days); indeed, the meter is now running backward, with Penn Station’s former grandeur channeled as it is moved from its present dismal setting--it looks more like a 1980s Eastern European disco than the portal to a great city--to the beaux-arts James A. Farley post office across the street. History is everywhere in New York, if one knows where to look.

Similarly, what unites many of the paeans to “lost New York” is that they are in fact paeans to lost youth, usually penned by writers who have long since decamped to the suburbs, trotted out now and again by the New Yorker magazine’s Nostalgia Bureau to utter wispy remembrances of a city New York can never again be--if only because it probably never was.

Perhaps the best way to think about New York is not as a place but as a process. The current lamentations for the death of authenticity occurring in Times Square’s Disney make-over imply that some kind of organic character defines certain sectors of the city--a hallowed ground of seediness, say--but the bad news is that New York was turned into a theme park a long time ago, from the utterly faux European pleasure garden that is Central Park to the varying stages of Dutch, English, French, neo-Italianate and Greek revival architecture (to name a few) that comprise this “authentic” place. New York is a place where people come to live out dreams of all sorts, and the city at heart is a stage set for those dreams, filled with movable scenery and convincing facades.

In their colossal history of New York from its founding until 1898, authors Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace present New York as a city where sense of place is best understood through time. It is no accident that the city is unique in warranting its own vernacular space on the clock (“a New York minute”). The city seems a constantly running machine, fueled by the electrical charge of its own power grid (a “grid of opportunity,” the authors write, as well as a strictly rational grid street layout), processing people, products, plots and prices: The city, after all, was for one heady time the country’s center of immigration, manufacturing, cultural production and finance. Just one striking example in “Gotham” of the habitual change to which the city grew accustomed was the May 1 spectacle of Moving Day, the annual English-inspired rite of upheaval when all but the very rich traded apartments in a frantic search for lower rents and an improved situation; clogging the streets each May Day, the population looked, to one observer, as if it “were flying from the plague.”

Like one of the zeppelins that futurists imagined would be tethered to the masts of New York skyscrapers, the narrative of “Gotham” hovers over the city, drifting along thematic currents, occasionally catching a cataclysmic gust; it drops in for a vivid close-up only to reascend, with equal aplomb, for a global panorama. Manhattan, we are reminded, has always been central to the flow of Western capital, whether as docking point for the Dutch West India company--the world’s first true multinational corporation--in the 18th century or as entrepo^t for West Indian sugar in the 19th century or the financial nerve center underwriting the closing of the American frontier, and the authors soundly map the complex web of transactions. At closer range, “Gotham” deftly intersperses events with the traffic of the city’s indelible cast of characters, including “Hell-Cat Maggie” of the feared mid-19th century street gang the Dead Rabbits, “whose teeth, filed to points, and fingers, embellished with brass nails, made her a welcome companion on forays against the Bowery Boys”; or Victoria Woodhull, a proto-feminist bankrolled by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who launched not only the first woman’s brokerage house on Wall Street but also an ardently feminist “Free Love” newspaper; or Jay “Black Friday” Gould, who profitably presided over the collapse of the gold market in 1869 from his heavily fortified Opera House lodgings, soon becoming, the authors write, the “most hated man in America.”

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Reading “Gotham,” one feels twinges of what one famous Bronx resident called “deja vu all over again.” Late 1880s civic ills such as garbage dumping and dangerously overcrowded subway platforms are alive today; Special Agent Anthony Comstock’s 19th century crusade against “indecency” summons the current mayor’s “quality of life” campaign against strip bars and porn shops. By the end of the 19th century, the city was already grappling with gun control and crime sprees. As one resident put it, “no man would venture beyond Broadway toward the North River by night without carrying pistols.”

What’s more, “Gotham” shows New York City’s estrangement from the state--and the nation at large--to have a fairly robust historical lineage. As the country debated in the 1780s whether to keep the capital in New York, the opposition seized on the city’s overwhelming Anglophilia (the king’s birthday, a horrified senator noted, was still observed “with great festivity”) as well as the irreligiousness that led one newspaper to label the city “a vortex of folly and dissipation.” By 1853, upstate legislators were calling New York “an empire--a community in itself,” and as the Civil War dawned, the city council debated whether New York, should the Union dissolve, be made a “free city by itself.” As Wallace and Burrows convincingly argue, New York had been intricately wedded to the Southern trade in cotton and slaves, and war struck fissures in the city’s political and economic establishment. War or peace, however, New York’s financiers would surely find a way to profit.

After its brief reign as the nation’s capital city, the authors write, New York went on to be a city of capital: “Nowhere else in the republic would the marketplace come to reign with such authority, or painters and politicians alike bow so low before the gods of business and finance.” Whether it was arriviste rich elbowing their way into patrician quarters (i.e., Edward Luckemeyer’s purchase of his own table at Delmonico’s--this seating arrangement featured as centerpiece a 30-foot lake with swans from Prospect Park) or the $370,000 Versailles replica ball held in the Waldorf at the height of the 1897 depression (guests waltzed behind boarded-up windows to avoid anarchist bombs and the envious glances of the milling masses), money was the very thread of the social fabric. It was all William Cullen Bryant could do, surveying the 19th century veneration for the “man who has made himself rich,” but to declare that in New York, “nobody cares anything for literature.”

Fortuitously for the sake of American letters, Bryant’s claim proved false, and the evidence is on abundant display in “Writing New York,” a collection of New York writing assembled by Philip Lopate. Just as New York laid claim to the bulk of money and people flowing into the country, so too did it emerge as a literary center, with the Harper brothers selling bootlegged British editions 24 hours after they were off the boat. The result, Lopate notes, is that “almost every major American author, if not a New Yorker, at least went through a New York phase.” Reading “Writing New York” in tandem with “Gotham,” one is drawn to the concomitance of themes: the unbending thrall to Mammon, the contradiction of glittering spires and wretched hovels, the tyranny and anonymity of the crowd, the sense that New York is a republic apart. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes of summiting the Empire State Building for the first time and realizing this was not so: “Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits--from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless.”

To Fitzgerald and many others, New York emerges not as muse but as a kind of literary mount improbable: the higher one climbs, the ever more elusive the city becomes. “No matter how independent a writer might be,” Lopate notes, “New York has always had a way of seeming stronger, of bending the individual will to its designs and obsessions.” It looms as the protagonist in virtually every novel it touches, it tempts the literary imagination with its 8 million stories and the living vignettes of its streets and it ultimately makes folly out of a good many attempts to render any new insight, to penetrate its smooth and towering stock portrayals. “Nothing will cut New York but a diamond,” writes Dawn Powell in a diary entry, excerpted in the anthology.

Merely living in New York is challenge enough for many writers, their energy sapped by high rents and infinite distractions. Liebling compares the city to a “complicated Renaissance clock” with marionettes and apostles doing turns as bells strike: “[T]he variety of the sideshows,” he writes, “distracts one’s attention from the advance of the hour hand.” Having entered the process, the writer is consumed, usually emerging at the end of the line at some other place, some Cheever place, his writing forever skewed by the city, forever haunted by some glimpse at the shrouded peak. Lewis Mumford describes an epiphany that struck him on the Brooklyn Bridge, an episode that remains “not as a constant presence, but as a momentary flash reminding me of heights approached and scaled, as a mountain climber might carry with him the memory of some daring ascent, never to be achieved again.”

Lewis Mumford, represented in Lopate’s collection, was one of the very best writers on New York, although he abandoned fiction fairly early on, turning from the bildungsroman to the buildings themselves. In “Sidewalk Critic,” an invaluable collection of his 1930s “Sky Line” columns for The New Yorker, Mumford chronicles a city mired in the Depression, waking up with the hangover of the Jazz Age, surrounded by “the hurtling skyscrapers of the ‘20s.” Of these, Mumford spares no quarter: The skyscraper is a “businessman’s toy” that “makes him feel prosperous even as he is losing money on it.” Mumford anticipates a “day of reckoning,” hearkened by the Depression, in which extravagance and uneconomical bombast will be curtailed. “What Goethe said once of literature applies equally to architecture,” he wrote. “ ‘It is by his restrictions that the master reveals himself.’ ”

Mumford’s style here is less portentous than in some of his later works, marked instead by touches of whimsy and an understated acerbity. He is often prescient (the automobile should be thought of as a “private locomotive,” he writes, meaning that “these new motor roads must not repeat the railroad’s costly mistake of attempting to go into the middle of a town”); often indecorous (of cocktail lounges he writes, “[I]f I must choose, I prefer plain plastered walls and decorated ladies to decorated walls and plastered ladies”) and only occasionally wrongheaded (he deplored urban density and thought skyscrapers should hover alone in Broadacre Cities, where they would “accentuate the clean and lonely qualities of a place”; as we know from Edge Cities and socialist planning, such efforts only look bleakly alienating.)

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Finally, Mumford shares that quality common to so many New York writers: a will to simultaneously romanticize and disparage the city. He is unsparing on the skyline, which from afar seems “the most exhilarating embodiment of the modern form” but up close is revealed as “wasted magnificence”; he candidly reminds New Yorkers that “none of the important things that have happened in modern architecture have taken place here.” (This was long before the Lever House or Seagrams Building.) Mumford himself, despite being the bard of New York urbanism, emigrated upstate in 1936.

Reading these three volumes, the lingering question one has of the city of New York is why it inspires such deep ambivalence, why it has drifted between sun and shadow, between American Dream and American Nightmare, why it luridly affronts the literary imagination, why the city’s essence seems best captured in the moment in “Sweet Smell of Success” when Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker, observing a drunk tossed into the gutter outside the Stork Club, marvels, “I love this dirty town!” New York is felt with all the contradictory emotions an addict feels for his fix. “At the bottom of our wicked hearts,” William Dean Howells wrote to Henry James, “we all like New York.”