“The denizens of New York are such utilitarians that they have sacrificed to the shrine of Mammon almost every relic of the olden time. The feeling of veneration for the past, so characteristic of the cities of the Old World, is lamentably deficient among the people of the New.”
The condition and the protest remain essentially the same. But it is no accident that so many of the unseen beauties of New York are survivors from the past. Most New Yorkers have their own private places. Those places most often evoke the past. For example, I sometimes enjoy visiting the traffic island in Grand Army Plaza, in Brooklyn, with its dumb modern monument to John F. Kennedy and its wonderful Bailey Fountain (all Neptunes and Tritons and memories of the Piazza Navona). I walk around the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch, with its evocations of the Etoile, in Paris, and look at the fine bas-relief of Lincoln by Thomas Eakins, and then stare up at the rest. I know that the heroic statuary at the top of this and similar monuments is essentially rhetoric; it propagates patriotic myths; it glorifies values I don’t share. And yet, I prefer looking at it to gazing at Calder or Donald Judd. I not only think about the formal values of the work, the craft, the belief in the well-made thing, but also imagine the artist’s studio, his rough hands, his friends dropping in to chat, the delivery of the great piece to its present site. I wonder who was president at the time, and what the newspapers said, and what happened to the models.
Those are, of course, impure reactions. But in some peculiar way the work that provokes them is doing what great art does: It invokes a sense of continuity with the past, joining us to the generations that came before ours, forcing an obligation to the generations that will follow. When I show my daughters Nathan Silver’s Lost New York, or the “then” and “now” photographs in various books from Dover Publications, they are angry that they’ll never have the chance to see any of those vanished places. And I’m angry because in nearly every case the building that replaced the old was inferior in style, craft, and even function to the thing removed.
If there is a lesson in those pictures of the hidden beauty of New York, it may be this: Leave things alone. Give up the idea of constant renewal, that variation on the dream of perpetual youth. Seek what is truly valuable. Embrace it. Protect it. Love it.
NEW YORK,
December 26, 1983-January 2, 1984
ON THE STREET / 2
This is how a life can end: It is the tail end of the lunch hour, Tuesday, March 4, and I’m in a taxi with my daughter, moving downtown on Seventh Avenue. The sky is sullen, the color of gruel. In the garment district, traffic inches along, blocked by double-parked trucks, men pushing carts, buses heaving their great bulk across lanes. Horns blare; men curse. A tractor-trailer stands across 34th Street like a wall.
This is how a life can end: The huge truck moves, and the blocked downtown traffic begins at last to move. Usually, it’s like water rushing from a burst dam. Today, the rush doesn’t happen. The lights are blinking green all the way to 23rd Street, but there is no clear passage for traffic. On every street, pedestrians are crossing the avenue, ignoring red lights, jaywalking in the center of the block. A mustached young man comes close, allows the taxi to pass within inches, performs a capeless veronica, matador of Seventh Avenue. A black man snarls angrily as if the taxi were challenging his right to jaywalk. A sockless man with a Jesus beard stands in the middle of the avenue looking at the sky. Our taxi is at the front of the knot of traffic; the driver is in his thirties, lean and dark, anxious. He is beeping his horn, riding his brake pedal.
This is how a life can end: We slow down at 31st Street as a dozen jaywalkers hurry to safety. “These people are nuts,” I say. The cab driver shakes his head: “Now you know why cab drivers go crazy.” Dark laughter. A man eating a hot dog in the middle of our lane jumps back and curses. Then up ahead, we see a dense group of people crossing against the red light at 28th Street. The taxi driver crosses 29th, still riding the brake, clearing a path with his horn. We are in the second lane from the right. Most of the jaywalkers are young, and they hurry to the safety of the corners. But there’s a second group beyond the corner, in our lane. A tractor-trailer is illegally parked at a bus stop and these people are waiting for the bus. The driver slows, still making staccato bursts with his horn.
And then directly in front of us, oblivious to everything, looking straight ahead as he walks west against the red light, is an older man. Until this moment, he has been screened by those who have hurried to the corner, and now he is suddenly, vulnerably, alone. The driver blares the horn, hits the brakes, tries to move left, finds that lane blocked by another car, and then there is a hard socking thump, metal smashing into bone, and a blurred image of the man as we go by, the man rolling, brakes screeching, my daughter’s scream, and we are stopped.
I look at the older man, who is on his back. Blood pumps from his mouth. He is shoeless. His body doesn’t move. And then the crowd, frozen in horror, comes alive. The driver is breathing shallowly, his head on the wheel, holding the wheel with both hands, gripping it. “No,” he says. “No. No.” He taps his head on the wheel. “Shit.” He gazes to his left, away from the fallen man, and then slowly turns, sees the smear of blood. “No,” he says. “No.”
My daughter is sobbing now, and I try to comfort her, and I hear people shouting, “Don’t move him” and “Call the police, you asshole, call the police.” And then part of the crowd turns ugly. A suety young man in a zipper jacket comes to the door on the driver’s side. “You doin’ sebenty miles an hour, man! You murder the guy!” Another shouts: “Fuckin’ cab driver, runnin’ the yellow light, yeah, that muthafucka!”
I get out of the cab. There are no police on the scene yet and all of this has happened in a couple of minutes. I try to calm down the angrier people, explaining I was in the cab, that the driver wasn’t speeding, that the old man simply had not responded, that he was clearly walking across the red light. “Still, he should go slow! Look, that’s an old man!”
That’s the way most of us are in New York these days; we have been trained by television and politics to retaliate. An old man is knocked to the ground by a cab, his life spilling onto the dirty tar, and people want to hurt someone back. The driver starts out of the cab. The suety man screams at him. The cab driver explains with some heat about his speed, about his horn, about the red light, but the suety man’s eyes are blazing and others are behind him. The passions of a mob are stirring in the cold damp air. “Mothafucka, you drive like a crazy man …”
I tell the driver to get back in the cab and keep quiet. Then behind us, pushing through the clotted traffic, comes a police car. The crowd abruptly ends its transformation into a mob. More sirens in the distance. The sense of time slowed is replaced by time become swift. Cops and medics work expertly on the stricken man; his body is covered with rubber sheets for warmth; they press down on his chest. Younger cops move the crowd onto the sidewalk, others try to get the traffic moving. An older cop with a sad, grave face picks up the man’s brown loafers.