The concept of New York

National Review, Feb 9, 1998 by Richard Brookhiser

THIS column, here in its first installment, is called "City Desk," partly for the "stop the presses" flavor of the phrase, although by now this is a very old homage. Fifty years ago, Priscilla Buckley had a drunken scamp of a colleague who would run through the lobby of the Daily News building, past the huge sunken globe, hollering "Scoop! Scoop!" Another scamp followed, a moment later, yelling "Kill that story!" A joke, even then.

But mainly "City Desk" refers to my desk, a desk in a city -- and not just any city. New York has been The City for about a century now.

Recently New York commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of Greater New York, whereby Manhattan acquired Brooklyn and the other jewels in its crown. As if to celebrate, a 101-year-old water main ruptured, leaving a thirty-foot crater in the middle of Fifth Avenue. A gas main joined in, sending up a two-story plume of fire. Ultimately, the political benchmark is as trivial as the explosion turned out to be. New York became The City not because of a legislative real-estate grab, but because it was already coming to incarnate what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "metropolitan urbanity." Urban and urbane are linguistically related words, and sometimes city dwelling and "the bright, gay vigorous elements" (Fitzgerald again) are related things, so that people imagine the latter when they think of the former.

Americans look at New York with a mixture of curiosity, horror, and emulation. (And not just on Seinfeld. I never saw a single episode -- one of the blessings of not watching television.) People in Dubuque are surely (and rightly) more interested in Dubuque than in New York, or even Seinfeld. But they are also more interested in New York than in Des Moines. Most of what happens here happens everywhere else; here it is larger, or more lurid; sometimes sharper. New York is America talking in its sleep.

Many accidents conspired to give New York its prominence. But the accident of its founding gave it its character. From my desk I can see, not only four restaurants, a deli, a sidewalk hidden by scaffolding, and my neighbors' bedrooms, but J. P. Morgan's church, and a park laid out on the site of a 350-year-old farm. New York is one of the oldest cities in the country (older than Williamsburg). It was founded for a specific purpose -- to traffic in furs via the Hudson Valley, where the French on the St. Lawrence couldn't interfere. Other American cities were religious and social experiments -- the City on the Hill, the City of Brotherly Love. New York was the city of trade, and money. Radicals might think of a dozen ways to seize the money, and liberals have thought of a million ways to spend it. But beneath their chatter, and their destructive policies, New York has been about making it, and displaying it. You had the right to display it, of course, if you had made it. No drones here.

New York was also a Dutch city. The old farm was owned by Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor. He stands in the park, in statue form, glaring and peglegged. The culture of New Amsterdam, writes the historian David Hackett Fischer, "combined formal toleration, social distance, and inequality in high degree." The themes for all future variations were given. Visitors to New York in the late eighteenth century described a city that had exactly the same energy it has now. "The several classes . . . mix very little." "I know of no place where food of every kind is cheaper or more abundant." "They talk very loud, very fast, and altogether. If they ask you a question, before you utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again and talk away" (this was observed by John Adams, who was not easily interrupted). "The readiest way for a stranger to recommend himself" is to "drink stoutly" and "talk bawdy." "The inhabitants are in general brisk and lively" and "dress very gay." Only the last feature requires modification, since everyone now wears black. (My wife, who is a psychoanalyst, wore a red blouse in one session; her patient exclaimed, "A color!") But one wears it, as one's bright forerunners did, to be fashionable.

The age and persistence of these paradigms is a blow to ethnic self-flattery, to all the Irish and Italians and Jews and Pakistanis and whoever else might think they have set New York's tone. But it was there, as steady as concert A, when New York was twenty thousand English, Dutch, and their slaves, huddling within a mile of the Battery.

These birthmarks impart a frantic quality to the rush every great city has, and perhaps a coolness as well. New York's look is sleek stone and steel. The gaudy Beaux Arts buildings sit squarely in their right-angled lots. New York even made a glass building that works, the laboratory gizmo of the Citicorp Building.

"City Desk" won't be about the city. It won't rate the Chinese restaurants, or describe the mayor's latest drag act. It will be from the city, about interesting things. Samuel Johnson, who lived in London, which was The City of his century, admired the Strand, but thought "the full tide of human existence" was most visible at Charing Cross. I will show you what tide I can see from my desk.