Multiplicity and the City

Imagining New York City.

Kublai Khan, in the imagination of an Italian novelist, declared to Marco Polo that he could deduce all possible cities from a model city of his concoction, wherein everything conformed to a mean. He asked why the traveller never described the cities he had reasoned from his model. Polo answered that, based on his travels, he too had conjectured a city from which he sought to infer all others: the obverse of the emperor’s.

It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.

For those who have never experienced New York City, it is still not difficult to imagine it. Images of its past and present come readily to mind—at first physical features like the skyline with its shapes and names almost as familiar as our own cities’, or the bridges that connect the islands of the harbour to the mainland, or the lights and signs of Times Square and the ubiquitous tenements and towering apartment buildings. Then a menagerie of life in the city, like accents, yellow cabs, bagel houses and their aromas, minority cultural stereotypes, et cetera: the assortment of features we mentally collate second-hand from the voluminous literature and film about the city. The more earnestly this activity of recalling and unifying the various descriptions is pursued, the more improbably preposterous the city becomes.

It is a lonely and bewildering city, a monstrous city, in the experience of new immigrants and tourists—to them too, at the moment of arrival, it is also an intensely exciting city. It is a crowded and vivacious city, as evinced in images of Broadway at night, or of families sitting on tenement stoops in the Bronx. It is a dangerous city, notorious for its history of organised crime and festering social inequality. It is the financial capital of the globe; it is also the brightest beacon to an aspiring artist of any origin. It is energetic and it is enervating. It is the great American city, the nation’s present future—yet within the nation, the city is almost a foreign land. It “has long faced both towards America and towards Europe”; it “acts as a window onto the new and a mirror into the once familiar”; it is “the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendours of contemporary civilisation”—paradox is platitude in New York City.

And: it is an city of individuals who scatter in disparate directions, intent on their own personal aspirations; it is a city loosely collecting together separate enclaves or villages that are largely distinct and isolated from each other; it is a city bound together by the sense of belonging among its inhabitants—both they to the city and the city to them—that is lifelong and irresistible.

The oppositions seem so weighted as to be irreconcilable, but that does not mean that some or all of them must be false. There is enough evidence for each of them to be true. This is the Venetian traveller’s (or Calvino’s) point, that cities naturally develop these conflicting descriptions—and by the time they do, they are large enough to compass them. It is probably true of any city, but perhaps New York’s real claim to uniqueness is in having spawned and containing more of these mythic, exceptionalist multiplicities than any other.

There is no need to make the contrasts cohere—there is only a need to weigh them in isolation against their own evidence, to determine the breadth of their applicability. If the city can be said to be at once united and divided, the question is not ‘which?’ but ‘why?’

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New York City divides over an intricate web of fault lines. There are divides of class, with the long history of manufacturing and organised labour groups still only slightly in decline, the gradual growth of the city into the financial centre of the United States, and the emerging trend of new technology firms in Manhattan. There are divides of race and family origin, with strong representations of whites and African-Americans since the city’s founding, the influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans at the turn of the last century, and the more recent large-scale entries of Hispanic and Asian peoples. The immigration flows have established divides of religion, especially with the significant Jewish arrivals beginning in the late nineteenth century, and of near-religions like the sports team one follows. And incorporating and overshadowing them all, there are the geographical divisions—the five boroughs, with their distinct characters.

Some of these lines are real barriers and sources of friction or even xenophobia. There have been riots in areas of New York City on the questions of racial equality and civil rights, and segregation was for centuries an impassable divide; some people still find certain regions of the city too intimidating to enter. Union strikes over the working conditions imposed by employers have also pushed the city into moments of heightened tension, especially after the Second World War. Other divisions have the character of parochialism. They are about establishing personal identity in a massive city. Religion, ethnicity, sexuality, baseball—New Yorkers both strongly emphasise the importance of these things to their identity and moderate the tensions they can generate in juxtaposition.

In Manhattan, where everything is concentrated to essences, the ley lines are distinct. Through a form of mythologisation, the various enclaves have developed a degree of permanency in their character and conceptual demarcations. Harlem, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Chinatown—the names are sufficient to evoke their character, a sort of self-intensifying synonymity born out of stereotype and historical legacy. The dominance of that island, at the political, financial and cultural heart of the city, is so great that the identity of the other boroughs is forged as much in opposition to it, and under its shadow, as from within.

Brooklyn, the proudest of the five boroughs, is perhaps least susceptible to this charge. It was a separate city until 1898, and is the largest borough in terms of population. Brooklynites in fact suggest it is a mistake to think of it as a borough. “Brooklyn is a country,” wrote columnist Jerry Della Femina. “It is a country to the rest of the world, a place where people are different from them.” Therefore the sense of community is very strong, and the shared experience of just ‘being from Brooklyn’ creates a unifying and distinguishing empathy even among those who have since moved on. It is nonetheless important that Della Femina defines the borough by reference to difference—they have set or accepted their bounds by what is beyond, not what is within.

But though the Brooklynite empathy is potent and binding, nevertheless “we had our provinces, our different sections, Italian, Jewish, black and Irish, and kids fought ‘gang wars’.” Like a fractal, the fissures of New York sub-divide with magnification. Perhaps, like fractals, they do this infinitesimally; not stopping at the level of ethnic communities or neighbourhoods or local groups or families, or even at the individual. Reading and listening to New Yorkers, one becomes aware of their emphasis on managing their manifold personal identities.

Immigrant cities—cities that are developed and replenished by new entrants of varying ethnicities—can have either strong or weak cultural coherence. The influence of immigration can work either way, usually in relation to the degree of resistance to change within the city. New York prides itself on its dynamism and relentlessly energetic change—what many people will still call ‘progress’—and celebrates its diversity. The pulsations of the migrant flow added an important chronological element to the shaping of the city. By the time of the great migrant intakes at the dawn of the twentieth century, Manhattan was starting to reach its capacity of residents, and was therefore largely unaffordable to new immigrants. The other boroughs, especially Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, became their destinations. As the new ethnicities founded their hubs in these places, these neighbourhoods grew and assumed a clear identity through insularity. Because of the relatively low levels of resistance to change in the city, New York City immigrants did not suffer the pressure to integrate that they might have in other cities, which further intensified the idiosyncrasy of emerging neighbourhoods.

But these did not have the permanency of the mythologised enclaves of Manhattan. A primary reason for this was that they were, being composed of immigrants, relatively poor neighbourhoods. As the newcomers gradually gained wealth, they began to disperse, to the suburbs or elsewhere. Asked why Queens had not established the lasting historical legacies of other places, the former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo replied, “It’s a transition place. That’s why. It has no permanence. People buy their first houses there, then move on. So it doesn’t have a history because it doesn’t have continuity.” But his interviewer, William E. Leuchtenburg (who grew up in Queens), demonstrates that there is still powerful identifying links for those who were “from” these places—he notes with a mixture of melancholy and great interest the transition and reinvention of his old neighbourhood from preponderance of white Europeans in his generation, to the various interlocking communities of Hispanic, Asian, and Indian migrants in the next. These transitions do not blur or dissemble the divisions of the city so much as add a temporal fracturing to the geographical tectonics. One identifies with being “from” somewhere, “when it was…”

This is nowhere more apparent than in Marshall Berman’s account of the devastation of the Bronx in the last century. His description of that borough’s “blasting to pieces” for being an inadvertent obstacle in the path of progress and modernity, under the supervision of New York City’s greatest developer Robert Moses, reads like an elegy to paradise lost. The Bronx had in the first half of the century become a neighbourhood for European Jews of modest means or moderate wealth. Berman retells sundering of the Grand Concourse, the Bronx’s most famous element, “the borough’s closest thing to a Parisian boulevard”, as Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway came through. Thirty years later, the Bronx was a place glimpsed over brick walls as commuters hurtled down the Expressway, “dozens of blocks covered with nothing at all but shattered bricks and waste.”

But there is a curious ambivalence in the mourning of both Berman and Leuchtenburg, which is perhaps best identified by Berman specifically in regard to Moses, but certainly applicable to Leuchtenburg’s Queens. Berman explains that “Moses struck a chord that for more than a century has been vital to the sensibility of New Yorkers: our identification with progress, with renewal and reform, with the perpetual transformation of our world and ourselves.” Both authors, as New Yorkers, are familiar with, and even (in an agonised way) proud of the generational reinvention and remaking of their city. They feel that the unrecognisability of their childhood neighbourhoods is a blow softened because they understand their identity with those places in temporal frames. Marshall Berman may decry his personal “Moloch whose buildings are judgment!” but he finally grants Moses an “undeniable tragic grandeur”.

Why dwell so long on the things that divide New Yorkers, rather than what unites them? Because, in another light, these divisions can be seen to deliver New York City its unity. The web of cracks cast over the metropolis is, equally, a network of nucleic bonds. If the gaps between were wider and less numerous, the city would, like an unstable atom, be too weak to hold together. Cities like Sarajevo for example, divided by a few wide gulfs, suffer this instability. But because New Yorkers recognise the multiplicity of their identities, they are able to forge bonds with other citizens sharing some part of their experience. The effect is hardly utopian; parochialism, lingering resentment and failures of understanding push citizens apart as well. But only rarely to the point of volatility. It also gives the metropolis its individualist ethic—you will always find someone sharing some of your experience, but much less often all of it.

Where the shared experiences are widespread, the city becomes notably protective of them. Because they are often shared at a low level of consciousness, when they are brought to the surface they simultaneously increase feelings of empathy and increase tensions over specific interpretations. Ellis Island, once known as the “Gateway to America” for being the location where ships carrying migrants across the Atlantic unloaded their human cargo for bureaucratic processing, was in the 1980s transformed into a museum of immigration history. The restoration was for the “Liberty Weekend”, celebrating the centenary of the Statue of Liberty, and the museum opened to enormous publicity. Former immigrants, their descendants, and tourists flock to the island. The intimidating experience of waiting to have one’s application for entry into the New World assessed was recreated in the restored, echoing building. “Here,” writes Mike Wallace, “undaunted by the renovations, armies of ghosts throng and jostle. The place is charged with massed significance.” He reviews the museum and challenges a number of its implicit simplifications, but remains awed by its force, and the effect on its patrons. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is less enamoured of it. Ellis Island has a sad history and a sad ambience; people had to confront terrible fears there, and those whose fears were realised were devastated, some to the point of self-annihilation. She asks, “Can the perfection of the restoration mitigate the imperfections of history?” The overweening patriotism of the museum displays obscures the true significance of the migrant experience in New York and wider America, which is joyous and solemn at once.

These tensions over interpretation are not easily overcome, but they are hardly a menace to unity. Rather, they are positive; they represent the trade in experience, the perpetual exposing of the forgotten or marginalised that, in multiplying and solidifying identities, permits New York City. Unified and manifold, they are what keep it from becoming too probable to be real.

Bibliography

Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Davis, John F. "The Changing Face and Role of America's Primate City." In New York: City as Text, edited by Christopher Mulvey and John Simons. Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1990.

Della Femina, Jerry. "Being from Brooklyn." In Brooklyn: A State of Mind, edited by Michael Robbins and Wendy Palitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Jackson, Kenneth T., and David S. Dunbar. "Preface." In Empire City: New York through the Centuries, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Leuchtenburg, William. American Places: Encounters with History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Mulvey, Christopher, and John Simons. "Citytext: A Theoretical Introduction." In New York: City as Text, edited by Christopher Mulvey and John Simons. Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1990.

Wallace, Mike. Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.