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Whatever else it may possess or lack, a great city cannot be dull. It must have a sense of place and a feeling all its own, and its citizens must be different from and more vital than those who live elsewhere. The difference does not even have to be in their favor. The native Parisian, for instance, is born with an ineradicable hauteur that others define as rudeness, and the native New Yorker knows the meaning of avarice before he can spell the word. So strong is the trait that a century ago, Anthony Trollope waspishly noted that every New Yorker "worships the dollar and is down before his shrine from morning to night." To preserve the spirit of the place, he suggested, every man walking down Fifth Avenue should have affixed to his forehead a label declaring his net worth. No such label is really needed: a Parisian is a Parisian and a New Yorker a New Yorker, with no mistake possible. But a man who lives in Detroit or Cleveland is not necessarily identifiable as a Detroiter or a Clevelander.
First Wild Promise
The city was a place of worship before it was a fortress or trading center, with a magical attraction for men who had always lived in wandering groups or in villages. Prudence might have dictated other sites, but men returned, again and again, to the cities they remembered. Troy was destroyed and rebuilt so many times that archaeologists classify their discoveries as Troy I through IX; Troy VIIA was the "Ilios, city of magnificent houses," as Homer called it, that fell to the duplicity of Greeks. Leveled by the Romans, Carthage returned to life to become the third city of the Empire; in the Middle Ages, Frederick Barbarossa poured salt on the blackened ruins of Milan, but neither fire nor salt could stop the city's resurgence.
The great city retains the ancient magic even today. Men do not always love it; often, indeed, they hate it. More often still, they hate it and love it by turns. Yet once caught by it, they cannot forget or long leave it. "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who did love Paris, "then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." New York, wrote Thomas Wolfe, who did not always love it, "lays hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory; he feels that he can never die."
Like all magic, the attraction of the great city is, in the end, beyond analysis and beyond definition. Marshall McLuhan and the late Frank Lloyd Wright may have been right in arguing that the city should be replaced by smaller communities. But men, alas and thank God, are never strictly practical. Until people are known by numbers alone, the great city will continue to exist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was speaking of Manhattan, but he might just as well have been talking of London or Paris—or Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon or Justinian's Constantinople. Looking at it from afar, he said, was always to see it "in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world."