NYC Post #8: Cultural Capital. 1945-2005. A Brief History of the Big Apple. (#8 of 8).

EVENT

^{NOTE: Most of the information here, including components of the title, are obtained through The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City's History by Eric Homberger, Henry Holt and Co., 1998.}

If there had been a defining theme in the period of New York's consolidation, the incorporation of the outer boroughs through the end of the second World War, it must have bee the city's prominence as the national cultural center. Following this train of thought, over the last sixty years, New Yorker's have increasingly (and in some ways, doubtlessly, not erroneously) come to understand their home as the global cultural center.

If any act during the period could be symbolic of this, it was New York's reemergence as one of the largest city's in the world (only Mexico City and Tokyo are larger), combined with its special status as host of the United Nations complex. This cluster of buildings and institutions, purchased by the Rockefellers at $8.5 million in midtown Manhattan on the East River, includes accommodations for delegates from over two hundred companies, representing the largest global "government" ever created.

Immigration laws had momentarily stunted the growth of New York City's non-American population. In 1910, four our of ten New Yorkers were born abroad, a figure that had shrunk to less than one out of four in 1950. The Hart-Celler Act, however, passed in 1965, represented a slight easing in immigration regulations, prompting massive influxes of new residents, particularly from Asia and Latin America. Today, more than one out of three New Yorkers was born abroad. The population of the city itself was 8,008,278 in 2000.

If New York had acquired an international status, however, it was finally becoming overwhelmed by problems that had plagued it from the beginning. Issues of poverty, congestion, and sanitation, corruption and financial mismanagement, and national trends like the oil embargo and rampant inflation came to a head in the early eighties when the city was on the brink of bankruptcy. Power was transferred to Wall Street entities, and a period of austerity followed, leaving its own powerful touch on the world's landscape, for example, in the creation of hip hop culture. Ultimately however, the city was restored during the 1990s, and today enjoys the reputation of one of the nation's most stable, prosperous, safe, and consistently growing cities, as well as the largest.

* * * * *

With the successive advent of communication technology and media, up to and including the internet, New York's artistic voice expanded and fourished from its traditional centers. The Greenwich Village scene evolved into the Ashcan School of literature and the Fourteenth Street School of painting, before that neighborhood was gentrified. In the postwar years, the same process occurred near the East River that had developed in Greenwich Village: the East Village evolved as the heart and soul of Abstract Expressionism. Movement continued: by the 1960s, the key community would be SoHo.

The complexity of these moves, and the sheer volume of thought and participants increasingly highlighted New York's as not just the nation's cultural capital, but a world cultural capital. The presence of critics such as Clement Greenberg and Meyer Shapiro, and artists from all around the world ranging from Mark Rothko to Andy Warhol presided over New York's well-earned status, at last, as a World City.

While New York's art and literary scene was packed up and down Manhattan island and scattered throughout the outer boroughs, major theater literally ran through the center of it all: Broadway by this time had long since been paved from Battery Park clear north to Inwood. New York's earlier theatrical history centered on a rivalry between rowdy, drunken venues such as the Bowery and the more cultivated and genteel Broadway sites. In 1904, however, the expansion of the subway endowed Broadway with the capacity to draw far more extensive crowds. The rivalry was off as the theater district leapt some sixty blocks north to 42nd and Broadway. Literally dozens of theaters crowded the blocks around Times Square and with the confluence of buses, subways, trains, and automobiles between Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central, midtown Manhattan became the undisputed center of American commercial theater. Later, as prices rose, outpricing experimental and nontraditional formats, alternative theaters ("Off-Broadway") sprang up in Greenwich Village. The next evolution ("Off-Off-Broadway") was even further afield.

Times Square, the heart of midtown itself, had gone through several transformations. The heart of experiments in cabarets and speakeasies, during New York's economic slum it became the city's most notorious Red Light district, with bevies of peep shows and porn shops. Corporate investment has torn down everything "historic" in Times Square and built it anew, with gentrification rapidly following. With the streets lined with eight or ten vertical walls of neon and fast-paced advertising, the streets thronged with hundreds or thousands at any time of day, any day of the year, the square could be fairly called the heart of New York City today. It is, in the words of James Taub, "the least serene place in the Western Hemisphere."

Outside this brief list of luminaries is a range of names and institutions too long to be comprehensive. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal became standard bearers in jounrlism. Spike Lee and Woody Allen not only redefined key assumptions about filmmaking, but they managed to create an indelible image of New York as a whole. CBGB's spawned punk in the 70s, and one decade later, the Bronx gave birth to hip hop. Columbia has remained one of the nation's pemier educational institution, while Wall Street continues to be the financial heart of the nation.

* * * * *

The most recent era also marked New York's ascendancy (and in most peoples' eyes, infamy) as host to the most powerful sports franchises in the world. In pursuits from the ING Marathon to the Knicks, New Yorkers have had a chance to shine, but they've never triumphed so visibly as in the game of baseball. The game had been played on Broadway since 1823, and as intracity rivaltries gradually coalesced into all-star teams that played teams from other regions, Major League Baseball became big business. City ballparks had humble beginnings at the Polo Grounds, home to the New York Giants for almost seventy years. They were rebuilt in 1911 with a capacity of over 50,000, and used until 1963. Meanwhile, across the river in the Bronx, Yankee Stadium, aka the Death Star, rose from the rubble and bought Babe Ruth, and they've been plundering talent with cash and deception ever since. Ranging around the outer boroughs, one eventually found a baseball team worth cheering for as something more than a guilty and/or sadistic pleasure: the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field. For a decade the Dodgers vied against the Giants with a viability and persistence that should make any Mets fan drool. But money won over local sentiments; New York baseball's better half relocated to California, and now we're left with the dregs and the unforgivables.

* * * * *

The Historical atlas reads:

The destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is likely to remain the defining event of the city's history. The changes which followed - the Patriot Act, the overturning of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and then the invasion and occupation of Iraq - transformed the attack on the WTC into a point of origin for a world-wide "war on terrorism" which rapidly left the city behind: it was a victim, and potential target, but this was Washington's show now.

It goes on to say:

New York is not so much a city or a community as a vast geographical and administrative basket in which essentially autonomous social worlds are to be found.

I disagree with this last beat. This is true of every community of a certain critical mass. The observation that follows regarding comparative education and prosperity is not unique. The same could be said of Chicago, of Detroit, or even of Flint. What is unique, from my perspective after a month, and with many more discoveries to come is the particular insularity of New York. It's isolating to be the largest city in the nation, and the most economically and politically powerful city in the world. If there is an undilutable difference between New York and other big cities is this... the densest county in the United States... the third largest city in the world... is isolated. New York, by becoming to such a dramatic extent the crossroads of the world has developed a crossroads mentality unseen elsewhere. The question of superiority or inferiority is dropped now, because this isn't a discussion of New York vs. Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles. The latter three are huge city with an awareness of there being other big cities... rivals, even. New York's experience is the experience of looking out over the world and finding it unusually empty, and big and small at the same time. It is a unique experience, and one that is often misunderstood and unrecognized.

And this is the angle of New York City in the year 2005.

<sup>FINAL NOTE. Most of the information presented in this series has been gathered from:
The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City's History, Revised and Updated, by Eric Homberger. Henry Holt and Company, LLC: New York. Copyright 1994 and 2005.

I've not paraphrased for the most part, so I haven't felt obliged to include extensive citation. While the book contained a lot of information, in fact, I found its organizational structure awkward, and its attribution of cause-and-effect to be sometimes flawed and occasionally incorrect. Moreover, I've supplemented the volume's information with that I've acquired on my own and from other sources. Any questions, please email or leave a comment.</sup>