In between Brooklyn and Riverside Drive, I spent three years in Washington and then returned to New York. This was in 2002. I thought it important that my partner, Noel, who had never lived in the city, experience Manhattan first. In that I betray my age, and a lot more, but Manhattan for me was the first city footing. We rented a place on the Upper West Side, very near where I had started out in the city. I remember looking out the window at a man crossing West End Avenue in the middle of the block in a motorized wheelchair while talking on a cell phone, glancing in both directions for oncoming traffic. I felt relief and affection. You wouldn’t see that in Washington. Most people in the building paid low, stabilized rents. Some people in the building had been born there. We paid a high but manageable market-rate rent that went up a hundred dollars with each new lease, as had been my experience in New York. In a few years movie stars started moving into the neighborhood. Soon the forest fire of the roots that is nothing like past neighborhood change but the metamorphosis of a city into something else started burning our feet with a sudden 20 percent rent increase. Angry, panicked, we were propelled into buying—how else were we to feel secure? With prices going up and apartments selling on the day they were listed, we felt lucky to find a landing here on Riverside Drive. At the same time we had to be aware that, to many in the new building, we ourselves were the very forest fire we were fleeing. I had lived in a dangerous New York but never one so nakedly Darwinian. After that I never had the slightest illusion that I was living in the city as I had known it.
Though our new building was even older than the one we had left; though Riverside Drive, with its balustrades and broad sidewalks, separated in places from the street by gardens, expressed the aesthetic confidence of another era; and though we lived in the midst of a dense, stable immigrant community, the new location felt from the beginning like the churning ground of the new city. But by then I was ready. Indeed, the very same kind of changes I had disliked on Bergen Street, because they unraveled the meaning and continuity of place, here cheered me as reinforcing my investment.
Some years later, I was sitting at my desk early one summer morning, looking out at the river, when my niece called. She and a friend had been standing in line outside the Delacorte Theater in Central Park since four in the morning for tickets to Hair, the musical written in the 1960s about the 1960s. Plays at the Delacorte are free, but you have to stand in line: two tickets per person are given out at 11, at the earliest. If it rains at showtime, you are out of luck. It was 8 a.m.—hours to go. My niece wanted me to check the weather. I reported predictions of severe rainstorms, hail, maybe tornadoes. Planes might not be able to land: she had better go home.
As it turned out, she did not heed my auntly advice. At lunchtime she called to say she had a ticket for me. Improbably, the rain held off all day. As we approached the theater, the park was wrapped in mists, the ceiling so low as to put us nearly in a cloud. But no rain fell. As half the people in the audience had taken an improbable gamble, they were, almost by definition, young. They had also spent long hours in one another’s company, as one could feel in the air of festive congeniality and common cause. The show was infectiously fresh, sweeping up the audience with its youthful charm, and I was no exception; it pulled me back into a time that had unfolded well before most of the people in the audience had been born. Yet because they were young, and I was not, it was as if the show belonged to them and I was an invisible onlooker. It was almost as if my presence was a little voyeuristic, not quite proper. There were other grayheads there, but we were isolated from one another.
Watching Hair took me back to my time at Columbia, in particular the student revolt in the spring of ’68. Whenever I think of that protest, images of the physical campus come to mind first, as if it were not just background but a protagonist. The university sits high, the Hudson glistening through trees far below on one side and, on the other, one block from campus, dangerous, overgrown, clifflike Morningside Park descending to the Harlem plain. But this dramatic topography is subordinated to the imperial classicism of the campus, with its broad, stepped promenades and terraces, its monumental buildings. Two massively colonnaded libraries face each other across an axis, one high, called Low, one low, called Butler, both so immovably grounded as to make a person feel like a feathery bit of flotsam. This is a perfectly coordinated and balanced environment that expresses unquestioned cultural confidence without one chink of self-doubt. The edge of Morningside Park is handsomely marked by stone balustrades. Back then, one looked over the balustrades, as from the deck of an ocean liner, over the unmaintained park, down into the then semiabandoned lawless zone of a Harlem decimated by riots.
The original Columbia protest was a gathering of several hundred at a sundial between the libraries to protest university plans to build a gym in Morningside Park, on the good ground that the park was public open space, one of Harlem’s few, and in support of Harlem activists who called the project “Gym Crow.” Student unease about the war in Vietnam, and the university’s complicity, was a strong subcurrent, however. Columbia was allowing Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm for use in Vietnam, to recruit on campus and was also affiliated with the Institute for Defense Analysis, which did research on weapons for use in Vietnam: in fact the president of the university, Grayson Kirk, was on the IDA board. Kirk’s office was located in Low Library, set high above the sundial and separated from it by two magnificently wide flights of steps.
At the protest, as planned, some raggedy students with a petition to the president in hand went up the long steps to the grand entrance to Low. But as they attempted to go in it became clear the door was locked. The president and his staff, it turned out, had all gone home to avoid receiving the students. Today it astonishes me how arrogant and yet fearful, how complacently overreactive, members of the “establishment” could be back then. How easy it would have been to courteously receive the petition! The locked door was an inflammatory rebuke, news of which spread rapidly. Soon additional protesters expanded the gathering at the sundial by many factors. Activist leaders were ready with speeches, but the gathering as it grew included many students of more moderate inclination—or at least they had been until now. Eventually the much enlarged large group marched to the gym site at Morningside Park. Over the course of a week, classroom buildings and Low Library itself, including the president’s office, were “occupied” by students, shutting down classes. Eventually the authorities called in the police to breach lines of faculty, graduate students, and others that had formed around the occupied buildings in symbolic protection of the students inside—I was on one of those lines—and clear out the occupiers in a nighttime operation. This attracted huge numbers to the campus and made big news. The administration was stupid, but what strikes me looking back is what all of us who were involved in the protest at various levels took for granted: that a coherent argument could be made to a university that we assumed was ours to argue with, and that the last thing we needed to worry about was its own vulnerability. I think protesters against both the gym and Vietnam were right, but what that rather violent night brings back to me most vividly now, ironically, is how easily we took our institutions for granted back then. We saw no fragility in them.
Hair is more about the cultural liberation of the 1960s than about political activism, which is secondary in its plot. But it inevitably reminds one of the conviction so many of my generation had that ours was a time of beginning leading inevitably to a progressive future. We had no idea that we were in fact, historically speaking, positioned at an ending: no inkling we were situated on a cliff edge over which the entire culture was about to plunge, along with our visions of change. We thought we were “radical,” or some variation thereof: at the very least progressive. Decades would pass before most of us—of any age—would begin to truly grasp the radicalism of the transition that all of American society was about to go through. For decades, the assumption that we were progressing on a continuum with the past—improving, reforming, carrying forward the causes of social and economic justice—would continue to animate us, though the actual lack of implementation, and indeed the political success of the right—Richard Nixon, for example—was a confusing contradiction.
There are various interpretations of when the era we are now in began, but my choice, in retrospect, would be the early ’70s, when venture capital began to invest in manufacturing in the Third World. A major reason why this began to happen then, and not earlier, as I understand it, is that investors became confident that the World Bank would shore up shaky Third World economies, and hence their regimes, when they began to wobble. But with the emergence of electronic communications and the internet, and with them the capacity not only to manage manufacturing from afar, but to disperse it—with the parts of a single product made in several far-flung places—the exodus of industry from the developed world accelerated, the gains in low wages and taxes having become hard to resist. The outflow was swift: there were only four years between the first and the last blast furnace shutdown in Youngstown, for example. Meanwhile it wasn’t clear what was replacing industry: what the first work of the United States or, indeed, of the developed world was becoming—exactly. Meanwhile, too, a devilishly confusing contradiction from which we have not yet recovered our political equilibrium became prominent: between an ever more worldwide market and national political systems.
Not only that, but our government, like that of most modern nations, had been actually formed in response to a growing industrial society. In the case of the United States, we were building from scratch—de novo. Our culture, too, had come into being largely in response to industrial forces, with its establishment of institutions and all the concentric circles of enterprises dedicated to shaping, critiquing, civilizing the powerful and ruthless market energies created as we shook off the colonial yoke and strove to catch up with the European nations. With the disappearance of industry, therefore, our federal government was a bit like a magnificent system of dikes with the ocean gone elsewhere. Much cultural tradition was stranded in that way, too. As what had been our primary order of work began to go out from under so, also, did the authority and effectiveness of governing philosophies that had been incubated and matured in a former era. But most of us didn’t realize this. We couldn’t understand why political debate became swamped and disoriented in the 1970s and ’80s. Assuming debate would inevitably right itself, we went on with visions for the future that had also been formed in the disappearing era: for example, seeing environmental restrictions as inevitably ascendant within the old national frame; and becoming dumbfounded by evidence to the contrary, such as the landslide election of Ronald Reagan, who felt politically free to reverse much of it. The emergence of the Reagan Democrats, factory workers who had once been integral to the progressive base, now out of jobs or likely soon to lose them, was another headspinner. But many of us didn’t realize that political continuity had been disrupted in an irreversible way. We noted the emergence of personal computers, and then the way electronic communications changed our way of life in small ways—bosses now had to learn to type!—but not, for the most part, grasping how the collapsed space of the screen was undoing the very warp and weft of our society. This obliviousness was possible because, unlike the early years of the industrial era, in which physical disruption was obvious, this new era infiltrated stealthily, without changing much of our tangible surroundings. The drastic effects were blatantly visible only in the calamitous abandonment of the industrial cities of the Midwest—but that was a special journalistic subject having little to do with the rest of us, living as we did in landscapes that looked much as they always had.
But another development occurred that further blinded us, while also adding to the velocity of change. This had to do with a long-standing alternating pattern in American political life, a pendulum swing between belief in the market as a creative force that is the source of all solutions to social problems, and a belief in government as a force needed to civilize the market with values outside its range. Both philosophies have weaknesses: the market can’t regulate itself and eventually hurts itself and society with shortsighted excess, while government, undisciplined by competition, tends to get so big and inefficient it can’t do its job well. We here in America are more open to the swing toward market values than Europe, where the weight of advantage has long lain with government, and where culture tends also to be more insulated against market values. Our swing is wider, therefore, and its terms possibly longer-lasting. As is often pointed out these days, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was a response to the market excesses that led to the 1929 Crash, and it stood us well—until the 1970s, when the industrial society for which it was designed lost its industry.
What is confusing is that by the time the ’70s rolled around, all else being equal, Big Government was due for a Big Critique. It had, in fact, become oversized, complacent, and bureaucratically sclerotic in some respects. Though my heart is with the protesting students, I can see from this perspective that, if we hadn’t been in the midst of metamorphosis, a conservative challenge might have been salutary—much as progressives would have denied that at the time. But what happened instead is that the normal pendulum swing toward the market coincided with the penetrating, radical, irreversible movement into a new era. Our societies, and all the institutions developed to civilize them, including our governments, take their form from the principal ways of work at the time of their formation, from how people make their living on the planet. When, with the arrival of computing tools and digital communications, the top tier of work changed drastically, our American society, and all the institutions developed to civilize it, became untailored to the actual energies of the time. One can see it in government: in, say, the structure of bureaucracies that are much like those of the big manufacturing corporations. One can see it in welfare policy, for example, which mirrored the entitled security of working-class jobs, including stay-at-home mothers. But one can see it most easily in politics as politics tries to adjust—not that the answer is easy to provide. A great example is the way liberalism itself became discredited, not only in the normal way the right can challenge those ideals but because the society it sought to reform and refine was fast going out of existence. The very word “liberal” rather suddenly became defamatory—liberals themselves using it to castigate opponents: this happened way before Fox News took up the campaign. The right used the defamation of liberals to promote the idea that government had become too powerful. This appealed to people like the Reagan Democrats, the working class that had lost its security, but I am convinced that to this day the real fear behind the rightward swing is not that government is too big and powerful, though that is what is said, but because it is weak—has become helpless before new conditions. Less frightening to go back to the days when it was merely too big. Meanwhile, then, as now, there was not even a glimmer of a vision on the progressive side of how to respond, politically, to the new society arising out of the new order of work, nor even much of an idea of what that society was—to this day the best progressives can come up with is the New Deal. But that was a vision for another world.
Throughout all this, conservatives, already with the wind at their back in the sense that the pendulum was tending toward government critique, haven’t had to come up with a response to the radical reconfiguration of society that was going on, because of their basic premise that the market is the force that knows best. All they had to do is champion the market, and attack all efforts to control it, and that got easier and easier as the old controls, the old ideals, the once quite sophisticated Great Society of the mature New Deal became ever less attuned to actuality. As for the market itself, driven by greed, it adjusts instantly to new conditions, like water to a new topography. So the right, with its belief in the unregulated market as the force that finds solutions to problems, combined with a distrust in government, was much more convincing under these circumstances, much more at home in this new environment than the left. Lifted by the momentum of the normal swing toward market values, the elevation of the right wing was swift. Very quickly, the idea that market values could provide the best answer to all problems—poverty, how to run a university, what art is good—became not just a refreshing alternative approach, but the only approach that made sense. The effect was annihilative, of culture, but especially in the political realm, where coherent debate disappeared, with the right absolved of the burden of making sense as liberals backed off their core causes in confusion, offering, in their place, only technocratic, issue-by-issue policy recalibrations. We remain in this state to this day.
Hair was written and first produced in the late 1960s, when we were unknowingly beginning to move fast toward irreversible transition. It was a reportorial play: the phenomenon of “the sixties” was still unfolding. Sitting in that young audience at the Delacorte, looking back at the past from the vantage point of what we now know, I wondered if my generation had anything of value to hand on. It’s a question each generation asks. In a society committed to growth and inclusion, the answer is never easy. But when the very armature of a society dissolves, the question of what can be let go and what must be carried forward becomes far more difficult to tackle. Sitting there, I was at a loss as to how even to create an arena of discussion in which such a question made sense. But one thing did come to me, though it certainly wasn’t in the minds of we long-ago protesting students; a countervailing, civilizing response to powerful market forces is possible, was done, could be done again. The sequence of eras cannot be reversed but the pendulum of belief will, inevitably, swing back again toward faith in government instead of market forces. One question is: Will progressives be ready with a social vision suited to a new society when the pendulum swings back?
The performance of Hair that evening was shut down by rain only once, for a few minutes: indeed, a half-moon showed through the low rolling clouds several times, adding to a beneficent mood. At the end the audience jumped up onto the stage to dance with the cast, including us grayheads. After all, we knew how to be spontaneous, and did so with verve, not that our separateness from the young audience, or from one another, was really altered. The young loved breaking through the fourth wall, and I have to admit I did, too, though I knew it was planned—was part of the direction.
On brilliant days, the Hudson as seen from my window on Riverside is so glorious that the sliver of city between my window and the water all but disappears. But in an overcast, windless autumn dawn, the river is flat and very black, in a way that makes it almost not there. In such a light all I see are the man-made structures on either side of the river—not even the Palisades stand out. On the near side it’s Riverside Drive, from under which, far down, cars stream in and out of the city on the Henry Hudson Parkway. The parkway can put me in mind of Robert Moses, under whose leadership it was constructed, and therefore of Jane Jacobs, who fought him in a struggle that has, over time, become a kind of passion play of urban-design values, with Jacobs the clear heroine, Moses the villain—though it’s true some revision of this sacred doctrine cropped up after Jacobs’s death in 2006.
Moses was an expert politician but also a trained urban planner whose ideas reflected the planning mind-set of the time; one impervious to aesthetics. The spirit of the City Beautiful movement of the late nineteenth century, which had produced lovely features along beaux arts lines, such as the Washington Square Arch, or Olmstedian inspirations like Central Park, was long forgotten as planning became a profession associated with engineering, both structural and social. The efficiency of the automobile was a dominant concern. Separating seedy parts of cities from forward-looking economic development sites was another. It was planners, not politicians, who routed early interstates into the hearts of cities across the nation. But to be fair you have to remember that from the nineteenth century onward—Olmsted’s parks and then the City Beautiful movement notwithstanding—the structure of feeling of people of a humanist inclination deplored the gigantic industrial city as a social horror. Though decline set in fairly early in the twentieth century, and was accelerating in the 1960s, the idea that cities were vulnerable, precious, and in need of curatorial attention just wasn’t current. Get people out into the green country—in cars—that was the common sense of planning in Moses’s time, had been for a long time, and, indeed, was the purpose of his parkways.
One of the most unquestionably deplorable aspects of cities, to people of progressive inclination, was slums. Moses razed slums, building in their place what he and other planners saw as utopian superblocks of high-rise public housing—the very same structures we now, in our turn, deplore. The idea was that the superblocks would break up the teeming grid, and, in place of tenements, provide apartments full of light and air with green space in between. Unlike postwar highways, which were a brand-new form, the public housing of this era had its origins in the socially idealistic modernist tradition—in the ideas of architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Indeed, public housing was one of the few realizations of their vision. Residential developers in the private sector, responding to market taste, did adopt a similar format in some urban projects, such as Manhattan’s Lincoln Towers, but, the great arena of postwar residential development was the building of suburbia, and that, aesthetically speaking, took the dead opposite direction.
Jane Jacobs was a resident of Greenwich Village with no training in urban planning. In the late 1950s, based on observation and then some unconventional research, she concluded that urban planners were a dangerous pack of fools who were destroying not only what was pleasant about cities but also their economic viability. In 1961, she published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she laid out, in vivid detail, the good that was destroyed by contemporary planning visions. So-called slums, she demonstrated, functioned as complex protective and connective social environments and were, in addition, entrepreneurial dynamos, in contrast to the isolation and sterility of the new housing projects. Using the yellow pages as one of her primary sources, she laid out the variety of enterprise in New York and the way the form of the city—sidewalks, stoops, windows on the street—supported business and social life. A case could be made that Jane Jacobs single-handedly changed the antiurban structure of feeling that went back to Thoreau. Her book made her a national figure. Is there a city lover alive today who is unaffected by her work?
But Jacobs also became very active in opposing specific urban projects in her home city of New York. Moses reigned there, so it was against him that she fought a number of legendary battles, starting with proposed changes to her own neighborhood, Greenwich Village, low-built, its narrow streets ungridded, an exemplar of a traditional urban charm to which the planners’ mind-set was blind. The first Jacobs campaign was against Moses’s plan to extend Fifth Avenue, destroying both the Washington Square Arch and the park around it: Jacobs won. Her tool was community organizing at which she was as brilliant as she was at writing. Next came Moses’s plan for a cross-Manhattan highway that would have traversed SoHo and Little Italy, just below the Village. This would have entailed razing multiple blocks as well as putting high-rises in Greenwich Village. Jacobs’s troops won that one, too. In 1968, Jacobs moved to Toronto to protect her sons from the Vietnam War draft. But she left behind a community well trained in resistance. In 1973, a truck fell through a portion of the old elevated West Side Highway, which ran along the river through Lower Manhattan up to the Henry Hudson at Fifty-Seventh Street, which it predated. With the highway shut down, a grand plan was put forward by the city, a plan in the Moses spirit, to replace the old highway with a state-of-the-art high-speed road with all sorts of ancillary development. This plan would have destroyed a wide swathe of the western edge of the Village. Community activists held off Westway, as the project was called, for over ten years and in the end prevailed. In fact, the power of community resistance to government plans that Jacobs tapped and developed has been a legacy so effective that some say it is destructive, making it close to impossible to implement large-scale urban plans, good or bad, in American cities to this day.
Jacobs was no romantic. But her ideas became romantic, and this, I think, had to do with the fact that her second book, The Economy of Cities, published in 1969, immediately preceded the moment in which cities began to definitively lose their role as dynamos of an industrial economy. Already in the early 1960s, the frailty of cities was becoming obvious—hastened by bad planning ideas, not to mention racial prejudice, that produced the socially abandoned inner cities in which the riots of the late ’60s broke out. By then, Jacobs’s vibrant slums, decimated by riots, were becoming half-deserted, dangerous places that had lost almost all their economic and social vitality. Then came the flight of industry from even the edges of the city, essentially making of the whole industrial city a mere husk of a former economy. Far from monstrous environments, cities overall were now vulnerable relics. A romance with urban architecture and “lifestyle” began to swell, and, with it, a pattern of gentrification engulfing the less damaged slums that had escaped destruction, an architecturally ingenious nineteenth-century city spared by neglect in an arrangement of blocks, stoops, sidewalks, in a variety of styles, the embodiment of the societal genius that Jacobs had detailed in her books.
Soon, all sorts of urban elements that had seemed ugly, like manufacturing buildings—always appreciated by artists—began to inspire tenderness in the ordinary city dweller and then to become the epitome of chic. Urban batteredness itself became beautiful, ennobled in high-fashion ads. The rise of this urban romance also coincided with the rise of the penetrating worldwide new era of mind-work that created a hunger for places of the former era, a hunger that actually, in itself, changed what the city was, even as it was driven by a yearning for what it had been. This very sensibility could lead one to assume that the city would last forever, as itself, as it always had: just more appreciated.
For twenty-five years starting in 1973, I lived on lower Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. The Arch and the Square were blessedly intact, and at first my walks took me that way. But then the cement truck fell through the elevated West Side Highway, which was then closed to cars. The old structure stood, now a quiet ruin on which New Yorkers could walk or bike, peering from the unfamiliar, midlevel height at the grungy half abandoned waterfront neighborhood, into tenements, or over the still-covered but unused piers on the Hudson River: parts of the city we never looked at from our speeding cars. One had a sense of freedom on the ruined highway, laced with a tinge of afterlife: there was no policing that I ever saw or safety measures—even the place where the truck fell through was barely blocked off.
One of the covered piers one saw during a walk on the highway was the Christopher Street Pier. It was completely windowless and shut up, except for a small entryway in one corner that appeared to have been torn open. It was well-known that an off-the-grid nighttime scene of gay sexual life took place inside, largely in darkness. In the ’80s, the superstructure was taken down, perhaps in a censorious spirit, though one of the results was an open pier, also ruin-like, forgotten-seeming, free, like the highway. It was still a gay meeting place, and there was also a big chain-link barrier to it with a very small chain-link door, as if in remembrance of the earlier entry, but, at least in daytime, all went there, squeezing awkwardly through the narrow door with bikes and strollers. The pier extended far out into the Hudson, open to the sky. It was cursorily paved over, leaving open edges where enormous timbers were exposed: cracked and silvered, rust-streaked and fissured. The timbers had settled every which way, creating large, comfortable crooks: you could lie in their arms. The breeze was often spanking, and the surface of the widening river could have a wild feeling of the sea. But down in the timbers, the sun would be warm.
In 2009, after the old West Side Highway had been torn down, leaving drivers with a start-and-stop road with lights all the way to Fifty-Seventh Street, a stretch of long-abandoned elevated railway called the High Line, between Fourteenth and Thirty-Fourth Streets, once used for transport to and from manufacturing buildings, was, to great acclaim, turned into a linear park full of ornamental grasses and other features of postmodern landscape art. The midlevel height was similar to that of the old West Side Highway, giving older New Yorkers a sense of déjà vu in the still existing sooty tenements with laundry strung between fire escapes, all of which, by this time, seemed truly to be of another era. Making the High Line was a great idea, but it quickly became too celebrated, in a way that made more of it than it really was. People were so happy with the High Line that I wondered if we had lost our knack for exploring the city: it was as if people didn’t know what to do, as if we were all somehow starved, but of what? Soon, fancy condos for young stockbrokers started to replace the tenements, whereupon the High Line has almost completely lost its midlevel perspective as from another footing in time, which had been its most interesting feature. The High Line also became so clogged with tourists, corralled by the linear form, that sometimes one could barely move in either direction. I pride myself on my ability to let go and move forward into whatever it is that the city is becoming today. There is no question that the High Line itself and the redeveloped waterfront are very positive changes. The relatively slow West Street instead of Westway, and the variety of relatively new architecture along it instead of homogenized high-rises, are a victory for humanistic urban values, in the Jacobian spirit. Still, on the High Line I can so miss the old free, forgotten-seeming New York that I become a grouch. I don’t like it when my urban experience is managed, “created.” I want to find things in the city by accident. I want places that have evolved. There is no anonymity on the High Line, nothing hidden about it, no mystery, no poetry: ah, no transcendence. What is there to write about? Oh well, I guess what it comes down to is that I can’t get romantic about the High Line. So there it is, the contradiction. Nothing could be clearer to me than the outdatedness of our old romances about place. And yet.
There is an oddness to looking back from a footing of accepted change to a moment when change was already happening but unsuspected. In some regards, I see myself as pitifully deluded back then on my habitual walks to the shut-down highway and the pier, both ruins, as in my romantic sense of Bergen Street, though that wasn’t all wrong: it’s just that I was tuned to the disappearing world, rather than to the emergent one. But some of these old experiences are lastingly revelatory in themselves: I can today, in memory, enter the stillness of the ruins, and the sense of being held by them, finding in that a footing from which I can pivot, looking back into the city’s past and forward into what is still unfolding. It was not just romance. It was not just illusion. It was a period that was, where place was concerned, oddly stable, even while hovering on the edge of disappearance, for a very long time.
I see now, too, how the big changes unfolding over decades were obscured to me then by illogical sequences similar to those that befuddled our entry into the global enclosure made by man. The great canopy of the Cold War severely retarded my recognition of the immensity of the transition we were undergoing in the city—that in fact the industrial age was fading away, and, more to the point, the profundity of what that meant on every level of our collective lives. Something that is really confusing about the way the Cold War held back recognition of our transition between eras is that nuclear technology, arising out of the invisible world of quantum physics, was actually our first, way-too-precocious experience of worldwide enclosure in collapsed space, the principal feature of the age to come. But now that the Cold War is well over, we can see how it bridged the transition in an obscuring way, reaching from the start of our mature period of industrial might, right over the flight of industry and the consequent decimation of cities, onward over the ’80s, in which the pendulum in the cyclical grandfather clock, which had seemed to be swinging toward a normal conservative correction, was carried right off its hook as liberalism became disoriented. Not that I recognized any of this at the time. If the swing toward market values seemed unbelievably reckless—the savings and loan scandal, junk bonds—then, I reasoned, the pendulum would be swinging back toward government, and a market-shaping philosophy soon. Meanwhile, electronic technology, though it seemed like just one more invention, burrowed into the foundations of society as it perfected collapsed global space. The Cold War, nearly half a century long, becoming so familiar one hardly noticed it was there, was also conducted, politically speaking, as a mesmerizing high tea held by Metternichian gentlemen in top hats, absorbing our attention—what could be more important?—while thieves prowled the house, looting our political, societal, and cultural heirlooms: liberals disavowing their own flag, scandals breaking with no impact, universities jettisoning the humanities: one could go on. But there it was, the eerily reassuring continuity of the Cold War high tea with the grandfather clock with its well-attached pendulum ticking in the background. True, our top-hatted diplomats were pouring mass annihilation into porcelain teacups, then raising them to one another in a decorous gesture of unclinking toasts to their own brilliance. One can make the argument—and I do—that this charade in itself undermined our society in the sense that the pretense of having this situation under control undermined all political authority. But there is also this to confuse us: the high tea of the Cold War, so supremely important, wasn’t an economic matter. It was a geopolitical ideological contest with the only alternative to capitalism, and this obscured the radical nature of changes in the world of work that were being wrought by the same subatomic physics out of which nuclear weapons had arisen. The existence of the enormous Soviet bloc, furthermore, together with China, held back the full worldwide range of the new economy by keeping a significant portion of the globe out of play.
So when the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, not only did we lose the drama that had given us a role in the world as a nation since World War II, but a major obstruction to the panoramic, infiltrative, electronically facilitated 24/7 worldwide economy was removed. Not that any of us necessarily paid much attention. I was on Bergen Street at this time, puzzling over why it was that the meaning of place, the very soul of the city, seemed to have been pulled out from under. It seemed impossible for that to happen. Surely the character of place was eternal. How could it be?
The Cold War was akin to the age to come in that its weaponry arose out of quantum physics, but also in that it was to meet wartime conditions created by that weaponry that the internet was invented. The Pentagon wanted a communications system that could survive nuclear attack. As Paul Baran, one of the originators put it, the development of the internet arose not out of intellectual curiosity but “in response to the most dangerous situation that ever existed.” The solution was a communications system in which information (messages) could be broken into bits that could take multiple paths to their destination where they would be reassembled by computer. Bits encountering a hole in the system could reroute onto alternative paths to the destination. To work under the short time lines of nuclear engagement, the system also had to be able to transmit very large volumes of information very fast. There we have it: the internet we know. Now that the danger that inspired it no longer overwhelms us, we can, perhaps, see in this military origin how closely the two forms of global enclosure, military and digital, really are. AT&T didn’t like this phone-supplanting development at all and refused to let the RAND Corporation, where the research began, use their long-distance circuit maps. (RAND resorted to stealing the maps.) The actual inventors were scientists, of course. (Several, oddly, had started out in acoustical science, though they weren’t very good at it. Others were attracted to gambling.) Much of the subsequent work was done at MIT. When it was discovered there that large files could be transferred by the system that eventually became email, that Stanford could share research with Harvard instantaneously, snobbish eastern universities couldn’t see the benefit. Why on earth would they want to be doing that? Many of the uses of what became email were not intentionally developed. The scientists stumbled on the ways internet communications are superior to the telephone in daily life as well as nuclear war: on how their networks could facilitate group discussion, for example. At one point a group of scientists came down from MIT to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate a precursor of email to generals. Captains of industry were also invited to the demonstration. As an example of what their new marvel could do, the scientists sent a written message to Boston and got an answer right back. Welcome to the telegraph! The generals were not impressed. AT&T was uninterested. No one, not even the scientists who invented it, seems to have understood the world-reshaping capacity of this technology. How many other times in history has a civilization-changing invention been developed by people who had no idea of the significance of what they were doing. Fire?
A lot of people got on the net in the 1980s. But it wasn’t until after the Cold War had ended that most of us found our lives altered—only in the mid-’90s that widespread internet use began to penetrate all domains, professional, domestic, and eventually even public, with the inexorable advance of the imperium of collapsed space, the bright hole into which the difference between this room and the next room, indoors and outdoors, this continent and one on the other side of the Earth, would disappear. We had in this established a kind of connectivity that could be said to be changing the human condition. By that time, the industrial age was three decades into its exit, a new world having arisen around us as if in the night.