By the late 1950s, cool could even claim its own turf; the denizens of Greenwich Village rose up to preserve Washington Square from the bulldozers of the master city planner Robert Moses, who tried to ram a highway through the middle of the park. This victory marked the first successful neighborhood revolt against urban renewal, and in the course of the battle, the first alternative newspaper, The Village Voice, emerged into its own. Cool signaled it would not be overrun by “progress,” the mainstream ideology. By the late fifties cool was capable of holding its own.
During the few years that separate Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, between the heydays of Woody Guthrie and of Bob Dylan, cool spread quickly from the edge to the cultural mainstream. By the 1960s, as Thomas Franks writes in The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, cool had become a commodity—something money could buy. By the mid-1990s, there were, like, cool malls. Allen Ginsberg and Miles Davis appeared in Gap advertisements. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road speech celebrating “the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,” had become a Volvo advertisement.
In his 1995 book I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier, Fred Moody writes that, on the Microsoft campus, “cool” could mean any one, or combination, of the following, depending upon context and tone of voice: “perfect, phenomenal, awesome, ingenious, eye-popping, bliss-inducing, pretty clever, enchanting, fine or adequate, acceptable, okay.” That same year, I heard my three-year-old daughter say “cool” when she saw an ad for Scooby-Doo reruns on the Cartoon Network. Today, cool is everywhere. This book illustrates the theory and practice of cool—and shows how we got to where we are.
Other cities may lay claim to being the birthplace of the cool. In late ’40s and ’50s, San Francisco was the center of American poetic style, and the tiny night-spot Jimbo’s Bop City in the Fillmore was one of cool’s cradles. In the 1950s, years before Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and the rest of the “Nouvelle Vague,” Paris gave birth to filmed cool when director Jean-Pierre Melville dropped Bob le Flambeur, a film about a Parisian con man who drives only the coolest American muscle cars and wears Ted Lapidus suits inspired by American gangster cool. But cool as we know it was made in New York.
New York has always been the home of the American avant-garde. In 1775, as Martin Shefter writes in Capital of the American Century: The National and International Influence of New York City, New York agreed to host the General Magazine of Arms and Military Stores for all of British North America. In exchange for agreeing to stockpile munitions that could be used against the anti-British mobs of Boston and Philadelphia, the London Board of Trade made New York the western terminus for the first regular transatlantic postal route. As a result, Shefter argues, New York’s newspapers were the first to get the political, economic, and cultural news from abroad. Ever since, the United States has seen the world through New York City’s eyes.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, every major U.S. newspaper chain owned a New York daily. The wire services—the Associated Press (founded in the offices of the New York Sun in 1848) and the United Press (founded 1907)—were New York–based. By 1880, most large book and sheet-music publishers had moved to New York from Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. Sheet-music publishing evolved into the recording industry, which also came to be based in New York. The mass circulation–magazine business has been based in New York since the 1890s.
The modern advertising industry came into existence in the 1920s in New York, to service the mass magazines. Then, in the ’30s, advertising helped create the radio networks, which in the ’40s evolved into the four national television skeins: ABC, CBS, NBC, and DuMont, all of them live from New York. Until the coast-to-coast coaxial cable was completed in the early ’50s, all network-television programming in the U.S. originated in New York. In 1945, there were 6,000 television sets in America. By 1951, there were ten million, all receiving their entertainment from New York.
In 1945, Europe was exhausted, and its intellectual and financial capital fled to New York. The “liberty ships” bringing home our troops steamed through the Narrows into what had become the world’s largest port. By war’s end, the United States, with just 6 percent of the world’s population, boasted two-thirds of the world’s economic capacity. The United Nations secretariat going up on Rockefeller-donated land along the East River only confirmed what everybody already knew: Washington may have been the capital of the world’s richest nation, but New York was the capital of the world.
Growing up in a series of minty-fresh suburbs following the bulldozers north from Dallas, Texas, I knew only a few people besides myself who had any desire to bail out. My friends who were smart rednecks knew that they were pointed toward the greedy energy of Los Angeles. But Judy Marcus and Eloise LaGrone and I always knew—I felt as if we knew it in our genes—that our destinies were tangled up with New York’s.
At that time in Texas, one could still get a driver’s license at age fourteen and a half, and I did. On one of the first occasions that I borrowed the car, I drove it downtown, just so that I could stand at the only corner in Big D—probably the only such corner within five hundred miles—where the buildings were tall enough to form a canyon, and imagine how cool it would be to be in New York. It would not be saying too much to say that this book is the product of that dreaming.