The Epic of New York City (100 page)

During its relatively brief existence New York has been the inspiration for, or has served as the background of, countless books, movies, plays, photographs, poems, music, paintings, and sculptures.

New York's almost 8,000,000 residents make it the third most populous city on earth, Tokyo being first and London second. However, the New York metropolitan region contains the greatest concentration of human beings on this globe. More than 16,000,000 persons live within this region, which includes the 5 counties of New York City, 7 other counties in New York State, 9 counties in eastern New Jersey, and 1 county in Connecticut. New York is no longer just a city, but the nucleus of a vast metropolitan area sprawling along the Atlantic seaboard.

Because of its size, New York is like a gigantic magnifying glass that enlarges human emotions and behavior. Depending on the viewer and his attitudes and what he wants to see, New York is evil or benign, steeped in ignorance or mellow with wisdom. To the gregarious it offers companionship, and on the shy it bestows isolation almost as absolute as that of the desert or the ocean. At one and the same time it is cruel and indifferent, kind and concerned. New Yorkers can turn their backs on murder committed under their apartment windows and then go out of their way to help strangers board the right subway train. Because newspapers and television focus on the unusual and bizarre, good people living quiet lives seldom get into the news. As Robert F. Wagner has said of New York: “It is a city of love and compassion and hundreds of thousands of unsung and uncelebrated acts of charity and kindness and heroism every minute of every hour and every hour of every day.”

Hoodlums terrorize the subways—but serenity may be found by sitting on a bench behind Grant's Tomb and gazing up the Hudson at a riverscape so majestic that it hushes the heart. Dope addicts
steal goods to sustain their habit—but at sundown the claret-stained façade of the Empire State Building looks like Mount Everest seen through rose-colored glasses. Police sirens chill the spine—but from a helicopter on a clear night the city's lights resemble diamonds scattered upon black velvet. Voodoo rituals are held in secret cellars—but Fifth Avenue is promenaded by women so beautiful and elegant that they look like Aphrodites in buttons and bows.

Down through the years people have been attracted to and repelled by New York. Too huge and powerful to be ignored, the city stirs extreme opinions. Here are some of them:

Robert F. Wagner:
“This city is the center of the universe.”
Raymond
L.
Bruckberger:
“A fabulous, strange, disturbing city, where the man outside a group must feel more alone than anyone else on earth.”
E. B. White:
“To date New York has shown nothing but progress. Hopefully we wait the first signs of decadence—partial decadence being the only condition under which anybody can exist with any degree of grace or civility.”

Robert Moses:
“New York notoriously lacks citizen leadership and is hard to arouse.”
James Huneker:
“Many years ago I learned to discount the hurry and flurry of New York. We are no busier than Bridgeport or Jersey City, but we pretend we are. It is necessary for our municipal vanity to squeeze and jam and rush and crush.”
Ambrose Bierce:
“New York is cocaine, opium, hashish.”
Günter Grass:
“Here you have everything—all of Europe and America, and people of all nations and colors.”

Billy Graham:
“New York is a crime-ridden city. . . . Immorality is rampant.”
Alec Waugh:
“New York has been a magnet drawing to itself from East, North, South, West, from every state of the Union and from every European country, the restiess, the dissatisfied and the ambitious, who have demanded more from life than the circumstances of their birth offered them.”
Simeon Strunsky:
“New York has more hermits than will be found in all the forests, mountains and deserts of the United States.”

R. L. Duffus:
“New York is a sort of anthology of urban civilization. The song that any city sings she sings. All that anybody can seek for that can be housed in steel and cement is here, and with it, never lost in all the city's drabness, respect for the striving, combative beauty-loving spirit of man.”
Carl Van Doren:
“Confusion rose around me and poured over me. . . . My mind could not help me
by thinking. It too was panic, spun in a vortex of sensations. There is no reason in a nightmare. Over and over I said to myself: This is New York, where I thought life would be large and free. This is New York, and I am a stranger in a nightmare.”

John Mansfield:
“New York City, in herself . . . a gladness, that romantic, beautiful, exciting city, the queen of all romance cities, with such sparkle in her air and in her people.”
Henry Miller:
“New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness, if you have no inner stabilizer.”
Sidney Hook:
“Educationally New York is to the United States what Paris is to France. . . . Whoever seeks intellectual stimulation will find it in America's first city.”

Irvin S. Cobb:
“There is this to be said for New York City. It is the one densely inhabited locality—with the possible exception of Hell—that has absolutely not a trace of local pride.”
John Lardner:
“The beauty of New York neighbors is that they can be acquired slowly, carefully, and selectively.”
Henry James:
“The very sign of its energy is that it doesn't believe in itself; it fails to succeed, even at the cost of millions, in persuading you that it does.”

William Makepeace Thackeray:
“Nobody is quiet here, no more am I. The rush and restiessness pleases me, and I like, for a littie, the dash of the stream. I am not received as a god, which I like, too.”
Aubrey Menen:
“The true New Yorker does not really seek information about the outside world. He feels that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.”
John Jay Chapman:
“The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.”

Raymond Loewy:
“New York is simply a distillation of the entire United States, the most of everything, the conclusive proof that there is an American civilization. New York is casual, intellectual, subtle, effective and devastatingly witty. But her sophisticated appearance is the thinnest of veneers. Beneath it there is power, virility, determination and a sense of destiny.”
Frank Lloyd Wright:
“This man-trap of gigantic dimensions, devouring manhood, denies in its affected riot of personality any individuality whatsoever.”

Walt Whitman:
“An appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet of successful democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate.”
Christopher Morley:
“Truly the magic of her spell can never be exacted. She changes too rapidly, day by day. Realism, as they
call it, can never catch the boundaries of her pearly beauty. She needs a mystic.”

Max Murray:
“The New Yorker says that he could live nowhere but in New York. He says it with a touch of pride. A scientist once discovered a frog alive in the solid rock, and when he took it out the frog died.”
P. G. Wodehouse:
“To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying.”
Edward Fisher Brown:
“Under maximum traffic conditions, a lion's roar would have difficulty in making itself heard on the streets of New York.”

Margot Asquith:
“I have never seen a modern town comparable to New York. The color of the stone and lightness of the air would put vitality into a corpse.”
Alexander Klein:
“There are some who say with passion that the only real advantage of living in New York is that all its residents ascend to heaven directly after their deaths, having served their full term in purgatory right on Manhattan Island.”
Cyril Connolly:
“If Paris is the perfect setting for a romance, New York is the perfect city in which to get over one, to get over anything.”

George Jean Nathan:
“The New Yorker, by and large, leads a life that is no more artificial, when you come to look at it closely, than the life led by the average country town hick. . . . Both are dolts.”
Heywood Broun:
“The plain fact of the matter is that New York is much too good for New Yorkers. Complete appreciation will come only when some Vesuvius has laid it low and posterity is forced to dig down into the dust to bring to light the buried treasure.”

Perhaps the main characteristic of the twentieth century is the rapidity of change, and this pace is faster in New York than anywhere else on earth. Always the unfinished city, New York tears down and builds anew with scant reverence for ancient landmarks, although steps are now being taken to save these monuments. Generally ignorant of the city's history, New Yorkers are less concerned with the past than with the present and the future.

Sir Patrick Geddes was a Scottish sociologist and town planner, who in 1913 drew up a scheme of city development. According to him, a large city goes through five stages during its rise and fall. First, there is the Polis, the young city. This develops into the Metropolis, a large but healthy city. In turn, this swells into the Megalopolis, an
unhealthy, oversized city with a tendency toward megalomania. Next, said Sir Patrick, comes the Parasitopolis, the parasitic city which drains an entire country of its lifeblood. Lasdy, there is the Pathopolis, the diseased, shrinking and dying city. If one accepts Sir Patrick's theory of the growth and decay of a city, New York now seems to be a Megalopolis beginning to turn into a Parasitopolis.

Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher and historian, agreed that the life of a city follows an inevitable pattern. Spengler wrote: “The stone colossus of the cosmopolitan city appears at the end of the life span of each great culture. Man, the cultural being, emotionally formed by the land, is taken possession of by his own creation—the city; he is being made its creature, its executive organ, and finally its victim.”

Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, disagreed with Sir Patrick and Spengler. Toynbee denied that there was any parallel between the development of a culture and the birth, maturation, and death of an organism. Wolf Schneider, the German author of
Babylon Is Everywhere,
said: “Unless one is entranced by a system, one cannot presume, after a survey of over 7000 years of city history, to make rules concerning the duration of a city's life or the decline of cities. Babylon was leveled four times and each time it rose again.”

Whatever the fate of New York, it continues to present charming vignettes. Early one evening, for example, a small crowd gathered at West End Avenue and Ninety-first Street. A little Negro boy stood on the second-floor terrace of a five-story building. He was making bubbles. Into a bowl of soapy water he dipped a plastic gadget shaped like a gutless tennis racquet, then lifted this wand, and with quick strokes sent bubbles into the air. Some were as big as basketballs.

A writer and his wife stopped to watch. So did a Puerto Rican delivery boy and a father and mother with their two children. A young crew-cut man and a couple of girls who looked like coeds climbed out a window onto a nearby balcony for a better view. If the Negro lad noticed the spectators, he gave no sign of it. Solemn-eyed, he went about his business—which was to touch this world with beauty.

The history of New York is the story of battles and riots, immortal men and great achievements, but the bubbleboy also was a part of that history. No yelping pack of reporters and photographers recorded the moment, for they concentrate on conflict, and this was serenity.
Around the world had gone the word that New York seethed with danger, but in this autumn gloaming, one bubble after another swung gently toward heaven and then winked to extinction. And before each bubble burst, for a few gleaming seconds it reflected the city, its streets, trees, houses, and smiling faces.

Perhaps those who watched might have agreed with Paul Morand, a French writer, who said of New York: “If the planet grows cold, this city will nevertheless have been mankind's warmest moment.”

 

Selected Bibliography

 

 

 

A
BBOTT
, W
ILBUR
C.,
New York in the American Revolution
. New York, Scribner's, 1929.