Quarrel & Quandary (30 page)

Uptown’s glamour drive is more domestic. On the Upper West Side, the bodegas and the little appetizing and hardware stores on Amsterdam, Columbus, and Broadway are long gone, and the great style emporia dominate, behemoths of food, cooking devices, leather accessories, “natural” cosmetics, no-color cotton sheets, Mission furniture. Zabar’s, the Fairway, Barney
Greengrass, Citarella, H & H Bagels—dizzyingly flooded with epicurean getters and spenders—harbor prodigalities of dimpled breads, gourmet coffees, the right kind of polenta, the right kind of rice and salsa, the right kind of coffeemaker and salad-spinner. Body Works offers soaps and lotions and oils, Godiva’s chocolates are set out like jewels, Gracious Home dazes with kitchenware chic. There is something of a puzzle in all this exuberant fashionableness and household seductiveness, this bean-grinding, face-creaming, bed-making: where are the political and literary intellectuals the Upper West Side is famous for, why are the conversations about olives and fish?

Across town, the Upper East Side seems, in contrast, staid, reserved, nearly quiet. The streets are less peopled. The wind is colder. A hauteur lurks in the limestone. If the West Side is a roiling marketplace, the East Side is a marble lobby presided over by a monarchical doorman. Fifth Avenue can be tacky here and there, but Madison grows more and more burnished, New York’s version of the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré. Here march the proud shops of the élite European designers, whose names make tailors’ music: Yves St. Laurent, Versace, Gucci, Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Prada, Missoni, Dolce & Gabbana. Here is the Tiffany’s of greengrocers, where Mozart is played and a couple of tomatoes will cost as much as a movie ticket. Here are L’Occitane for perfumes and Bulgari for diamonds. On Park and Madison affluence reigns, and with it a certain neighborhood serenity—a privacy, a regal seclusion. (Over on Lexington and Third, the city’s rush begins again.)

Posh East and extravagant West dislike each other, with the ingrained antipathy of restraint and profusion, calm and bustle; nor are they likely, except for an audacious handful of crosstown adventurers, to rub elbows in the shops. A silent cold war chills Manhattan. Its weapons are Zabar’s in the West, Versace in the East. There is no hot line between them.

Who lives in New York? E. B. White, mulling the question fifty years ago, imagined “a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart.” This has a musty if sweetish scent for us now—eau de Jimmy Stewart, perhaps. The circumstances of the arrivals were generally not so benign; nor was their reception. In a 1922 address before the New York–based American Academy of Arts and Letters, Owen Wister, the author of
The Virginian
, said of the newcomers, “Recent arrivals pollute the original spring.… It would be well for us if many recent arrivals would become departures.” He meant the immigrants who were just then flooding Castle Garden; but the children of those immigrants would soon be sorting out the dilemmas of welcome and unwelcome by other means.

I remember a ferocious street game that was played in the northeast Bronx long ago, in the neighborhood known as Pelham Bay. It was called “War,” and it was exclusively a girls’ game. With a piece of colored chalk you drew a small circle, in which you placed a pink rubber ball. Then you drew a second circle around it, concentric but far larger. This second circle you divided into as many pie-slices as there were players. Each player was assigned a pie-slice as her designated territory and wrote in it the name of a country she felt to be her own. So it went like this: Peggy Scanlon chose Ireland; Dorothy Wilson, Scotland; Hilda Weber, Germany; Carolyn Johnson, Sweden; Maria Viggiano (whose Sicilian grandmothers yearly wrapped their fig trees in winter canvas), Italy; Allegra Sadacca (of a Sephardic
family recently from Turkey, a remnant of the Spanish Jews exiled by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492), Spain; Madge Taylor (an immigrant from Iowa), America; and I (whose forebears had endured the despots of Russia for nearly a thousand years), Palestine. So much for the local demographics. Immediately after these self-defining allegiances were declared, someone would shriek “War!” and the asphalt mayhem of racing and tackling and tumbling would begin, with the pink rubber globe as prize. I don’t suppose little girls anywhere in New York’s boroughs nowadays play this disunited nations game; but if they do, surely the pie-slices are chalked up with preferences for Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Greece, Lebanon, Albania, Pakistan, India, China, and of course—for antecedents who were never willing immigrants—Africa. In New York, origins still count, and not always benevolently.

The poor of New York occupy streets only blocks away from the palaces. There are cities where such matters are handled otherwise. In Paris some time ago, heading for the Louvre—a row of former royal palaces—I passed a pitiful maternal scene: a dark-eyed young woman half-reclining on the pavement, with a baby in the crook of her arm and a sad-faced little girl huddled against her. The infant’s only covering was a newspaper. “Gypsies,” someone explained, in a tone that dismissed concern. “By the end of the day, when she’s collected her hoard of francs, her husband comes to fetch her in a white limousine.” Behind this cynicism lay a social reality. The woman and her children had to be taken, however sardonically, for canny entrepreneurs, not outcasts
begging for pennies. The outcasts were elsewhere. They were not in the shadow of the Louvre; they were in the suburbs. In New York lingo, “suburbs” evokes green lawns and commuters of middling affluence. But the great European cities—Paris, Stockholm—have cordoned off their needy, their indigent, their laboring classes. The habitations of the poor are out of town, away from the central brilliance, shunted off and invisible. In New York you cannot lose sight of the poor—the workfare leaf-rakers in the parks, the ragged and piebald homeless, who appear on nearly every corner, some to importune, some to harass, and the pressing mass of the tenement poor, whose eager children fill (as they always have) the public schools. The vivid, hectic, noisily dense barrio, bouncy and bedraggled, that is West 155th Street leads straight across northern Broadway to that austerely resplendent Venetian palace, designed by McKim, Mead, and White, where Owen Wister inveighed against the intruders. But New York, like the stories of O. Henry (one of its early chroniclers), is pleased to spring ironic endings—so there stands the noble Academy, far uptown’s distinguished monument to Arts and Letters, surrounded now by poor immigrants, an emerald’s throw from the buzz and dust of Broadway’s bazaar, where rugs and pots and plastic gewgaws clutter the teeming sidewalks. In New York, proletarian and patrician are neighbors.

As for the upper crust in general, it is known to run New York. This stratum of the social order was once dubbed the Four Hundred, but New York’s current patriciate, however it may have multiplied, escapes being counted—though it counts as heavily
as ever and remains as conscientiously invisible. Elitism of this kind is rarely political; it almost never becomes mayor. In a democratic ambiance New York’s potentates and nabobs have no easy handle; no one names them, not even in tabloid mockery. Then let us call them, collectively, by what they possess: Influence. Influence is financial, corporate, loftily and discreetly legal; Influence is power and planning and money. And money is the armature on which the mammoth superstructure that is New York is sculpted: architecture and philanthropy, art galleries and libraries and foundations, zoos and conservatories and museums, concert halls and universities and houses of worship. The tallest buildings—the Chrysler, the Empire State, the risen polyhedrons of Rockefeller Center, the Twin Towers, assorted old spires—all have their ankles in money. Influence
means
money, whether in the making of it, the spending, or the giving. Influence is usually private and guarded; it may shun celebrity; it needs no public face; its precincts are often reclusive. You are not likely to follow Influence in its daily maneuvers—though you can, all week long, observe the subway riders as they patiently swarm, intent on getting in and getting out and getting there. The jerky cars grind out their wild sawing clamor; locked inside the racket, the passengers display a Buddhist self-forgetfulness. Noiseless Influence, meanwhile, is driven in smoked-glass limousines, hidden, reserved, arcane. If all the rest of the citizenry were carted off, and only Influence were left, the city would be silent. But if Influence were spirited away in some grand and ghostly yacht, a kind of Flying Dutchman, say, the men in their dinner jackets, the women in their gowns, what would happen to New York? The mysterious and mazy coursings of money would dry up. The city would come to a halt.

Old money (old for us, though it was new then) made the palaces. Here is James D. McCabe, Jr., writing in 1872 of the
transport cathedral, in Second Empire style, that was the brainchild of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railway magnate:

And here again, in 1948, is E. B. White (a man who knew how to catch the beat of what he called “Manhattan’s breathing”), describing his own encounter with the Depot’s successor, built in 1913 on the same site:

Kodak got in, too, and honky-tonk turned into logo. Like some painted colossus, Kodak’s gargantuan sign, in flaming color (it was named the Colorama), presided for years over the crisscrossing rush-hour flow—a fixture of the terminal’s contemporary identity. The gilded constellations on the vaulted horizon dimmed to an undifferentiated gray; no one troubled to look up at blinded Orion. A gluey grime thickened the interstices of the
marble balustrades. Frankfurter wrappings and sticky paper soda cups littered the public telephones. Commuters in need of a toilet knew what to avoid and went next door to the Grand Hyatt. The temple had become a routinely seedy train station.

And then New York, the Eraser and the Renewer, with a sweep of its resuscitating will, cleansed the temple’s degradation. What old money brought into being, new money, along with civic determination, has refurbished. The theme is artful mirroring: the existing grand stair engenders an answering grand stair on the opposite end of the great concourse. The gawky advertising signs are banished and the heavens scrubbed until their stars glitter. Below and behind, the secret ganglia of high-tech engineering and up-to-date lighting may snake and throb, but all across the shining hall it is Commodore Vanderbilt’s ghost who walks. Grand Central has no fear of the ornamental; it revels in breadth and unstinting scale; it
intends
to inspire. The idea of the publicly palatial—unashamed lavishness—has returned.

And not only here. Follow Forty-second Street westward to Fifth Avenue and enter the most illustrious temple of all, the lion-sentried Library, where the famed third-floor Reading Room has just undergone its own rebirth—both in homage to, and in dissent from, the modern. Card catalogues have descended into the dustbin of antiquated conveniences. Electrical outlets accommodate laptops; rows of computers parade across the vast polished tables under a gilded rococo ceiling, a Beaux-Arts confection frosted with floral arabesques. Whatever the mavens may say, and however the critics may scowl, New York (in at least one of its multiple manifestations) thirsts for intimations of what the Victorians did not hesitate to invoke: Noble Beauty. New York has learned to value—though never to venerate—its old robber-baron muses, not for their pre-income-tax devourings, but for their appetite for the baronial: the Frick
Collection, the Morgan Library, the Cooper-Hewitt (housed in Andrew Carnegie’s sixty-four-room mansion). The vanished Pennsylvania Station, the original—razed a generation ago as an elaborate eyesore, now regretted, its bargain-basement replacement a daily discouragement—will soon rise again, in the nearby body of the superannuated General Post Office (Roman, kingly, columned). Fancy, then, a soaring apparition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that prototype of urban palace, and of its philosophical rival, the Museum of Modern Art, hovering over the city, scanning it for symptoms of majesty—the Met and
MOMA
, joined by spectral flights of the City Ballet, the serious little theaters, and Carnegie Hall, all whispering “Aspire, aspire!”

Susurrations of grandeur.

But grandeur on this style is a neighborhood of the mind, and a narrow one at that. Real neighborhoods and psychological neighborhoods may, in fact, overlap—literary Greenwich Village being the most storied case in point. In the Village of the psyche, the outré is always in, and it is safely conventional to be bizarre. Writers once looked for cheap rent in these streets, after which it began to
feel
writerly to live in the Village, within walking distance of the fountain in Washington Square. The earlier luminaries who resided here are the more enshrined—Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Horace Greeley, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Bret Harte, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather; and, in a later generation, Thomas Wolfe, E. E. Cummings, Richard Wright,
Djuna Barnes, Edmund Wilson, Elinor Wylie, Hart Crane, James Agee, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden! Yet fame re-enacted can become parody as well as homage, and there was a touch of in-your-face déjà vu in the nineteen-fifties, when Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and LeRoi Jones (afterward known as Amiri Baraka) established the then newborn East Village as a beatnik redoubt. Nowadays it would be hard to discover a writers’ roster equal to those of the past, and West Village literariness hangs as a kind of tattered nimbus not over the old (mostly temporary) residences of the celebrated but over the bars, cellars, and cafés they once frequented. The Saturday night hordes that flow through Bleecker Street are mostly from New Jersey. (“The bridge-and-tunnel crowd,” sniffs the East Village of the hour.)