This post is about New York City and whether
or not it has ever achieved, to use the memorable phrase of our forty-first
President (Poppa Bush), “the vision thing.”
Certainly there was plenty of it in America once, since the New England
colonies, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Georgia were all founded to create, here
in the New World, an ideal community or sanctuary free from the intolerance and
tyranny of the Old. But not New
York. Right from the start it was a
business town, a place to make money.
When the Dutch founded New Amsterdam in 1626, they meant it to be a
trading post, a place where beaver skins and other pelts obtained from the
native peoples of the interior could be loaded onto ships and sent to Europe,
since beaver skins were in great demand for the hats of fashionable
gentlemen. And geography had
predetermined that this was the spot for such a post, since it offered a large
harbor at the mouth of a navigable river reaching far into the interior.
And right from the start the settlement
featured also a heady mix of people, a hodgepodge of races and nationalities:
not just the Dutch, but also Norwegians,
Danes, Germans, Walloons, Bohemians, Italians, blacks both slave and free, Munsees,
Montauks, Mohawks, and others, including refugees like Englishmen fleeing the oppressively
sectarian colonies of New England and, in time, French Huguenots and Sephardic
Jews. Half the early inhabitants of New
Amsterdam were non-Dutch, and business was conducted in half a dozen languages,
the currencies employed being Dutch guilders, beaver skins, and wampum (belts
of strung beads made of seashells).
And early on there developed a type of
resident that would always characterize the city: worldly, brash,
self-confident. Then as now, New York
was a magnet for hustlers and achievers, for all those eager to get ahead, make
money, acquire power. And that included not
just fur traders, but also pirates, prostitutes, and sharpers of every stamp
and breed.
Hardly a place, then, for vision. Yes, there was prayer, but probably to many
different gods, and not so much of it as to interfere with business.
Fast-forward to the eighteenth
century. Renamed New York when the
English took it over in 1664, the growing city was still a commercial hub, a
significant port. And a city with a
large population of slaves – one resident in five was black -- their numbers second
only to Charleston, South Carolina. What
did they do? They fished, hauled water,
cleaned privies, cooked for white people, split firewood, swept chimneys,
peddled, worked in shipyards. But
slavery degrades the masters as well as the slaves. A slave rebellion in 1712 killed 9 whites and
wounded 6, and the retaliation was severe: 20 blacks were hanged, 3 burned at
the stake, 1 broken on the wheel, and 1 roasted slowly for eight hours. And in 1741, when several fires broke out,
white citizens suspected black arson – probably erroneously – and burned 13
blacks at the stake and hanged 17. I am
no expert on eighteenth-century New York, but suggest that a city so involved
in slavery, and the dread of a slave revolt that results, was hardly a fertile
ground for vision. During the Revolution
the British promised their freedom to all slaves of rebels, and slaves from all
over the colonies flocked to British-occupied New York. When the British left the city in 1783, some
3,000 blacks went with them.
Fast-forward again, this time deep into
the nineteenth century. As the leading
port and financial center of an independent nation, New York, now a metropolis,
could develop freely and express what I have termed its dark eros: the blind
energy, ambition, and desire that characterize it to this day. Flocking to it, along with immigrants from
abroad, were all those locals bent on making it, on achieving wealth, success,
and fame. The city, like the nation, was
drunk on Go Ahead, on material progress, on Bigger, Better, Faster, on
More. Confined to a long, narrow island,
its growing population pushed steadily north, opening new streets and building
new homes and stores and banks, even as it launched ships, cast marine engines,
refined sugar, transshipped cotton from the South, and imported textiles and
iron goods from Britain and silks and fancy goods from France. In this frenzy of construction and commerce,
was there room for vision?
One could easily doubt it. Literature and great ideas New York left to
Boston. Abolition didn’t tempt it; too
many New York merchants had lucrative business ties with the South, and a few
of them were secretly getting rich from the slave trade. What great achievements did the city accomplish, aside from making money? I know of three: the completion of the Croton
water supply system in 1842; the laying out of Central Park, which opened to
the public on the eve of the Civil War; and the construction of the Brooklyn
Bridge, which opened in 1883. But are
these accomplishments the products of vision?
The water supply system, bringing clean
water from upstate into the homes of the affluent, who could now bathe
themselves and flush away wastes with ease, transformed the daily life of citizens,
but maybe doesn’t rate as the realization of a vision. But the creation of the 843-acre park, a vast
expanse of greenery in what, as the city expanded northward, would become the
heart of the city, with separate pathways for pedestrians, horseback riders,
and carriages, and sunken transverses to hide commercial traffic crossing the
park, all this could indeed be seen as realizing the vision of its inspired
creators, Olmsted and Vaux. Nothing like
it had ever been done in this nation. It
was meant to welcome all citizens, rich and poor alike, and provide them with
an urban Eden free from the turbulence of a noise-ridden, congested
metropolis. If the poor found the trip
uptown to this leafy paradise a bit long and burdensome, while the wealthy paraded
on its drives in their thin-wheeled, sleek black carriages with a coachman and
footmen in livery, that need not detract from the splendor of the vision.
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| The Drive in Central Park, a somewhat idealized view by Currier & Ives. |
Likewise the construction of the Brooklyn
Bridge, the greatest suspension bridge built to date in the nation, can be seen
as the product of vision. To project
such a span over an expanse of water and connect two great cities, New York and
independent Brooklyn, thus eliminating the threat of winter ice jams and tides
and wind and sleet – to sink two huge caissons through muck and clay and sand
down to bedrock, then build on that bedrock two giant towers and bind them high
over water with a harp of steel – to realize such a project was indeed the
result of vision. Even in this
money-grubbing city, corrupt and dirty, where the rich got richer while the
poor stayed poor, great dreams could be realized. Secular dreams, material dreams, but dreams
nonetheless.
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| Ad Meskens |
Still, New York could inspire counter-visions,
visions hostile to it. In the 1890s the
Populist movement flourished in this country, representing farmers and laborers
in the South and West who resented the dominance of Eastern bankers and
plutocrats, big corporations and railroads, and the high cost of money. Populist leaders inveighed especially against
that hub of greed and corruption, Wall Street, which meant that New York City
seemed to embody all that they detested … and feared.
Fast-forward again into the twentieth
century. By the 1920s New York, whose
thrusting of ever taller buildings had always dazzled and amazed visitors, was
sprouting in abundance those truly American marvels, the skyscrapers. Indeed, with Manhattan now all built up,
where else could the city expand except high into the sky? Even today, when those big glass boxes known
as high-rises clutter up the scene, I still marvel at the Woolworth Building,
the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State, and salute their stark modernity,
their secular – dare I say it? – vision.
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| New York City as seen from the Empire State Building, circa 1932. |
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| The Empire State Building today, as seen from the east. Beyond My Ken |
Not to mention Rockefeller
Center, Lincoln Center, and the multiple creations of that master builder,
Robert Moses, and the George Washington and Verrazano bridges. I have walked the George Washington Bridge en
route to or from the Palisades and, in spite of all the noisy traffic, have had
that feeling of being projected into space, into sky, with my knees trembling
at a glance at the abysms of space below that separated me from the river and
the little toy boats on its surface: no ordinary experience, but one both
exalting and frightening, made possible by what must be the most sublime of
visions.
That twentieth-century New York was a New
Thing, all its own, struck any visitor coming from the Old World for the first
time. In a previous post I quoted
Salvador Dali’s rapturous salute to the city when he first came in the 1930s:
The poetry of New York is an organ,
Gothic neurosis, nostalgia of the Orient and the Occident, parchment
lampshade in the form of a musical partition, smoked façade,
artificial vampire, artificial armchair…. New York is not prismatic; New
York is not white. New York is all round; New York is vivid red.
New York is a round pyramid. New York is a ball of flesh a little pointed
toward the top, a ball of millennial and crystallized entrails; a monumental
ruby in the rough – with the organ-point of its flashes directed toward heaven,
somewhat like the form of an inverted heart – before being polished!
Anything inspiring such Surrealist lyricism,
such a hymn to the Modern, surely points
toward vision, not the vision of a single inspired architect or planner or
engineer, or even a team of them, but a collective vision, a vision of the many.
I have defined New York City’s driving
force as a dark eros, a combination of blind energy, ambition, and desire. Cannot this force be considered visionary,
and can we not attribute to such a vision these essentially material
achievements? Yes, then, there is vision
in New York.
But I will take it one step further. The Gothic cathedrals of Europe are certainly
the products of vision, but an essentially spiritual vision. I marvel at their soaring vaults and towers,
their sculpted Virgin and saints, their breathtaking stained glass windows,
their every detail expressing a living, vibrant faith. Can the structures and bridges of New York be
in any way comparable? Or is it folly to
even attempt such a comparison? Can one
think of the Empire State Building and Notre Dame de Paris in the same
breath? Or the Prometheus of Rockefeller
Center and any Gothic sculpture? Surely
the Prometheus and Atlas of Rockefeller Center are more related to the epic
sculpture of the Renaissance.
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| Notre Dame de Paris, illuminated at night. Fabien1309 |
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| Virgin and Child, in front of the western rose window of Notre Dame. MOSSOT |
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| The Prometheus of Rockefeller Center, bringing fire to mortals. Jorge Royan |
A nun of my acquaintance insists that
there is no spirituality without sexuality, and no sexuality without
spirituality. So I wonder if, against
all likelihood, the secular vision producing the monuments of New York can have
a hidden spiritual component. Behind
this city’s and this country’s urge to dream, dare, do, is there some lofty
purpose that surpasses the individual agents, that seeks to achieve some goal
of which we are but dimly, if at all, aware?
THIS NATION CAN
DO ANYTHING
DREAM DARE DO
THE EYES OF
THE WORLD ARE
UPON YOU
Hasn’t this always been the nation’s
credo, and by extension now, the city’s? So here we tread upon the thorny question of
American exceptionalism, the belief that we are somehow different, special,
unique, created by God or some Unseen Power to realize a Great Purpose on this
earth. Which brings to mind a refrain
from a poem by Carl Sandburg:
We
are the greatest city,
the
greatest nation:
nothing
like us ever was.
Isn’t this the credo of
America? But Sandburg isn’t celebrating
New York and America (he preferred Chicago anyway). This refrain is from his poem “Four Preludes
on Playthings of the Wind,” which begins with an epigraph: “The past is a
bucket of ashes.” Like Shelley in his
poem “Ozymandias,” Sandburg is really expressing the folly of such
exceptionalism, the fragility of grandiose human achievement. A sobering thought, when one contemplates
soaring bridges and towers, epic statuary, wondrous parks. Visions too are fragile and probably, in the
long run, doomed. Maybe the Twin Towers
– which I never quite managed to like – were our Babel, our crowning hubris,
and destined for destruction. Maybe we
should think small for a change. But has
New York ever thought small, and would it still be New York, if it did? Surely not.
But maybe we should. Think small,
that is. Maybe. And maybe not.
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| Our crowning hubris? |
 |
| September 15, 2001. A New York City fireman calls for ten more rescue workers to enter the rubble of the World Trade Center. |
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| Clothespins. Kris Krug |
What brought me to this subject was an
article in a recent New York Times
inspired by the imminence of Fashion Week.
It seems that our previous mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, though no fashion icon
himself, had a close relationship with the
fashion world, attending their shows, speaking at their award ceremonies,
showing up at their store openings, and walking the red carpet at their
galas. “I am a fashionista!” he on one
occasion jokingly announced. “Our mayor,
our father, our caretaker,” one designer gushed. Said another, “He realizes that fashion is
the heartbeat of this city.” (All these
years in New York, and I never detected its heartbeat!) So in love was the fashion world with
Hizzoner, they gave him a private farewell dinner last December at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But the old order changeth, giving way to
the new. Enter a new mayor named de
Blasio, all six feet five of him.
“Nobody in fashion knows this guy,” one fashion exec has observed. “I am sure we will seduce the new mayor,
too,” says designer Diane von Furstenberg.
Which may not be so easy. De
Blasio’s “tale of two cities,” contrasting the ultra rich 1% with the other
99%, didn’t resonate with fashion, an industry that doesn’t exactly cater to
the hoi polloi, least of all those at the very bottom of the heap. Bloomberg and his partner Diane Taylor were
very social creatures, hobnobbing easily with the fashion world at its frequent
dinners, parties, and events. But the
new mayor, with two teen-age children, may be more homebound and less socially
inclined. And it doesn’t help that in
the last primary the fashion crowd bet on the wrong horse, Christine Quinn, and
not on that unknown who came from behind, Bill de Blasio. But the fashionistas are hopeful, insisting
that anyone with two “with-it” children like Dante and Chiara has to have a
secret fashion bent. So will the new
mayor be seduced? We’ll soon get a hint,
since he’ll be expected to attend the imminent opening of New York Fashion
Week. And this is one seduction of a
politician that we can all witness at least without dismay. Suspense is building. Can progressives and fashion march in step
together? Or even dance? Time will tell.
Coming soon: The Sacred in Secular New York. (Is it even conceivable? The sacredness of water, Pete Seeger, and
GE. The role of silence and my five
secret spots. Greek gods and dancing
Shiva.)
©
2014 Clifford Browder
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