City Desk: The U.N. of Motion - changes in the faces and social make-up of New York, New York - Brief Article

National Review, June 14, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

Mr. Brookhiser, an NR senior editor, is author most recently of Alexander Hamilton, American.

Any building that stands a long time shows the passage of fashion. Nothing in New York is as old as the Pantheon, but then we change our fashions faster than Romans do.

A block up the street from me is a four-story building of the last century, with a gray limestone front and a few modest doodads, which began its life as a German beer hall. From the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was an East and a West Germany. The 19th century had a West Germany too; it began on the East Side of Manhattan and fanned out as far as Minnesota and Texas. The city's Germans were staunch Republicans, even when police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt quixotically tried to enforce Sunday closing of their cherished saloons. The saloon in my neighborhood was decorated inside with examples of German humor-a stained glass ceiling of crescent moons smoking cigars; dark murals of toping monks. Maybe you had to be da. Like many New York bars, it was an audience chamber for ward politicians. It was also where the young H. L. Mencken took three- stein lunches at the feet of the worldly music critic James G. Huneker, who discoursed (maybe even knowledgeably) on George Sand's lovers and Franz Liszt's warts.

According to the last census, German Americans are the largest ethnic group in the country. But the world wars cleansed them of ethnicity. German-language newspapers closed, Mullers and Brauns became Millers and Browns. At the saloon the monkish murals grew darker as the humor got dimmer. Trying to refresh the formula the building opened a jazz club in its basement and redecorated the bar; at one point a huge toy gorilla on a swing hung over it. The only remaining link to the building's past was through its taps: German Americans had more than one brew to give for their country.

A fire gave the last call at the bar, and the smoke-stained limestone sat, like a child's smudged face, while the neighbors wondered whether a new tenant would get there before the wreckers. Salvation came from a restaurateur, who bought the shell for his avocation, not his vocation, for he is a devotee of martial arts, and he converted the building to studios offering classes in movement and fitness.

Now moons and monks look down on classes in African dance, Brazilian martial arts, and (from India) four kinds of yoga. There are classes in t'ai chi, a Chinese system of stylized martial-arts movement that seeks to channel physical and spiritual energies. A related form, chi gong, has been in the news lately in China because of difficulties arising from the claims of a leading practitioner there. I first learned of this story from a friend in the city who said that the leader had a mandate from the "masters" to diffuse the practice more widely. These masters are dead, or unborn; at least, they don't communicate by phone, not even cells. My friend had no trouble with the concept of otherworldly masters; he only questioned whether they had delivered such a message. People in China were less skeptical, and the leader soon had 60 million followers, which caused the Communists some unease until we bombed their embassy in Belgrade and rechanneled that energy.

The U.N. of motion has one German delegation, a class in the method of Joseph Pilates. Pilates was a gymnast and hospital worker firmly grounded in the here and now: He found that he could rehabilitate injured patients by devising exercises that used the tension of their bedsprings. In time he designed a series of spring-tension machines with evocative names (Wunda-Chair, Cadillac, Reformer) for the healthy. Using Pilates machines is quite different from working out in a normal gym. Gym equipment concentrates on either the push or the pull. Pilates machines work both on thrust and stretch. Gyms bulk you up; at the extreme, you stop fitting into blazers. The Pilates method is supposed to lengthen you out. As soon as the old saloon began offering classes, the neighborhood coffeehouses filled up with willowy dancer types, as if there had been reforestation. My wife, who has been trying out the method herself, was 5 feet tall when she started, and remains 5 feet tall. But her torso does look elongated. As far as the old saloon is concerned, it's a long way from Pilsen; New York burghers in the 1890s were tallest when they lay on their backs. Yet Herr Pilates might have fit in as well then as he does now; he gave instruction in a bathing suit, gripping a can of beer.

His method is very hot right now, in studios far beyond the old saloon, which cater, not to neighborhood enthusiasts, but to lost beautiful people. (Call them Julia Roberts, though their name is legion.) You would think they were tall enough already, but apparently every half inch helps when you have zero self-esteem. John Milton, also a reformer, would shake his head.

For what admir'st thou, what transports
    thee so,
An outside? fair no doubt, and worthy well
Thy cherishing, thy honoring, and thy
    love,
Not thy subjection . . .