There Went New York; or What Is New York?

Reviewed by Mason B. Williams

New York is layered with ghosts. “It carries on its lapel,” E.B. White wrote, “the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.” Holed up in the Algonquin Hotel, White compiled a brief compendium: “I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, … thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska … (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own senses of emanations from without.”

The Fall of a Great American City: New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence
By Kevin Baker
City Point Press, 2019
176 pages

“Does anyone even [write] such things anymore?” Kevin Baker asks in this bracing essay, an extended version of a piece that originally appeared in Harper’s. In fact, The Fall of a Great American City is Here Is New York in jeremiad form — the latest entry in a now-flourishing corpus that might be called the “My Lost City” genre. (I’ve drawn the name from Luc Sante’s ineffable 2003 reminiscence.) Whereas White expressed postwar New York’s heady optimism (and also its noire dread), Baker’s book is an extended lamentation of the loss of those things that were once worth celebrating. In the current age of inequality, he writes, New York “is being plundered not only of its treasure, but also its heart, and soul, and purpose.”

The indices of this loss are many, but at their core is a dwindling sense of the rich particularity, the feeling of being embedded in a distinctive history grounded in a distinctive place that White evoked. A great city, Baker writes, “must be a place with a past.” It must be a place “of the particular and the peculiar, where one can see, all the time, things you don’t see anywhere else.” It must foster a vibrant street life — “the warrens of little shops and businesses that once sustained our neighborhood in the ‘exuberant diversity’ that Jane Jacobs considered a prerequisite to a successful city.” These are “the dwindling treasures of our existence in the city,” Baker writes. “Nothing so grand, just the framework of a life.” The symptoms of decline include everything from predatory monoculture and retail vacancies to the closure of favorite old restaurants and cinemas, the demise of long-term tenancy to the proliferation of banal architecture to the fact that the only public goods that really seem to work are those with affluent clienteles.

Impermanence is one of New York’s core characteristics, and New Yorkers have been lamenting the loss of their city’s soul, Bryan Waterman once noted, since the Knickerbockers yearned for the old Dutch city. Baker insists that this time is different—St. Mark’s really is dead. Perhaps, but who really knows?

More significant from the historian’s perspective is the fact that the My Lost City genre tends to focus on Manhattan south of 96th Street and parts of Brooklyn; the moral heart of Baker’s story is the Upper West Side. Jeremiah Moss, in his book Vanishing New York, recognized as much: “I’m not talking about the whole city … because my city is a romantic notion.” This particular focus has consequences, which render the genre problematic as an account of the city’s contemporary history. Compare Baker’s declension narrative with the conflicted stories of recovery told in books that focus on communities of color, such as Rob Snyder’s Crossing Broadway, Brian Goldstein’s The Roots of Urban Renaissance, and A. K. Sandoval-Strausz’s Barrio America. At the same time, the genre’s limited geographic ambit can yield a narrow topical focus — the problem of racial inequality, for example, appears for the first time on page 102 of Baker’s book, and issues central to the experiences of black and Hispanic communities during this period, such as policing, are largely absent.

Baker’s account of why New York has changed offers an apt and spirited summary of recent research and reporting on the political economy of development in the city, wonderfully illustrated with telling details. (An ad for a glitzy development on the Lower East Side, he relates, promised a “golf simulator room, a squash court, bowling alleys, [a] light-filled circular spa” and not least, “an adult tree house.”) For Baker, the primary cause is soaring rents, themselves a product of a “flood of outsiders” — wealthy outsiders — whose presence has been solicited by the city and state governments. Decades of austerity and tax incentives for corporate and luxury development, he writes, “have resulted in a New York where economic survival for most of its people is more tenuous and harried than it was during the worst of our ‘bankruptcy’ and ‘Sodom on the Hudson’ days from forty years ago.” (True: as Baker relates, in 2015, the official city poverty rate stood at 19.9 percent, up from 15 percent during the city’s 1975 scrape with bankruptcy.) Stagnant or falling wages and soaring rents have contributed to the displacement of long-time residents, community businesses, and the “odd people” (to use William H. Whyte’s term) which give New York its character. Notwithstanding the city’s affluence, New York’s public officials act, Baker writes, “as if they were running a Carolina mill town in the 1930s,” throwing subsidies at corporations and wealthy residents who don’t need them. This, he concludes, has led to “high-rent blight,” commercial vacancies, and “dead zones” full of vertical safe deposit boxes for the global elite which occupy swaths of prime real estate while contributing little to the civic good. Despite a generation of scholarship on neoliberal governance, though, historians still have much to learn about the causal mechanisms of soaring rents and displacement. Baker, for instance, identifies rent regulation as a crucial area of policy. Yet we still don’t know all that much about the politics and actual workings of rent control in the last four decades.

For these reasons, The Fall of a Great American City is best regarded as a primary source, not a work of history. As such, it invites historians to contemplate some interesting questions. How are we to understand the My Lost City genre? What ideas, impulses, needs, meanings, and feelings feed it, and what does its flourishing tell us about the city’s recent history? That historical question, in turn, suggests a more normative and political one: What is New York, and what should it be?

If the My Lost City genre has been catalyzed by the concrete changes Baker describes, I think it should also be understood, at least in part, in terms of the purposes New York’s physical and social landscape have served for a certain kind of person. New York has attracted a particular type of romantic, someone with a drive to become a part of something interesting and important, something big, and, not least, to be surrounded by a critical mass of others who feel similarly — who feel, like Frank O’Hara, that they “can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless [they] know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” The city has been especially attractive to people who, as Bob Dylan once put it, happened to be born far from where they were supposed to be. Baker and Moss both grew up in Massachusetts towns with four-figure populations, and their writing is imbued with a sense of discovery, the passion of which amounts practically to a first true love. (I, too, am one of these people; I grew up in a small, deindustrializing city in West Virginia, and though I moved to New York a decade after Moss and three decades after Baker and Sante — to a very different city — I recognize something of my own experience in theirs.)

The physical and social landscape of the city played a crucial role in the development of this romantic attachment: one invested the streetscape with meanings, emotions, and memories as if in the belief that they could be retrieved later. And because the past is omnipresent in New York for those with the curiosity to look, a fascination with the city leads naturally to a fascination with its past. Though one tends to think of nostalgia and romance as being at odds with a grasp of historical detail, the essayists in the My Lost City genre tend to be deeply knowledgeable about the city’s past; their romantic connection to the past is not mindless or instrumental, but rather an organic extension of their love for the city into the fourth dimension of time.

Why does any of this matter? The sensibilities of romantics are not a compelling public interest. But the My Lost City genre speaks to vital normative questions, I think, because it has an important social and political dimension which transcends individual concerns. If New York offers personal fulfillment, it also holds out the promise of a kind of counter-republic — a place apart from the constraints of modern American life. “[I]n the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all,” Luc Sante wrote. “We thought of the place as a free city … I had never gotten around to changing my nationality from the one assigned me at birth, but I would have declared myself a citizen of New York City had such a stateless state existed, its flag a solid black.” Though Sante’s city is gone — today’s city offers municipal ID cards rather than black flags — New York still seems, however elusive the promise may be, a place where a better, more cosmopolitan and democratic collective life is possible. The displacement of a much-loved community institution by a CVS or a Bank of America is thus not only a personal injury, but also a reminder that the city could be more noble were we able to govern ourselves better. The loss of an institution like Fiorello La Guardia’s Essex Street Market, Baker notes, sunders the threads that enfold New Yorkers past and present into a common story.

In that sense, though its insular vision of New York renders the My Lost City genre an artifact of a particular cluster of experiences rather than a full accounting of New York’s recent past, the political and moral impulses at its heart remain as vital as ever. A fascination with discovery, a sense of belonging to a story whose physical traces abound, a stubborn insistence that a better collective life is possible — all these facilitate the kind of cosmopolitan citizenship that will be necessary to build a more decent city. As I write, New York’s future feels open, uncertain, in a way it hasn’t in decades. The COVID-19 crisis offers cash-rich corporate investors an opportunity to buy up huge portfolios of city real estate, and it threatens to further entrench racial and class inequalities upon which any vision of a decent city founders. But perhaps the fever-break of commercialization and the forced vacation from the tourist economy will open space for new forms of community investment — and this at a moment when New Yorkers are mobilizing through all forms of democratic politics with a renewed fervor and commitment. Maybe the book isn’t closed; maybe today’s citizens are writing a new chapter on what it means to be a New Yorker.

Mason B. Williams is assistant professor of leadership studies and political science at Williams College and the 2020–2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is the author of City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (W.W. Norton, 2013).