New York Observed
WAS NEW YORK ever more of a cynosure for brilliant foreign observers—continental, English, and even Asian—than during and after the war? Not since Tocqueville, Dickens, and Mrs. Trollope had visited in the 1830s and ’40s had so much alien intelligence been directed at New York’s buildings and manners and the physiognomy of its citizens. Here were the existentialists Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir; the English critics and novelists Cyril Connolly, V. S. Pritchett, Stephen Spender, and J. B. Priestley, who came to see and judge the postwar American scene and sometimes were taken around by such expatriate friends as Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, ex-Englishmen who were going native in, respectively, Los Angeles and New York. (Connolly compared the welcome he got from Auden to that of the town mouse condescending to the country mouse in the Disney cartoon.)
From Middle Europe, the future historian John Lukacs arrived as an unknown “displaced person” of twenty-two in 1946, having fled Budapest under the Soviets. A dockers’ strike on the East Coast diverted the Liberty Ship on which he had sailed from Bordeaux to Portland, Maine. Traveling down to the city, he experienced “the surprising and disconcerting impression that so many things in New York looked old.” The “shattering iron clangor” and catacomb depths of the subway were out of Kafka, not Piranesi; the “steely rows of windows” in office and industrial buildings recalled the “windrows” of Theodore Roosevelt’s teeth; the “Wurlitzer sounds and atmosphere” of the streets seemed from 1910 or 1920.
Places familiar from the movies or magazines—the Waldorf Astoria, Rockefeller Center, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street—looked exactly as he had expected, but he felt the people often looked older than their years. Americans clung to outmoded fashions like high-buttoned shoes and steel-rimmed spectacles (restored to fashion by John Lennon in the sixties, now superseded again by horn-rims) or were old-fashioned physical types, like the millionaires with “round Herbert Hoover faces” encountered in the expensive vicinity of the Waldorf. (Their archetype, the ex-president, who looked like Mr. Heinz Tomato of the advertisements, lived in the tower.) Bernard Baruch, the financial and political oracle (self-appointed), somehow resembled the Flatiron Building. Even in summertime American men kept on their hats and undershirts. American women typically wore longer skirts and primmer bathing suits than European women. “There were entire classes of American women who inclined to age more rapidly than their European contemporaries,” Lukacs recalls ungallantly. “This had nothing to do with cosmetics or even with their physical circumstances; it had probably much to do with their interior lives”—the failure, perhaps, of youthful dreams that turned fresh-faced girls into middle-aged women before they reached thirty.
Jean-Paul Sartre proposed that the salient fact about New York’s social geography was its tremendous linearity, “those endless ‘north–south’ highways,” the avenues, that demarcated the separate worlds of Park, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Avenues, and “the No Man’s Land of Tenth Avenue.” “The space, the great, empty space of the steppes and pampas, flows through New York’s arteries like a draught of cold air, separating one side from the other.” Beyond the Waldorf Astoria and the handsome facades of “smart” apartment buildings canopied in blue and white, he catches a glimpse of the Third Avenue Elevated, carrying from the Bowery a whiff of old-fashioned poverty. Unchanged in its tawdry essentials since Stephen Crane wrote An Experiment in Misery in 1898, the Bowery was a great magnet for philosophical Frenchmen like Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Albert Camus, who delighted in the “authenticity” of its flophouses and sleazy entertainments. “Nuit de Bowery,” Camus wrote in his travel journal. “Night on the Bowery, Poverty—and a European wants to say ‘Finally, reality.’ ” The elevated railroads and a place like the Bowery were “survivals,” “islands of resistance,” which the armies of progress had encircled and would overwhelm at leisure; though doomed to extinction, they were America’s true monuments. Let it be remembered that there were still horses drawing ice carts and milk wagons, tenements that Jacob Riis would have recognized with a shudder, and countless furnished rooms that might have housed Sister Carrie or Lily Bart on her way down. One of La Guardia’s last campaigns was banning pushcarts and putting grocery vendors into sanitary markets.
Cyril Connolly declared New York “the supreme metropolis of the present”—one of the most-quoted remarks ever about the city, but almost never in context. New York, as he said, would be the most beautiful city in the world if one never needed to descend below the fortieth floor; the light is southern, the vegetation and architecture northern, the sky the royal-blue velvet of Lisbon or Palermo. “A southern city, with a southern pullulation of life, yet with a northern winter imposing a control; the whole Nordic energy and sanity of living crisply enforcing its authority for three of the four seasons on the violet-airy babel of tongues and races; this tension gives New York its unique concentration and makes it the supreme metropolis of the present” (my italics). This ultramodern metropolis to which Connolly pays tribute is not as gone as the gaslight New York of O. Henry, but it is more than half-vanished:
[The] glitter of “21,” the old-world lethargy of the Lafayette, the hazy views of the East River or Central Park over tea in some apartment at the magic hour when the concrete icebergs suddenly flare up; the impressionist pictures in one house, the exotic trees or bamboo furniture in another, the chink of ‘old fashioneds’ with their little glass pestles, the divine glories—Egyptian, Etruscan, French—of the Metropolitan Museum, the felicitous contemporary assertion of the Museum of Modern Art, the snow, the sea-breezes, the late suppers, with the Partisans, the reelings-home down the black steam-spitting canyons, the Christmas trees lit up beside the liquorice ribbons of cars on Park Avenue, the Gotham Book Mart, the shabby coziness of the Village, all go to form an unforgettable picture of what a city ought to be: that is, continuously insolent and alive, a place where one can buy a book or meet a friend at any hour of the day or night…
Those secondhand-book stores that stayed open all night, like the one off Washington Square where Connolly bought a first edition of E. E. Cummings at two a.m., are as extinct as the particular fashionable Manhattan into which he was made welcome: a “concrete Capri” and “a noisily masculine society,” where wit and wisecracks flowered rather than art.
Another alert British observer, Cecil Beaton, found fashionable New York women to be “hard and awe-inspiring.” They had an “Indian elegance” that might be attributable to the rocky ground on which they flourished, displaying “legs, arms and hands of such attenuated grace; wrists and ankles so fine, that they are the most beautiful in the world.” In his view, it was the men who fell apart too young in America. “Few men over twenty-five are good-looking; often those most charming college boys with faces fit for a collar ‘ad,’ concave figures, heavy hands, fox-terrier behinds and disarming smiles, run to seed at a tragically early age, and become grey-haired, bloated and spoilt.” The generic American businessman, who was of course the generic American type, had a “foetus face.” The photographer suspected that the American’s bland features betrayed an empty soul: the man of letters more generously suggested that they masked a tragic sense of life. “Why, after midnight, do so many Americans fight or weep?” he asked. “Almost everyone hates his job. Psychiatrists of all schools are as common as monks in the Theibeid.”
Affluent New Yorkers seemed to lack a capacity for relaxation, from which followed the rigors of “leisure time” activities: golf, backgammon, bridge, plays, movies, sports, “culture,” not to mention the conspicuous consumption of whiskey and cocktails, which made the hangover one of the perils of the American scene. Cigarette smoke was another, but hardly anyone protested—certainly not Europeans, who smoked as much. From Voisin, the Colony, and Chambord (said to be the costliest restaurant on earth just after the war, with a typical dinner costing as much as twenty-five dollars) to Schrafft’s, to Woolworth’s and the humblest corner drugstore fountain, everybody smoked—big bankers, laborers, society women, Partisan Review intellectuals, movie stars, ribbon clerks—before, after, and often during meals, adding to the great pall hanging over New York in the forties; and every meal was drowned in ice water, which European visitors found extremely unhealthy.
Like its great singer Walt Whitman (“I am large, I contain multitudes”), New York contradicted itself: its multitude of observers contradicted one another. Was Manhattan remarkably clean, neat, and decorous, as Cecil Beaton maintained? Sartre was struck by the filth on the streets, the muddy, discarded newspapers blown by the wind and the “blackish snow” in winter: “this most modern of cities is also the dirtiest.” At least wherever the grid extended it was impossible to get lost (“One glance is enough for you to get your bearings; you are on the East Side, at the corner of 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue”). Beaton retorted it was all too easy to lose one’s way: street signs were few, entrances to the subway obscure, post offices unmarked, public lavatories invisible or nonexistent. Appurtenances like awnings, which in England actually signified something (a party, a wedding), in New York sheltered the entrances to grand hotels and flophouses alike.
Or consider the Automat: “a high point of civilization,” according to Connolly, who was known as a gourmand, extolled for offering an endless selection of food for nickels and dimes: “strawberries in January, leberwurst on rye bread, a cut off the roast, huge oysters, a shrimp cocktail, or marshmallow cup-cake.” Switching for a moment to an American observer, the same cuisine was remembered at a distance of a quarter-century by Elizabeth Hardwick (in the forties, recently arrived from Lexington, Kentucky) for “its woeful, watery macaroni, its bready meat loaf, the cubicles of drying sandwiches; mud, glue and leather, from these textures you made your choice. The miseries of the deformed diners and their revolting habits; they were necessary, like a sewer, like the Bowery, Klein’s, 14th Street.” Thus, we are reminded that the past is not only another country, where things are done differently, as the novelist L. P. Hartley instructs us—it is also a matter of taste.
Literally and figuratively, the atmosphere was supercharged: the traffic lights, which even dogs were said to heed, went straight from red to green. Simone de Beauvoir wrote of “something in New York that makes sleep useless.” And Sartre: “There is the wailing of the wind, the electric shocks I get each time I touch a doorbell or shake a friend’s hand, the cockroaches that scoot across my kitchen, the elevators that make me nauseous and the inexhaustible thirst that rages in me from morning till night. New York is a colonial city, an outpost. All the hostility and cruelty of Nature are present in this city, the most prodigious monument man has ever erected to himself.”
And yet postwar New York was a quieter and less changeable place than before or since. New Yorkers experienced nothing in these years like the usual incessant building up and tearing down, “the new landmarks crushing the old quite as violent children stamp on snails and caterpillars,” as Henry James put it in The American Scene (1907). It was quieter after the demolition of the elevated subways, the Els, beginning in 1930 and completed in the fifties.
The United Nations complex (1947–52) and, appropriately for a collectivist age, two giant housing blocks—Metropolitan Insurance’s Stuyvesant Town, which Lewis Mumford denounced as “the architecture of the Police State,” and the publicly funded Peter Cooper Village—comprised the most important additions to the cityscape in these years. The pace of commercial construction did not become energetic until around 1952, when Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House began the march of glass-walled postwar skyscrapers up Park Avenue in the same year that the United Nations complex was completed. Neither Lever House nor the Seagram Building (1958) contained more than a small fraction of the floor space of the Empire State or the Chrysler Building. It was not until Walter Gropius’s Pan Am Building in 1963 that a corporate monument imposed itself on the city like the Jazz Age behemoths or Rockefeller Center (1930–39) as an ensemble. Indeed, it is significant that rather than the Empire State or the Chrysler Building, it was the timeless-seeming, end-of-history architecture of Rockefeller Center—“Egyptian,” some said, although Cyril Connolly was reminded of Stonehenge—that seemed the high-rise most emblematic of the city. In the forties, New York was actually scaled down, as many old money-losing buildings of ten or twelve stories were pulled down and replaced with thrifty “taxpayers” of two or three, a sign of diminished expectations applauded by the New York Times and by Lewis Mumford in the New Yorker.
It was in the forties that New York began defining itself ever more as a constellation of self-contained urban enclaves, “an island of islands.” The housing shortage during and after the war, along with rent regulation (imposed by the state in 1947 after the OPA controls lapsed), eventually turning much of the housing market into a lottery, discouraged the old nomadism. Increasingly New Yorkers were apt to hive into particular neighborhoods and stay there. One thinks of Mrs. H. T. Miller in Truman Capote’s career-making story “Miriam”: “For several years, Mrs. H. T. Miller had lived alone in a pleasant apartment (two rooms with a kitchenette) in a remodeled brownstone. She was a widow: Mr. H. T. Miller had left a reasonable amount of insurance. Her interests were narrow, she had no friends to speak of, and she rarely journeyed farther than the corner grocery store.”
New York was showing its age. What old-fashioned relics the skyscrapers of the twenties appeared to a French visitor like Sartre, who had so admired American movies and American jazz, which now seemed to him to have outlived their future! “Far away I see the Empire State or the Chrysler Building reaching vainly toward the sky, and suddenly I think that New York is about to acquire a History and that it already possessed its ruins.”
Beneath the aging skyscrapers, most of the built city was still Walt Whitman’s “Babylonish brick-kiln,” not high but deep, not futuristic but fraying, and grimy beneath the glitter.
In Europe the winter of 1946–47 was the coldest in three hundred years, freezing and threatening to starve victors and vanquished alike; coal and foodstuffs were in shorter supply in London and Paris than during the worst of the war. There was snowfall in Saint-Tropez, and wolves were sighted on the road from Rome to Naples. The era of the Cold War began in a cold season.
New Yorkers were generally sheltered against the cold, but in summer, with home air-conditioning almost as rare as television before 1947, they sweltered in the most intense heat waves that anyone could remember. The eight million made their way to the Roxy, the Capitol, Radio City Music Hall, and the other giant movie palaces that had air-conditioning; or went to Coney Island, Brighton Beach, or Jones Beach, passing amid scenes unchanged since the turn of the century, but that would barely last out the decade: whole families spending the night on tenement roofs, small children wedged together on fire escapes, old people sitting up late on kitchen chairs by the stoop—the lost world that lives on vividly in Alfred Kazin’s memoirs and Helen Levitt’s photographs.
Truman Capote writes of a particular August day in 1946 when “the heat closed in like a hand over a murder victim’s mouth, the city thrashed and twisted.” Central Park was like a battlefield, whose “exhausted fatalities lay crumpled in the dead-still shade,” as documented by newspaper photographers. “At night, hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its brain and its central nerves, which sizzle like the inside of an electric-light bulb.”
“On some nights, New York is as hot as Bangkok.” The famous opening line of Saul Bellow’s The Victim (1947) might have been inspired by the heat wave of the preceding year; it is definite that Bellow had never spent a sultry night in Bangkok, but from the next sentence it is obvious that he had read Spengler. “The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky.”