The suicide rate for younger New Yorkers is about 56 percent of the national average, which reflects the fact that suicides are more common in rural areas. The death rates from suicide in Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming are more than 2.5 times higher than those in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. While some of this effect may reflect the loneliness that can come from geographical isolation, my work with David Cutler and Karen Norberg on youth suicide also points to the fact that gun ownership is about four times as high in small towns as in big cities.
The majority of suicides among younger people involve firearms, and many studies find that suicides are more common when firearms are more common, a fact that is a little odd because guns are hardly the only means of killing oneself. Hunting is the strongest predictor of gun ownership in the United States, which explains why youth suicides rise significantly with the number of hunting licenses in a county.
While the low mortality rates of younger urbanites reflect a surfeit of buses and a dearth of firearms, lower mortality rates among older people are more of a puzzle. Death rates are 5.5 percent higher nationwide than in New York for people fifty-five to sixty-four years old, 17 percent higher for those sixtyfive to seventy-four, and more than 24 percent higher for those seventy-five to eighty-four. Differences in education, employment, or income don’t seem able to explain the disparity.
Mayor Bloomberg waged war against smoking by dramatically increasing cigarette taxes and limiting where one could smoke legally, but New York had become healthier than the nation as a whole before he took office. Perhaps all that walking makes New Yorkers healthier, but can that explain why they die less often from cancer? Los Angeles is also significantly healthier than the nation, and walking is far less common there. I’d like to think that the health of older New Yorkers reflects the vigorous nature of city life, but I can’t rule out the possibility that selection may also be playing a role. Poor health increases the likelihood of retirement, and retirement increases the likelihood of leaving the city and moving someplace warmer.
The health of cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco represents an astonishing turnaround from the past, when density too often meant death. Throughout most of human history, proximity enabled the spread of infectious diseases that struck down those humans who had the temerity to risk living near one another. Huge investments in massive waterworks were needed to curb the spread of cholera and yellow fever, just as huge investments in policing were needed to reduce crime in the 1990s. The massing of millions in small land areas requires a vigorous public sector to combat crime and illness, which perhaps explains why people in New York are so much fonder of big government than people in rural Kansas.
Epidemics will continue. Long after the Croton Aqueduct brought clean water to Manhattan, the 1918 influenza pandemic and AIDS both managed to kill millions. But today the spread of disease in cities is limited by investments in public health, and self-protecting urban innovation is as important as ever. The AIDS virus was discovered because a Parisian clinician who was treating sick patients connected with retrovirus researchers at Paris’s Pasteur Institute. The health of cities depends on the health-creating aspects of urban life—good hospitals, faster information flows, fewer cars and guns—dominating the disease-spreading consequence of density.
Calhoun’s warning remains relevant: Urban density may create marvels, but it also comes with costs. The world lost much when plague ravaged Athens 2,400 years ago and when AIDS struck New York in the 1980s. Crime and congestion are still with us; their costs are most terrible in the growing cities of the developing world. But these problems are not insurmountable obstacles to urban success. Cities create their own champions, like Dr. John Snow or Colonel Waring or William Vickrey, who fight to make cities livable. They have often succeeded, and when they do, urban areas become not only habitable but delightful, for concentrated talent doesn’t just make cities productive, it also makes them fun.
CHAPTER 5
Is London a Luxury Resort?
Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are typically seen as firm, fearless men of destiny, but on Bond Street, their bronze statues sit chatting and smoking, looking for all the world as if they had just finished eating an expensive French feast and were now waiting for Eleanor and Clementine to finish shopping. The two men, whose friendship helped save London during its darkest hour, seem to be enjoying the city’s latest incarnation as a place of pleasure. Nowhere are London’s extravagances more evident than on Bond Street, whose shops are elegant echoes of London’s past, filled with pricey baubles: oversize Graff diamonds, Patek Philippe watches, Chanel suits, Louboutin shoes, and whatever Sotheby’s is auctioning right now.
Bond Street is at the center of one of the world’s great urban playgrounds, a city filled with things to see and buy and taste and learn. If price is no object, you can enjoy Art Deco luxury staying at Claridge’s, right off Bond, and eat Gordon Ramsay’s cooking. If you walk down the Burlington Arcade, an elegant pre-Victorian cluster of shops that runs parallel to Bond Street, and cross over Piccadilly to have a look at the ornate waistcoats being sold in the Piccadilly Arcade, you can then reach, in quick succession, Churchill’s shirt maker, New & Lingwood; his cigar merchant, JJ Fox; his shoemaker, John Lobb; and his wine merchant, Berry Brothers and Rudd. They are all still selling their wares to the world’s elite.
London, of course, has other, more high-minded pleasures. Some of the city’s intellectual adornments—the Linnean Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Royal Academy of Arts—are housed right next to the Burlington Arcade in a splendid Palladian mansion. It’s only a few minutes by London cab to the theaters of the West End or the treasures of the National Gallery. Samuel Johnson’s words still resonate: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
Pleasure is powerful, and London’s delights are more than just the stuff of glossy travel magazines. Urban enjoyments help determine a city’s success. Talent is mobile, and it seeks out good places to consume as well as produce. London’s amenities have helped the city attract thirty-two billionaires, according to Forbes, an impressive share of the world’s wealthiest people. About half of those megarich Londoners are not English, like Lakshmi Mittal, who earns his fortune in India but lives in a mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens that he bought for $100 million in 2004. Some of those billionaires may come to England for the country’s tax benefits, but within England they choose London because it is a good place to enjoy being rich.
Whereas the typical nineteenth-century city was located in a place where factories had an edge in production, the typical twenty-first-century city is more likely to be a place where workers have an edge in consumption. A century ago, firms were tied to spots like Liverpool or Pittsburgh because of natural attributes like harbors and coal mines. The global decline in transport costs means that companies are now footloose, free to locate where people want to live. In some cases, that freedom has led to suburbia or the Sunbelt, but increasingly, attractive cities like London also entice enterprises and entrepreneurs by their quality of life.
When I was a child in Manhattan in the 1970s, people fled New York because its crime and grime made it, for many, an unpleasant place to live. Housing wasn’t particularly expensive, because New York wasn’t that desirable. Certainly few were mad enough to live in Manhattan and commute out to suburban workplaces. While the New York depicted in the Scorsese classics of the 1970s was a place of harrowing crime, twenty-first-century New York is a playground for the prosperous. Until the bust started in 2006, real estate prices shot up far more quickly than income, which reflects the fact that people are willing to pay a lot just to live in New York.
One reason that London and New York and Paris are so pleasant is that they contain centuries’ worth of investment in buildings and museums and parks, but they also benefit from the urban ability to magnify human creativity, which makes cities enjoyable as well as i
ndustrious. Urban innovation doesn’t mean just new types of factories or financial instruments; it also means new cuisines and plays. Above all, the abundance of human talent in a place like London offers an opportunity to interact with people who interest you. One reason why billionaires favor places like London and New York is that they get to hang out with other billionaires, who presumably can empathize with their special trials and tribulations.
As humankind becomes wealthier, more people will choose their locations on the basis of pleasure as well as productivity. To understand why cities are succeeding and whether they will continue to thrive in the future, we must understand how urban amenities work and how consumer cities succeed.
Scale Economies and the Globe Theatre
In 2003, Oscar winner Kevin Spacey, who is certainly clever and entrepreneurial, moved to London to become the director of the Old Vic Theatre Company. Many Americans found this decision just as inscrutable as everything else about the ingenious actor. Spacey is a New Jersey native who grew up in California. Surely, Hollywood should be able to hold on to such a major movie star. If he was so hell-bent on live theater, then there was always Broadway, where he had enjoyed repeated success. What would draw an entertainer of his popularity to a London theater on the wrong side of the Thames?
The appeal of London’s theaters to Kevin Spacey, and much of the rest of the world, reflects enduring urban advantages. First of all, live theaters involve substantial fixed costs. Any five-year-old can put on a play, but a modern West End experience includes a large stage, sophisticated lighting and sound equipment, and often ornate interior spaces. The fixed costs of plays also involve the time required for actors to learn their lines and perfect their roles, something most five-year-old performers skip. Drama is affordable to ordinary people, as the Old Vic was to its poorer audiences in Lambeth, because those fixed costs are spread across thousands of viewers.
The fixed costs involved in theaters, opera houses, and museums explain their connection with cities. Large urban areas have large audiences that can jointly share the costs of a sophisticated drama. Today Broadway is sustained by thousands of tourists, but fifty years ago, the Great White Way catered to the vast numbers of New Yorkers who attended the theater regularly.
The first significant public theater in the English-speaking world was built by James Burbage in 1576 and called, appropriately, the Theatre. London had grown dramatically during the sixteenth century, and its burgeoning population was eager for entertainment. Burbage built his playhouse close to the city but outside its walls, in a sort of regulation-free zone where places of ill repute, such as brothels, taverns, and theaters, could operate.
Medieval theater was primarily religious, and much of it took place in churches, which had infrastructure ready-made for performing. In the wake of the Renaissance and the Reformation, the English developed an interest in secular plays. English comedy made its first appearance in the 1550s with plays like Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, which are rarely performed now, except by pre-Elizabethan extremists. By the 1560s, raised stages became common; there is a hot scholarly debate about whether court plays had such stages before then. The nobility provided some demand for theatrical productions, but because even the most dramatically precocious peer didn’t want to see the same play night after night, acting troupes began catering to a wider audience.
Burbage belonged to a troupe of players supported by the Queen’s favorite, the Earl of Leicester. Even though the earl was a generous patron, the troupe toured regularly to increase its earnings. By traveling, actors could get access to a large enough audience to support themselves, but the need to move inevitably meant that productions were sparse. But just as temporary medieval fairs evolved into sedentary commercial cities, traveling drama troupes morphed into sedentary theater companies. The growth of urban London made it possible to move to a more permanent system in which the actors stayed put and the audience came to them, which is how Broadway still works today. Burbage’s Theatre was the start of this tradition, and it was followed by a succession of Elizabethan theaters like the Curtain, the Rose, and the Globe.
In the early days of London theater, there were no drama schools, so actors learned from each other, as James Burbage’s more famous son, Richard, did from his father. Even more impressively, a series of great playwrights— Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare—connected with each other in the city’s theatrical community and produced the first great works of English drama. The first written reference to Shakespeare in London’s dramatic circles was in 1592, when he was disparaged by Robert Greene, a somewhat dissolute playwright who may have been the model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Greene, Thomas Kyd, and Marlowe were all University Wits, well-educated, raffish writers who seem to have taught each other, and possibly Shakespeare as well, in London’s dense streets and taverns.
We know only snippets about these interactions, but their plays certainly play off one another—the connections between the texts suggest a pattern of connected creativity. Greene may have attacked Shakespeare, but that didn’t prevent the younger playwright from borrowing the structure of Greene’s novel Pandosto for The Winter’s Tale. Thomas Kyd is widely thought to have written the ur-Hamlet, performed in 1589. Kyd is also one of the possible authors (along with Greene) of King Leir, another precursor of Shakespeare. Kyd shared a room with the wild man of English drama, Christopher Marlowe, who was accused of being a spy, an atheist, a secret Catholic, a heavy tobacco user, and plenty of other apparently awful things.
Shakespeare’s plays, such as Hamlet and As You Like It, have direct references to Marlowe’s work. The connections between The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s earlier The Jew of Malta have been long studied. Dido, Queen of Carthage is thought to have influenced Antony and Cleopatra. The moral choices of Doctor Faustus and Macbeth seem quite similar. Some experts, such as Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, are confident that they personally knew each other. Given the small size of London’s theatrical community, how could this not be true?
The connections between Shakespeare and Marlowe take nothing away from Shakespeare’s brilliance, but instead remind us that genius knows enough to borrow ideas from its neighbors. London has also long taught thespians, who learn by acting in plays and studying the more senior performers around them. Shakespeare surely learned his acting skills in this fashion, and so did Edmund Kean two centuries later. The twentieth-century giants of the British stage—Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, and Ralph Richardson—acted together, directed each other, and helped train the stage’s future stars person-to-person. When he began his tenure as director of the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic, Olivier directed the young Peter O’Toole in Hamlet. By moving to the Old Vic, Kevin Spacey was choosing the city at the center of English-speaking drama, which continues to educate and entertain like nowhere else.
London’s large audiences enable the Old Vic to cover the fixed costs of its expensive productions, but city size also enables smaller, more experimental live theater to survive. The Second City began in 1959 in cheap Chicago space that had once been a Chinese laundry. Their smaller productions could survive with modest audiences, a hundred would do, but would they have found even that modest level of demand for cutting-edge comedy in small-town America in the 1950s? To this day, big cities like New York and Los Angeles remain known for experimental live comedy theaters, like the Upright Citizens Brigade.
Live performance is connected to the spread of innovation in cities because the first stirrings of a new artistic phenomenon are almost always performed live long before they are distributed electronically. Larger cities’ larger audiences help cover the cost of paying live disc jockeys, like DJ Kool Herc, who started playing his turntables like musical instruments in the early 1970s, moving back and forth from one record to another. Would-be performers, like Grandmaster Flash, who heard Herc in the house parties of the West Bronx, then riffed on his idea. If records were instruments, then why not add vo
cals? Grandmaster Flash and MC Melle Mel are celebrated as the seminal, Bronxbased partnership that brought rapping and mixing records together. Def Jam Records, which began with the urban connections of a Bronx hip-hop DJ (Jazzy Jay), a rap promoter (Russell Simmons), and an NYU student (Rick Rubin) who played in a punk rock band, then brought hip-hop into the mainstream with acts like Run DMC, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys.
The Division of Labor and Lamb Vindaloo
Today an evening’s entertainment in a big city is more likely to mean a dinner at a restaurant than a night at the theater, and since so many more people eat out than go to plays, great restaurants are a more important draw for most cities than great theaters. In the United States as a whole, as of 2008, there are 1.8 times as many people working in grocery stores as in full-service restaurants. But in New York, that ratio is more than reversed; in Manhattan there are 4.7 times more people working in restaurants than in groceries, and between 1998 and 2008, employment in Manhattan restaurants increased by 55 percent.
While theaters illustrate the urban edge in paying for fixed costs, restaurants show the benefits that come because cities allow for the division of labor and specialization. Adam Smith noted that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market and wrote that “In the lone houses and very small villages which are scattered about in so desert a country as the Highlands of Scotland, every farmer must be butcher, baker and brewer for his own family.” Isolation meant that each family had to produce its own food. In Smith’s day, cities had butchers and brewers. Today, cities have a wide array of restaurants offering a dizzying cornucopia of culinary styles, price ranges, and atmospheres.
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Made Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier Page 15