THE CITY OF AMBITION
In 1995, Daniel’s wife, Bing, was awarded a fellowship to pursue a master’s degree in law at New York University. For the next academic year, the couple lived in a subsidized university apartment facing Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Their baby, Julien, was less than a year old, and Bing’s parents also lived in the one-bedroom apartment to help with child-rearing. The living quarters were cramped—the parents slept in the bedroom; Bing, Daniel, and Julien slept on a mat in the living room; and visiting friends slept under the kitchen table—but it was a happy time. Every morning, Daniel would take Julien to the apartment window, stick Julien’s head out, and show him the Empire State Building on the right side, and the World Trade Center on the left. On September 11, 2001, however, Daniel learned that not everybody was equally enamored of Manhattan’s skyline.
In 1998, the then mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, ended his second inaugural address on a high note: “I ask God to bless us and our great city—the capital of the world now and forever.” Such an expression of civicism would seem absurdly bombastic and inappropriate in any city other than New York. What makes New York “the capital of the world”? The mayor was not referring to the fact the United Nations makes its home in New York. Rather, he meant that New York is the capital of the financial and business worlds. But economic power isn’t enough: “The greatest and most successful cities have always been those in which the arts have flourished and grown. It is in music, drama, dance, paintings, sculpture, and architecture created, and in the writings of our philosophers, theologians, poets, novelists, and historians that we define ourselves for future generations—not only for future generations of New Yorkers, but of Americans and people around the world. The most precious legacies of great cities are the great works of art they give the world.”1 So New York is the capital of the world because it’s the world’s economically most powerful city and also because of its great, unparalleled contributions to the world of culture. To borrow the language of mathematics, New York is Hong Kong plus Paris times two. One might ask, how exactly did New York become the “capital of the world”? There are several reasons, but the key factor is that the city has succeeded in attracting a continuous stream of talented and ambitious immigrants from other parts of the country and the world at large.
New York’s greatness came at a substantial cost, however. The city was not built on a foundation of imperial expansion like some great European cities, but its rise to economic prominence was accompanied by severe injustices, such as slavery and callous exploitation of the working class. Moreover, the byproducts of the city’s success—alienation, loneliness, high crime rates, and short-sighted hubris that has shaken the world capitalist system to its core—have spawned a rich literature on the ills of urban life. The dark side of ambition, in other words, is an extreme form of an individualism that is almost unique among great cities.
Yet somehow New York manages repeatedly to resurrect itself, no matter how profound the depths of its economic, social, and moral crises. Perhaps that’s the source of Giuliani’s confidence that New York will remain the capital of the world forever. But why does the city bounce back? How can it survive the repeated challenges to decent community life? Paradoxically, the main reason is the strong underlying sense of community in the city. New Yorkers are attached to their local neighborhoods, as documented most famously by Jane Jacobs’s sympathetic account of neighborhood life in Greenwich Village.2 They are also attached to the city as a whole in a way matched in few great cities, and the sense of civicism manifests itself most clearly in times of crisis. The effort to sell the slogan “I Love New York” is perhaps the most successful city-branding campaign in history, but its success is founded on genuine affection for the city and its way of life. In short, New York–style civicism constrains the pursuit of ambition; without that sense of community, the city of New York would long ago have been surpassed by another capital of the world.
THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
Daniel’s best childhood friend, Ira, was the son of his father’s best friend in Montreal, Tevia Abrams. But Tevia was offered a job with the United Nations and he took his family to New York when Daniel was about five. From that point on, Daniel’s family would make yearly trips to New York to visit the Abrams family. For Daniel, the yearly trips to New York were the highlight of his childhood: he was enthralled by the view from the top of the Empire State Building, the hustle and bustle of pedestrians, the diverse and mouth-watering food. And he dreaded the return trip back home, especially the view from the Champlain Bridge of a few lonely buildings in downtown Montreal, which inevitably reminded him his own city played in the minor leagues.
Today, the skyscrapers of Manhattan seem like deliberate attempts to affirm the mastery of man over nature. What they replaced was the New World’s equivalent of the Garden of Eden. In 1609, the English navigator Henry Hudson, employed by the Dutch West India Company to find a western sea route to the Orient, encountered a beautiful island that the Lenape Indians called “Mannahatta,” meaning “island of a thousand hills.” The verdant paradise had more ecological communities than Yellowstone, more native plant species than Yosemite, and more birds than the Great Smoky Mountains. Had it been left undisturbed, “it would be a national park. It would be the crowning glory of American National Parks.”3
As we know, history took a different turn. The Dutch were interested in making money, and they used the island (New Amsterdam, they called it) as their economic base in the New World. In 1626, they bought the island from the Lenape Indians for sixty guilders (twenty-four U.S. dollars) worth of trinkets and other goods, which seemed like a good deal to the Lenape, who did not have a notion of private property. Spurred by international trade, New Amsterdam gradually developed into a multiethnic and major commercial city, and by the time of the last Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant (1647–64), it had “developed the characteristics of religious tolerance and population heterogeneity that would set it apart from other American cities.”4
The teenage Daniel paid a visit to Ira’s elite public secondary school in lower Manhattan, Stuyvesant High, named after the Dutch governor. Ira had been admitted via competitive examinations, an achievement-based system entirely unfamiliar to Daniel: back in Montreal, kids tended to go to whatever public high school was closest to home (in Daniel’s case, his mother had considered sending him to a private school, but she balked when the admissions officer informed her that the school offered “decadent” services such as golf lessons). Ira took Daniel to the nearby Ray’s pizzeria, which sold pizza by the slice, another unfamiliar practice. What tasty tomato sauce and so much cheese! The pizza was far superior to the insipid concoctions served in Montreal. Daniel polished off five slices. At night, Daniel observed Ira writing long essays as part of the admissions process for top-rated universities. At the time, Daniel was more focused on improving his hockey skills; he still had an outside chance (in his own mind) of playing for the Montreal Canadiens.
In 1644, a fleet of English warships arrived in the harbor. Stuyvesant wanted to fight, but the economy-minded citizens implored their leader to accept the generous terms offered by the English commander. Stuyvesant surrendered without a fight, and the English renamed the city to honor the Duke of York; hence, New York. The city prospered under British rule, but Boston and Philadelphia were larger and more important cities in the eighteenth century. During the American Revolution, the British amassed a huge fleet to defend New York and easily defeated George Washington’s forces in 1776, but Washington learned from the experience: he avoided major battles with the British unless the battles were to be fought on terms extraordinarily favorable to his own forces, and he kept the war going until the British tired of the human and financial sacrifices (the same strategy successfully employed by Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese in their war with the United States two hundred years later).5 When Washington returned to New York in 1781, he was shocked at how British forces had transformed the island into an armed barricade, describing it as “totally stripped of trees and wood of every kind.”6
On April 30 1789, George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States on the balcony of Federal Hall at 26 Wall Street. New York, roughly half-way between Massachusetts and Virginia, appeared to be the logical choice for the new country’s capital. But Thomas Jefferson, the new secretary of state, opposed the plan, and the nation’s capital was moved to a swampy area along the Potomac River, a district that would later be named for the nation’s first president. With politics out of the way, New York was made safe for the pursuit of economic supremacy. By 1807, New York was “the first city in the United States for wealth, commerce, and population.”7 Rather than recount the economic history of the city, however, let us ask why it became the world’s premier center of commerce and finance.
Proximity to water is, historically speaking, a necessary condition for the development of great economic cities. Blessed with the most hospitable and functional harbor on the Atlantic seaboard, New York is no exception. As Calvin Tomkins explained in 1905, the city was uniquely well-placed for economic takeoff: “The only other cities which have any strategic position on the Atlantic seaboard are Montreal on the St. Lawrence and the city of New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico. The one is interfered with by the cold of winter and the other by the heat of summer. In the case of every other city along the seaboard, the trains coming to it have to climb up over the Allegheny Mountains and down again, and the expense is heavy as compared to the level haul from the West to New York…. The fact that the transportation of the world is coming to its gates makes New York the city that it is.”8
But geography per se can’t explain New York’s economic success. For one thing, the people of New York had to, and did, make full use of the city’s natural advantages: they developed the first regularly scheduled shipping service in 1818, and built the Erie Canal by 1825, linking the city with the American West and shifting the country’s trade axis in New York’s favor.9 More to the point, the relative importance of the city’s port in the global economy declined in the twentieth century, just as New York cemented its role as the “capital of capital.” In 1900, the Port of New York was the busiest port in the world,10 but today it pales in economic significance compared to the ports of Singapore and Hong Kong. If the story of New York’s economic success were mainly explained by its advantageous geographical location, New York’s global economic importance should have declined along with the decline of its port. Yet the opposite occurred.
Bing and Daniel hit the town. It’s the first time they have left baby Julien at night, and they feel guilty. But Don Giovanni, Daniel’s favorite opera, is playing at Lincoln Center (the largest performing arts venue in the country) and it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. They are moved by the music. After the opera, the under-dressed couple goes for a drink at a nearby café filled with glamorous-looking people. Poor Julien can wait a bit longer. The whole evening feels like Cinderella’s coming-out ball, except that it didn’t end at midnight. Yes, the urban planner Robert Moses forcibly cleared out old neighborhoods and displaced seven thousand people to build Lincoln Center, but the cultural institution did succeed in revitalizing the neighborhood.11
Let us consider the possibility that New York’s history of economic success is mainly attributable to its visionary urban planners. In the twentieth century, nobody stands out more than Robert Moses: as his biographer (and sharpest critic) Robert A. Caro puts it, Moses was “America’s greatest builder. He was the shaper of the greatest city in the New World.”12 Moses explicitly strove to model himself after Baron Haussmann, the visionary who made Paris into the nineteenth century’s greatest city.13 Moses’s plans for remaking the city came at the right time: New Yorkers were thinking big. The unification of Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn into the “Greater City of New York” in 1898 instantly doubled the city’s population and its geographical reach from the twenty-three square miles of Manhattan to more than three hundred square miles, all unified under one municipal government.14 The Brooklyn Bridge, the greatest engineering project of its age, had linked the hearts of Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1883, but more infrastructure projects were needed. In came Moses, who, starting in the 1930s, built an almost invincible power base. The Great Depression struck New York harder than any other American city,15 and Moses put the city back to work. As the head of various commissions, authorities, and agencies, he built vast bridges, tunnels, and expressways that opened up New York to its suburbs and linked its diverse boroughs. Without these infrastructural developments, New York would have declined into economic irrelevance.16
Moses also expanded the public realm with extensive recreational facilities. His most famous early project, Jones Beach, has been beloved by generations of heat-weary New Yorkers. He sought to make Manhattan more livable for the middle class by building cultural facilities. In total, Moses
was responsible for thirteen bridges, two tunnels, 637 miles of highways, 658 playgrounds, ten giant public swimming pools, seventeen state parks, and dozens of new or renovated city parks. He cleared three hundred acres of city land and constructed towers that contained 28,400 new apartments. He built Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Shea Stadium, Jones Beach, and the Central Park Zoo. He built the Triborough and Verrazano-Narrows bridges, the Long Island and Cross-Bronx expressways, parkways down the side of Manhattan and north and east of the city, avenues, overpasses, causeways, and viaducts. Any New Yorker or visitor to the city has at one time or another driven down, walked through, sat in, or sailed into something that Moses created.17
It seems fair to add that most New Yorkers and visitors to the city have benefited from Moses’s creations. So why is Moses—unlike Paris’s Baron Haussmann and Singapore’s Goh Keng Swee—such a demonized figure in the history of urban planning, notwithstanding recent efforts to reevaluate his legacy?
One obvious objection is that political actors are supposed to be elected and held accountable in democracies, but Moses never held public office (in 1934, he did run as a Republican for governor of New York but lost badly to his Democratic opponent). Moses’s model here was Haussmann, whom he described admiringly “as a talker, an ogre for work, despotic, insolvent, full of initiative and daring, and caring not a straw for legality. Everything about him as on a grand scale…. [His] dictatorial talents enabled him to accomplish a vast amount in a very short time, but they also made him many enemies, for he was in the habit of riding roughshod over all opposition.”18 What’s interesting—and impressive, in a sense—is that Moses managed to accumulate Haussmann-like powers without the backing of a dictator: he exercised power by heading commissions that allowed him to draft legislation and appropriate funds, running aggressive public relations campaigns, and acting fast with land acquisition and with laying asphalt so that projects gained a momentum all their own.19 In practice, his power could not be challenged seriously by any governor of New York State or mayor of New York City from 1934 to 1968 (a longer reign than Haussmann himself had).20 Moses’s exercise of power is certainly problematic from a democratic point of view, but how else can great cities undertake large-scale infrastructure projects? Today, “New York cannot manage to find the resources for the most minimal infrastructural improvements that are essential to a world city.”21 In an otherwise critical perspective on the Moses legacy, Anthony Flint comments that “among government, business, and civic leaders in New York who have been frustrated by what they see as paralysis, there has even been talk of the need for a new Robert Moses, to supply basic infrastructure and the big projects needed to propel the city as a competitive economic center for the twenty-first century. Projects on the scale of those of Moses could not take place today, as the kind of thoughtful citizen involvement Jacobs envisioned has evolved into mere NIMBYism—the protest of ‘not in my own backyard.’ Citizen opposition now brings even modest projects to a grinding halt.”22
Critics also object to the brutal way Moses carried out urban development. Caro estimates that for his public works projects, Moses evicted a half million people from their homes, and “more significant even than the number of the dispossessed were their characteristics: a disproportionate share of them were black, Puerto Rican—and poor.”23 But Moses made no apology for his methods: “You cannot build a city without moving people. You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs…. We do indeed sympathize with tenants and do everything possible to help them, but we cannot give everybody and his lawyer what they want.”24 Haussmann was equally brutal in his methods (the Parisian poor were expropriated or forced outside of the city center by expensive rents), yet he is still held in high regard overall. And it’s worth asking again about the likely alternatives: in many other American cities, the middle class and the rich fled to the suburbs and the downtown core went into steep economic decline. Moses’s urban development projects helped keep the middle and upper classes in Manhattan, thus contributing to the economic revitalization of the city, and arguably the economic growth and larger tax base eventually helped the poor as well.
Moses-style urban renewal has also been criticized on aesthetic grounds. Moses razed neighborhoods and built “big rectangular structures and cruciform, X-shaped towers on what became known as superblocks…. Increasingly, Moses abandoned the attention to fine details that characterized Jones Beach and the swimming pools and bathhouses, instead focusing on the number of new apartments—just as his later expressways, built with the single goal of the swift flow of traffic, possess none of the charm of his wooden-guardrailed parkways.”25 These cold and uninviting towers are blamed for the deterioration of affordable housing in New York: because the residents did not identify with such ugly and alienating structures, the superblocks eventually fell into disrepair and became dangerous and crime-ridden. But the problem may not lie with ugly buildings per se: the governments of Hong Kong and Singapore similarly destroyed old neighborhoods and replaced them with ugly public housing superblocks on an even larger scale, yet they are regarded as relatively successful housing programs for the poor and middle classes.
Perhaps the key reason for Moses’s bad reputation today is his excessive faith in the automobile as the emblem of modern development. Drawing on Le Corbusier’s vision of huge towers linked by parks and highways, Moses proposed building a Lower Manhattan Expressway that would run through what is now Soho. The urban activist Jane Jacobs galvanized opposition to the proposed highway on the grounds that it would destroy potentially vibrant neighborhoods and actually increase traffic. Jacobs won the battle—the city government rejected the expressway in 1964—and she proved to be correct on both counts. Once the plan for the expressway was shelved, Soho came back to life as investors poured in money without fear of being expropriated. Today, Soho is a remarkable urban success story, famous for its cast-iron buildings, bistros, designer shops, and art galleries. And Jacobs’s then counterintuitive argument that building new highways just invites more traffic that quickly fills the lanes to capacity is now widely accepted (unfortunately, it is less accepted in Beijing). Portland has erased a freeway through its downtown and even Los Angeles has given up on bumper-to-bumper highways; more and more American politicians are seeking to shift federal funding from highways to public transit, streetcars, and high-speed rail for a more balanced transportation system. In the final analysis, Moses was on the wrong side of history, but mainly because of what he tried to do rather than how he tried to do it: “Had Moses been in charge of building the world’s greatest transit system, he would be cheered today no matter how many people he had uprooted.”26
Moses fell from grace and left New York in bad shape. In the mid-1970s, the city experienced a deep economic crisis and became synonymous with crime and social disorder. Yet twenty years later, New York entered a period of optimism and economic revival that it hadn’t seen in a half century. The city was helped by pragmatic political leaders such as Rudolph Giuliani and the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, but it rose from the ashes without the aid of an urban visionary like Moses. So let us return to our original question. What’s the key explanation for New York’s success as the world’s premier economic city? If it’s not really about geography and visionary urban planning, then what’s the X factor?
Singapore, November 1993. Daniel receives a fax from the distinguished New York intellectual Daniel Bell. It begins: “I suppose that anyone named John Smith is accustomed to seeing that name in many places, even on books when each of the John Smiths are authors. But it was quite a surprise to see an advertisement in the TLS [Times Literary Supplement] by Oxford University Press for a book by Daniel Bell on Communitarianism and Its Critics, and not have that Daniel Bell identified other than by that name.” Bell goes on to explain that he has also written on communitarian themes and ends his letter by saying, “In any event, out of obvious curiosity, I would like to learn a bit more about your background and thinking.”
Daniel replies with a fax explaining his family heritage: “Fleeing the Russian pogroms with little more than a shirt on his back, my great-grandfather Daniel Belitsky disembarked at Ellis Island in 1905 along with thousands of other Jewish immigrants to the new world.” Daniel explains that his grandfather shortened his name to Bell so as to better fit with the Gentile mainstream, and that he hoped that one of his sons would name a child “Daniel” in honor of his father. So that’s how Daniel got his name.
Within a couple of hours, Daniel receives another fax from Daniel Bell: “There are many extraordinary parallels in your account. My grandfather, Avram Bolotsky, came to Ellis Island ca. 1905 from the triangle of Lithuania-Poland-Russia…. My uncle, who was my legal guardian, was a dentist, Samuel Bolotsky, who took the name Bell, when I was about ten years old in 1929. So, from 1929, I was Daniel Bell.”
The two Daniel Bells pursue an almost daily faxed correspondence. The younger Bell says that his book on communitarianism had been classified in the Library of Congress as sociology instead of political theory. The elder Bell replies: “Leave it for two reasons: one, if you apply for a job in “democratic” China, you can cite a long and thick bibliography (I am appending an abbreviated c.v.).27 The other reason is that since you will be writing for a long time, a Chinese scholar in the future may be astounded by the discovery of the incredible longevity of a Daniel Bell with over ninety years of productivity.”
Bell the younger replies: “Thanks for your C.V.—I’ll definitely make use of it if I apply for jobs in a democratic China, but even if my potential employers find it plausible that I could have written so many books there’s the larger problem that we’ll most likely have to wait several hundred years before we see a democratic system in China.”
The two Daniel Bells eventually agree that the younger one should use the initial “A” in future publications so as to avoid further mix-ups. It doesn’t always work out as planned, however. Daniel A. Bell finds a job in not-so-democratic China and still gets confused with the “real” Daniel Bell when he is invited to give lectures at Chinese universities.28
New York has a long history of drawing immigrants in search of a better life: “On island of Manhate, and its environs, there may well be four to five hundred men of different sects and nations” and “eighteen different languages,” noted Father Jogues in 1643.29 But really massive immigration started only in the nineteenth century. In 1860, the poet Walt Whitman captured the exuberant mood of the city:
Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island 1908. Photograph © Lewis Wickes Hine/Bettmann/Corbis.
Immigrants arriving fifteen or twenty-thousand a week….
A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—
hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men;
The free city! no slaves! no owners of slaves!
The beautiful city! the city of hurried and sparkling waters! the city of spires and masts!
The city nested in bays! my city!30
Whitman was referring mainly to (white) immigrants from the German states and from Ireland: in 1860, more than two hundred thousand New Yorkers hailed from Ireland, and nearly one hundred twenty thousand more from the German states.31 Germany and Ireland continued to be the main suppliers of immigrants in the late nineteenth century, but they were joined by new waves of immigrants from eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and China: “the influx of eastern European Jews, Italians, and Chinese confirmed that New York would now become a city for all the world, and in numbers on a scale unheard of in history.”32 Starting in 1886, the immigrants were greeted by the Statue of Liberty, the tallest structure in New York at the time. The statue was originally intended to show support for the Union cause in the Civil War, but it conveyed a message of welcome and uplift to the immigrant (Emma Lazarus had been moved by the plight of the Russian Jews and wrote the immortal words that were cast in bronze and fixed to the statue in 1903: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”). In 1892, the U.S. government built facilities for processing immigrants on nearby Ellis Island: about twelve million immigrants passed through Ellis Island over the succeeding fifty years, and more than 40 percent of the American population (not to mention Canadians) has at least one ancestor who passed through the island.33 Why does this matter? Because the millions of diverse and highly ambitious immigrants made New York into the “capital of the world” in the twentieth century. That’s the X factor. E. B. White’s essay (1949) “Here Is New York,” the most quoted piece of prose about New York City, put it well:
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical temperament, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.34
Changes in immigration policy in the 1920s radically limited new immigration, but the flood of immigrants resumed in the 1990s, when a million foreigners came to New York, mainly from the Caribbean, Central America, and Asia. The 2000 census shows that today, 40 percent of the city’s inhabitants are foreign born (most likely an underestimate that doesn’t count illegal immigrants), a percentage similar to that in 1910 at the peak of the “New Immigration.”35 Immigration, Eric Homberger notes, “is perhaps the greatest of all the ideas that serve to unite New Yorkers.”36 The reason is obvious: because immigrants, filled with ambition to “strike it big,” provided the energy and dynamism that made the city into the capital of the world.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 1994. Daniel and Bing are invited for dinner at the home of Daniel Bell the elder and his wife, Pearl. Asked about his future plans, Daniel tells the Bells that he is applying for jobs in Hong Kong. Pearl expresses disapproval: Isn’t that city just about making money? What about culture? She says she couldn’t live in a city without a vibrant cultural scene. Isn’t it better to live in New York?
New York is both the capital of capital and the capital of culture. But how did that happen? After all, Hong Kong is also composed of ambitious immigrants who made the city rich, and yet it didn’t develop anything like New York’s vibrant cultural scene. What explains the difference? Perhaps it’s a function of size: New York (population eight million) has a larger talent pool. But that can’t be the key explanation: few would dispute the claim that New York’s contribution to the world of literature, music, painting, and theater is far out of proportion to its population. Perhaps it’s the freedom to create? But Hong Kong has a long history of civil freedom; its people were rarely constrained from creating works of art for political reasons. Perhaps New York was lucky to have public-spirited capitalists who used their wealth to promote culture? That’s part of it. By the end of the nineteenth century, newly rich “robber barons” such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan spent their money on cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History.37 But New York is famous not just for preserving great works of art in museums, but even more for creativity and innovation in the world of art.
Daniel’s great-grandfather Daniel Belitsky eventually moved from New York to Montreal, where he had a sister. One of his five children, named Sam, went to New York to seek his fortune. In New York, Sam met and married his wife, Claire, and they had three children, two of whom were born in New York (Daniel’s father, Don, and his uncle, Arthur). Sam was offered a tryout with the New York Rangers hockey team, but he turned it down (the story goes) because of the low pay and possible discrimination against Jewish hockey players. He tried his hand at business without much success, and the family moved to Montreal to start a business with the financial backing of Sam’s elder brother, Maurice. But young Arthur felt constrained in Montreal. He decided to move back to New York at the age of eighteen, telling his parents that he preferred the theater scene in New York. Arthur went on to a successful career as the author of two books and an entertainment columnist for the Village Voice with his column “Bell Tells.” He was also one of the first gays to “come out of the closet,” helping to found the Gay Activists Alliance. His parents were upset at first but eventually took pride in their son’s achievements. Arthur died of complications of diabetes in 1984 at the age of fifty-one. Daniel has fond memories of Arthur, who procured tickets for special Broadway musicals (such as Carol Channing’s thousandth performance in Hello, Dolly!) and high-profile concerts (like the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden) whenever Daniel visited New York. The Village Voice organized a memorial service for Arthur that was attended by several hundred members of the gay community. Daniel recalls being moved by scenes of his elderly grandfather embracing and shedding tears with a string of Arthur’s former boyfriends at the memorial service.
People go to New York because it is seen as the land of promise, the place to realize one’s potential. As the architect Robert A. M. Stern describes the process, “you can come here and invent yourself or can be born here and reinvent yourself, and you can change yourself. And if you can change yourself, presumably, you are also changing the whole structure of the world that you operate in, in order to make your fictive reality come alive.”38 But what makes the process of change so creative is that there are so many different starting points. Perhaps the main reason for the explosion of new forms of culture in New York is the diversity of its immigrant pool.
Daniel is invited to give a talk at the United Nations. As he steps into the building he notices the ethnically diverse group of people inside, but then he realizes that it’s just as diverse outside. He can’t think of another city where the “United Nations” also exists on the city’s streets.
New York City has been the destination for “a hundred immigrant streams deluging the city at levels unprecedented since the 1920s,” and the city became less than half white at some point during the 1980s.39 Different kinds of immigrants from a radically different range of ethnic, linguistic,40 and social backgrounds are bound to be confronted with new perspectives, to question old ways of doing things, and to innovate. That’s why New York is filled with so many diverse restaurants, including combinations like Cuban-Chinese and Brazilian-Japanese. That’s why new forms of music emerge that eventually take the world by storm: bebop, mambo, punk, disco, and hip-hop.41 And that’s why new social movements, such as the gay liberation movement and feminism,42 originate and flourish in New York. All these innovations must rest on a foundation of freedom and wealth,43 but the clash of perspectives of diverse kinds of ambitious people is what makes New York into the capital of the world.44
AMBITION VERSUS COMMUNITY
New York, December 31, 1983. Daniel goes to Queens to meet his close friend Tatiana at the home of Tatiana’s childhood friend, Jane. The trio then drives in Tatiana’s old Mercedes Benz to Manhattan for New Year’s Eve. They park a few blocks away from Times Square and walk through the throngs of happy people to watch the ball drop from the Times Tower, a tradition that dates back to 1907. They kiss strangers in Times Square at the stroke of midnight. A friend has somehow secured a penthouse in a nearby building, and they go there to drink champagne. A few bottles later, they walk back to the car. But the streets are not so welcoming anymore. No cars or cops. Sidewalks strewn with liquor bottles and used needles. A few prostitutes and pimps. Packs of young thugs on street corners. Drug addicts asleep or dead. Daniel and his two female friends pick up their pace. A filthy, bearded man emerges from an open sewer—is it possible?—and approaches the trio. Jane panics. She screams and bursts out crying. It seems to work: they have joined the community of crazy people. They are left alone and run to the car. It’s a miracle: the Mercedes has not yet been vandalized!
City life has often been viewed as individualistic and morally decadent, as the antithesis of decent communal life. In biblical times, city people were portrayed as particularly corrupt (think of Sodom and Nineveh). Cities were often described, especially by prophets, as cities “of blood” or “of murderers” (Ezekiel 22:2; Ezekiel 24:6; Nahum 3:1), of fear (Jeremiah 15:8), and full of theft and violence (Ezekiel 7:23). Leaders who came from rural backgrounds were thought to be innocent and free of sin. Moses left urban Egyptian sprawl to find God in the wilderness. When the people of Israel demanded to have a king like every other nation, Samuel went searching for one in the countryside. He found Saul and, after him, David, who before being appointed used to shepherd his father’s flock in the hills around Bethlehem.45
The city makes its first appearance in the Bible in the story of the Tower of Babel:
Everyone on earth used to speak the same language and the same words. As people migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar [Babylon] and settled there…. [T]hey said, “Let us build a city for ourselves, with a tower that reaches to heaven, so that we can make a name for ourselves and will not be scattered all over the earth.” But the Lord came down to inspect the city and tower that the people had built. Then the Lord said, “It is because they are one people and all speak the same language that they have been able to undertake this—in fact, nothing that they set out to do will be impossible for them. Let us go down and confuse their speech, so that they will not understand what they are saying to each other.” Thus the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth, and the building of the city was stopped. (Gen. 11:1–9)
The point of this story seems pretty clear: it just did not seem right that humans should try to reach the realm of the divine, perhaps even challenging God’s rule in the process; the arrogance of the idea must have been what caused God to frustrate their plans, to halt construction of the half-built tower and confuse their speech in order to stop their urban building mania. The story, in other words, seems to be a parable of human hubris and divine retribution, a not-so-subtle warning to overly ambitious human beings who seek to “make a name” for themselves: we should not think too much of ourselves and too little of God.46
Viewed within this moral framework, the story of New York seems equally clear: it’s a model of arrogance, the revenge of godless human beings, a gathering of diverse peoples from around the world who are molded into speaking a common language and who resume their urban building mania. New Yorkers destroyed the Garden of Eden and replaced it with towers reaching to heaven in order to assert man’s mastery over God and his creations.
Already in the nineteenth century, before the skyscrapers were built, New York’s unique drive for nighttime supremacy (the use of artificial light in New York was much more widespread than in London or Paris) seemed to be sending the message that “the mightiness of human construction replaces religious wonder at the divinely driven power of the natural world.”47 Man was finally successful at challenging the biblical adage that concretely expresses our limitations: “The night cometh, when no man can work” (John 9:4). In 1916, new zoning laws allowing for towers without height restriction (covering an area not to exceed 25 percent of the lot) came into effect, thus ushering in the age of the skyscraper, the greatest architectural innovation of its time. Skyscrapers had symbolic significance as icons of progress or, as David Nye calls them, “geometrical sublimes.”48 They reflected enthusiasm for technology and man’s victory over natural and physical obstacles. Le Corbusier is “intoxicated” as he observes the nighttime Manhattan skyline: “It is a Milky Way come down to earth; you are in it.”49 The most dazzling high-rise of its time was Cass Gilbert’s 1913 Woolworth Building, the corporate headquarters of the revolutionary retailer that invented the idea of low prices at high volume, with all the merchandise on display. Gilbert’s use of neo-Gothic tracery gives the building a medieval feel and “led the Brooklyn minister S. Parkes Cadman to dub it ‘the Cathedral of Commerce’ at its opening gala. Cadman was not only making a commentary on its architectural style but on the fact that in the battle between God and Mammon, Mammon appeared to be winning.”50 In 1929, the Chrysler Building bested the height of the Woolworth Building, only to be bested two years later by the Empire State Building.
But the Empire State Building opened at the height of the Great Depression, few tenants could be found, and people took to calling it the “Empty State Building.”51 The Great Depression itself was triggered by hubris in the world of speculation and finance, seeming to confirm the view of the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child that “in Wall Street … Mammon, as usual, coolly calculates his chance of extracting a penny from war, pestilence, and famine; and Commerce, with her loaded drays, and jaded skeletons of horses, is busy as ever ‘fulfilling the World’s contract with the Devil.’”52 The Empire State Building, as we know, eventually filled up with tenants and became one of New York’s most beloved symbols. Its height was finally surpassed by the World Trade Center, completed in 1971. The “pretentious and arrogant”53 buildings quickly became the most hated structures in the city, but they successfully revitalized the financial district. After they were destroyed on September 11, 2001, the religious evangelist Jerry Falwell attributed the terrorist attack to Providence, angered by the debauchery of morally decadent sinners: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”54
In short, to its religious critics New York has come to symbolize a city where the hand of godless man has replaced the hand of God. Ambrose Bierce put it most succinctly when he defined Mammon in his Devil’s Dictionary as “The God of the world’s leading religion. His chief temple is the holy city of New York.”55 It is certainly possible to criticize such perspectives, especially the views of ideologues like Jerry Falwell. Still, we must recognize that the blind pursuit of individualistic ambition does have some costs.
Avner feels bothered by Manhattan’s street grid. The streets are nameless but numbered, as if to declare: we place no greater value on this event or that person. What’s more, the avenues seem never to end. They go on and on, crossed by seemingly innumerable numbered streets. Imagine yourself as a five-year-old. Now, go, stand on Fifth Avenue during rush hour. But don’t stand as you are. A five-year-old’s height is about one meter. Bend and observe what you see from this height. You will probably see movement. You will see legs moving fast, you will see sunshine and shadows replacing each other. You will not know these legs, who they belong to. It is difficult to move from one place to another while you are on the street. It is not safe, distances are long, and there is no place for privacy. One must join the wave of people who walk forward. Adults seem to know their destinations and directions. But if you are a child not sure of your direction, whether to keep going straight, turn left, or whatever, you would want to stop from time to time. You’d like to look around you and see whether you are going the right way, whether you should keep on going. But you can’t stop. If you stop all of a sudden, if you turn backward, if you hesitate, people might walk over you, through you, at you. Pedestrians in Manhattan’s commercial district have no time for hesitation. They do not expect you to stop and wonder. So children do not walk in Manhattan. This is alienation.
Manhattan’s street grid was set out in 1811 and designed to impose some order on a city that was growing rapidly in population. The hills of Manhattan were leveled and new rectilinear streets were laid out for the undeveloped part of the island north of Washington Square. The commissioners entrusted to lay out the streets dismissed out of hand the “supposed improvements by circles, ovals, and stars” that characterized Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s plan for the political capital of Washington, DC (and were later to characterize Haussmann’s Paris). Instead, the primary motivation for the grid plan was to exploit real estate. Recalling that New York was to be composed “principally of the habitations of men,” they favored “straight-sided and right angled houses [which] are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in.”56 Unlike Paris or London, there was to be little space left for parks on the grounds that since “the prices of land are so uncommonly great, it seems proper to admit the principles of economy.”57 The subsequent growth in the value of real estate was an incomparable speculative investment, leading to the great nineteenth-century New York property empires (owned by the Astors, the Wendels, and others) as well as small apartments and high rents for most of the city’s inhabitants.
A long line of architectural critics have deplored the rectangular grid as monotonous and soulless. In 1902, Jean Schopfer wrote, “New York, from that time on, grew like a child in an orthopaedic corset. There were no places set apart in the plan for sparkling fountains under shady trees; no edifice to interrupt the monotony of eternally straight and parallel lines; and the streets, each with its number like a convict in a prison; and the avenues, all the avenues, stretched onward, onward indefinitely, with the sky for background; and not an inch of land is lost.”58 Lewis Mumford’s influential 1961 work The City in History denounced the grid as spectacularly inefficient and wasteful, best suited for the capitalist conversion of natural resources into a medium for speculation and exploitation.59
Daniel and Tatiana meet near Central Park with another friend, Lena, a designer in a leading house of fashion. It’s a beautiful spring day. Lena knows what’s hip. No need for a map; it’s impossible to get lost with the numbered streets. They walk and walk, all the way to Washington Square, stopping every few minutes at boutique hotels, charming exhibits, and cool cafés. What a culture of riches! What a lovely way to spend an afternoon!
Yet the grid also had a positive legacy: New York developed into one of the most pedestrian-friendly cities in the United States, a city best experienced by strollers and gazers. The original commissioners of the grid eliminated alleys to allow for bigger, more desirable lots, reflecting the reality that very few in New York would ever have the means to own a horse and carriage. Thus, there was no need for rear stables.60 No parks, but also no parking for horse carriages or, later, for cars. As Nathan Glazer puts it, “I think the interest in New York is sparked and maintained by the fact that it is a city shaped and in large measure completed before the age of the automobile.”61 Today, fewer than 20 percent of Manhattan residents own cars, and the sidewalks of Manhattan are bustling and filled with pedestrians.62
Daniel is invited to give some talks in the New York area and he stays at the apartment of Judy and Tevia Abrams on the upper East Side of Manhattan, a few blocks from “Museum Mile.” His clothes are all crumpled from travel and he steps outside looking for a dry cleaner. To his pleasant surprise, every single block seems to have one. The following year, Daniel goes to Jerusalem to work on this book with Avner. He stays in an apartment on Mount Scopus, and roams the streets looking for a nearby dry cleaner. No luck. Only half-joking, Avner advises Daniel that he should go to Tel Aviv to find a dry cleaner.
Cynthia Ozick writes: “What Manhattan talks about, obliquely or openly—what it thinks about, whatever the season, is ambition.”63 Who makes it, who doesn’t, that’s what matters. The conversation goes straight to job talk and quick evaluations are made of one’s place in the social pecking order. It’s not as enjoyable as Paris-style conversation, but if it’s just talk, what’s the big deal? Yes, it’s the world of appearances, but who has time to explore another person’s Being in a city that prioritizes ambition? If people seek recognition for their accomplishments, why not give them a bit of face? As the New York University sociologist Steven Lukes put it, vanity is the least bad of human sins.64 So let’s talk about the really bad ones.
Avner’s hotel room window in downtown Manhattan gives him the illusion that he is watching a film on a wide-screen TV. If he wants, he can open the window and let the noise in, or he can shut it and turn the noise off. He watches as a limousine stops and a movie star gets out, almost stepping on a homeless person. Bystanders take photos of the celebrity. Another scene outside: A worker comes to clean the public garbage cans. He lifts one in order to empty its contents into a large plastic bag. Maybe because of the cold, he drops the can and the garbage spills onto him. It is very wet, and his trousers and shoes get muddy and filthy. He bends to pick up the garbage. People pass by. Nobody stops to help him. Avner recalls a line from one of Leonard Cohen’s songs: “Oh, please don’t pass me by, for I am blind, but you can see.”65 But it is not the worker, begging these people not to pass him by, who is “blind.” People have become blind, blind with indifference to other people’s agony and misery. If Manhattan does not always cause injustice, it certainly makes people indifferent to it.
The arrival of Peter Stuyvesant in 1647 brought relative prosperity and growth to New Amsterdam, and also some of the New World’s first slaves, many of them imported by the Dutch West India Company from the Caribbean or directly from Africa in what was becoming one of the company’s most profitable industries.66 After the Dutch left, the slave trade continued to grow in economic importance: “In the eighteenth century, New York merchants began a leap of imagination and ambition that took the city onto the world stage. It was the determination of sea captains and traders to enter the slave trade—thus creating the famous triangular trade route that brought English goods and West African slaves to New York (the slave auction was located at the foot of Wall Street)—that brought the city to a new role in the world economy.”67 In 1746, when New York had a population of 11,720, slightly more than one-fifth of the inhabitants were slaves, the highest concentration of slaves north of Virginia. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, New York’s slave holdings had become the nation’s second largest after Charleston, South Carolina.68 Slavery was abolished in New York in 1827, but “it is necessary even now to stress that slavery was integral to the development of New York.”69
The end of legal discrimination did not, unfortunately, end the reality of discrimination. In 1863, the Civil War Draft Riots in New York—the single worst civil disturbance in American history—resulted in the deaths of several hundred blacks at the hands of crazed mobs.70 The arrival of Irish and Germans in the same period drove blacks out of the employment fields in which they had formerly had a presence, such as domestic service, barbering, and shoe blacking. Immigrant artisans and mechanics excluded black competitors from their trades, and blacks were left with the least remunerative employment, as servants and waiters. In the second half of the nineteenth century, there was little economic opportunity to attract blacks from other regions and New York’s black community shrank as a proportion of the city’s total population.
The great migration of blacks from the South took place in the twentieth century. New York City was a principal magnet for African Americans aiming to better their lives and to escape rural poverty and the effects of Jim Crow laws. Between 1900 and 1940, the black population of the city rose from 58,142 to 418,857, and it nearly doubled again between 1940 and 1960. Harlem established itself as a black cultural center in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the Harlem Renaissance led to a flowering of music and literature. But the arrival of blacks in Harlem was marked by hostility, fear, and open opposition from white residents. A panicky “white flight” followed, leading to a collapse of property values, rising unemployment, and deterioration of the economic position of black families in Harlem. The decline of Harlem began with the Depression and reached its nadir in the 1970s, when Harlem became a byword for crime and social chaos.71
Summer 1987. Daniel visits New York with his leather-clad Cuban-American friend Emilio. Emilio is driving, and Daniel asks to see Harlem. Another friend in the car notices that Emilio’s window is partially open and asks him to close it. Emilio refuses and deliberately rolls down his window the whole way. Daniel does the same. They drive through Harlem and it’s not as “bad” as Daniel expects.
The decline began to reverse in the 1980s, when the city as a whole climbed out of the deep pit into which it had sunk in the financial collapse of the 1970s. Today, Harlem is one of New York’s most vibrant neighborhoods and attracts people of all ethnicities who are seeking bargains, more space, and a sense of community.72 Busloads of tourists, white and black, crowd the streets.
Early 1990s. Avner comes to New York for a conference. He cannot find the hotel at night, and he keeps asking people for directions. Later he finds out that he has the wrong address. But nobody stops to answer him or even pay attention to his question. Fifteen years later, in 2007, Avner makes another trip to New York to lecture and raise money for Hebrew University. After the lecture (close to Columbia University), seeing that it’s a beautiful day, he decides to stroll a bit and talk to people; maybe he can get a good story for our book. He walks about ten minutes and suddenly finds himself in the middle of Harlem. People are charming and friendly and he chats with fellow pedestrians.
The point here is not to suggest that racial and other forms of injustice in New York City no longer exist. Family backgrounds and historical legacies influence outcomes, even long after institutional discrimination ends. The city is still a nation of contrasts, essentially divided between those who make it and those who don’t. And those who make it often make it on the backs of those who don’t. But the most egregious and visible forms of injustice have been eliminated, which makes it even more of a challenge to remind New Yorkers of the need to equalize opportunities and care for the “have-nots.”
Daniel speaks to a friend who works for a New York law firm. She tells Daniel that she was very cautious when she first started working for the firm, not wanting to speak up without a thorough understanding of the legal issues. But she observed her colleagues being rewarded for speaking up with confidence about complex and ambiguous legal issues (the partners were too busy to familiarize themselves with the details of the legal issues at stake). Eventually, she learned to speak with authority about issues that she knew were more complex and ambiguous than she was letting on, and her career took a turn for the better.
In Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland, Vinay, an ambitious food critic from Bangalore, supports himself by writing a magazine column about cheap, little-known New York restaurants. But the sheer variety of foodstuffs bothers him: “One night it’s Cantonese, then it’s Georgian, then it’s Indonesian, then Syrian. I mean, I think this shit is good baklava, but what the fuck do I know, really? How can I be sure?” Yet when he writes, Vinay exudes bright certainty and expertise. The book’s narrator, Hans, a Dutch-born equities analyst, comments: “Similar misgivings, I should say, had begun to infect my own efforts at work. These efforts required me, sitting at my desk on the twenty-second floor of a glassy tower, to express reliable opinions about the current and future valuation of certain oil and gas stocks…. I felt like Vinay, cooking up myths from scraps and peels of fact.”73
But that’s part of the game. Ambitious people are not supposed to be cautious; they go out on a ledge and hope things work out. They learn to speak with certainty about uncertainty.74 Sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn’t. In a casino, the winners are winners and the losers are losers. On Wall Street, however, it’s not so simple. The gamblers make big bets and the losses affect other people. The bigger the losses, the greater the damage. In the worst case, the whole capitalist system takes a huge hit.
As the capital of capital, New York was the epicenter of the two worst economic crises of the past century. The Great Depression—the longest, most widespread, and deepest depression ever recorded—started with the Wall Street crash of 1929 and rapidly spread to the rest of the world. That crash was preceded by an economic bubble that seemed to signal endless good times, but the bubble burst. Economists argue about the reasons for the crash, but F. Scott Fitzgerald points to the psychological heart of the problem in his essay “My Lost City” (1936):
I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not an 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. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.75
Beijing, early 2010. Daniel attends an informal dinner hosted by a friend. He is seated at a round table with employees of Goldman Sachs and members of the Chinese Communist Party. They compare notes. It turns out, to everyone’s surprise, that the two organizations have a lot in common; perhaps they are the common characteristics of all successful organizations? They both have rigorous and meritocratic criteria for promotion, involving consultation at multiple levels (except for the very top levels; there, the criteria for promotion are more mysterious). They both recruit from the most elite pools of students. They both stress the organization’s history within the ranks of the organization, and members of the organization are supposed to adhere to the organization’s principles. They both emphasize widespread consultation within the organization before decisions are made. They both have a sense of the importance of serving the public (high-ranking employees of Goldman Sachs often end up working for the U.S. government; the company is sometimes referred to as “Government Sachs”). Somebody jokes that the two organizations have something else in common: they are both the most hated organizations in their respective countries.
In Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Wall Street bond traders such as Sherman McCoy are the “Masters of the Universe,” men for whom “there was … no limit whatsoever!”76 In September 2008, Wall Street crashed again and nearly brought down the whole global financial system. The financiers of Wall Street “gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruins.”77 Even more worrying, the main actors on Wall Street themselves didn’t completely understand the “financial weapons of mass destruction” at their disposal: “In some ways Wall Street was undone by its own smarts, as the very complexity of mortgage-backed securities meant that almost no one was able to figure out how to price them in a declining market.” But there was no need to understand so long as people were making money. In the end, Andrew Ross Sorkin notes, “this drama is human one, a tale about the fallibility of people who thought they themselves were too big to fail.” And the key lesson has not yet been learned: “Perhaps most disturbing of all, ego is still very much a central part of the Wall Street machine. While the financial crisis destroyed careers and reputations, and left many more bruised and battered, it also left the survivors with a genuine sense of vulnerability at having made it back from the brink. Still missing in the current environment is a genuine sense of humility.”78 Perhaps God was right to halt construction of the tower.
Yet the history of New York shows that the city inevitably recovers from the depths of its economic, social, and moral crises. Towers are rebuilt and the city comes back to life in all its artificial glory. As Cynthia Ozick puts it, “New York will never leave town. It will never sink into a desert waste. Catapult us forward a thousand years, and we won’t recognize the place; yet it is certain to be, uninterruptedly, New York, populous, evolving, faithfully inconstant, magnetic, man-made, unnatural—the synthetic sublime.”79 But how can that be? If New Yorkers really believe that they are masters of the universe, if it’s a community composed of extreme individualists with no sense of their limits, the city would have self-destructed a long time ago. The answer, of course, is that there are limits to New York–style ambition. It is limited by a sense of community.
COMMUNITY AND THE CITY
Avner misses his family; he feels miserable in New York. He recalls Leonard Cohen’s words, apparently written while he was visiting Manhattan. Cohen describes how, late at night when he looks out at the buildings, he sees a face in every window looking back at him. He then writes, “And when I turn away, I wonder how many go back to their desks and write this down.”80 Is he imagining it? If you look through your window in Manhattan, the last thing you are likely to see is somebody else looking at you. Cohen is imagining a community of lonely people longing for some comfort, since they all feel like strangers in their own town. He wonders how many do as he does, writing down such a poem. Perhaps they write a note to themselves, about others writing notes to themselves.
Manhattan is the capital of people living alone: “Of all 3,141 counties in the United States, New York County is the unrivaled leader in single-individual households, at 50.6 percent…. [I]n Manhattan, 25.6 percent of households are married, whereas the national average is 49.7…. These numbers should tell an unambiguous story. They should confirm the common belief about our city, which is that New York is an isolating, cold-hearted kind of place.” Yet the common belief may be mistaken: “The picture of cities—and New York in particular—that has been emerging from the work of social scientists is that people living in them are actually less lonely. Rather than driving people apart, large population centers pull them together, and as a rule tend to possess greater community virtues than smaller ones. This, even though cities are consistently, overwhelmingly, places where people are more likely to live on their own.”81
What explains this apparent paradox? How can people who live alone experience a greater sense of community? The answer is that loneliness isn’t an objective state of affairs, like the fact of living alone. It’s a subjective state, like whether we feel alone. Just as widows are more likely to feel better in a community with more widows than in a community with only a few single elderly women, so singles are more likely to feel better in a city with more singles, such as New York. Equally important, friends can sometimes substitute for family. Friendship increases the likelihood of subjective happiness, with benefits such as reducing health risks and prolonging life. Urban dwellers are more likely to have a substantial social network: the sociologist Claude Fischer found a 40 percent increase in the size of friendship-based social networks moving from semirural areas into the urban core.82 In New York, the cheerful characters in Friends may be more typical than the Robert De Niro character in Taxi Driver who calls himself “God’s lonely man” (though the latter makes for better art).
But too much community can be suffocating. People—especially ambitious people—also need some elbow room to develop their talents. New York attracts ambitious people because it has developed social norms that combine friendship with respect for privacy. The writer John Steinbeck is best known for novels that describe the people and landscape of California, but he chose to live in New York the last twenty-seven years of his life. He explains the attractions of the city:
I live in a small house on the East Side in the Seventies. It has a pretty little south garden. My neighborhood is my village. I know all the storekeepers and some of the neighbors. Sometimes I don’t go out of my village for weeks at a time. It has every quality of a village except nosiness. No one interferes with our business—no one by chance visits us without first telephoning, certainly a most civilized practice. When we close the front door, the city and the world are shut out and we are more private than any country below the Arctic Circle has ever been. We have many friends—good friends in the city. Sometimes we don’t see them for six or eight months and this in no way interferes with our friendship. Any place else this would be treated as neglect.83
It’s understandable why people who live in New York love it, but it’s also understandable why visitors without social networks can feel lonely there.
While Bing was hard at work at New York University law school, Daniel had a term off. Every morning, he would put baby Julien in a stroller and they would walk around Greenwich Village. Julien seemed to enjoy the frequent change of scenery, the new colors and smells. They would stop at Washington Square to observe the strange cast of characters, the fire-throwers, musicians, acrobats, comedians, whoever happened to be performing that day. At night, Daniel enjoyed taking walks with his friend Fawaz and being teased by an Italian waitress at a neighborhood café. He also developed a friendship with Cy, the doorman at their dorm. But it couldn’t last. Daniel knew he was heading to Hong Kong, and he would brag that he could predict the performance of the Hong Kong stock market by observing the World Trade Center at night. If many lights were left on, it meant a busy trading day in Hong Kong. He confessed, however, that it was harder to predict whether the market would go up or down.
Like her Greenwich Village neighbors, Jane Jacobs loved Washington Square Park: “Throughout the early 1950s, she brought her sons to the play areas or strolled around with them under the dappled canopy of trees…. It needed no dressing up, as it was a place steeped in history…. But most of all, Washington Square Park was a place to be outside and to run around green grass and trees, in the middle of a city that could feel very paved and gray.”84 But one man, Robert Moses, was threatening it all. He proposed to run a highway through the center of Washington Square. Jacobs mobilized her neighbors and influential intellectuals to lead the struggle to save the park. The Village Voice editorialized: “It is our view that any serious tampering with Washington Square Park will mark the beginning of the end of Greenwich Village as a community. Greenwich Village will become another characterless place…. Washington Square Park is a symbol of unity in diversity.”85 The New York secretary of state Carmine de Sapio was eventually brought on board, and Moses realized that he had been checkmated by “a bunch of mothers.”86
Meanwhile, Jacobs was composing The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Throughout the writing process, she gazed out the window at 555 Hudson Street for inspiration from the “sidewalk ballet” of her Greenwich Village neighborhood. Jacobs drew on her observations to defend the view that successful neighborhoods are characterized by diversity. Four conditions, Jacobs argued, are necessary for diversity: a street or district should have mixed primary uses (residential, commercial, and entertainment, all jumbled up in close proximity); short blocks designed to make the pedestrian feel more comfortable; a mixture of ages and types of buildings; and a dense population.87 Older neighborhoods often have such features; hence, they should be preserved and renovated rather than razed and replaced. The book was published in 1961 and went on to become the single most influential work in the history of urban planning. Ironically, however, Jacobs may have been too successful for her neighborhood’s own good: the West Village neighborhood Jacobs helped save by blocking its designation as a slum recently had its zip code cited in Forbes magazine as the most expensive in Manhattan.88
Jacobs’s recommendations may help to preserve and nourish the bonds that tie us to our neighborhood, but they seem limited if the concern is the health of the city as a whole. How can we promote civicism, a love of the city? After all, New Yorkers are supposed to love New York, not just Greenwich Village. As a matter of fact, they probably do identify more with the city than with their neighborhoods. How did that come about? No doubt Moses’s bridges and tunnels helped to bring about a sense of civic unity. But a strong sense of civicism can be created only by public spaces where different kinds of people from different neighborhoods interact and develop a sense of common concern for the city as a whole.
Chicago, August 2002. Daniel and Julien attend a baseball game between the Chicago White Sox and the hated New York Yankees. It’s a tight playoff race and the fans are cheering wildly for the local team. Between innings, Daniel talks to the elderly man from Chicago sitting next to him. He is a World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific theater. Daniel tells him about Hong Kong now. Then the man reveals a secret that he hasn’t told even his own family members: although he claps for the White Sox, he is inwardly cheering for the Yankees. But why? Daniel asks. The man explains that he saw Babe Ruth play for the Yankees as a kid and has been hooked ever since.
According to Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar, “the New York Yankees have always functioned somewhat like a barometer of the state of their city. When thing are looking up for the city—the Roaring Twenties, the postwar years of boom and expansion between 1949 and 1962, or the low-crime renaissance of 1996–2000—the Yankees respond with a string of world championships. But when the city is facing the abyss of social dissolution, financial bankruptcy, and high crime—1969, 1973, and 1990—the Yankees find themselves stuck in the cellar.”89 But maybe the Yankees do not function simply as a barometer of the state of their city. Yankee pride contributes to and reinforces pride in New York City. There’s nothing like a victory parade for a successful sports team to break down barriers of class, race, sex, language, or neighborhood and to shift the focus from the self to the city.
Baby Julien wants to take a horse carriage ride around Central Park. Daniel is reluctant, but Bing says why not; it would be fun for Julien. Daniel goes along, but it doesn’t feel right. High up in his horse carriage, he feels like an aristocrat looking down on the hoi polloi.
The idea of a public space that unites New Yorkers of all types goes back to the mid-nineteenth century. The grid system’s major flaw is that it did not make plans for a public park. For the city’s wealthiest citizens, it didn’t really matter: they could go for a stroll in Washington Square (a gathering place for the social elite in the nineteenth century). Other New Yorkers had to go cemeteries to commune with nature.90 In 1844, the celebrated journalist William Cullen Bryant penned an editorial calling for a new public park for the “vast population,” including the newly arrived immigrants. Thirteen years later, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a contest to design the largest and most expensive public park ever built. Olmsted’s earlier writings had expressed admiration for a park in England where “the privileges of the garden were enjoyed equally by all classes. There were some who were attended by servants, and sent at once for their carriages, but a large proportion were of the common ranks, and a few women with children, or suffering from ill health, were evidently the wives of very humble laborers.”91 So he designed a massive public green space where “the rich and the poor, the cultivated and well bred and the sturdy and self-made shall be attracted together and encouraged to assimilate.”92 Central Park opened in 1858 and became an instant success, attracting millions of diverse visitors, who would mix and take pride in the park and the city as a whole.
Does civicism matter in practice? one might ask. In ordinary times, perhaps not. But New Yorkers have expressed their civicism when the city needed it most. In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory claimed the lives of 146 immigrant women, mainly Jewish and Italian, in the greatest industrial disaster in New York’s history. On the ninth floor, just above where the fire started, owners had locked the exit door in order to increase productivity. A few days later, in a heavy rain, more than a half million New Yorkers marched in and watched a mass funeral procession. The fire galvanized disparate groups to petition the state government and led to the formation of a Factory Investigating Commission, which made sixty recommendations covering all industrial conditions. Fifty-six of them were adopted, including strict fire codes, a limit to the workweek, and the establishment of a board empowered to issue regulations that had the force of law.93 It may seem like a stretch to credit Central Park with such outcomes, but the park may have played a role in creating the idea of a unified city with common concerns that transcend class boundaries. Or let’s put it this way: had the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire taken place in the early nineteenth century, would diverse social forces have been galvanized to the same extent?
More civicism emerged during World War II. As a service to those on leave, the American Theatre Wing opened the Stage Door Canteen in the basement of a theater on Forty-fourth Street in 1942. “Here enlisted men—no officers allowed—could eat, see a show, and dance, often with celebrities. Lauren Bacall volunteered on Monday nights, often spending the entire evening dancing; Broadway stars Katharine Cornell and Helen Hayes bussed tables; Alfred Hunt even took out the garbage. Onstage, everyone from Benny Goodman to Ethel Merman performed, and on an average over 2,000 GIs passed through the door.”94 The club closed when the Japanese surrendered in 1945, and New York could resume its normal role as the city of individualistic ambition “where you go to seize the day, to leave your mark, to live within the nerve of your generation.”95
Hong Kong, September 11, 2001. It’s late at night. Bing and Julien have gone to sleep. Daniel switches on the television. Oh no, it looks like a disaster movie, like The Towering Inferno. Boring. He switches to another channel. The same movie: what a coincidence! Another channel, same movie again! This time, Daniel realizes that he is not watching a movie. The World Trade Center has been attacked and the two towers have collapsed, with thousands killed, including more than four hundred firefighters, police officers, and other rescue workers. It’s far more horrifying than any movie he could have imagined.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, civicism reemerged in its strongest form yet: “The rancorous racial tension in New York was sharply reduced. Communities that formerly defined themselves in terms of their conflicts with the police were able to feel a common sense of civic identity. The city’s firemen are heroes in the eyes of everyone.”96 Mayor Giuliani, formerly viewed as a combative, moralistic, and deeply partisan figure, transformed himself into a resolute and compassionate leader who was spontaneously applauded when he walked down the street. For John P. Avlon, Mayor Giuliani’s chief speechwriter,
the greatest inspiration came from the deep grief of ordinary New Yorkers: makeshift memorials of notes and melting candles in parks outside firehouses; the American flags that hung from almost every apartment building; the steadfast souls who stood along the West Side Highway every hour of the day and night for more than a month, holding handwritten signs and cheering the rescue workers on their way to and from ground zero…. Most startling and beautiful was this: along the walls of the church [St. Paul’s Chapel], posted on pillars and taped in pews, were letters and cards written by children from across the United States, covered with brightly colored drawings of eagles, firemen, the towers under attack, and American flags. They bore messages of hope, faith, and gratitude: “Thank you … you are my heroes…. I am sorry the people died … thank you for saving the people…. I love the city…. God Bless America.”97
Summer 2003. Daniel and his sister Valérie climb up Mount Pinnacle on the border between Canada and the United States. They are carrying their father’s ashes. He was born in the United States and spent most of his life in Canada, and he had asked that his ashes be scattered on the border between the two countries. Daniel and Valérie improvise a ceremony. This place looks like the border. They open a bottle of rum, add a bit of Coke, and drink a toast in his honor. The ashes are taken by the wind into, they hope, the two countries. But now Daniel wonders. His father was the least nationalistic person he had ever met; why would he want his ashes to be scattered on the border between countries? He loved New York and Montreal; why not scatter his ashes in those two cities? Oh, yes, perhaps some ashes in Paris as well. Nationalism has become so deeply rooted in our psychological makeup that it seems hard to think outside the box, even for Daniel’s father.
God bless America?
God bless New York.