Quarrel & Quandary

by Cynthia Ozick

  In Archaeology 101 they tell a New York joke. It is the year 3000. Archaeologists are sifting through the rubble of overgrown mounds, searching for relics of the lost city that once flourished on this brambly wild site. They dig here and there without reason for excitement (beer cans, a plastic sherd or two, unbiodegradable grocery bags), until at last they uncover what appears to be a primitive concourse of some kind, along which is placed, at surprisingly even intervals, a row of barbaric-looking poles. The poles are molded of an enduring ancient alloy, and each one is topped by a head with a single glass eye and an inch of crude mouth. “Identical sacrificial cultic stands in homage to the city’s divinity-king,” the archaeologists conclude. What they have found are Second Avenue parking meters: the Ozymandias of the late twentieth century.

  The joke may apply to other modern societies (no contemporaneous city, after all, was as modern as Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon), but New York eludes such ironies. 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. If you walk along Lexington Avenue, say, it isn’t easy to be reminded that Manhattan is an island, or even that it lies, like everything else, under an infinitude of sky. New York’s sky is jigsawed, cut into geometric pieces glimpsed between towers or caught slantwise across a granite-and-glass ravine. There is no horizon; the lucky penthouses and fifteenth-floor apartments and offices may have long views, but the streets have almost none. At night the white glow that fizzes upward from the city—an inverted electric Niagara—obscures the stars, and except for the Planetarium’s windowless mimicry, New York is oblivious of the cosmos. It is nearly as indifferent, by and large, to its marine surround. Walt Whitman once sang of the “tall masts of Mannahatta” and of the “crested and scallop-edg’d waves,” but the Staten Island ferry and the Circle Line beat on mastless, and the drumming ribbon of the West Side Highway bars us from the sound and smell of waters rushing or lapping. New York pretends that it is inland and keeps dry indoors and feels shoreless; New York water means faucets and hidden pipes and, now and then, a ceiling leak or the crisis of a burst main. Almost in spite of itself, Riverside Drive looks out on the Hudson, and can, if it likes, remember water. On Manhattan’s other flank, the F.D.R. Drive swims alongside the East River like a heavy-chuffing landlubber crocodile, unmindful of the moving water nearby. And here come the bridges, the Queensboro, the Manhattan, the Williamsburg, and finally the Brooklyn, Hart Crane’s fabled “harp and altar.” These varied spans, squat or spidery—together with the grand George Washington to the north and west—may cry out their poetry of arch and tide and steely ingenuity; but when you ride across in car or bus they are only, again, urban roadways. The tunnels are the same, with their line of lights perpetually alert under the river’s tonnage. New York domesticates whatever smacks of sea. And when the two rivers, the Hudson and the East, converge and swallow each other at the Battery’s feet, it is the bays alone, the Upper and the Lower, that hurry out to meet the true deep. New York turns its back on the Atlantic. The power and the roar New York looks to are its own.

  And if New York is to be misinterpreted and misunderstood, it will not be by future antiquarians, but by its present-day citizens. The Village stymies Wall Street. Chinatown is Greek to Washington Heights. Harlem and Tribeca are mutual enigmas. Neighborhoods are sealed off from one another by the border police of habit and mindset and need and purpose. And there is another border, even more rigid, and surely more disconsolate, than geography: the divide between then and now, a gash that can occur in a single lifetime. Fourth Avenue, masquerading as Park Avenue South, has lost its venerable name; Sixth Avenue—despite its rebirth, half a century ago, as Avenue of the Americas—has not. Where are the hotels of yesteryear? The Astor, the Chatham, the Savoy-Plaza? The Biltmore and its legendary clock? Where are the rows and rows of second-hand book stores that crept northward from Astor Place to Fourteenth Street? Where are Klein’s and Wanamaker’s and Gimbel’s and Ohrbach’s? Where are those urban walkers and scribes—Joseph Mitchell, Meyer Berger, Kate Simon, Alfred Kazin? Where is that cloud of gray fedoras that made men in crowds resemble dandelions gone to seed? When, and why, did New York hats give up the ghost? And who was the last to dance in the Rainbow Room?

  The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky—born in Leningrad, exiled to New York, buried in Venice—used to say that he wrote to please his predecessors, not his contemporaries. Often enough New York works toward the opposite: it means to impress the here-and-now, which it autographs with an insouciant wrecking ball. Gone is the cleaner-and-dyer; gone is the shoe-repair man. In their stead, a stylish boutique and a fancy-cookie shop. To see—close at hand—how the present is displaced by a newer present, how streets long confident of their particularity can rapidly molt into streets of a startlingly unexpected character, is to be a bit of a god: what is Time, what is Change, to the gods? For New Yorkers, a millennium’s worth of difference can be encompassed in six months. Downtown lofts on spooky dark blocks that once creaked under the weight and thunder and grime of industrial machinery are suddenly filled with sofas upholstered in white linen and oak bars on wheels and paintings under track lighting and polyurethaned coffee tables heaped with European magazines. Bryant Park, notorious shady hangout, blossoms into a cherished noonday amenity. Or else the deserted tenements along the Metro-North line, staring out eyeless and shamefaced at the commuters’ train down from Stamford, will, overnight, have had their burnt-out hollows covered over with painted plywood—trompe l’oeil windows and flower pots pretending, Potemkin-like, and by municipal decree, that human habitation has resumed.

  Yet despite New York’s sleight-of-hand transmutations and fool-the-eye pranks, the lady isn’t really sawed in half; she leaps up, alive and smiling. If physical excision is the city’s ongoing principle, there are, anyhow, certain surprising tenacities and keepsake intuitions. Wait, for instance, for the downtown No. 104 at the bus stop on Broadway and Seventy-second Street, look across the way, and be amazed—what Renaissance palazzo is this? A tall facade with draped female sculptures on either side, arched cornices, patterned polychrome bricks: ornamental flourish vying with ornamental flourish. And then gaze down the road to your right: one vast slab after another, the uncompromising severity of straight lines, brilliantly winking windows climbing and climbing, not a curve or entablature or parapet or embrasure ruffling the sleek skin of these new residential monoliths. In sharp winter light, a dazzling juxtaposition, filigreed cheek by modernist jowl. The paradox of New York is that its disappearances contain constancies—and not only because some buildings from an earlier generation survive to prod us toward historical self-consciousness. What is most steadfast in New York has the fleet look of the mercurial: the city’s persistent daring, vivacity, enchantment, experiment; the marvel of new forms fired by old passions, the rekindling of the snuffed.

  The Lower East Side, those tenement-and-pushcart streets of a century ago, once the venue of synagogues and succahs and religious-goods stores and a painful density of population, and later the habitat of creeps and druggies, is now the neighborhood of choice for the great-grandchildren of earlier tenants who were only too happy to escape to the Bronx. The talismanic old Rainbow Room has shut its doors? Never mind: its drama and urgent charm have migrated south. The downtown bands and their girl singers have a different sound, but the bands are there, and the girl singers too. At the Knitting Factory and other clubs—with names like Arlene Grocery, Luna Lounge, Baby Jupiter—you may catch up with Motel Girl, a band specializing in “Las Vegas stripper noir”: avant-garde jazz described as jarring, seedy, sexy, Movietone-violent, dark. Even Ratner’s on Delancey, the destination of senior citizens with an appetite for potato pancakes and blintzes, has succumbed to bands and poetry readings. Many of the singers and musicians live in the old tenement flats (toilet down
the hall) on Avenue B, with monthly rents as high as a thousand dollars. Broadway and Prince, where Dean & DeLuca boasts three hundred varieties of cheese, was home to a notions shop two generations ago; not far away, on Orchard Street, the Tenement Museum stands as an emblem of nostalgic consecration, ignored by its trendy neighbors. You can still buy pickles out of the barrel at Guss’s, but the cutting-edge young who come down to Ludlow and Stanton for the music or the glitz rarely find those legendary greenhorn warrens of much historic interest; their turf is the East Village. The Lower East Side’s current inhabitants, despite their fascination with the louche, are educated and middle-class, with mothers back on Long Island wishing their guitar-playing daughters had gone to medical school. What these seekers on A, B, and C are after—like Scott and Zelda plunging into fountains to jump-start the Jazz Age—is New York’s insuperable constant: the sense of belonging to the glamorous marrow of one’s own time.

  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.

  2.

  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.

  3.

  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.

  4.

  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 ambian
ce 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.