This Was New York, Baby

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The stories in "My Ears Are Bent" portray a New York that seems different in kind, not degree, from the one today. It was, for example, a city whose power was built on water — the great, deep Port of New York — and sustained on by transporting goods, food and people by water. For a reminder, read the pieces on the ferry that took day-trippers from the Battery to Coney Island, and on the Night Line from New York to Albany. The 30s was also the city's first chance in the century to try coping with a major Depression. In earlier hard times, private welfare agencies had the task of caring for the needy. Now the local government tried. Here's Mitchell's report, beautifully rendered in its observation and avoidance of tabloid melodrama, on a city flop house:

"At 3 A.M. there were only a few beds left on the women's floor of the Municipal Lodging House, a floor which overlooks the East River. In rows of narrow institution beds 165 women lay sleeping. In white cribs in one corner there were two sleeping children, a boy and a girl. Above the cribs was an exit light, a pale red bulb, and one could see that there were smiles on the faces of the sleeping children. Somewhere among the 165 women lay their mother. The little girl had red curls, and in one hand she clutched a sticky toy, a prize from a popcorn box which lay, empty, on the linoleum floor."

Mitchell kept his New Yorker office into his 80s, yet he published little after "Joe Gould's Secret" in 1964. Perhaps all that listening had bent his ears out of shape, or he couldn't see the city as a Jacobsian collection of neighborhoods with a personality and oddball characters with deranged charm. New York keeps changing, like a man in an unending series of volcanic midlife crises, while our expectations of it stay constant. So for his last 30 years Mitchell came to work like Bartleby, and he did what Bartleby did.

"OUR PRIMAL DEAL"

"The city is thronged with strangers ... brimful of all kinds of legitimate liveliness — the life of money-making, the life of pleasure..."
— Edgar Allan Poe, "Doings of Gotham," 1844 Among the terrific writers energized by the city are the authors of "Gotham." Incapable of composing a staid sentence, Burrows and Wallace spin out the town's lurid, instructive tale like master storytellers. Savor this description of the 1885 railroad wars: "There seemed no way to quit the free-enterprise merry-go-round, so the ride spun on, propelled by fear of failure, accumulated rancor and mistrust, monumental egotism, and the sheer exhilaration and momentum of combat." The authors' exhilaration gives "Gotham" the momentum of great journalism and rich history. And if you think this is for locals only, please note that the first four (rapturous) readers' comments on amazon.com are from Boston, Washington, Dallas and Ipswitch, Queensland, Australia.

Unlike Paris, London or Rome, New York is not the seat of national government. Its wealth was not built on Sunbelt balminess, agricultural bounty or manufacturing muscle. New York got where it was by creating, through brains and nerve, the capitalist information society. From Fifth Avenue to Madison, Wall Street to Broadway, it retailed the dreams money could buy. Start with Peter Stuyvesant's legendary purchase of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians for $24. No matter that that sum, if invested at 6% interest, would now be worth $62 billion. It was still a steal — in the words of Burrows and Wallace, "our Primal Deal."

In New York, the Deal was ever intertwined with showbiz. Entrepreneurs, like Elisha Otis in the 1850s, promoted their products in publicity stunts. During one, the platform of his "safety elevator," full of passengers, rose two meters above the floor; Otis took a dagger, "cut the cable holding them aloft and voila, nothing happened, thanks to the invisible safety catches." Not only was the elevator a hit, it spurred New York's growth as the first and ultimate vertical city.

Pittsburgh made steel; Atlanta made textiles; New York made money. The city harnessed, or stole, an idea (transcontinental railroads, electric lighting and, in its financial canyons, the very buying and selling of money) and coaxed it into huge profits for some, cozier living for many, ruin for still more. In this 24-mi. sardine can, Theodore Dreiser wrote in 1923, "the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak — and so very, very many." Proximity to success made the rabble desperate, and financial brigands like Jay Gould called on the hard-nosed Pinkerton detectives to quell riots; he said he had hired "one half of the working class to kill the other half."

In 1999, I wrote this about "Gotham" and Gotham: "Cynics, looking at the current abrasion of the city's cops and its black citizens, will say Gould lives. Romantics, seeing a neo-Gothic skyscraper shadowing a stock market that touches 10,000, will say New York is still the Big Golden Apple. [T]he place is capacious and contradictory enough to embrace all extremes and emotions. The book may even make those who love hating New York realize that it's not hell, just a helluva town."

Catastrophe changes things. The deaths of 23 N.Y.P.D. cops and 47 other law enforcement officers in the World Trade Center collapse pushed police brutality out of most people's minds, and the national notion of New York as a wounded city helped deflate stock prices that had been too high to justify. A lot of us who in 1999 were nostalgic for the New York of Joseph Mitchell have since become wistful about those churning days of innocence three years ago — any day before last September 11th.

So I live in a city of memories and, still, a city for dreams — a furnace for ambition. What Martin Scorsese said about getting started in filmmaking applies to surviving in New York: "Drive counts." The pace, the pulse is quicker here. Folks on their way to work stride down a midtown block in silent competition with all the other fast walkers. There's so much up for grabs, and so many others grabbing. We are pushy. We push ourselves, and the city pushes us. Sometimes those forces collide, the city wins, and down we go, like Penn Station. But sometimes they combine, and a victory here is the sweetest. Get one big enough, and they'll throw you a ticket-tape parade in the bombastically named Canyon of Heroes on lower Broadway.

Last Saturday, Andre Agassi acknowledged the juice that Gotham funnels into its residents, immigrants and visitors — the elixir of wanting. Exulting on his improbable journey to the men's finals at the U.S. Open in Queens, he shouted, "This is New York, baby!"