The New York Dreams
Kim, through her Facebook traipsing, heard of a series called American Experience: New York done by Ric Burns, younger brother to famed documentarian Ken Burns. It is a historical perspective from the western origins as a Dutch colony in 1609. There are chapters of this documentary like any good series and it is all done chronologically naturally. Given my forty-four years living in New York and Kim’s thirty years, the city is a big part of our personal histories, so we are fascinated by this well-done history that takes the perspective of the uniqueness, importance and energy that is New York City. The story does not romanticize the City, but gives a well-rounded view of the good and the bad, the diversity and the brutality, the successes and the failures, the dominance and the submissiveness, all driven, according to Burns, by the clarion call of the almighty dollar. The overriding thesis of the City in the Burns perspective is commerce and this would be hard to deny. The governance, the culture, the Knickerbocker society (Knickerbocker being a fictitious construct of a writer made up by Washington Irving), are all subservient to the drive for prosperity. Along the way, New York had no choice but to embrace diversity as it became the entry point for a century of immigration from every imaginable corner of Europe and Africa. It went through its commercial connection to slavery, but moved on when it became difficult to control African Americans and it felt like bad business compared to other opportunities with westward expansion and the throughput of goods, services and people through the City to the Midwest via the Hudson and Erie Canal.
Whenever friends would come to New York to visit and asked for tourist recommendations, we would remind people that there was more to see than The Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty and Times Square. We always sent them to the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street at Delaney Street. It was there, more than at Elis Island that one could see the real impact of the continuous and changing waves of immigration into New York through the ages of over 200 years. It is fascinating to hear the documentary narrators talking about the dozens of languages that could be heard on the streets as early as the Mid-Seventeenth Century. We marvel at that phenomenon today and here it has been going on for four hundred years and is an ongoing symbol of the international diversity that is New York City. That diversity and constant change made New York a chaotic place during countless eras. It was a leading indicator of the social changes that were in perpetual motion in America and nowhere more in evidence than in New York.
There are many familiar names that come up in a history of New York starting with Peter Stuyvesant, George Washington (during and after the Revolutionary War), Alexander Hamilton, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor and the likes of Dewitt Clinton. But it is the familiar names that we don’t necessarily think of relating to New York like P.T. Barnum and Walt Whitman that I, for one, did not connect with the City. Whitman’s seminal poetic work, Leaves of Grass, just never seemed like a poem to New York City. But when one realizes that the poems are about life and humanity and the celebration of the body and materialism, it becomes logical that he wrote about New York. Washington Irving and Teddy Roosevelt are strongly connected to New York. I lived on Irving Place near Washington Irving High School and would walk past the original Roosevelt home on 22nd. Street.
One of the more interesting factors that gets played up is the decision to institute a grid system above Houston Street. This was done in 1811 when the City had a mere 95,000 residents, but envisioned a world-class city of millions. The unprecedented decision to level the natural geography of hills and ponds was a startling decision at such an early date. It was less clear that New York would become the crossroads of the world at that time, but the visionaries in New York had the optimism on and vision to imagine what would become of this eight miles of island and its surrounding boroughs. And the vision didn’t end there as Frederick Olmstead went on to design Central Park, another unprecedented approach to an urban conservancy unlike any of the tamed and docile parks of London and other cities. It is observed that Central Park is a symbol of American egalitarianism in that it is open to all citizens of the City and it is a symbol of American vision since it was created long before there was a city from which to seek refuge. But the reality of the Park was like the reality of America, wonderful in its theory and falling short in its reality. The Park was less for the working class than it was envisioned to be and it became more of a place for the wealthy.
There were lots more interesting tales of New York, but none so poignant and meaningful in today’s environment than the one about Abraham Lincoln coming to New York from Illinois as a minor politician in 1859. He stayed in Manhattan at the uppity Astor Hotel but went to Brooklyn to hear an abolitionist minister speak. That same night he went to a Broadway minstrel show that featured a new tune by an Ohio song writer called Dixie, which would go on to become the anthem of the Confederacy. This irony of all that is so thick you could cut it with a knife. The most interesting factoid that I hadn’t known was that it was Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union and the plaudits he received from that by Horace Greeley, then editor of The New York Tribune, that launched his national political viability and notoriety that carried him into the presidency. Horace Greeley made his own fame by coining the great American war cry of “Go West Young Man!”
I am certain that these are just a few of the thousands of amazing New York City stories. As they say, there are a million stories in the naked city and no city is more naked than New York. I am almost too scared to go back to New York for fear that the collective efforts that propelled this formidable urban center over four hundred star-studded and turbulent years may have been dealt a terrible and hopefully not deadly blow by the COVID-19 Pandemic. I don’t like to think of this vibrant and energetic city made silent by the demands of social distancing. Cities like Rome, Paris and London can stand on their physical monuments, but New York, while not lacking in monuments, is really about its people and its teeming masses, which can no longer teem and can only huddle like those arriving immigrants over the centuries. Ultimately, the New York dreams will return and the new course of the future will be envisioned and begun, just as it has for four hundred years and will most likely for another four hundred years.