The Archipelago of New York
Neither came from New York and yet both were of New York. It is said you choose your friends but not your family. I disagree. It’s like nature versus nurture. While your family forms your nature. I believe that with the passage of time, your nurture comes from your friends and they dominate who you are. You may be from where you spent your childhood, but you are where you spent your adult years. Both Kim and I are New Yorkers. We
spent our adult lives in New York.
New York is just another city. New York is so much more than a city. I’m not sure which is more true, though I know they are both true. I think of New York as a gathering of islands, an archipelago. And every island has a story and every story tells a tale to explain that island.
The New Yorker’s View of the World, Saul Steinberg’s famous expression of the self-absorbed tendency of New Yorkers, was first published as a New Yorker magazine cover in 1976. That was the same year I graduated from business school and moved to New York. While not taking anything away from the originality of the work, I’m not sure it was such a unique perspective that New Yorkers were self-absorbed. During five years at Cornell, a school heavily dominated by students and alumni from metro NewYork City, I had come to understand that New Yorkers think New York is the center of the universe.
The geography of New York is centered around the greatest natural harbor in the world, New York Harbor. There’s diversity of all sorts around that harbor. The glacial moraine and natural prairie of Long Island (the home of both Queens and Brooklyn) is contrasted by the metamorphic rocks called Manhattan and the Bronx. The story of Manhattan topography that I most enjoy comes from a geotechnical engineer I know, who explained that if you draw a skyline of the island from south to north you will have effectively traced the depth and shape of the bedrock that lies
beneath ground. That is to say that the reasons skyscrapers inhabit the southern tip and the midtown region and not the Greenwich Village area has to do less with commercial flows and more to do with the metamorphic strata below ground and its ability to support big buildings. I would say, “who knew?”, but apparently builders knew.
And then there is Staten Island. This rock, left here 21,000 years ago by the Laurentide Ice Sheet and disconnected from the rest of the moraine of Long Island in a great flood about 12,000 years ago when the Verrazano Narrows was cut to the sea, stands 410 feet tall and is the highest point of land on the Eastern Seaboard. This island looks like it should be part of New Jersey rather than New York, but by quirks of history forms the fifth and most rural of New York’s five boroughs. It was this island that housed the British forces of King George as they prepared their assaults on the colonial armies of George Washington.
These are the Archipelago of New York and the only thing more diverse than the terrain and geology is the urban Anthropology that exists today. Each borough has its own culture that reflects its composition and relationship to the other boroughs. The center of the New York universe is, indeed Manhattan. All boroughs are influenced by the gravitational forces inflicted by Manhattan. And like the solar system, the closer the borough is to the sun of Manhattan, the more it reflects that influence. The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, in that order, are shadows of the bright light at their center.
Being the immigration port of entry for countless waves of immigrants over the past two hundred years, New York and its boroughs have also taken on the flavor of those waves. 36% of the population is foreign-born. Manhattan is predominately and increasingly populated by educated whites and foreign nationals (less and less immigrants and more wealthy foreigners). Queens is the new Chinatown, the Bronx is Hispanic and Caribbean, and Brooklyn is changing rapidly from African-American, Hispanic and Russian to a younger version of Manhattan. Staten Island is the domain of European white immigrants heavily dominated by Italian, Greek and Irish with the spice of Sri Lanka recently thrown in. Staten Island (Richmond County) is also the most unionized county in America at 37%, with many of those coming from our first responders of FDNY and NYPD due to the requirement that these suburbanites-at-heart live within the city limits. Accordingly, Staten Island is the only politically “red” borough in New York.
The best way to completely explain the differences in the Archipelago is through storytelling. My stories are not intended as comprehensive, they are my stories. But they do flow from the patterns laid out by the geography, history and demographics of the islands.
My children currently live in Brooklyn (daughter and son) and Staten Island (son). I lived in Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island. The only borough that has not directly touched my life in the Bronx. I was a commuter (Penn Station) for thirteen years from Long Island. I’ve lived in Battery Park City, Tudor City, Union Square, Flat Iron, Gramercy, South Street Seaport and now FiDi. I’ve managed to avoid the Upper East and Upper West and always chosen to live downtown. I don’t know what that says about me, but I like the feel of being a downtown guy.
I used to think I would only live in New York City long enough to figure out where I really wanted to live. Then I spent a bunch of years as a suburbanite wondering why anyone would want to live in the City. And then I moved in and pretty much have wondered for thirty years why anyone would live anywhere else. Commuting sucks. City living is so convenient and so pleasant, right until you need to get out. Kim and I no longer want to get out, but we will. We will move on to San Diego someday soon. But she and I will always be New Yorkers at heart and we will miss not being a part of the world’s greatest archipelago.