The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  The F.B.I. concluded that the riots were not basically racial. Instead, it announced, “a common characteristic of the riots was a senseless attack on all constituted authority without purpose or reason.” The F.B.I. said further that “the Communist Party U.S.A. does not appear to have officially instigated these riots, though its members were observed taking part” in some of them. In 1965 an admitted Communist was convicted of conspiring to riot and of advocating the overthrow of the state of New York. He had been arrested soon after the Harlem riot.

  Mayor Wagner cut short his visit to Europe and flew back to New York. The evening of July 22, 1964, he was driven to a studio in Liederkranz Hall, at 111 East Fifty-eighth Street, to address New Yorkers by television. Looking solemn and drawn, Wagner said:

  Law and order are the Negro’s best friend—make no mistake about that. The opposite of law and order is mob rule, and that is the way of the Ku Klux Klan, the night riders and the lynch mobs. Let me also state, in very plain language, that illegal acts, including defiance of, or attacks upon the police, whose mission it is to enforce law and order, will not be condoned or tolerated by me at any time. . . . The nation and the world have their eyes on New York. The racists in the South and North certainly do. Minority groups everywhere do. Africa and Asia do. Indeed, all the world is watching us. . . .

  Some people sadly wagged their heads and said that the city was sick, that it was trying to destroy itself, that it was too huge and complex to be governed, and that its problems were too difficult to be solved. Undeniably, the problems were staggering, and they seemed to worsen with each passing day. There was violence on the streets, in the subways, and in the lobbies of apartment buildings. The gulf between rich and poor increased. Welfare cases mounted. Automation threw people out of work. Manufacturing firms moved out of the city. Unemployed boys lolled about the streets, looking for trouble. Dope addiction increased. Decent housing was inadequate. Traffic jams strained tempers. Commuter service declined. Sometimes there were delays in getting patients into hospitals. The city’s budget rose. The quality of education and racial balance in schools fretted thoughtful people. Courts were jammed with backlogs of civil cases. Air pollution edged toward lethal levels. Water too was polluted and becoming ever more scarce. Piers rotted, and the port got an ever smaller share of the nation’s oceanborne foreign trade.

  Trying to govern a city in crisis visably aged Mayor Wagner, who finally decided he had had enough. When he announced that he did not plan to run for a fourth term, he set the stage for an exciting and significant mayoralty campaign in 1965.

  Three candidates vied for what Robert Moses called the “preposterous, impossible job” of being mayor of New York City. Abraham Beame, the colorless city comptroller, ran as the candidate of the city’s Democratic machine. William F. Buckley, Jr., the tart-tongued editor of the National Review, ran as the candidate of the Conservative party, with the avowed purpose of taking votes away from the third candidate. This was John V. Lindsay, a maverick Republican, who won the endorsement of the Republican, Liberal, and Independent Citizens parties.

  Lindsay said, “You hear a lot of people say that the city is too big to be governed by one man. I don’t agree with that at all.” Political observers gave him a scant chance of winning in a city where registered Democrats had a seven to two edge. Lindsay was up against a rich and entrenched Democratic machine, and right-wing members of his own Republican party opposed him.

  A liberal Congressman who had helped draft the 1964 civil rights bill, Lindsay announced, “I am a Republican, but New York City must have an independent, nonpartisan government.” His campaign literature quoted John F. Kennedy: “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.” Lindsay all but disowned his own party, disdained the help of regular Republicans, relied heavily on volunteer workers, opened storefront offices throughout the city, averaged only 4 hours of sleep the last part of the campaign, and traveled nearly 7,000 miles visiting every corner of New York. But Lindsay posters boasted: “He’s fresh while every one else is tired.”

  Lindsay was only forty-three years old, having been born on November 24, 1921, in a modest West Side apartment. After he attended a private school in Manhattan, he was graduated in 1940 from St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. He next took an accelerated course at Yale and then entered the navy, taking part in the invasion of Sicily and participating in landings on various Pacific islands. In 1946 he was discharged as a full lieutenant with five batde stars.

  Following the war he earned a degree from the Yale Law School. After working briefly as a bank clerk, he signed up with a top Manhattan law firm and within five years became a full partner. A superb trial lawyer, he won praise from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Ever since returning to the city after the war, Lindsay had been active in Manhattan politics, and in 1958 he was elected to Congress from Manhattan’s Seventeenth Congressional District, called the Silk Stocking District because it included the fashionable Upper East Side. During his seven years in the House of Congress he racked up a voting record more liberal than that of many Democrats.

  By the time Lindsay ran for mayor, he was married and the father of four children. He was a strikingly handsome man—even better looking than John F. Kennedy, with whom he was favorably compared. Broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, Lindsay stood six feet three and had wavy light-brown hair, blue eyes, and a flashing smile. He was ambitious and earnest, vigorous and eloquent, and had an appetite for command. He blamed the city’s decline on Mayor Wagner and hammered away at “machine men” and the “backroom, clubhouse hacks.”

  In a major political upset, Lindsay won the 1965 election by a narrow margin. His triumph was an intensely personal one. Richard Nixon, the former Republican Vice-President, said, “It is a Lindsay rather than a Republican victory.” Shortly before being sworn in as the 103d mayor of New York City on January 1, 1966, Lindsay said, “I plan to give New York the most hard-working, the most dedicated and, I hope, the most exciting administration this city has ever seen.”

  Chapter 50

  “THIS CITY IS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE”

  NEW YORK is one of man’s greatest achievements. There never has been another city like it. Only superlatives can express its magnitude, power, and renown.

  New York is the capital of the world because it contains the head-quarters of the United Nations. It is the best known city on earth. It is the wealthiest city of modern times. Its influence is felt in every corner of this planet. It is the world’s greatest cultural center and creative force. It has the world’s largest educational system. It is the greatest tourist attraction in the world. It is the biggest and busiest manufacturing city in the world, Robert F. Wagner once saying that New Yorkers “make more, sell more, buy more, eat more and enjoy more than the citizens of any other city in the world.” It is the financial capital of the world. It is headquarters for most of the biggest corporations in existence. It is the communications capital of the world. It is the entertainment capital of the world. It has more churches than any other city in the world. Its government is the largest in the United States, except for the federal government. Its police force is larger than the standing armies of many foreign nations. Its subway system is the most heavily traveled passenger railroad in the world. Its harbor is bigger than the world’s next six largest harbors put together.

  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 met
ropolitan 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.