The skyline is more or less the same, but the mean streets are no longer mean. They’re just irritable. And a bit dull. But you’ve still gotta love the Big Apple.
Previously I wrote about the singular fascination of islands and the odd micro-cultures they cultivate. I made a list of the sea-surrounded specks that I particularly liked, but I had the nagging sense I’d missed somewhere, that one of my islands had gone missing. And then, as is the nature of these things, it crashed into me in the middle of the night. Of course. The most cussedly singular of all the self-defining islands is Manhattan. Barely an island at all, cut off by only a mere moat, spanned by great girder bridges, just semi-detached enough for an odd individuality, New York, New York. The only other city apart from Edinburgh and London that I’ve ever lived in.
For one amazingly happy and self-destructive year, it was my city and I was its citizen. Manhattan is the 19th-century model of how all cities were supposed to look. It was a robber baron’s vision of the future. But nothing dates as fast as predictions and futurology. They fix a look that is forever the moment they were conceived in. By the time I got to live there in the ’70s, New York had developed the famous look of a stalled archaic thudding grandeur. The emphatic gestures of the skyline were contradicted by the angry filth of the streets. New York was acned with graffiti and rubbish, the roads were potholed and riven with seeping oil and infernal steam. New York was murky. The mafia ran utilities, City Hall was partisan and biddable and the police were notoriously open-handed. It was the time of the great corruption, when Nixon was being dragged, inch by inch, down the long road to impeachment. The stink and guilt and loss of Vietnam hung in the air and, most devastating and depressing of all, disco was at its most noisomely idiotic. The city had gone from being a vision of the future to being a dire dystopian warning. Delegations from European cities gingerly came to see what lay ahead for them – and if they could avoid it.
New York was the urban jungle, a cautionary tale, and New Yorkers rather revelled in their Grimm retelling of it. They talked endlessly and viciously about murder, the more random and salacious the better. Old ladies pushed under subway trains for kicks, joggers gang-raped and brain-damaged in Central Park, junkies found rotting in the basements of Fifth Avenue apartments. New York invented mugging. The word became a constant refrain, the morning complaint like the weather in London or the traffic in Tokyo. Mugging was New York’s weather, New York’s traffic. So we all learned to carry nothing, no watch, no ostentatious coat or briefcase, no smart handbag, definitely no jewellery. Everyone walked in the same slumped, determined, aggressive, un-eyecatching way. We all looked the same, millionaires and muggers, students, panhandlers and plutocrats. The midtown socialite and her maid were indistinguishable. New York the über-capitalist city became New York the communist one.
It invented the apocryphal story. New York was a great omnibus of things that had happened to a friend of a cousin of a brother-in-law of a girl at work. The rumours were the morbid pleasure of decay. The favourite was the one about the city worker who bumps into a tough-looking Puerto Rican in the street. Immediately, as all New Yorkers do, he checks for his wallet. It’s gone. This one time he’s reached the end of his tether, so he turns and, throwing caution to the wind, confronts the thief. Give me the wallet, he shouts. The mugger, shocked at being finally confronted, hands it over. The businessman gets home, and there’s his wallet on the bedside table.
The defining film of the moment was Death Wish. At night I walked a dog in the park where Charles Bronson meted out summary justice to street thugs. In fact, the park was mostly populated by ancient middle-European men playing floodlit chess. I worked as a janitor’s assistant in a Harlem school. My boss was a big Jamaican who carried a revolver in his overalls. I was never frightened in Harlem or on the subway I took there, but I did like the sense of tension, the watchfulness, the worldliness of the naked streets where wits were what you needed. I was in my twenties. I looked like a young punk. I didn’t know any better.
Last week I read a short paragraph in the paper: the citizens of Harlem are signing a petition to stop Columbia University from expanding. In the ’70s, Columbia was an island of middle-class aspiration and white liberal hope in the black and Puerto Rican underprivileged sprawl of crime and violence. Harlem was the wicked wood where all the bad people waited before creeping through Central Park to rape and pillage Jews. Harlem was a worldwide byword for robbery, squalor and racial discrimination. Columbia, on the other hand, was secure. Well, apparently we were misinformed. Columbia is now the problem, and Harlem should be protected as a site of cultural and historical significance. The university is an interloper, a conglomerate whose expansion will spoil the atmosphere of the neighbourhood. And that is the final, irrefutable proof that New York, the New York I lived in, no longer exists.
The skyline is more or less the same, but the mean streets are no longer mean. They’re just irritable. New Yorkers got what they fervently prayed for: law, order and garbage collection. They got a property boom and a safe island. In terms of murder and robbery, Manhattan is now one of the safest places in the West to live. It’s also one of the dullest. More concerned with aspiration and appearances than life, the city that never slept now doesn’t go out much past 9.30pm as it has to get into the office by 6am. It runs on the spot to CNN, not dances in the dark to Madonna. It just shows you should be careful what you ask for.
I still love the city, though. I go back regularly, walk the old streets. And like all places you return to, it’s a mixture of here-and-now and then-and-there. There’s a particular bright sunlight you only get in New York, and the buildings look particularly fine and defined against it, as if they’re super-hyper-real. It always makes me happy, because it reminds me of being happy.
Manhattan is now a rich middle-class island with bankers’ concerns and shopkeepers’ worries. It has succeeded in buying off the murderers and muggers, and with them the artists and writers, the social parasites, the lounge lizards, the remittance men and the unforgiving women, the amusing failures and all those who came to the city from all over America and the world to claim social, artistic and sensual asylum from the broad bigotry of small towns and wide suburbs. They’ve all gone now, and they’ve taken the thing that the real-estate sellers, the arbitrage traders and the hedge-fund topiarists all wanted to find here in the first place. New York has once again become a prophecy of the future, a different cautionary tale about the consequences of fear: judicious tedium.