How to Be Alone : Essays

First City

Two things that happened this year got me wondering why American cities in general and New York City in particular still bother to exist. The first was a plane ride back east from St. Louis. I sat next to a smart, pleasant woman from Springfield, Missouri, who was taking her eleven-year-old son to see relatives in Boston. The son had already scored points with me by removing a book, rather than a Game Boy, from his backpack, and when his mother told me that they were stopping in New York for two nights and that it was her son’s first visit there, I asked what sights they planned to see. “We want to go to the Fashion Café,” she said, “and we want to try to get on the Today show. There’s that window you can stand in front of? My son wants to do that.” I said I hadn’t heard about this window, and it certainly did sound interesting, but what about the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building? The woman gave me a funny look. “We’d love to see Letterman too,” she said. “Do you think there’s any chance of getting tickets?” I told her she could always hope.

The second thing that happened, after this reminder that for the rest of the country New York is now largely a city of the mind — at best, a site for the voodoo transformation of image into flesh — was a walk I took down Silicon Alley, in lower Manhattan. Silicon Alley is a district where the romance between downtown hipsters and the digital revolution has emerged from upper-floor bedrooms and set up house behind plate glass; I could see girls with fashion-model looks who wouldn’t be caught dead at the Fashion Café clustering around monitors while gurus with shaved heads helped them to configure. The Cyber Café, at 273 Lafayette Street, is a strange phenomenon. According to Web dogma, it ought not to exist. “Click, click through cyberspace,” William J. Mitchell writes in his recent manifesto, City of Bits. “This is the new architectural promenade. . a city unrooted to any definite spot on the surface of the earth, shaped by connectivity and bandwidth constraints rather than by accessibility and land values, largely asynchronous in its operation, and inhabited by disembodied and fragmented subjects who exist as collections of aliases and agents.” Yet the Cyber Café—to say nothing of the thousands of clubs and galleries and bookstores and noncyber cafés doing business within a mile of it — resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned see-and-be-seen promenade.

Two New Yorks, then: one a virtual province of Planet Hollywood; the other a definite spot on the surface of the earth, populated by young people who even as they disembody and fragment themselves cannot resist the urge to Be There. Between the New York of Springfield’s imaginings and the New York of Lafayette Street is a disjunction that I feel well equipped to appreciate. I grew up in Missouri, and in the last fifteen years I’ve moved to New York six times. At no point was a job or a ready-made community waiting for me. As a self-employed writer, I can live anywhere I want, and it would make sense for me to choose an inexpensive place. Yet whenever I’m in one of those inexpensive places I feel drawn to reinflict New York on myself — this despite my fear of neighbors with televisions and pianos, my aversion to Gothamite provinciality, and my immunity to the city’s “cultural vitality.” When I’m here, I spend a lot of time at home; as a rule, I hit the museums and theaters only in a last-minute panic, before moving somewhere else. And, fond though I am of Central Park and the subways, I have no overpowering V for the Apple as a whole. The city has little of the soul-stirring desolation of Philadelphia, say, and none of the deep familiarity of Chicago, where I was born. What draws me back, again and again, is safety. Nowhere else am I safe from the question: Why here?

Manhattan, in particular, offers the reassurance of high rents, which means that this is a city that people want to live in, not escape from. It’s no accident that Parisians adore New York. Its orthogonal street grid notwithstanding, they feel right at home here, since one of the things that makes Europe Europe is that its urban centers are still attractors, rather than repellers, of public life. Conversely, for an American Midwesterner like me, hungry for a feeling of cultural placement, New York is the next best thing to Europe.

Most North American metropolises are wildly centrifugal, however, and the contrast between our lifeless inner grids and Europe’s thriving centers has prompted the architect and essayist Witold Rybczynski to ask, “Why aren’t our cities like that?” In his recent book, City Life, he sets out to examine “urban expectations” in the New World. Although he devotes much of the book to explaining the different look of our cities, Rybczynski understands that “like that” means something deeper: an urban vitality, an at-homeness with the idea of living in cities. Washington, D.C., has Parisian-style diagonal boulevards, height uniformity, and monumental architecture, and yet no one would mistake the feel of a residential D.C. street at ten in the evening for the Fourteenth Arrondissement. Nor is there any mistaking our country’s current mood of hostility toward cities. Upstate New York has taken revenge on Gotham in the person of George Pataki; planned cuts in Medicare, welfare, and other federal programs target city centers like ICBMs; and the groups that the Western and suburban Republicans now ascendant in Congress have identified as flies in the ointment — poor people, gay people, liberal elites, rap musicians, NEA-sponsored performance artists, government bureaucrats — all happen to be concentrated in big cities.

City Life traces the provenance of this hostility. Paying a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia, Rybczynski reports being struck not “by its strenuous ‘historical’ character. . but rather by how familiar it seemed.” Williamsburg is the prototype of the American small town, distinctive not only in its “spatial liberality” but in its relation to nature. European towns were traditionally enclosed by walls of stone and walls of class; membership in the bourgeoisie (literally, “town dwellers”) brought various jealously guarded privileges. American towns were open from the start. Surrounded by wilderness, Rybczynski says, “town builders reacted not by emphasizing the contrast between the natural and the man-made, but by incorporating natural elements in the town as much as possible, whether as green squares, tree-lined streets, or ample gardens.” That the colonial town became specifically “a celebration of the house,” however, resulted from the accident of North America’s being settled by the English and Dutch, whose wealthier citizens, unlike their counterparts in other European countries, had a marked preference for individual home ownership. In America, even people of modest means could afford private ownership, and land was so plentiful that each house could have a private yard. Nor was the deconcentration of society simply spatial. Rybczynski discerns in our earliest history “a startling tendency toward a far-flung homogeneity,” and he relates how Alexis de Tocqueville, scouring the backwoods for an American peasantry in the 1830s, instead found a settler who had books and newspapers and spoke “the language of towns.” With the rule-proving exception of African slaves and Native Americans, there was no peasantry above the Rio Grande, and the result of this disjunction between the rural and the rustic was distinctively American: urbanity without urbanness.

In Rybczynski’s telling of it, the first century and a half of postcolonial American history was essentially a detour in the inevitable fulfillment of these proto-suburban ideals. Quaker practicality and a profusion of immigrants ensured that Philadelphia, for example, which William Penn had laid out as a “green country town,” quickly saw its spacious grid parceled up by speculators and bricked up with row houses. It was Penn’s grid, not his green vision, that became the norm for big American cities. In the absence of a belief in cities as unique repositories of culture, moreover, there was little to prevent American cities from becoming purely commercial enterprises. However much the country’s urban gentry came to hunger for European refinements, attempts at making cities more “like Paris”—Daniel Burnham’s plan for a horizontal Chicago of parks and boulevards is perhaps the most famous — soon foundered on the economics of skyscrapers or sank beneath waves of immigration. As Rybczynski puts it, “the city profitable replaced the city beautiful.”

Yet the city profitable worked. The first decades of this century were the heyday of urban life in America. I generally resist wishing I’d lived in an earlier era (I always imagine myself dying of some disease whose cure was just around the corner), but I make an exception for those years when the country’s heart was in its cities, the years of Lou Gehrig and Harold Ross, Automats and skyscrapers, trolley cars, fedoras, and crowded train stations. I make this exception precisely because the era seems so anomalous, so extraneous to the continuum connecting Williamsburg colonials and Tocqueville’s urbane woodsmen to the far-flung tract-housing dwellers of today. It seems like a time when the country could have turned in a less wasteful, more public-spirited, more European direction.

Ironically, these decades were a time, perhaps the only time, when European cities were looking westward for inspiration. If there’s a villain in City Life, it’s Le Corbusier, who, with what Rybczynski calls “a Warholian gift for self-promotion,” toured the world publicizing his vision of the Radiant City of the future. City Life offers a nice contrast between the heroic descriptive work of the nineteenth-century Tocqueville and the malignant fatuity of the twentieth-century Le Corbusier, whose vision was prescriptive: superskyscrapers surrounded by grass and superhighways; a Cartesian separation of work from play, of housing from commerce. When Le Corbusier proposed razing six hundred acres of central Paris, he was ignored by everyone but his fellow French intellectuals. In America, however, his ideas influenced a generation of city planners and eventually inspired hundreds of urban “renewal” projects. In Manhattan we still live with the radiance of NYU’s dorms and East Harlem’s projects.

Radiant City planning, whose wrongheadedness is old news now, by no means killed the American inner city singlehanded. Kenneth T. Jackson concluded his study of American suburbanization, Crabgrass Frontier, with an excellent analysis of the “residential deconcentration” of America. Jackson pinned the unique degree of American suburbanization on two fundamental causes: racial prejudice and inexpensive housing. Suburbs provide uneasy whites with a safe haven, and a variety of factors — high per capita wealth, cheap land and transportation, government subsidies and tax breaks — have made flight affordable to the great middle class.

The most salient contemporary American urban expectations, therefore, are that core cities will be poor and non-white, and that the suburbs will be soothingly homogeneous. Rybczynski is strangely oblivious to these particular expectations. In City Life’s final chapter, “The Best of Both Worlds,” he celebrates the Philadelphia community of Chestnut Hill, which became a middle-class haven in the first decades of this century, when a local millionaire named George Woodward and his father-in-law built several hundred beautiful rental houses of Wissahickon schist. With medium population density, a parklike ambience, and carefully planned architecture, the Woodward development showed the influence of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, a model development begun outside London in 1906. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs observed that garden suburbs, since they have neither the street life of real cities nor the privacy of real suburbs, succeed only if their residents are homogeneous and relatively affluent. Rybczynski, who now owns a house in Chestnut Hill, contradicts Jacobs by asserting that the community “has become more socially and economically heterogeneous.” He extols it as “a small town and a city both,” “an only slightly urbanized Arcadia” whose central shopping street, Germantown Avenue, is “precisely the sort of old-fashioned pedestrian district people find so attractive.” He speaks of the “long” waiting list for Woodward house rentals.

For a check on the reality of American cities, it’s worth taking a closer look at the neighborhood Rybczynski calls home. The last time I moved to New York, it was from Philadelphia. My wife and I had heard about the waiting list for Woodward houses, and we were surprised when, at the interview required of all applicants, we were told that several houses were immediately available. Only later did we learn that every one of the dozens of families in Woodward houses on our block, in the predominantly black city of Philadelphia, was white. At the closest good supermarket and the closest mall, both of which are in mixed neighborhoods, you will rarely see a white shopper from Chestnut Hill. When I shopped at these places I was struck by the exemplary warmth and courtesy with which I was treated. Knowing that a black male shopper at a predominantly white mall or supermarket would probably have had quite a different experience, I couldn’t help wondering whether the courtesy wasn’t meant to be literally exemplary. As in: We would like to be treated the way we are treating you.

THE FIRST CITIES of European countries have tended to be capitals in every way — commercially, culturally, governmentally, and demographically. Early America, however, was so far-flung and so distrustful of concentrated authority that it was not until 1900 or so, when Wall Street and the big media had established themselves as the country’s shadow government, that the four functions fully converged in New York. One measure of New York’s enduring primacy is that it continues to act as a lightning rod for national resentment. When Americans rail against “Washington,” they mean the abstraction of federal government, not the District of Columbia. New York is resented as an actual place — for its rudeness, its arrogance, its crowds and dirt, its moral turpitude, and so forth. Global resentment is the highest compliment a city can receive, and by nurturing the notion of the Apple as the national Forbidden Fruit such resentment guarantees not only that ambitious souls of the “If I can make it there, I’d make it anywhere” variety will gravitate toward New York but that the heartland’s most culturally rebellious young people will follow. There’s no better way of rejecting where you came from, no plainer declaration of an intention to reinvent yourself, than moving to New York; I speak from personal experience.

It worries me a little, therefore, that the city has now been paid the additional compliment of a million-and-a-half-word encyclopedia. There’s something decidedly valedictory about The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by the same Kenneth Jackson who wrote Crab grass Frontier. The Encyclopedia has the heft and ambition of a monument. It’s a grand list for an age in love with lists. As soon as I got the book, I paged to the entry for “Sewers,” a topic of perennial fascination. I found a good historical overview of the subject but no hint of the daily drama of contemporary sewers. Indeed, a numbing sameness afflicts nearly all the longer articles in the Encyclopedia. Each entry begins with vaguely colorful arcana from the city’s earliest history (reading about “Intellectuals,” for example, we learn that “the leading intellectual circle of the late eighteenth century was the Friendly Club”), goes on to pursue the subject doggedly decade by decade, often achieving a full head of steam around 1930 (thus, under “Intellectuals,” The New Republic and Partisan Review are treated at some length), and finally peters out rather sadly in the present (“In the mid 1990s. . major magazines of opinion continued to be published in the city but lacked the urgency and influence that they had enjoyed in earlier times”). It’s an odd thing to experience the present, which is, after all, so present, again and again as the dusty terminus of historical spurs. Reviewers of the Encyclopedia have dwelled on what’s missing from it, and their quibbles reinforce the notion of the city as a work completed, rather than a work in progress.

The chief pleasure of the Encyclopedia lies in a kind of Derridean lateral slide of association. I move from “Terrorism” to read about “Anarchism,” across the page to “Amphibians and Reptiles,” on to “Birds,” and (after a side trip to “Birdland” and a courtesy call on “Parker, Charlie”) to “Cockroaches,” which “are known to be attracted to toothpaste,” which brings me to “Colgate-Palmolive” and its founder “Colgate, William,” who fled England in 1795 “to escape public hostility toward his father, who had supported the French Revolution.” It’s like a game of Telephone: “Anarchism” connecting with the sansculottes not by way of history but, rather, via “Cockroaches.”

Yet there’s something empty about this pleasure. A city lives in the eye, ear, and nose of the solitary beholder. You turn to literature to find the interior point of intersection between subject and city, and as a living connection to New York’s history a few lines of Herman Melville or Don DeLillo outweigh whole pages of an encyclopedia. This is Ishmael downtown:

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs — commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward.

This is DeLillo’s Bucky Wunderlick, walking the same streets more than a century later:

It was early afternoon and soon to rain, nondeliverance in the air, a chemical smell from the river. The bridges were cruelly beautiful in this weather, gray ladies nearly dead to all the poetry written in their names.

DeLillo, an essential New York artist, is unmentioned in the Encyclopedia, whose lengthy “Literature” article has little more to say about the post-Norman Mailer scene than this: “Many of the writers who had become well known in the 1960s left the city during the 1970s and 1980s.”

DURING THOSE 1970S and 1980s, Rybczynski says, a new shopping center opened in the United States every seven hours. In City Life he asserts that as malls increasingly come to have hotels attached to them and museums and skating rinks and public libraries housed within them, they are entitled to be considered “the new downtown.” He marvels at the “variety” at a shopping-center food court (“Tex-Mex, Chinese, Italian, Middle Eastern”) and compares the scene to a sidewalk café. What ultimately attracts people to malls, he believes, is that they supply “a reasonable (in most eyes) level of public order; the right not to be subjected to outlandish conduct, not to be assaulted and intimidated by boorish adolescents, noisy drunks, and aggressive panhandlers.” He adds, “It does not seem too much to ask.” To “academic colleagues” who might object to the “hyperconsumerism” and “artificial reality” of malls, Rybczynski replies that “commercial forces have always formed the center of the American city” and that “it is unclear to me why sitting on a bench in the mall should be considered any more artificial than a bench in the park.”

For my part, I’m willing to admit to an almost physical craving for the comforts of the suburban mall. Natural opiates flood my neural receptors when I step from the parking lot into the airlock. Inside, the lighting is subdued, and every voice sounds far away. Never mind that Waldenbooks doesn’t stock Denis Johnson and that Sam Goody has no Myra Melford; I have cash in my wallet, my skin is white, and I feel utterly, utterly welcome. Is this a community? Is the reality artificial, or am I part of a genuine promenade? I don’t know. When I’m not being actively repelled by the purple and teal that are this year’s favored suburban leisurewear colors, I’m too busy enjoying the rush of purchase to pay much attention.

My craving for city life feels entirely different. It’s often tinged with anxiety; I’m never entirely relaxed until I’m back at home; there’s a world of difference between inside and outside. How is it possible that life in New York, whose buildings are like ossified upwellings of pure molten capital, can be so much less beholden to the world of consumerism than life in the suburbs, which ostensibly offer more freedom and privacy? The answer is, narrowly, that cities represent an older, less advanced stage in the development of buying and selling, in which producers work cheek by jowl with consumers and the whole economic mechanism is open to inspection and so is less susceptible to the seamless enchantment of modern sales pitches; and, more generally, that there’s something in the very nature of cities which enforces adult responsibility. I don’t mean to suggest that we city dwellers are any less mad for products than suburb dwellers are, or that the cleansing and police actions of various Business Improvement Districts are not, even now, transforming large swaths of Manhattan into outdoor malls — only that it’s far easier on the streets of New York to have experiences that have nothing to do with the spending of money than it is in the typical galleria.

Rybczynski is correct, nevertheless, in stressing that “civic” and “commercial” have always been near-synonyms in America. Although European cities, too, historically functioned as trading and manufacturing centers, they had more ancient functions as well: as fortification, as the sites of cathedrals and universities, as the residences of princes, and, most important, as the embodiment of regional or national identities. Barcelona is Catalonia, and every new building erected there serves to make Catalonia’s identity that much more glorious and concrete. It’s impossible to imagine an American city being cherished in the same way, if only because we have no regional identities as coherent and enduring — as tribal—as the Catalonian. This country was populated largely by immigrants in search of freedom or economic opportunity, or both, and I suspect it’s no accident that the heyday of American cities directly followed the decades of peak immigration. These immigrants were similar only in their rejection of the Old World and so could never develop urban fealties that extended beyond a given ethnic neighborhood. It was only a matter of time before they adopted the New World ideal of house-as-kingdom, with its implications that what you earn and what you buy matters far more than where you do it.

The real mystery, therefore, is not that we have so few cities “like Paris” but that we have any at all. However many Americans prefer the suburbs, there are still millions who expressly choose cities. “Yuppie” is not a kind appellation, but the people who put the u in the word remain impressive in their sheer numbers. Even the most woebegone urban centers — Syracuse in the Rust Belt, Colorado Springs in the midst of neo-Californian sprawl — manage a few blocks of mixed-use vitality. And many larger cities — New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle — have a clearly sustained critical mass. For better or worse, the most reliable measure of a city’s vitality is whether rich people are willing to live in the center of it. Once upon a time, the middle class was the bellwether of urban vitality; in Mayor Giuliani’s speeches, it still is. But, as Labor Secretary Robert Reich has observed, the term “middle class” today has a definition more sociological than economic. And the best definition might be “suburban.”

However reliable the presence of the rich may be as an indicator, it’s merely the final effect in a chain of causes which begins with a city’s ability to attract young people. How long would the upper crust persevere on Park Avenue without the horde of young singles who fill Yorkville? How long would downtown remain a capital of culture without constant infusions of young artists, students, and musicians? We hear a lot about the dependence of poor people on cities, but young people, especially creative young people, need them just as much. The suburbs may be an ideal place to spend a childhood, but people in the years between leaving the nest and building a nest of their own need a place to congregate. So cities will continue to see, at a minimum, heavy nighttime and weekend use — unless, of course, Internet-brokered marriages become common; and the only thing more dismal to imagine than virtual courtship is daily life in the marriage of two people who would court that way.

HIKING IS WHAT I DO for fun in Manhattan on windy days or after sundown, when the diesel fumes lift. I’m a recreational walker, and in the last few years I’ve noticed something odd when I’ve hit the sidewalks of suburban St. Louis and suburban Colorado: a not negligible percentage of the men speeding by me in their cars or sport-utility vehicles (it’s always men) feel moved to yell obscenities at me. It’s hard to know why they do this. The only things unusual about me are that I’m not driving and that I’m not wearing teal and purple or a backward baseball cap. My guess is that they yell at me simply because I’m a stranger, and from the perspective of their glassed-in vehicles I have no more human reality than the coach on their TV screens who has elected to punt on fourth and short.

I’ve been yelled at in New York, too, but only by deinstitutionalized psychotics, and then only in the midst of fellow subway riders who sympathized with me. Jane Jacobs identified as a hallmark of city life the existence of privacy in heavy crowds — a privacy whose maintenance depends not on the pseudoparental expedients of isolated houses and controlled shopping environments but on modes of adult behavior best learned in public spaces like the sidewalk. That the country’s widely decried “breakdown of civility” began at home, rather than in so-called urban jungles, can be confirmed at any movie theater, where audiences accustomed to watching videos in the bedroom have forgotten how to shut up.

In Death and Life Jacobs also quoted Paul Tillich, who believed that the city, by its very nature, “provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” Familiarity, whether of chain stores or of cookie-cutter subdivisions, erodes the autonomous intelligence and, in a weird way, undermines privacy. In the suburbs, I’m the stranger; I feel exposed. Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.

I’m not so innocently enamored of cities, of course, as not to see that the plate-glass windows of Silicon Alley serve purposes of display similar to those of the CRT screens behind them: that the hidden link between Fashion Café and Cyber Café is a culture of Being Seen. It’s possible to worry, too, that young people who come to Manhattan seeking what I seek — centrality, the privacy of crowds, the satisfaction of being a fly in the ointment — will eventually be repelled by the miasma of Disneyfication that is hanging over SoHo and Fifty-seventh Street and creeping into the East Village and Times Square. For now, though, I work and sleep in a building that houses two dressmakers, a realtor, an antiques dealer, a caterer, and a fish seller. When I lie on the floor and relax by listening to my breathing, I can hear the slower respirations of the city itself, a sound like the rumble of a surf: subway trains crowded with people who are teaching themselves how to be here.

[1995]