Quotes of the Day

I live eight blocks from the World Trade Center — where it was. "Eight blocks" may mean nothing to you, my non-New York friends, who on a typical day are no more likely to walk from where you live to where you shop than you are to read Schopenhauer in Esperanto. So, in simple American, eight blocks means that if you were driving 65 mph on one of your highways and you passed my apartment building, you would reach the memory of the World Trade Center 22 seconds later, or about the time it takes to read the 100 words in this paragraph.

A year ago, the World Trade Center was just that huge, architecturally undistinguished place at the southern end of my Tribeca neighborhood. I bought books there, at Borders in Building 7. I rushed through its concourses and covered bridges to get to the much prettier World Financial Center atrium across West Street. And each January, at the Windows on the World restaurant, I would attend a party for the New York Film Critics awards. On September 11 the books turned to ash. The atrium was cratered, though at least that is being rebuilt. Many of the waiters who served our dinners died.

On that day, the World Trade Center graduated from being a bunch of buildings to being a monument. In its death — and of course in the deaths that accompanied its fall — the WTC achieved a grandeur and status it had never known in its 27-year life. It means so much more in its poignant absence than it did in its hulking presence. It has joined all the vanished relics of New York's past, in a city that cherishes living in the Now and the Then.

The ornery truth is that great buildings come and go in this town. New York is so congested, and so rapacious is its impulse to reinvent itself, that it quickly developed the bad habit of tearing down great edifices with no more thought for precious antiquity than a householder would replace grandma's furniture with Ethan Allen knockoffs. Sometimes a grand mastodon is replaced by an instant classic, as when the original Waldorf and Astoria Hotels gave way in 1931 to the Empire State Building. And who can remember what stood at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue before Walter Chrysler commissioned the most gorgeous of all Deco skyscrapers? But more often the magnificent surrenders to the mediocre. Bye-bye, Roxy Theatre. Farewell, Wanamaker's.

The tendency is easily explained: nothing in New York costs more than real estate, and if a new building is cheaper than an old one, pennywise burghers will make the switch — the architectural equivalent of cashiering middle-aged employees for younger, less expensive ones. If Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Eastern cities retain more of their visible past, it's because no one was willing to pay to get rid of it. New York never lacked tycoons with a taste for the wrecking ball.

Yet New York is also the one American city that glories in its past — trades in it. Many visitors come here to do business, create more profitable tomorrows, but many more are here for a living history lesson: national (the Statue of Liberty), cultural (our museums), showbizzical (Broadway, which is its own musical anachronism). And many residents ache when they think of what might still be here, except for the plausible imperative of greed. Is it an exaggeration to say that a certain generation of New Yorkers felt the 1963 destruction of the McKim, Mead & White Penn Station every bit as keenly as we do the loss of the World Trade Center? New Yorkers are surrounded by so much of the past, architecturally and artistically, that they yearn for what's gone to be magically restored, for Oz to be rebuilt by pressing the rewind button.

I am one of those sentimental souls. All right, I've lived here for 37 years. But I think that others, who have visited New York, or who just love the idea of this strange place, can be fascinated by the city's past. For all of you, I suggest you take a trip into the city's teeming history, as rendered so eloquently in a quartet of popular history books. Two of them I wrote about (for TIME's European edition) when they were published nearly four years ago; two others have kept me company for the past year or so. All four are just the things, in what will be a melancholy week thinking about New York, to read, keep and take heart from.

"WE ARE ALL VISIBLE"

How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in "Swingtime" and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left...

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

I emerge from a Lower Manhattan subway at night and thrill to see the Woolworth Building, 792 feet high, lighted up like God's cash register. F.W. Woolworth didn't believe in mortgages; he paid for this svelte, soaring neo-Gothic monolith with $13.5 million in cash, with the nickels and dimes his stores charged for their trinkets. In 1913, when it opened, it was the tallest building in the world; since last September 11, it is the tallest in lower Manhattan. F.W. is long gone, and so, now, are his stores; the last ones closed in 1998. That was the year the Woolworth Company sold off its most spectacular remaining asset. But this Cathedral of Commerce stands as a reminder of New York City's perpetually mercantile soul. It's as close as we get to Chartres.

I hear European readers snorting at a New Yorker's notion of ancient history. "So an 89-year-old edifice is your idea of a shrine; we've had Queen Mums older than that." Yes, it's true: New York is a pup compared to Paris, which in scale is still a medieval city, and London, where you can walk behind Simpson's in the Strand and find the remains of a Roman bath. But in the States, where way-back-when means yesterday, New York is the only place that dares to, or wants to, carry itself like a great European city. For nearly 400 years it has been the focus of America's power and arrogance, its commerce and culture, its stunning and appalling diversity. For all those centuries it has been, and surely still is, what O. Henry called "the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city."

Could New York's history and culture possibly be synopsized in just two volumes? Yes: in "Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898," by Edwin G. Burrows, the Broeklundian Professor of History at Brooklyn College, and Mike Wallace, Professor of History at John Jay College, City University of New York; and in "Writing New York: A Literary Anthology," edited by Philip Lopate. These big, brilliant, complementary books amount to 2,500 pages between them, weigh in at 7 lbs. and are worth every back spasm.

"Gotham" traces the town's growth from the Ice Age to the incorporation of its five boroughs. "Writing New York" offers a banquet of observations on the city from 108 writers, beginning with Washington Irving — who called it "Gotham," or Goats' Town, after a village in England — and ending with a 1996 piece of bleak nostalgia by Vivian Gornick: "Now the city is violent, everything costs the earth, and we are all visible."

Put "Writing New York" by your bedside and find months of keen visions. Just a few, plucked and random and with gratitude... Walt Whitman reminisces on actors he had seen a half-century before on the Bowery, the Broadway of its day. The poet and physician William Carlos Williams recalls his work in Hell's Kitchen with indigent moms and battered or battering kids at the Nursery and Child's Hospital (where, I believe, our current Poet Laureate Billy Collins was born a few decades later). Jane Jacobs, the graceful, influential writer about city planning, describes a day in the life of a neighborhood — Hudson Street in Greenwich Village — as "an intricate sidewalk ballet," a 24-hr. play with hundreds, thousands of characters. The city, she says, is an organism kept alive not by the headliners, the great and the wicked, but by ordinary people in the magnetic pull of their daily destinies.

I scan Lopate's collection enviously: what a daunting, lovely task to choose the best writing on a city that attracted some geniuses, repelled others. A trip to New York gave the deaf-mute Helen Keller "the comforting certainty that mankind is real and I myself am not a dream." The Cuban poet Jose Marti was moved by the kindness of citizens in a 1888 snowstorm. Charles Dickens, on an 1844 visit, described Broadway as "a wide and bustling street which, from the Battery Gardens to its opposite termination in a country road, may be four miles long." (Four miles up from the Battery? Today, that country road is called 42nd Street.) He also wrote of his outrage at the stench of pigs roaming the streets and the sight of prisoners brutalized by inhuman conditions and civic indifference.

"THERE'S A SUBWAY HANDY"

If Dickens had returned 100 or 150 years later, he would have found little changed. Here the poor are not only among us but in front of us. Capitalism creates enormous inequalities; proximity makes them a daily encounter. A billionaire's wife, as she dashes from the front door of her Fifth Avenue penthouse to the waiting limo, is compelled to catch a glimpse of the homeless man asleep in his urine. This might explain New York's status as the most liberal of all cities, if it weren't that the barrage of need and squalor thickens the skin of its middle-class citizens — gives them "New York nerves." The poor in the subways become a species of performance art; the poor on the streets are no more than a peripheral piece of soot that our practiced eye automatically washes out.

Privilege in the suburbs is isolation from poverty: from the sight of it and thus from the minding of it. In a city like Los Angeles, the car is an isolating influence; I'm in my tank, I stare ahead, I am my own community; everyone else is just traffic. On a trip to L.A. a while back, I decided to see the Watts Towers, Simon Rodia's hand-hewn steel-and-wire spires. I was astonished to find it took an hour to drive there from Hollywood, and suddenly I realized that the Watts riots of 1965 must have seemed as remote to the average Angeleno as if they'd occurred in Santa Barbara. New York's riots, in Harlem the year before, took place a single A-train stop from midtown. The price of urban revolution here has always been one subway token. Or less: the jump of a turnstile.

New York, really, is its subway system. Since the system's inception a hundred years ago — a thrilling amalgam of civic ambition, engineering brilliance and heroic hard work — subways have been the arteries that get everyone everywhere, fast and relatively cheap. The system's decay in the 70s, when the graffiti vandals decorated nearly every car with artwork that screamed gaudy hell at passengers who were already frazzled enough, was an unmissable part of the city's decline into bankruptcy and violence. When the subways were cleaned up, people felt better; they could get to work rumpled but undefiled.

The subways also epitomized the density of New York living. This congestion — the traffic jam of ambitions, an accidental elbow in a clogged subway — creates Manhattan melodrama. It doesn't tell us we're all in this together. We're in it separately. But we do recognize that we are all in it. The knowledge of a shared destiny energizes and sustains many of us, enervates and defeats others. We may take as our model either Fiorella La Guardia, the Italian Jew whose verve and acuity raised New York out of a Depression ("Writing New York" includes a canny précis of his work by master builder-destroyer Robert Moses), or the young copyist in Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (also in "Writing New York") who, in a private depression of almost Gandhian defiance, kept telling his employer, "I would prefer not to."

Whether we are activists or passivists, the city is big enough to embrace us all, and all parts of us. It embraces multitudes, it contradicts itself; Central Park doesn't just have Woody Allen on the West Side and Mia Farrow on the East of all that mountain greenery, it has the Plaza Hotel on the South side and Harlem on the North. In his 1954 prose poem "Meditations in an Emergency," O'Hara celebrated this messy too-muchness: "One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes — I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life."

This verse, each letter attached to a pike in a fence a couple hundred feet long, snakes through the yacht basin between the World Financial Center and the Hudson River. It withstood the blast of the WTC buildings two blocks away and is there to inspire strollers with the ingenuity of the poet who wrote it, the good sense of the bureaucrat who chose to display it and the impotence of the bombers who couldn't destroy it.

JOE MITCHELL'S SECRET

"It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and the bums."
— Joseph Mitchell in "My Ears Are Bent"

As Mitchell saw it, fear of the powerful made city editors cautious and newspapers the archives of lies. So after nine years at The World, the Herald-Tribune and the World-Telegram (newspapers mergers occurred as quickly and often as fatally as media mergers would later: by 1966 seven papers — the World, Telegram, Sun, Journal, America, Herald and Tribune — had briefly conflated into the World-Journal-Tribune), Mitchell left daily journalism for The New Yorker, where he stayed until his death in 1996. He also carved out his own beat: the nuts and the bums, the jetsam of the S/S Manhattan, the little people whose daily passage Jane Jacobs chronicled.

They are the stars of "Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories", a collection of Mitchell's New Yorker pieces. We meet the ticket taker at a Bowery movie house, the Iroquois beam-climbers who helped build New York's skyscrapers, the bearded lady in a Times Square freak show, the denizens of a dozen raffish bars and seafood joints. In one booth at the Minetta Tavern is Joe Gould, Mitchell's most famous "creation" (Ian Holm played him in a movie, "Joe Gould's Secret," based on a Mitchell article and book), the Harvard-educated hobo who claimed to have compiled a History of the World. And everywhere are New York's oldest citizens: rats, rats by the millions, whose doings I will trace in another column, when I summon the nerve.

My favorite Mitchell character may be Philippa Duke Schuyler, a gifted child of nine, the daughter of a Negro journalist and a white writer. "Philippa reads Plutarch on train trips, eats steak raw, writes poems in honor of her dolls, plays poker, and is the composer of more than sixty pieces for the piano... She began composing before she was four, and she has been playing the piano in public, often for money, since she was six." It is a beguiling and touching sketch — the more so to those who know of Philippa's later life as a wanderer over four continents, a journalist and author (of five books), a just-short-of-brilliant concert pianist, a lecturer for the ultra-right John Birch Society and a lay missionary in Vietnam. On May 9, 1967, she died in a helicopter crash evacuating children and clergy from Hue to Da Nang. She was 36.

For bringing the lives of Philippa and Gould and hundreds of other New Yorkers to the pages of The New Yorker, Mitchell was rightly, if somewhat fulsomely, revered. The 1992 publication of "Up in the Old Hotel" was a career-defining event comparable to the 1978 issuing of John Cheever's stories. Newsweek said that Mitchell had created "what Joyce might have written had he gone into journalism." That's almost exactly wrong. Mitchell's prose didn't dazzle or force itself on the reader; it was a silent guide, as he was journalism's best listener. Indeed, as he matured he removed fancy metaphors and first-person interpolations from most of his work; the "I" disappeared, the "eye" took over.

I and eye take a stroll together in an earlier, just as valuable Mitchell collection, "My Ears Are Bent," first published in 1938 and reissued last year. For a young man just up from Robeson County, North Carolina, getting a job as a reporter was like being given instant citizenship papers in the anarchic republic of New York. Idealism is the first casualty. "I have seen six men electrocuted," he writes in the introduction to that first collection, "and once a young woman who had been stabbed in the neck died while I was trying to make her lie still, and one night I saw a white-haired cop with a kindly Irish face give a Negro thief the third degree, slowly tearing fresh bandages off wounds on the Negro's back..."

"THE BEST TALK IS ARTLESS"

I suspect that Mitchell's rural upbringing made some sights of the big city shocking (he wrote that New York "women are remarkably narcissistic"). I bet it also gave him an air of courtliness that helped him get people to talk — the kind he wanted to hear. "The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way the meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels." Here's Gill Holton, a Lenox Avenue gambler, predicting a Joe Louis victory over Max Baer: "When Mr. Baer stick his head out it's going to be touched. Like a man stick his head into the dumb waiter and a ice wagon fall on it."

Often, the talk his editors wanted was from big shots, businessmen promoting themselves or wallowing in rancor. Mitchell, a working populist, hated hearing from them and yearned for reprieve, parole into a city full of freaks and loan sharks and ferryboat captains, and girls in their summer dresses. "After interviewing one of those gentlemen you go down in the elevator and walk onto the street and see the pretty girls, the pretty working girls, with their jolly breasts bouncing about under their dresses and you are relieved; you feel as if you had escaped from a tomb in which the worms were just beginning their work; you feel that it would be better to cheat, lie, steal, stick up drugstores or stretch out dead drunk in the gutter than to end up like one of those industrial leaders with a face that looks like a bowl of cold oatmeal."

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!"

• Richard Corliss
• On a sad anniversary, Richard Corliss pays tribute to a "fatal, great city"