How NYC Got This Way

The opening moments of Ric Burns’ “New York: A Documentary Film” on PBS suggest a gorgeous travelogue, a valentine to the director’s adopted city: the skyline, seen from New York Harbor at the tip of Manhattan, bathed in calm blue light, then fast-forwarding to streets and bridges for a kinetic cacophony of color and sound, a montage of diverse peoples, which it turns out is the key to the city’s success.

But that’s hardly the whole story. For Ken Burns’ younger brother--known for a darker set of documentaries such as “The Donner Party” (1992) and “The Way West” (1995)--does not spare New York its history. Among the incidents caught by his lens: slavery in colonial times, the 1863 Civil War draft riots, slums, sweatshops, the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911, the stock-market crash of 1929 and hatred among immigrant groups.

Produced by Burns and longtime collaborator Lisa Ades, written by Burns and architect-author James Sanders and narrated by David Ogden Stiers, the 10-hour production spans five nights and nearly four centuries from the arrival of the Dutch in 1609 to the Depression and the opening of the landmark Empire State Building in 1931.

A final two-hour episode, taking New York into the millennium, is set for next spring.

Burns sees New York as the “King Kong” of cities, “the city Americans love to love, and love to hate,” a place where the contrasting forces of capitalism and democracy, corruption and culture have been intertwined more than anywhere else.

“This is the capital of transformation,” he said of New York on a recent visit to Southern California, “the place where we keep changing and changing again. The convergence of commerce and diversity over 400 years knit together--sometimes in tension, occasionally in harmony--the most transformative culture the world has ever seen.” The film is a special presentation of WGBH’s series “The American Experience,” produced by Burns’ Steeplechase Films, in association with WGBH in Boston, WNET in New York and the New York Historical Society.

New York has been a near-obsession with Burns, who moved there in 1976 at age 21 to go to Columbia University, where he got his undergraduate degree. “One of the precipitating events [for the film],” he noted, “was Robert Caro’s [1974] book ‘The Power Broker’ about [builder] Robert Moses--the single greatest work of urban history in the 20th century ... In fact, Ken and I in 1985 talked to Caro about doing a film on Moses,” said Burns, who worked with his brother on a number of films, including “The Civil War,” which he co-wrote with Geoffrey C. Ward.

But “American Experience” eclipsed the brothers Burns in 1989 with its own film on Moses. The idea for “New York” was cemented as Ric Burns and Ades were finishing the documentary “Coney Island” (1991).

Five years in the making, the film features some two dozen commentators, including historians Kenneth T. Jackson and Mike Wallace (co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gotham”), Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), director Martin Scorsese, writer Peter Quinn, poet Allen Ginsberg, the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III and Caro.

Along the way, viewers get to know a raft of characters, including DeWitt Clinton, who Burns believes did more to shape the future of New York than anyone in its history. An early 19th century mayor and governor, he was the visionary behind the “grid” of New York’s streets, which shaped the city’s psyche, and the building of the Erie Canal, which linked New York to the Midwest.

“New York” also shows that New Yorkers have a way of transforming tragedy.

“In certain key moments in New York’s history,” said Burns, “the people who did not own the keys to production, and the people who did, found themselves on the same side of the fence. One was the aftermath of the Triangle fire. No amount of finger-shaking or muckraking was going to make a factory owner spend more money. You needed the force of government.

“And in the full glare of what was now the prototype of the mass media, on a Saturday afternoon in March, right off Washington Square, 144 girls and two men were burned to death. And Al Smith, one of the great heroes of New York’s story, pushed through laws which were really the template for a more custodial idea of government, which was exported to Washington.” And what surprised Burns the most? “That you can make sense out of a city like New York. That there is a story in this famously irrationally chaotic [city] that’s so overwhelmingly in-your-face. And it’s got what any story needs to have, a central hero, which is New York.” *

“New York: A Documentary Film” airs Sunday through Thursday from 9-11 p.m. on KCET and KVCR.