The Greater City
AS IN THE 1920S, so in the 1940s it seemed to European visitors like Sartre and Camus that all the wealth and dynamism of a continent were concentrated on the island of Manhattan, slightly less than thirteen miles from north to south and no more than two and a half miles from east to west, about half the size of the city and county of San Francisco, a statistic that always surprises. Brooklyn (Kings County) and the Bronx had bigger populations, but Manhattan remained the citadel of Greater New York, and Greater New York, with a population of 7.9 million, was the second-largest city in the world after London. As early as the teens and twenties, certain foreign observers and resident boosters had spoken of New York City as the world’s leading metropolis. Now—sometime during the war, it would seem—it had become the capital of the twentieth century, just as Paris, according to Walter Benjamin, had been the capital of the nineteenth century.
Stamped in gold on the cover of the “Green Book,” the official directory of its municipal departments and officeholders, was the motto “The World’s Greatest City,” which the war had made good. At the end of 1945, Fiorello H. La Guardia’s long, turbulent reign as mayor of New York came to an end; his Democratic successor was William O’Dwyer, a lawyer and onetime policeman, whom he had once compared to a cabbage. After twelve years, New York and La Guardia had each tired of the other’s intensities. Even tired, La Guardia would have liked another term, but having over the course of his career run on Socialist, Democratic, Republican, American Labor, and Fusion tickets, he had at last run out of parties to nominate him. The amiable O’Dwyer promised a progressive but less exigent administration, without the storm and stress. He was born in Bohola, County Mayo, Ireland, in 1890, the son of schoolteachers, and his success story seemed to vindicate the myth of the melting pot as vividly as that of his first-generation Italian-Jewish predecessor.*1 More so, really, since no one could have invented La Guardia except himself, while O’Dwyer was the cop on the corner who rose to power with the help of his friends at Tammany Hall.
Arriving in New York in 1910, at the age of twenty, with a worldly fortune of $23.35 (about average for an Irish immigrant at that time), O’Dwyer had to scramble to support himself with odd jobs, including grocery man, deckhand, plasterer’s helper, stoker, hod carrier, and, rising in the world, bartender at the Plaza Hotel, until joining the police force. Acquiring a night-school law degree at Fordham University and the favor of various Democratic bosses, he rose to become district attorney of Kings County, in which office he became famous for prosecuting the entrepreneurs of “Murder, Inc.,” the enforcement agency of organized crime. Despite his successful pursuit of the noted extortionist and executioner Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, many suspected then, and many more later, that His Honor’s relation to the underworld was not always as distant or adversarial as it might have been.*2 The mayor was a considerable raconteur, with many admirers in the press. One of his closest friends was the founder and editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross. As the New Yorker writer Philip Hamburger wrote, “These two colorful, exotic men loved to sit on the porch of Gracie Mansion, gossip, joke, and swap tall stories of their youth—one man from Ireland, the other from the Far West.”
As New York’s one hundredth mayor, counting from Dutch colonial days, it fell to O’Dwyer to preside over the “golden anniversary” of Greater New York in 1948. Fifty years before, led by the visionary reformer Andrew Haswell Green, the politicians of old New York had agreed to combine the municipalities of the city (Manhattan and the Bronx) with Brooklyn, along with Queens and Richmond (Staten Island), into the modern City of New York. In the first moments of January 1, 1898, as flares and fireworks had burst over a jubilant crowd, the ensign of the Greater City was raised up the flagstaff of City Hall. From an island metropolis of 23 square miles, and 1.5 million people, New York was transformed into a city of 299 square miles and 3.4 million.
Greater New York was an imperfect union—more of a confederacy than a true merger, the New York Times’s Warren Moscow observed many years later, as shown to this day by the respect dutifully paid to the borough boundaries by gangs and racketeers, not to mention mere politicians, if they are wise. But consolidation served the purposes of efficiency, especially in transportation, and apart from a few recalcitrant politicians and clergymen in predominantly Protestant Brooklyn, it had long been recognized as inevitable. In fact, the real symbolic moment of union had occurred years before, on May 15, 1883, when New York’s mayor, Franklin Edson, accompanied by the president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, and the governor of New York, Grover Cleveland, had met the mayor of Brooklyn, young Seth Low, midway on the span of the Brooklyn Bridge on the day of its dedication.
Most important, consolidation disposed of the threat that New York would be overtaken in population by upstart, faster-growing Chicago—1,150,000 in 1890, having doubled in a decade—with all the loss of prestige, trade, corporate headquarters, and political sway that such a terrible event would have threatened. With its primacy on the American scene secured, New York was ready to advance globally. In The Greater City, an official history commissioned for the 1948 jubilee, Allan Nevins, a former newspaperman turned Columbia University professor, rejoiced that in the last half-century Greater New York had so far surpassed all other cities in its combined distinctions,
it might almost call itself the world metropolis…Down to the first World War, it had yielded precedence in financial fields to London, in artistic fields to Paris, and in musical fields to Berlin. In the period between wars these European capitals had struggled bravely to regain their old position. But at the end of the Second World War New York stood alone. Even in population, London, which had kept abreast of it only by annexing outlying suburbs, was ready to yield first place to its eight millions. In wealth, resources, and volume of hopeful energy no city of battered, impoverished Europe, of adolescent Latin America, or of the interior United States, could challenge its primacy.
As ever, the Empire City exaggerated the overall American condition. New York had gone from being Depression-bound to being the “supreme metropolis of the present” according to the British literary critic Cyril Connolly, while actually changing less than in any comparable span since 1800. The brute fact was, New York had succeeded in the race of cities not by advancing but almost by standing still—even as so many huge cities outside of North America were fading, or falling, or sinking downward to darkness.
In London, its only rival for size, whole districts were in ruins.*3 There were still fancy-dress balls: at one of the fanciest of these, the tart-tongued Lady Cunard was told by someone, pointing to the glittering crowd, “This is what we were fighting for,” to which she tersely replied, “What, are they all Poles?” But in postwar Britain unemployment soon exceeded Depression levels; most Londoners were miserably cold during the first winter of peace, and even colder in the terrible second; and rationing continued to be stringent—it would not be entirely lifted until 1954. In Paris most people found their living conditions were worse just after the war than they had been at the end of the German occupation. In the USSR, Leningrad and Moscow were drawn into the morbid isolation dictated by Stalin’s dread of foreign influences. Almost a whole generation of men had been lost in the war and the Terror, the gulag archipelago was swollen with new prisoners, and in the wreckage of their cities people lived on thin gruels of cabbage and potato scraps.
In Berlin the dead were too many to bury, yet the city was filling up with refugees from the south and the east—“displaced persons.” As the historian Hugh Thomas writes, “An accurate picture of life in Central and Eastern Europe in the winter of 1945–46 should thus include the sight of hundreds of trains, themselves in bad condition, carrying thousands of victims of international conflict to places where neither they nor their immediate ancestors had ever been, each refugee clutching a sack or two of possessions, cold, hungry, ill, bewildered.” Bombing, fighting, disease, and, most of all, flight had reduced the population of Berlin, which stood at a peak of 4.3 million in 1943, by a third. Nearly 95 percent of its built-up area was in ruins; almost half of its residential units had been entirely destroyed. Most of what remained of its industrial plant had been removed by the Soviets; even railways had been stripped and carted away. Surveying the wreckage, the poet Stephen Spender imagined that for centuries to come visitors would gape and wonder at the grandiose broken hulks of the Reichstag and the Chancellery, “the scenes of a collapse so complete that it already has the remoteness of all final disasters.” (Unimaginable then that by century’s end the Reichstag would be “wrapped” by the Bulgarian artist Christo and restored as the capitol of a reunified Germany by an English architect, Sir Norman Foster.)
Vienna, formerly the second city of the Third Reich, was divided, like Berlin, into occupation zones—doubly divided, since the inner city had also been quartered by the Allies. The fighting and bombing in April 1945 had ripped up much of its infrastructure, including sewer lines, with the resulting threats of typhoid and dysentery. (American moviegoers would soon be acquainted with Vienna’s sewers through Carol Reed’s movie The Third Man, adapted by Graham Greene from his novel, in which Orson Welles played the black-marketer Harry Lime.) Cold, hunger, and physical desolation were facts of daily life in the famous European cities that once had vied with New York for political, economic, or cultural preeminence, regardless of the side on which the war had found them.
In the East, the damage to Japan’s urban fabric was apocalyptic, literally so in the atomic-bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kyoto had been spared at the insistence of Secretary of War Henry Stimson; so much of the built-up area of Tokyo had been destroyed in the fire raids that American military planners felt that the bomb would have been wasted on it. Briefly Tokyo had ruled a vast empire extending from the mid-Pacific to the gates of India, from the Aleutians to Java, and deep into China; now it had been stripped of all overseas possessions. (Japan’s warlords hoped almost to the end to retain Korea, having occupied and brutalized this ancient kingdom the longest.) Most Japanese, including the political elite, were extremely surprised when the American occupation forces, as they began to arrive in September 1945, did not demand to be fed, which would have led to mass starvation. Food remained scarce. Just after the war, on any given day, a third of Tokyo’s population could be found foraging in the countryside.
Yokohama, the seaport on Tokyo Bay from which the imperial warships had sailed, was “a sad place that had been flattened by bombs and the inhabitants were living in shacks made of rubble, propped up in fields of rubble,” wrote Anatole Broyard, who was in command of a stevedore battalion with the dismal assignment of “scrap[ing] a solid crust of shit off a dock a quarter of a mile long. I didn’t realize at first that it was human shit. As I figured it out later, Japanese stevedores and embarking soldiers had had no time for niceties toward the end and had simply squatted down wherever they stood. The entire dock was covered with a layer that was as hard as clay. The rain and traffic had packed it down.” The real work was done by a huge crew of Japanese equipped with “axes, shovels, sledgehammers, picks, crowbars—whatever we could find.”
Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Manila, Asia’s other great modern cities before the war, were shaken shadows of their former selves. As the novelist James Salter reveals in Burning the Days, in the Pacific, though the war was over, “its vast, shabby landscape remained. In Manila Bay the water was the color of rust from sunken ships. Unidentified masts and funnels were sticking above the surface. Manila was half destroyed; the tops were blown off the palm trees, the roads were ruined, the air filled with dust.” At the end, the Japanese commander had mounted a prolonged and desperate defense, which became a brutal slaughter. By the time the last Japanese were routed from the old walled inner city, the Intramuros, a hundred thousand Filipino civilians had been killed, and most of the city was bloodied and ruined.
From one end of Eurasia to the other, one might behold, as Spender wrote of Germany, “ruins, not belonging to a past civilization, but the ruins of our own epoch, which make us suddenly feel that we are entering upon the nomadic stage when people walk across deserts of centuries, and when the environment which past generations have created for us disintegrates in our own lifetimes.”
Just as the lights in its office buildings seemed positively incandescent after the dimout, it was against this dismal wasteland background in Europe and Asia that New York dazzled—“the incomparable, the brilliant star city of cities, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean paradox, the inferno with no out-of-bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States,” as John Gunther rhapsodizes in Inside U.S.A.
Nor did any other American city come close to rivaling it in power or panache, as theater of ambition or simply as spectacle. Philadelphia (as New York viewed its ancient rivals) was staid and stultified, and Boston, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Hub of the Universe,” was too self-absorbed to notice how provincial it had become. The cities of the West Coast were peripheral in a world system still centered on the Atlantic, if no longer on Europe; something had gone out of San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906, while Los Angeles, “the great anti-cultural amusement-producing center,” as Edmund Wilson described it, had a well-deserved Day of the Locust reputation for apocalyptic natural disasters. St. Louis and New Orleans were in visible decline. Houston, which was somewhere in Texas, was a bit crude and grasping; Detroit was a company town; and Chicago, which once aspired to become the First City of the world, was now resigned to being merely Second City in the country. (Notwithstanding, Colonel Robert McCormick, the publisher of the Tribune, stoutly maintained that Greater “Chicagoland” was as powerful and populous as Greater New York, and had a much higher moral tone.)
Since Roosevelt’s Hundred Days, in 1933, Washington, DC, had finally begun to exercise power commensurate to the grandeur of its avenues. No potentate of Wall Street could presume to deal with the president of the United States as his equal, as within living memory the senior J. P. Morgan had attempted to deal with Theodore Roosevelt, saying to him, “If we have done anything [wrong], send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” But lacking any distinctions besides the political, Washington was nobody’s idea of a metropolis, in the forties or the fifties, for that matter, when the senator from Massachusetts John F. Kennedy famously quipped that it was “a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”
But New York was the richest city in the world, the greatest seaport, and the biggest manufacturing center, employing more workers—mostly Jewish and Italian—in the needle trades alone than labored on Detroit’s assembly lines or sweated in Pittsburgh’s steel mills. New York, said D. W. Brogan, a Cambridge University don specializing in America, was the only American city big enough to boast of being little. (“Little Old New York,” a fond phrase, he thought, like “Dear, Dirty Dublin.” Brogan was Irish.)
New York did not officially celebrate its marriage to the sea, like Venice, but after three hundred years it was still reasonably faithful: the Port of New York remained a “floating traffic-jam” of red- and green-painted ferries, lighters, lumbering car floats, barges, riverboats, and smoking tugboats escorting majestic ocean liners. From the windows of the newly constructed apartment blocks around Washington Square, Brogan wrote, those restored floating palaces the Queen Elizabeth, the Île de France, and the Nieuw Amsterdam, seemed almost close enough to touch as they glided on their way to the piers on the lordly Hudson, their arrivals and departures as gigantically emblematic of the city as the skyscrapers. From her youth on Central Park West, Marya Mannes remembered in 1961 two sounds: horses’ hooves clattering on the pavement at four o’clock in the morning, “not before and not after,” as a Plaza Hotel brougham headed homeward, and the “bull roar of ocean liners,” outward bound.
From 1820 to 1960 the Port of New York was the busiest in the world. It possessed superb advantages. It was never icebound, rarely dangerously foggy, and several channels led into the harbor, the broad, deep-dredged Ambrose being the most important. Counting all the navigable waterways within a twenty-mile radius of the Statue of Liberty, the entire port included seven bays, four rivers, four estuaries, several creeks—altogether, some 772 miles of shoreline, of which 285 miles of water frontage were developed, crowded with piers, bulkheads, groins, wharves, and “those warehouses,” as recalled by Mannes, “dark red or old yellow, with blind-bricked windows, that on any waterfront spell the movement of goods and produce, ship chandlers, and the smell of hemp and iron.”
The Chelsea Piers were full of maritime drama and labor strife; South Street still fragrant with memories of the old whorehouses and grogshops on Cherry Street, of the sailors’ boardinghouses with names like Blind Dan’s and Mother Bastard’s; redolent, too, of yesterday’s catch. And how like the prow of some immense ship was the tip of the island, the melancholy Battery. “There is some sense to this conceit,” wrote the maritime officer and author of maritime histories and fiction Felix Riesenberg, “for I have felt it when pinned there by my imagination, as if the oncoming city were pushing me back into the sea.”
The great seaport was also a great entrepôt, a great emporium, and—which even many natives did not suspect—a great industrial city, whose output measured in dollars exceeded Detroit’s. It supported as many odd occupations, and tempted with as many luxuries and exoticisms, as all the bazaars of the rest of the world combined. John Gunther, surveying a Midtown block in 1946:
I have just walked around the block to see concretely what illimitable variety this neighborhood affords. Within a hundred yards I can go to church, have my hair cut, admire flowers, visit two banks (both low Georgian buildings in red brick), and dine in one of the supreme restaurants of the world or at Hamburger Heaven. Within a slightly greater radius I can buy a Cézanne ($55,000), a chukar partridge ($7.50), a pound of Persian caviar ($38), or a copy of the Civil Service Leader (10 cents). Within two hundred yards are three competing pharmacies comfortably busy, a shop for religious goods and missals, a delicatessen squeezed into a four-foot frontage, windows full of the most ornately superior English saddlery, a podiatrist, a good French bookstore, a Speed Hosiery repair shop, and, of course, the inevitable small stationery shop with its broad red band across the window advertising a variety of cigars.
Thumbing through the sixteen hundred closely printed pages of the classified telephone directory, he discovered that the occupations supported by New York included “cinders, chenille dotting, bullet-proof equipment, breast bumps, bungs, boiler baffles, glue room equipment, abattoirs, flow meters, eschatology, mildew-proofing, pompons, potato chip machinery, rennet, spangles, solenoids, and spats.”
This otherwise chaotic enumeration suggests why New York was a great manufacturing city that, however, did not feel like one, or look the part. Led by garment making, printing, machinery, food products, and chemicals (including perfumes and cosmetics), its industries were light. Its small loft factories operated behind office facades. In the text accompanying Andreas Feininger’s superb photographs in New York in the Forties, John von Hartz writes that many of the shoppers patronizing Macy’s, Gimbels, or Saks at Thirty-fourth Street could easily have been unaware that the suits, dresses, and underwear they were buying were manufactured a few blocks away in the Garment District, where the only signs of industry were the bursts of steam that spilled from windows, released from pressing machines.
*1 O’Dwyer was one of eleven children. When he was still a young man, one of his brothers was killed in a robbery, causing the future mayor to swear eternal enmity to the criminal class. His youngest brother, Paul O’Dwyer, followed him into the law, embraced labor and civil rights activism, ran unsuccessfully against Jacob K. Javits for the United States Senate in 1968, served as president of the City Council of New York from 1974 to 1977, and until his death in 1998 personified some of the best instincts of postwar urban liberalism.
*2 Lepke was eventually electrocuted. In 1943 he was lodged in the West Side Jail in Manhattan, where Robert Lowell, passing through on his way to the Federal Correction Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, to serve his time as a conscientious objector, remembered having pointed out to him “the T-shirted back/of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke.” Although O’Dwyer’s supporters credited him with eighty-seven murder convictions during his term as DA in 1940–41, it was widely noticed that after his prosecution of Lepke he showed no inclination to indict other figures as notable in the criminal field, such as Albert Anastasia and Joe Adonis. O’Dwyer was in the army during the war and an emissary of FDR in Italy. In the course of the 1945 contest for mayor, it emerged that he had paid a friendly social call on Frank Costello, one of the city’s leading mobsters, who was supporting his election. None of this history prevented O’Dwyer, who had run unsuccessfully against La Guardia in 1941, from being elected by a margin of 700,000, the biggest in the city’s history to that date.
*3 After the war the most populous cities in the world were London, New York, Shanghai, Berlin, Moscow, Chicago, and Paris.