The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [2]
New York is the ultimate bazaar. Think about other cities: Los Angeles has Hollywood; Pittsburgh, steel; Detroit, automobiles; New Orleans, jazz (and food); Houston, a space center; Nashville, country music. Boston has Harvard; Washington is government; Moscow is the Kremlin; Zurich is banking; Miami Beach is, well, Miami Beach. Think about New York. It cannot be characterized the way other cities can. A single street or avenue or neighborhood can symbolize an entire industry or life style. Wall Street is finance; Broadway is theater; Seventh Avenue is fashion; Madison Avenue is advertising; Fifth Avenue is shopping; Greenwich Village is bohemia; Coney Island is amusement. Everyone has heard of Radio City Music Hall, the Statue of Liberty, the UN, Central Park, the Empire State Building. Once Harlem, and now the South Bronx, defined a slum.
As a bazaar, no other city can compete with New York. Ideas, services, merchandise are placed on sale here, then sold or rejected. But more: the city is a bazaar of cultures, life styles, people. Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Irish- and Italo-Americans, West Indians, Haitians, Malaysians, poor Vietnamese or Continental European refugees, romantic poets, gays, Moonies, feminists, iconoclastic geniuses, nuts, Scientologists, Kreminologists, every shade of political opinion, not to mention addicts, pimps, prostitutes, shopping bag ladies—all flower here. Unlike small towns or homogenized suburbs, New York does not quickly dismiss unusual behavior or ideas as weird. It is almost normal to be abnormal. “On any person who desires such queer prizes,” E. B. White has written, “New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.… New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants, so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.”
New York is also an incubator of the nation’s ideals. We are the Statue of Liberty City, gateway to the new world for millions of immigrants. For these pioneers and their offspring, the streets really were paved with gold. Freedom, opportunity, optimism, compassionate government, the melting of class, ethnic and racial divisions—for the multitudes, New York worked. It worked for the Aulettas. My brother, Richard, was the first Auletta to go to college. In Coney Island, we grew up shoulder to shoulder with Jews, Italians, Irish, blacks, Hispanics. My father, Pat, is Italian; my mother, the former Nettie Tenenbaum, is Jewish. Her sister Rose married Pete Dellaquila; sister Sally married William Pagluiga. My father’s brother Mike wed Sally Altman. It was terrific. We got the cultural advantage and got to take off from school on both Catholic and Jewish holidays.
Sure, there were racial and ethnic tensions in Coney Island: a black might get his ankles bent if he strayed into Braggo’s coffee shop on Mermaid Avenue and West 15th Street, where some pretty tough Italians hung out; a passing Jew might be called a “fairy.” But even those who did not want to be were exposed to others in a way that could not help but educate them. Out of this exposure there slowly grew greater tolerance. First for ethnic and racial minorities. Then for ideas, different life styles, for people who in other places might have been