I suppose that 30 years from now (as close to us as we are to 1958), when I’ve been safely tucked into the turf at the Green Wood, someone will write in these pages about a Lost New York that includes Area and the Mudd Club and Nell’s, David’s Cookies and Aca Joe and Steve’s ice cream. Someone might mourn Lever House or Trump Tower or the current version of Madison Square Garden. Anything is possible. But if so, I hope that at least one old and wizened New Yorker will reach for a pen and try to explain about our lost glories: and mention spaldeens and trolleys and — if he can make it clear, if he has the skill and the memory — even Willie Mays.
NEW YORK,
December 21-28, 1987
THE SECRET CITY
Every day, we move through the giant city on the sad or preposterous or exhilarating errands of our lives. Most of the time, we see little. We are New Yorkers, after all, and I it is our pride that we think we know the city. Certainly each of us is outfitted with an interior map, a template of the city’s geography. The sun rises in Brooklyn and sets in New Jersey. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. We know where the bridges are, and the tunnels; we understand how they lash together the stony islands of the New York archipelago. We are aware of the great markers — the Empire State Building and Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall, Wall Street and Yankee Stadium, all those and a few dozen more. We are filled with information about our restaurants, theaters, museums, bookstores, music, scandals, celebrities, gangsters, and home-run hitters. We are from here. We know.
And yet, if we stay around long enough, if we try to see without the blinders imposed by work and fear and habit, we discover one terrible fact: We know almost nothing. New York can serve as home, workshop, prison, or bazaar. It can dazzle or defeat us. But it never yields up all of its secrets. In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.
Obviously, all attempts at imposing symmetry are doomed. But it can be said with some modest confidence that for each of us there are two New Yorks: the city we think we know and the Secret City. The first is inhabited by friends and enemies, relatives and acquaintances, and to some extent by the public figures of the time; we understand its rules and protocols; we discuss it at dinner or on the telephone or in bed.
But the Secret City is barely glimpsed. Often it is as different from the familiar city as the New York of Louis Auchincloss is from the New York of John Gotti. There are some doors in this city that are forever closed to strangers; some are among the satrapies of the Upper East Side; some are in Ridgewood. You see a New Yorker who has established dominion over one of the great Wall Street firms; he has done his work with honor and responsibility, and now he and his family lead gilded lives. In the precincts where he works, he is treated with respect, a certain awe, and even, among those who depend upon him for advancement, a small amount of fear. But his accomplishments, his reputation, his existence mean nothing at all to this other New Yorker, a good carpenter from Fort Greene, who makes objects of wood that might be around long after the first man is dead. For each man, the other lives in the Secret City.
Each day, the citizens of these hidden worlds pass one another in the street and almost never connect. Here we are on West 47th Street on a Tuesday afternoon plump with spring. Out on the sidewalks are the grandees and supplicants of the world of diamonds, gold, precious stones; they deal, trade, bargain with one another; they decode fresh news from Antwerp and the Urals. And moving among them is a professor of Romance languages, now turning, abruptly adjusting his stride, then angling through traffic toward the Gotham Book Mart. He sidesteps the elated young accountant from Forest Hills who is carrying on his shoulder a brand-new VCR from 47th Street Photo.
As he enters the splendid old bookstore, he is brushed by the messenger from the commercial-art studio, rushing to pick up photostats. He doesn’t even see the professional wrestler who is going to consult his back doctor. All inhabit separate worlds, different cities. And if it’s impossible even to know 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth, how could anyone ever hope to know the great sprawling anarchic city itself?
One can’t. Sometimes I wander the city without plan or destination, cooling out after a prolonged bout of work. And if I’m now too old to be surprised, I can be intrigued. More than once, I’ve found myself on West End Avenue, staring up at the old pre-war buildings. They are like vertical neighborhoods, the most obvious symbols of the vertical city, with their penthouses snug and distant at the apex. And I try to imagine the lives lived within their walls.
Who is the man with the white hair and the grave manner standing at that sixth-floor window? His hands are behind his back. He looks down into the avenue, but occasionally his mouth moves, he glances behind him. I imagine the air thick with Freudian orthodoxies, and some troubled human being supine upon a couch, while lacerated murmurs beg for peace.
Two floors above, there are four windows so filthy that the glass resembles membrane. I conjure an atmosphere of retreat and withdrawal, some final decision to avoid all further disappointment, to move until the end through loveless rooms full of shrouded furniture, dusty books, and old newspapers, like the Collyer brothers when I was young. On such days, I never investigate; sometimes the most terrible thing of all is to confirm what you have only imagined.
Those apartments are part of the Secret City, a place that is a part of New York, and therefore dense and layered and always plural. But that very density is always changing, those layers shifting, new elements being added to the pluralism. As soon as you think you have figured out New York, have located its poles and its center of gravity, the city’s axis shifts again. A disco or restaurant is suddenly hot; a year later, it’s in Chapter n. You read learned treatises about white flight, the triumph of the suburbs, the end of middle-class New York; within months, white families are contending with black families for the same run-down real estate and, hey, where did all those Koreans come from? The place is simply too large, too dynamic, too infinitely various and mysterious. Almost all of us live with what Alvin Toffler might have more properly called present shock.
That might be why there has never been a great novel about New York. The best New York novels have been fragments, pieces about the garment district, Wall Street, the lives of the rich, the agony of the slums, the treacheries of the theater or the Mob or the magazine business. They are often as brilliant as tesserae, and as incomplete. The New Yorks described by Scott Fitzgerald and Jerome Weidman, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow and William Styron, Jimmy Breslin and Henry James, Jay Mclnerney and John Cheever, Edith Wharton and John O’Hara, John Dos Passos and Daniel Fuchs and Mario Puzo (to name only a few), simply have nothing in common with one another. Forget literary mastery, craft, the sense of place. It’s the vision of each writer that is completely different. Each sees a certain New York and reveals it to the rest of us. But it’s usually not our New York. We can go to London and still see Dickens. Balzac’s ghost prowls Paris. Raymond Chandler seems to have invented Los Angeles. But we never see one writer when we look at New York. The great novel of twentieth-century New York might be the Daily News.
There are, of course, a number of forces that sometimes unify the city we know and the Secret City: weather, sports, television. But when you see the children of the rich prancing like Lippizaner stallions through the Upper East Side, you do not need a degree in anthropology to realize that they are different from the people on the corner of 5th Street and Avenue C. Not better or worse. Simply different. Separated by money, history, and unearned privilege from their fellow citizens. The woman in Crown Heights, her husband gone, struggling to keep off welfare and send her children each morning to school, inhabits a universe different from that of those women with predatory faces that you see in Bendel’s. I know second-generation New Yorkers who have never been to Brooklyn; I know Brooklynites who have never been to Radio City Music Hall. Class separates us. And rank, identity, esteem, and prestige.