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:
One of the most imposing buildings in the city is the new Grand Central Depot, on Forty-second street and Fourth Avenue. It is constructed of red brick, with iron trimmings painted white, in imitation of marble. The south front is adorned with three and the west front with two massive pavilions. The central pavilion of each front contains an illuminated dock.… The car-shed is covered with an immense circular roof of iron and glass.… It is lighted from the roof by day, and at night large reflectors, lighted by an electrical apparatus, illuminate the vast interior.
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:
Grand Central has become honky-tonk, with its extradimensional advertising displays and its tendency to adopt the tactics of a travel broker. I practically lived in Grand Central Terminal at one period (it has all the conveniences and I had no other place to stay) and the great hall seemed to me one of the more inspiring interiors in New York, until Lastex and Coca-Cola got into the temple.
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.
5.
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.)
Neighborhoods of the mind, though, are rarely so solidly placed in a single location. Of actual neighborhoods (or “sections,” in moribund New Yorkese)—Soho, Little Italy, Chelsea, Gramercy Park, Murray Hill, South Street Seaport, and all the rest—only a few are as determinedly self-defined as the Village. But a courageous denizen of any of them (despite home-grown inhibitions of boundary and habit) can venture out to a collectivity of taste and imagination and familiarity unconstrained by geography. Jazz and blues and nightlife aficionados, movie buffs, gays, rap artists, boxing and wrestling zealots, singles, esoteric-restaurant habitués, Central Park joggers, marathon runners, museum addicts, lovers of music or theater or dance, lonely-hearts, shoppers, hotel weekenders, barflies, churchgoers, Talmud enthusiasts, Bronx-born Tibetan Buddhists, students of Sufism, kabbalists, theosophists, voice or ski coaches, SAT and LSAT crammers, amateur painters, union members, members of boards and trustees, Internet devotees, fans of the Yankees or the Mets or the Jets or the Knicks, believers in psychics and tealeaves readers, streetwalkers and their pimps, antiques fanciers, art collectors, philanthropists, professors of linguistics, lexicographers, copy editors, librarians, kindergarten teachers, crossing guards, wine votaries, storefront chiropractors, Chinese or Hebrew or Arabic calligraphers—all these, and inconceivably more, can emerge from any locality to live, if only for a few hours, in a sympathetic neighborhood of affinity. Expertise and idiosyncrasy and bursting desire burn and burn in New York: a conflagration of manifold, insatiable, tumultuous will.
6.
I was born in a brownstone on East Eighty-eighth Street, between First and York Avenues—but both the latter avenue and the area have since altered their designations and their character. York was once Avenue A, and the neighborhood, populated largely by German immigrants, was called Yorkville. It was in Yorkville before my birth that my infant brother was kidnapped by a madwoman. The story as it was told to me is set in a certain year, but not in any special weather; it seems to me that it must have been summer. I see my mother, hot, sleeveless, breathless, frantic, running through the night streets of Yorkville to find the kidnapper and snatch her baby back. He had been sleeping in his wicker carriage in a nook among rows of br
own bottles and drawers filled with maple-flavored rock candy on strings, not four yards from where my young father in his pharmacist’s jacket, a fountain pen always in its pocket, stood tending to his mortar and pestle, working up a medicinal paste. Into my parents’ drug store the madwoman flew, seizing baby and carriage and all, and out into the dark she fled, only to be discovered some hours later in nearby Carl Schurz Park, disheveled and undone by furious infantile howls, and grateful to relinquish the captive screamer.
In my half-dreaming re-creation of this long-ago scene—the stolen child, the fleeing madwoman—why must it be summertime? I think I know why. New York in summer is another sort of city; in mood and weight it has nothing in common with wintry New York. A New York summer is frenetic, syncopated, blistered, frayed, dusty. There is a desperation in its heat, and a sense of letdown, despite relief, in its air-conditioned indoors. Melting squads of tourists, in shorts and open shirts or halters, sweat pooling under their camera straps, their heads swiveling from one gaudy carnival sight to the next, push through Times Square in anxious quick-march. Smells of perspiring hot dogs under venders’ grease-lined umbrellas mingle with the exhaust fumes of heaving buses. There is nothing relaxed about the summer city. New York’s noise is louder, New York’s toughness is brasher, New York’s velocity is speedier. Everything—stores, offices, schedules, vacations, traffic—demands full steam ahead; no one can say that the livin’ is easy. New York in July is out of synch, not quite itself, hoping for ransom, kidnapped by midsummer frolicking: picnickers awaiting free twilight performances of Shakespeare in Central Park; street parades of nighttime swelterers along Museum Mile, where tappers and clappers gather before the Jewish Museum to salute the tootling klezmer players; breakdancers down from Harlem, twelve-year-olds effortless and expert and little and lithe, who spin on their heels across from the hive of Madison Square Garden. In the American heartland in summer, babies fall down wells and pipes, and that is news. In New York—fidgety, frittering, frenzied, boiling New York—summer itself is news.
The true city is the winter city. The woolly enchantment of a population swaddled and muffled, women and men in long coats, eccentric boots, winding scarves; steam sculptures forming out of human breath; hushed streets; tiny white electric points on skeletal trees! The icy air like a scratch across a sheet of silver, the smoky chestnut carts, the foggy odor of hot coffee when you open a door, a bakery’s sweet mist swirling through its transom, a glimpse of rosy-nosed skaters in the well of the Rockefeller stelae, the rescuing warmth of public lobbies—New York in January is a city of grateful small shocks. And just as in an antiquated English novel of manners, New York has its “season”—lectures, readings, rallies, dinner parties, chamber music in someone’s living room. While in summer you cannot rely on the taxis to turn on their air-conditioning, in winter each yellow capsule is a hot little bullet; the driver in his turban remembers his subcontinental home. There is no dusk like a New York winter dusk: the blurry gray of early evening, when the lone walker, ferried between day and night, jostled by strangers in packs, feels most desolate, and when the privacy of burrowing into a coat collar brings on a nameless loss. At such a moment the forest of flowering lights (a brilliance suddenly apprehended) makes its cheering claim: that here, right here, is importance, achievement, delight in the work of the world; that here, right here, is the hope of connection, and life in its fulfillment. In a gregarious New York winter, especially in restaurants at eight o’clock, you will hear jokes, stories with amazing climaxes, futures plotted out, jealousies retailed, gossip above all: who’s up, who’s down, what’s in, what’s out. Central heating never abolished the theory and practice of the fireside.
7.
What Manhattan talks about, obliquely or openly—what it thinks about, whatever the season—is ambition. Europeans always make much of this: how hard New Yorkers work, the long days, the paltry vacations, the single-minded avarice for status, the obsessiveness, the terrible drive. What? No dolce far niente? But only an outsider would remark on the city’s striving; for New Yorkers it is ingrained, taken for granted, valued. Unlike Bartleby, downtown’s most distinctive imaginary inhabitant, New York never prefers not to. New York prefers and prefers and prefers—it prefers power and scope to tranquility and intimacy, it prefers struggle and steel to acquiescence and cushions. New York is where you go to seize the day, to leave your mark, to live within the nerve of your generation. Some might say that there is nothing new in this—why else did Willa Cather begin in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and end on Bank Street? Why else did Jackson Pollock, born in Cody, Wyoming, land in New York?
Yet there is a difference. New York ambition has changed its face. Fifty years ago, when postal clerks and bank tellers wearing vests were what was still called “family men,” the hankering young were on the lowest rung of any hierarchy. Their patience was commanded; their deference was expected. It was understood that power and position were the sovereign right of middle age, and that a twenty-three-year-old would have to wait and wait. Opportunity and recognition were light-years away. A few—writers mostly—broke out early: Mary McCarthy at twenty-two, Norman Mailer at twenty-five, Philip Roth and John Updike at twenty-six. Leonard Bernstein and Bobby Fischer were youthful stars. Still, these were all prodigies and exceptions. In the run-of-the-mill world of getting ahead, the young were at the bottom, and stayed there until judged—by their elders at the top—to be sufficiently ripe. The Information Age, with its ear to the ground, reverses all that. The old ways are undone. A twenty-something young woman in publishing keeps a television set on in her office all day, monitoring possible acquisitions: what sells, who’s cool. The auditory and the visual, in whatever mode, belong almost exclusively to the newest generation. Everywhere in New York the knowledgeable young are in charge of the sound, the image, the latest word; ambition need no longer stand in line and wait its graying turn. (Fifty-somethings, their passion still unspent, and recalling the slower passages of long ago, may be a little wistful.)
In a city always relinquishing, always replacing, always on the wing, mores close down and expectations alter; milestones fade away; landmarks vanish. In its shifting primordial constancy, New York is faithful to loss and faithful to change. After the hullabaloo over the demise of Books & Company on Madison and Shakespeare & Company on upper Broadway, some still mourn those small principalities of letters. But does anyone born since the Second World War miss the intellectual newsstand next to the Chock Full O’ Nuts across from Washington Square, or the Forty-second Street Automat, where you could linger over your teacup and read your paper all afternoon?
Now and then, heartstruck, I pass the crenellated quasi-Gothic building that once housed my high school, where latecomers, myself among them, would tremble before its great arched doorway, fearing reprimand; but the reprimanders are all dead. My Latin teacher is dead. My German teacher is dead. My biology teacher is dead. It is only the city itself that lives on, half-amnesiac, hardly ever glancing back, re-inventing its fabric, insisting on being noticed for what it is now. There is no grief for what precedes the common memory, and ultimately the fickle urban tide, as immutable as the Nile, accommodates every disappearance.
8.
In May of 1860, when Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park was just in the making, a forty-year-old Wall Street lawyer named George Templeton Strong recorded in his diary his own preference:
The park below the reservoir begins to look intelligible. Unfinished still, and in process of manufacture, but shewing the outline now of what it is to be. Many points are already beautiful. What will they be when their trees are grown and I’m dead and forgotten?
One thinks sometimes that one would like re-juvenescence, or a new birth. One would prefer, if he could, to annihilate his past and commence life, say in this A.D. 1860, and so enjoy longer acquaintance with this era of special development and material progress, watch the splendid march of science on earth, share the benefits of the steam engine and the electric telegraph, and
grow up with this park—which is to be so great a fact for the young men and maidens of New York in 1880, if all goes well and we do not decompose into anarchy meanwhile.… Central Park and Astor Library and a developed Columbia University promise to make the city twenty years hence a real center of culture and civilization, furnishing privileges to youth far beyond what it gave me in my boyhood.
A century and a half on, Strong’s “era of special development and material progress” may seem quaint to us, for whom fax and e-mail and jets and microwaves are everyday devices, and whose moonwalkers are already old men. By now the park below the reservoir, the library on Fifth Avenue, and the university on Morningside Heights are seasoned inheritances—established components of the city’s culture and civilization. But even standing as we do on the lip of the new millennium, who can resist falling into George Templeton Strong’s wishful dream of a new birth and a longer acquaintance? His New York of steam engine and telegraph, as ephemeral as the May clouds of 1860, has ceased to be. Our New York, too, will disappear, and a renewed and clarified city will lift out of the breathing breast of the one we know. New York, Enemy of the Merely Picturesque, Headquarters of Misery and Marvel, Eraser and Renewer, Brain and Capital of the Continent!
Quarrel & Quandary Page 24