Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [12]
PAST AS PROLOGUE
It is indeed remarkable that so many tangible traces of earlier eras remain, given that few structures in New York were ever hallowed by mere age. As the city’s economy shifted from commercial to industrial to corporate, older buildings were exuberantly torn down to make way for newer ones—higher, more fashionable, more convenient, more profitable—and these ruthless remakings gave the cityscape a chameleon-like, quicksilver quality that matched the mutability of its economy, its populace, and its position on the planet.
The city’s well-merited reputation as a perpetual work-in-progress helps explain why from Washington Irving’s day New Yorkers were famous for being uninterested in their own past. “New York is notoriously the largest and least loved of any of our great cities,” wrote Harper’s Monthly in 1856. “Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years together. A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.”
One of our ongoing avenues of inquiry follows New Yorkers as they slowly developed the conviction that their past was worth knowing, even worth preserving. Indeed we believe there is a greater degree of interest in Gotham’s history today than was ever the case before. We hope to nourish this ripening historical sensibility by telling the city’s story in a spirited way—a relatively easy task given that it’s intrinsically dazzling, a claim we think transcends both the fond boasting of all historians for their subject and the legendary conceitedness of New Yorkers (we notorious braggarts).
More difficult, perhaps, because it goes against the American ahistorical grain, we also hope to show that temporal analysis can be as useful as it is entertaining, that it can be helpful for New Yorkers (and Americans) to better situate themselves in time. This does not mean adopting the narrow presentism that runs through some of the narratives advanced by present-day commentators—sagas of rise and dirges of decline aimed at providing a pedigree for their purveyors’ optimistic or pessimistic takes on the state of the contemporary city.
Optimists portray New York as a magnificent and never-better metropolis. They point to the inrush of new immigrants, no longer streaming past the Statue in the harbor but airlifting their way into Kennedy, as evidence that much of the world sees New York as a place of opportunity, a mecca for the talented and ambitious. The newcomers’ belief that they can survive and prosper (say the optimists) rests on solid foundations. Wall Street’s enormous corporate and financial sector churns out professional and business services jobs. New York hosts the nation’s publishing, advertising, fashion, design, and network television industries. Its museums, concert halls, playhouses, nightclubs, and festivals draw vast numbers of tourists, who in turn help sustain an enormous array of restaurants and hotels. Some see a high-tech, Silicon Alley, bio-medical future lying just around the corner.
New housing blooms amid the outer borough ruins, these boosters note, and new capital improvements head toward completion. Refurbished subways are cleaner and swifter. Crime is down dramatically. The City University of New York, though under attack, provides opportunities for the newly arrived and the less advantaged, while the city’s tradition of social caring sustains a network of public support services, albeit one in parlous condition. Despite cultural antagonisms, moreover, the city remains a model of rough-hewn cosmopolitanism and multicultural tolerance, with an astonishing mix of peoples living side by side in reasonable harmony. Indeed