I now live on Riverside Drive and 135th Street, high up, sight flying straight from my study window out over the Hudson River with hardly any mediation. Riverside is elevated here, on a viaduct connecting two hilltops, the West Side Highway angling out from under, Amtrak down there, too, with its woofing warble that I like to hear. A bit of industrial waterfront is visible and the river. Across are the Palisades, heroic geology, and, from the plateau behind them, planes rise and descend at Teterboro Airport. Apartment buildings set on top of the Palisades appear to be the same height as the cliffs and, in that, make nonsense of them. Upstream the George Washington Bridge plows into the Palisades from Manhattan, a bit below their top. Cars and trucks stream, or sometimes crawl, across the bridge, adding to the overall sense that I live in an environment of motion.
By the time I moved here, the struggle between seeing the city as I had known it and seeing it as what it was becoming was long behind me. As for the internet, I could go in and out of collapsed global space without blinking. I had come to understand intellectually, and a little less well emotionally, that the city I had known was a creation of the industrial age, and that that era had passed, leaving behind an intact fossil now occupied by a different time, the time of that collapsed global space—an era as yet without a satisfactory name, still incompletely unfolded and certainly far from maturity. It is an age that does not yet know itself, nor does the city know itself either anymore. I had gone from glimpsing the disappearance of the former world to looking for clues to the character of the emergent one, even while treasuring moments in which a human presence of time past fills the city as a wind fills a sail, then drops off—just a gust. These moments are precious, not only because of their sweetness but because they remind us of what living in a fully developed society, in its prime, can be.
The older city was punctuated by wells of stillness, of which homes themselves were the most common, but which were to be found in more public places also: a library, a church, a less visited part of a large museum, and sometimes even a busy corner. These spots, I find, still exist. You are hurrying in crowds and then there you are in a shaft of quiet from which you look out all around you in perfect calm. One spot where I find such a shaft is at the northwest corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, just a bit above the intersection. The southwest corner of the sidewalk at Fifty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, far busier, has, all my life, reliably contained such a well of stillness, despite the intensity of both car and people traffic. But the wells can appear temporarily almost anywhere. Without them, the ferocious energy of the city would become brutal. They provide outdoor counterpoints to a cyclonic energy, and in that are essential to livable existence in it. Especially in Manhattan, the simultaneous compacting and diffusing of energy would have no stability at all were it not pegged with multiple refuges of quiet.
But homes, in their normalcy and quotidian privacy, have long been the most permanent still points for New Yorkers, and the most necessary. For myself, until I moved to Riverside Drive, I had chosen homes that had an inward-turning, nested quality, physically positing stillness to the energy outside. They had a feeling of being way inside the city. That is not to say that a view is necessarily antithetical to the stillness of home. I lived for a long time with a view from lower Fifth Avenue across Greenwich Village, but that was in itself a stabilizing vista. The view from this new home on Riverside Drive is not. The building is old. Major elements in the view are old: the Drive, the river, the ancient Palisades. But overall the view with its enclosing motion thrusts me into the destabilized reality of collapsed global space, which had, in any event, whether I liked it or not, already invaded my home, in the form of the screen most obviously. Home itself, in other words, had already changed whatever its address. Still, even though I had been attracted to the apartment because of the out-flinging view, it gave me agoraphobia for a while.
As for this matter of New York having been an “industrial” city—that is to say, the creation of a manufacturing economy—one has to qualify that by saying that, over time, it became a center less of factories themselves than of corporate headquarters: of management. In this, it was the national apogee. It’s not really natural for me to call New York an industrial city. Of course I have always known that it was that in an academic way, but to me, personally, it has been “New York,” as distinct from any other city for most of my life. The economic interpretation of the man-made world is illuminating, but, to my way of seeing, it’s also much too specialized and reductive to truly capture the layered complexity of a particular city like New York. Furthermore, one of the most blinding fallacies of our age is to see everything in terms of money. It is true that how money is made and how that has changed is a story that bridges the gap that has opened up between place as we have known it and what it is becoming. It’s also true that in order to understand that gap as I experienced it in New York, I had to see the physical artifact as that of an “industrial city.” When change of the kind we have been going through detaches so much of the physical world from the energy out of which it was created, so that it becomes a kind of fossil, the story of how money was made and how that has changed can show us how we got from there to here in a way no other story can. But I also distinguish between money, a sophisticated invention, and work, which is elemental, a part of both our nature—most of us want to be productive—and our condition: we have to work to live, whether money is in play or not. Work is embedded in our very existence in the sense of survival but also in our identity and desire for fulfillment as human beings, whereas money is our own creation. So even as I use the term “industrial city,” and note how the way wealth was produced shaped the city, and do this because landscape itself taught me to do so, I also resist the tendency of an economic way of thinking to exclude so much else about life.
We can’t really know what the city is today, much less what it is becoming. All we know for sure is that the metamorphosis has to do with work, and that electronic tools have a lot to do with how work has changed. For me, one of the most pervasive effects of those tools is a demotion of the physical world. It’s this, above all, that has drained meaning from cities, as from all landscapes, often leaving the old, complex, expressive physical creation intact, but without its animating spirit. At the heart of my struggle with how to know cities under these new conditions is my belief that the genius of all landscapes lies in how, in addition to expressing a way of work, they serve as a substructure of our common interior life. To me, this symbiosis between physical and immaterial realms gets close to what civilization is. One of the most confusing aspects of this moment, in which the material world seems to have become altogether less important—people walking down the street on cell phones, the disappearance of the desk, the person in bed next to you vanished into the screen—is that we are left without the old fertile relationship between our interior and exterior realms. Carrying around with us, as we do, these tools that vastly extend our minds, we seem to have somehow floated free of the physical landscape, impossible as that seems. Where to get a footing, then?
Another result of the ascendance of the immaterial realm is that forms in the material one become fungible. In the industrial age, cities, however particular, whatever their previous histories, were generic, were The City. But as these fossils of an old way of work reinvent themselves in this new era—or fail to—the results are so various, their improvised characters so happenstantial that the question arises as to whether the city as long-evolving archetype, changing with the eras, is actually disappearing. Are our separately struggling old cities simply in metamorphosis, are they just overwriting themselves as landscape always does, puzzling us because we don’t know how to read them in their new form, or are their various efforts at renewal like campsites among ruins? Sociologist Saskia Sassen has seen in New York, Tokyo, and London a new role for the city as command centers of the global economy, bringing an extreme centralization necessary to balance the extreme decentralization of work in an era in which locality is unimportant. She sees other candidates in play, such as Sydney and Frankfurt, but this is a role that only a few cities can assume. Are all the others then still kin as they once were in times past? Whatever New York, in its burgeoning prosperity, is becoming, we can say with some confidence that, with its deranging alloys of solidity and mirage, inheritance and disinheritance, continuity and severance, remembrance and oblivion, it is an epicenter of questions about the nature of the city in our new era.
There is an additional challenge to efforts to read all parts of our new landscape. Given that mind-work can slip quietly into the fossil of the old one, and given that the old one into which it slips is so well known to us as the expression of a fully evolved era, is so reverberative on multiple levels that our fluency in it will always override the stumbling discomfort of grappling with a new place-language, it’s no wonder, given the power of the established archetype, and the deep imprint it has left on our imaginations, that most of the time we can happily overlook the fact that the world has changed at all. How, under these circumstances, are we to recognize an emerging world as such, much less learn how to read it with anything remotely approaching our understanding of the old one?
Though for me work is more elementally human than the abstractions of economic thinking, there is a strictly economic aspect of work in our present transformation that cannot be avoided, and which I have already referenced several times. It has to do with a kind of hierarchy of work. It has to do with what kind of work produces the most wealth in the wealthiest, most developed countries. In watching our transformation move forward in the city of New York, I cannot get away from the fact that when the first work of the world changes, just about everything else does, too, pulling the world as we have known it out from under like a rug. Other kinds of work—agrarian, industrial—go on, of necessity. But the first work of the prevailing economic powers is the dominant force that affects the meaning of all places and landscapes within its domain, whether they are directly the result of that work or not. Because, this time, the first work takes place in a worldwide arena, this time the change in place-meaning is worldwide, too. Because of the way our new electronic tools penetrate daily life, this transformation is not only panoramic but intimately infiltrative: inescapable. No place is excluded from this effect. New York, however, having become a kind of “command center” of the worldwide economy, has become a good spokes-landscape for our time.
One of the especially confusing aspects of the reign of this new world-shaping work, however, is that, though we know what the tools are, we can’t say exactly what, of the many kinds of work that can be done with them, is the one that is recrafting the meaning of place. What work, exactly, is the hand of landscape design today? We are uncertain about the answer partly because the kind of work electronic tools can do is so different from any we have hitherto known. Specialists make guesses: the first work is “services”; the first work is inventing computer programs; the first work is managing the global economy with those computer programs. Of course, you must use money to measure which it might be, but it’s important to try to think of these activities also as work in that sense of an age-old productive activity, rather than as defined by money. It is especially important for us to look at work as separate from money because it appears possible that money itself might be the actual field of our new first work—the creation of financial “instruments” and “devices” as made possible by our tools of extended mind, for example. If money itself is the real field of our new work, then we had better have a footing outside money from which to consider its actual use to us: its real productivity, its value, not to mention the way it shapes society and structures our common interior life.
One of the best views of Manhattan is from the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, directly across the East River from Wall Street. One steps from the intimacy of old streets into a wide expanse of water and sky—the Statue of Liberty to the left, the Brooklyn Bridge to the right. This alone would be dramatic. But straight across, too close for comfort, the towers of Wall Street shoulder one another, ruthless and joyous, singing their “We win” aria. In my Brooklyn years I often walked there, but never failed to be shocked by the sight of Wall Street. The Promenade was, in itself, serene, but that serenity was no match for the blast from across the river. The intensity thrilled me, but it also brushed me with fear. Most of the coastline around the harbor is low-lying, though it is all urban artifact, spiky and boxy in silhouette, as opposed to the smooth lines of land; and in this you sense the extent of the industrial city, how it is in itself a terrain that envelops even the large harbor easily in its arms. In the shouldering towers you see vortical centralization, the primary spatial tension in the industrial city as a physical form.
When I was a very young woman, just coming to New York on my own, I worked for a spell on Wall Street, a touchstone experience of the city. This was in 1964. The job was in a top law firm: I was a page, which meant I carried mail and other documents around to the lawyers, and that was interesting, because of the Rembrandt-worldly faces, especially of the partners, full of irony and cleverness but also thought. Lawyering back then still had about it a certain grandeur, albeit tinged with Machiavellian sophistication. I remember wryness and ferocious intelligence leavened with humor. Sometimes I would proofread a document aloud with a lawyer, and that was interesting, because it was, usually, a contract for one the firm’s big clients, household names—AT&T, Morgan, Westinghouse—a glimpse into the vast intricate word works behind entities so established in American life that they were a kind of terrain in themselves, kin to the Mississippi and the Rockies.
But the experience I took away as a touchstone was the atmosphere on Wall Street at noon. The public space—cow paths turned into canyoned streets by the crowding soaring towers—was intense and pressurized in a way I had never known in a place. The rush of crowds themselves, the mood generated by uncountable urgent enterprises in constant near collision, imprinted themselves on me. I had no friends there at first, so I would go out for lunch alone, a naïve little being, exposed without protection to the swirl. I think, looking back, that it was largely the low-level employees who were rushing—with messages, on errands, with lunch. Among them strode figures in suits with an air of princely leisure. Yet even that conspicuous privileged nonchalance somehow conveyed intensity. The rule of devil-take-the-hindmost was implicit. Wall Street at noon was deadly serious yet cumulatively lighthearted, too, like a high-flying circus. Everybody, from rabble to raja, was driven by purpose. The towers and canyons expressed and reinforced this intensity perfectly, but the source of the crazy energy of the place was the crouching classical Stock Exchange, sooty and ancient looking. If, in 1964, there was one place in the nation in which the energy of the mature industrial age produced its most perfect froth, that would be Wall Street on a weekday at noon.
Though in four years I would be on the ramparts protesting the corporate establishment, I liked the heady swirl. It wasn’t that I had an attraction to the world of speculation, or even law, and certainly not the corporate life of the gray flannel suit. I think it would be safe to say that in me such aspirations were zero. My ambition was to be a poet and, as for money, I had given pitifully little thought to it. What I liked was how people seemed to be entirely themselves—too busy to pretend differently—as well as the feeling of unbounded pursuit combined with instinct, yet all shaped by the extraordinary form of the place. I liked the worldliness, I liked the human spectrum displayed, I liked the gutsiness, I liked the silliness, and I liked the head-spinning crisscrossing of intent that somehow seemed to all come together into a single engine. Wall Street then was a caste-stratified society, in which women especially were relegated to a lower order, but maybe because I had no Wall Street ambitions this didn’t bother me. I was too busy taking in information about the world—about form, and feeling, and layers of feeling and the possibilities of being. The boisterous spirits of the lunchtime crowds that surged through the labyrinth seemed to set the towers topsy-turvy. When I think back to my first exposure to that voltage, the feeling that comes to me is of an ongoing earthquake of dizzying emancipation—a kind of cracking open, a sense of leaping possibility, a heart-seized, arrow-struck feeling of you can do anything. It was an invitation, of a particularly American flavor, I think. It turbo-charged the appetite for taking chances, for living—for poetry, even.
At the time, I interpreted the scene as entire in itself, but of course it was not. Behind the Wall Street of that time lay the Midwest, booming, belching, blasting. That is perhaps the most important factor that distinguishes Wall Street then from Wall Street now: that there was physical making behind it, and that it was secondary to that—drew energy from it. But there was something else, equally important to the timbre of the swirl and the invitation it seemed to issue. That was the array of countervailing forces that checked the raw energies of industrial society. Most important of these was the federal government that sought to tame the energies in ways consistent with civilized society. One can see the government as it was then as a grand contrapuntal invention, taking its shape in part from the very force it sought to regulate yet at the same time bringing intention—values other than sheer moneymaking—to the blast.
Nor was that all. While government to date remains the only power that can subordinate the primitive vitality of the market, in a mature society rings upon rings of other countervailing enterprises—all sorts of shapers and shelterers—exert their force to stabilize, balance, push back, distill, temper, and corral the primal energy in favor of purposes outside its scope. Many of these addressed government itself with critiques. Academia would be one. A lively, independent intelligentsia would be another. Newspaper journalism, which started in the late eighteenth century as harebrained sensationalism, over time had developed into a tradition proud of high standards of factual accuracy and of the role of counterforce to both government and business. A very large philanthropic establishment, a world of “nonprofits,” was explicitly committed to values unrecognized by the market. A cultural establishment—the museums, the symphonies, in many cases themselves represented by monumental architecture, edifices that were the equal of government buildings—also saw itself explicitly as a realm that required protection from the barbarity of the market. The cultural establishment, in turn, had its own rings upon rings of counterresponses, of antiestablishment establishments, with their sovereigns and ragamuffins, their courtiers and hecklers, and around these were studios, back rooms, black-box theaters, cafés, bars where all sorts of experiments and explorations—what once was known as the avant-garde, because of the way it could upset establishment assumptions—flourished and failed but never doubted the importance of its mission. Supporting this, in turn, was an extensive artistic bohemia, an informal society of people who lived on little to pursue their art, and this collectively reinforced that choice, even elevated it. There was a sense back then that if a work of art sold well that suggested the artist had in some way “sold out.”
But, even outside the arts, the structures of feeling that underlay our culture at the time did not derive from the values of the market. The enterprises that attracted the talented risk takers, in fact, were not those on Wall Street, but, rather those in the encircling rings of countervailing purpose. Indeed, in the culture of the educated young, to go to work at a corporate headquarters on Wall Street was a form of settling for the more ordinary thing—a better-paid version of the assembly line. The rings of countervailing purpose, meanwhile, far from the fragile will-o’-the-wisp it was later revealed to be, was in itself an establishment representing the full spectrum of the human spirit and as much a part of the landscape as the law firms and corporations, as inextricable from it as its very buildings. There is hardly a realm of life in which counterresponse was not manifested. Go back there and take up any perspective, professional or personal, and swing your telescope around: there is no end to it, fields upon fields, establishments and counterestablishment and counter-counterresponders, unfolding along an extended spectrum from the orthodox to the revolutionary, consciously counteractive and impulsive, systematic and improvisatory, institutional and ad hoc, conservative and rebellious, producing standards and their opposing standards, arguments and counterarguments, made by idealists and realists, crusaders and high priests, Good Samaritans, Quixotes, tsars, Rasputins, Goliaths and Davids, Philistines and Israelites: nations upon nations.
But much of this still exists, you might say, and there is certainly a sense in which that is true. Yet much of the countervailing world, if you look closely, has changed. The values of the market now infiltrate the most established cultural institutions. This is hard to pin down yet pervasive. Academia is one of our most formally designated cloisters, in the past vigilantly protected from market values, but less so today. University boards used to be made up of well-to-do alumni who saw their role as preserving those protective traditions from which they had benefited. Now boards act more like venture capitalists, of whom they are often composed, who understand success only in terms of growth, launching aggressive physical-expansion programs. As for the students in those universities, “business” is now the top career choice for so many of the best and the brightest of the young. On the side of social justice, a wide domain, once powerfully attractive to youth, the path is almost nonexistent today. How could it be otherwise when, for some time, the prevailing wisdom has characterized poor people as responsible for their condition? Therefore helping them is probably counterproductive, engendering dependency and keeping them from developing the competitive qualities they need to succeed. The assumption that the business sector offers the most interesting path in life is so pervasive that kids are confused if they find it unengaging: they must have some failing.
This mind-set penetrates fields that one might think were so far off the market chart as to be immune. You might choose to be an artist, for example, but for the choice to be valid in our current culture you must frame a “career”—that is to say, a path to market success. Indeed, your career likely determines the character of what you create—to do otherwise would be to choose insignificance. The idea that if an artist’s work sold well he or she had sold out was pretentious; much of the old antimarket culture was flawed by vanity, arrogance, and snobbishness. We don’t want that back. But the infiltration of all standards, all cloisters, and all countervailing establishments by market values ultimately compromises a society in substantive ways. Today even an idealistic kid assumes that if an artwork doesn’t sell for a high price that probably means it’s not good. How could he think differently, when the entire art world has become so entirely engulfed by the concept of art as investment? To be avant-garde now is to desperately experiment, not in order to upset bourgeois society or to critique the government, or even to shock the establishment critics, but in order to ride the next wave of market investment by plutocrats. It almost seems that a part of the art itself has become timing; the art of hitting that wave in just the right way and at just the right moment for market success. There is a playfulness in this that I like, quite different from the old superserious pursuit of greatness. But the totality of the market orientation is not fun. Meanwhile, it’s the common sense of the time that a museum should set policy according to popularity—the blockbuster shows. And gift shops have expanded to the point of being major attractions. For a museum to do otherwise would make it a kind of “loser.” Somewhere here a line has been crossed, putting us into a self-destructive mode. If you believe art is important, something to wake people up and alert them to possibilities beyond the obvious, this is, for all the fun, a crippling, self-truncating societal direction.
You can’t escape this shift in values. Like other aspects of change in our time it wheedles its way into the soul. Even I, for example, though committed to challenging it, am overtaken by it often. The Carnegie Studios, on Fifty-Seventh Street in midtown Manhattan, is a city landmark, attached to Carnegie Hall, its commodious apartments long set aside by the Carnegie Hall Corporation for working artists. A few years ago the foundation, financially pressed, as most cultural institutions are, and with an aggressive market-values board, decided that it had to evict the artists and turn the tower into corporate offices. A documentary, Lost Bohemia, was made of this process, from a point of view partisan to the artists, but it was a good documentary, so it also revealed that many tower denizens were more eccentric than productive, some studios jammed with the results of pack-ratting lifetimes. Well, really, how can one blame the Corporation, I found myself thinking—the thought behind being that if the residents had been artistic geniuses then maybe the support would have been justified. Just think what that real estate is worth! Fifty-Seventh Street! Get real! Then a shudder at this shift in what had been my instinctive pattern of thought. The protection of a realm had become invalid to me because the individuals who were benefiting weren’t “successful” (didn’t make a lot of money or have fame). Since when did I measure the worthiness of a pursuit by particular performances, let alone financial success? In fact many stupendously successful artists had lived there at one time—Isadora Duncan, Marlon Brando, Leonard Bernstein, for example—but that was hardly the point: my reaction had been to the holdouts who on the whole were not well known, but there were exceptions: Bill Cunningham, for example, a fashion photographer for The New York Times who took fabulous photos of everyday people in their getups on the streets of New York for which he was celebrated. The worst of it was that most of the artists were old, and therefore in some cases not in their most productive years. Others were still going strong, which is what many artists do whatever their age. The residents of the Carnegie tower were, in fact, a small, lingering bohemia that I was just brushing away.
The reflexiveness of my “common sense” shocked me, violating some of my most deeply held beliefs about the artistic life, but the real lesson of the documentary was how hard it is to represent a bohemia of any kind as valid today. I have noticed, for example, that when the bohemias of former times show up in the movies now, or on TV, the people in them are almost always presented as drug-addicted impostors, weak individuals who, rather than doing something worthwhile, are avoiding the challenges of life. Their real agendas are nastily self-serving, usually having to do with bilking the productive people. That actual work went on in such realms, work of importance to which practitioners were justifiably committed, is no part of the plotlines on this subject that I have seen. I wonder if it would be possible today to represent any bohemian world, let alone a contemporary one, as convincingly admirable in a movie for mass consumption.
The world in which many countervailing rings surrounded Wall Street was far from perfect. Certainly the invitation was out of range of hearing for many. Harlem was about to explode right here in New York, as were inner cities all over the United States. Washington, fully fledged in its liberalism, was busy miring us in Vietnam. And yet today there is something missing that is so large that it can hardly be identified, like a vanished horizon that used to orient us all. It’s the container in which those tragedies found their meaning. What is the tragedy of the Harlem riots without the theater of the industrial city within which they took place and as they affected it? The pressure that Vietnam put on us is hard to recall without the experience of a boundaried nationhood that went without question in industrial times. Can one even begin to make the argument that there is such a thing as an “establishment”—public, of long standing, respected, but also, on those grounds challengeable—now? A good part of the shock is how worlds vanish, even as they leave forms behind intact: traditions, architecture, institutional names—like part of an abandoned stage set. You can’t get back in there, not really. You can’t reanimate it. There is no play. The audience, the actors are long gone.