Yesterday's New York Times article about the Q train (and Bryan's post about it) reminded me of a famous comment made some eight years ago about the diversity of the ridership on New York's subways, in this case the 7 train.
The comment is a perfect illustration of Thomas Bender's point in the essay "New York as a Center of Difference" (from The Unfinished City [2007]) that New York's "historic cosmopolitanism" puts it odds with the cultural mythologies that have dominated Americans' understanding of what it means to be American. Bender identifies these as Puritanism and Jeffersonian agrarian and argues that neither can give positive cultural or political value to heterogeneity or conflict. Each in its own way is xenophobic, and that distances both of them from the conditions of modern life."
The comment is also a good illustration of the mindset that Thomas Frank describes in his study of contemporary U.S. conservatism, What's the Matter with Kansas (2004): "People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and suburban Kansas City."
The comment was made by major-league pitcher John Rocker, a native of Georgia, and (at the time) the closer for the Atlanta Braves. In an interview, Rocker told Sports Illustrated in the spring of 2000 that New York is "the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark, looking like you're riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing."
Rocker's views may well have represented the views held by a fair number of Americans about their fellow citizens in New York. Indeed, one salon.com writer wondered whether Rocker "merely an expression of the national id whose blurted-out comments represent the sinister opinions secretly held by all the rest of us?" Nevertheless, Rocker's comments were deemed offensive not only by New Yorkers, but also by Major League Baseball, which suspended Rocker for the rest of spring training and the first 28 games of the season (though the punishment was reduced on appeal to merely the first 14 games of the season).
Rocker never really lived down the controversy and (perhaps by coincidence) his pitching performance declined thereafter. By 2003, he was no longer playing major-league ball. Last year, he was implicated as a steroid user during an investigation into an Atlanta steroid ring.
You can learn more about Rocker's views (and order a "Speak English" T-shirt) from his website, http://www.johnrocker.net.
I was reminded by the piece of a late-eighteenth-century account of travel by stage from New York to New Haven. It comes from the diary of a 25-year-old NYC physician and poet named Elihu Hubbard Smith, a central figure in my book Republic of Intellect. Here's his take on his fellow passengers, 29 November 1795, just following New York's yellow fever epidemic that year:
We were six, beside the driver: an old, greasy, gouty, lecherous Jew; a huge Irish manufacturer of Fleecy Hosiery; a South Carolina merchant; a middle-aged, decent Frenchman; a young mercantile Hamburger who spoke French & English; & myself. The Israelite was for fun and singing; but no one sung. He & the Irishman discust politics & The Fever. The Frenchman & the German, first fell on the French Emigrants, next on the Fever--& lastly upon this country. All these topics they handled, with prodigious volubility, in French. The Carolina growled a little, & muttered something on merchandise: I was silent. . . . A rambling talk, on religion, at Supper, gave opportunity to all the guests to discover their infidelity; & the Hebrew, in particular, disclaimed Moses & the prophets; & emphatically pronounced this sentence, that--'from Genesis to Revelations, all is trumpery.'The Times article makes a point that 8 passengers with iPods refused to be interviewed, raising the well-worn specter that headphones are going to cause us all to be bowling alone someday. Nevertheless, the point remains that most subway riders wouldn't be as engaged with their fellow commuters in quite the way Smith was with his -- even though he clearly positions himself above them as an observer. And that doesn't even get to the issue of New Yorkers then and now who, by virtue of class, never condescend to ride with the rest of humanity.
THIS DAY IN NEW YORK CITY HISTORY
On July 3, 1868, Charles T. Harvey conducted the first test of New York's first elevated railway. The experimental section of the rail was built on lower Greenwich street and was designed to be pulled by cables according to a system that Harvey had invented and patented. The New York Times reported on July 4 that "the trial trip upon the elevated road in Greenwich street having been postponed on Thursday on account of an accident to the machinery came off yesterday at noon and was very satisfactory. The car ran easily from the Battery to Cortlandt street, starting at the rate of five miles an hour and increasing to a speed of ten miles. The company does not pretend with its present machinery to run the cars faster than fifteen miles an hour; but during the next two months will make arrangements for much more rapid motion."
Harvey's line would eventually become the Ninth Avenue El, and by mid-1879 it had reached 81st Street. Two years later, it was extended further, turning on 110th Street to Eighth Avenue, where it continued up to the Harlem River at 155th Street.
SOURCES:
Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford UP), pp. 1053-54.
James Blaine Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit (1918), available online at http://www.nycsubway.org/articles/fifty_years_07.html.
Images from http://www.cable-car-guy.com/html/ccnynj.html.
Last night, I saw the new Will Smith movie Hancock, which happened to be showing around the corner during the evening, despite the fact that it officially opens today. Smith plays John Hancock, a reluctant superhero who's equally drawn to saving people and to hitting the bottle, not necessarily in that order. He doesn't care how much collateral damage he causes, and the opening scene features mayhem on the freeways of Los Angeles that ends with a car impaled on a skyscraper. Indeed, if you're a New Yorker, one of the pleasures of the film is watching downtown L.A. get trashed with a glee that is usually reserved for the Big Apple in big budget pictures like Ghostbusters (1984), Smith's own Independence Day (1996), or The Day After Tomorrow (2004). In fact, in the aftermath of the opening freeway scene, the Los Angeles police chief complains to the media about Hancock, wishing that the superhero would just go bother those people in New York.
New York, after all, is a far more familiar stomping ground for superheroes than L. A. Frank Miller is supposed to have said that Superman's Metropolis is New York during the day, while Batman's Gotham City is New York after dark. In the "Afterword" to Batman: Knightfall, A Novel (Bantam Books, 1994), Dennis O'Neill writes that "Batman's Gotham City is Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November."
"Electric Earthquake," the seventh episode of the Superman cartoons produced in the 1940s by Paramount Pictures and Fleischer Studios, is clearly set in Manhattan; likewise, the earliest Batman comics are set in New York. The panels at right are from Detective Comics 31 (1939) and indicate that the setting is "the dark of a New York night." (Click on the image to get a closer view.) The 1978 film version of Superman, starring Christopher Reeve, makes use of famous New York landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center. And other comic series, including Spiderman and Daredevil, are set in New York.
Hancock is an odd movie; after a surprising third-act revelation, it transforms itself itself into something other than the superhero version of Arthur (1981) that the teaser and trailer would lead you to expect. Hancock is a lot messier and edgier than Iron Man (2008). The early reviews have been mixed, but I tend to agree with David Denby in this week's The New Yorker, who argues that Hancock "suggests new visual directions and emotional tonalities for pop." And Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Jason Bateman are all terrific. Go see for yourself.
When I was growing up on Riverside Drive in the '60s and '70s, the mailbox on the corner listed a couple of times a day when the mail was going to be collected. As I remember it, if you went to the box at those times, the mailman would soon arrive to pick up the mail. I remember often running to catch the last pick-up of the day and seeing the mailman there, opening the box. And I knew that if I missed the pick-up, I could run up to Broadway, where there was a box that had a slightly later pick-up time.
It doesn't work that way anymore, at least as of November 30, 2007. Click on the picture above (from the box on Fourth Avenue just south of 14th Street, and you'll get a larger version that shows that the sticker was printed on that date.) As far as I can tell, all of the mailboxes in my zipcode -- 10003 -- have identical collection times: 7:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. Payphone-project.com provides a map on which you can see the locations of all the mailboxes in my zipcode. Click on any of the markers and you'll see the same two times listed.
I'm assuming that there are not a host of mail carriers simultaneously picking up mail from all of the 10003 boxes. In fact, I'd bet there are relatively few (maybe even one) making the rounds. So what the times 7:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. actually mean are "sometime in the morning after 7:00 a.m." and "sometime in the afternoon after 1:00 p.m."
As for that 5:00 p.m. that we all used to know and love? Forget it: go to the post office if you want your mail to move in the late afternoon.
(By the way, it's even worse in my old neighborhood, 10027, which seems to have a pick-up at 1:00 p.m. only.)
Hopefully the designated hours do indicate the earliest times that a mail carrier might arrive, and not an average pick-up time. Imagine some pour soul running out to make the 7:00 a.m. pick-up, when in fact the carrier had collected the mail at 6:50. Oh, you'll say, but there's the 1:00 p.m. as a fallback. Okay, well what if that carrier arrives at 12:50 p.m., and I get there at 12:59?
Which is often the case, when I'm trying to return a Netlix disc in a timely fashion. Generally the mails are pretty speedy in and around the New York area. I know that if I get that envelope in the box around the corner before 1:00 p.m., then Netflix has it the next morning, and I have my new disc the following day (except when Netflix has to send the disc from a non-local warehouse).
What does this all mean? Is it a sign of greater or less efficiency that I can no longer be sure precisely when my mail is being collected? Maybe it all moves so fast and so well that I shouldn't worry about hitting a particular time of day. But if there is, in fact, an unpublished timetable, wouldn't you like to know it? Wouldn't you like to know that you can actually put the Netflix disc in the box at, say, 3:00 p.m. and have it move the same day?
If anyone has any inside knowledge about the USPS's mail collection policy in New York City, we'd love to hear about it at ahistoryofnewyork.com.
The Rolling Stones' landmark album Some Girls was released thirty years ago today. In the liner notes that accompany the soundtrack to the recent documentary Shine A Light, Martin Scorsese writes, "When I was offered the chance to make a concert film with the Stones, I knew right away that I wanted to make it New York. For me, for many other people, they will always be a New York band." The film was shot at New York's Beacon Theater, which Keith Richards describes as one of his "favorite rooms" before launching into a version of "You Got the Silver."
When I read Scorsese's remark, I realized that I felt the same way about the Stones. I first became aware of the band when "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll" started blaring from radios in the summer of '74. It wasn't the Stones' most popular single ever -- I don't think it ever cracked the Top Ten -- but something about the way it sounded -- the thump of Charlie Watt's drums and the sleazy lilt of the fuzzed and acoustic guitars -- had me hooked. I have a vivid memory of hearing the song while stuck in traffic with a friend on the L.I.E. on the way to his parents' weekend house in Remsenberg, Long Island. That friendship didn't survive middle school, but the my virtual friendship with the Rolling Stones has proven to be durable.
In honor of Scorsese's remarks, I started putting together a list of the Stones's most New York-y songs, and I quickly realized that the list was dominated by tracks from Some Girls. For me, the album is indelibly associated with the death of a beloved teacher named Paul-Philippe Bolduc, who taught me French during my high school years at Trinity School on New York's Upper West Side.
Greetings from upstate, where the 29th Conference on New York State History is underway. In an hour or so I'm presenting a paper called "The City on Stage," which grows out of an undergrad seminar I've taught a few times and will serve as an early run at my contribution to our Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City.This is my first NYSHA conference, and I'm enjoying myself, even though this remote locale (we're at Skidmore College, where I'm writing from a dorm room that smells like dirty feet) reminds me that I don't miss being at a college with a quad: there's something creepy about the insularity of it all. Which doesn't mean the school hasn't been a wonderful host ...
The conference itself is a nice blend of academics and public historians -- like many such conferences, a little on the grey side, which I actually enjoy. I've met multiple borough historians and some local history association presidents (including one for Randall's Island) with whom I hope to keep contact and rely on as resources for teaching NYC cultural history.
I'll have more to write later about last night's highly enjoyable keynote by Kevin Baker (author of the historical NYC novels Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Striver's Row). First I wanted to provide a couple links based on one of the more interesting presentations I hit yesterday: on celebrity culture, burlesque troops, and what appears to be a stalker diary written by a young African American woman named Ellen Waite, who had been a hotel worker in Saratoga Springs but moved to the city sometime during the year chronicled in what seems to be a fascinating little diary.
Emma's diary, owned by the New York State Library, has been beautifully digitized and is available online, both in pdf images and as a transcript. A paper by Susan Ingalls Lewis and Morgan Gwenwald of SUNY New Paltz chronicled Emma's growing obsession, once she'd relocated to New York City from upstate, with the British burlesque bombshell Lydia Thompson, who was famous, among other things, not only for her intensely physical stage presence but for horsewhipping a man who'd insulted her husband/manager. (Aside from the paper yesterday, anything I know about Thompson comes from Robert C. Allen's very fun book Horrible Prettiness, on the cultural meanings of burlesque performance in 19c NYC.)
Waite apparently goes, in the diary, from fawning over Thompson on stage to following her around town, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. She ends her year with this:
"Saturday 31. The weather is not settled yet. but it has moderated considerably. my eyes were gratified by a sight of my darling tonight. I shall not have much longer time to look at her. well the old year is about gone into the vast gazes[?] of eternity with the hopes and fears sorrows and disappointments of Millions in its grasp. it has been a year of sorrows and disappointments like many others to me, I wish that the new year might bring brighter prospects and answered petitions to me, and so farewell to 1870."
I count it among small miracles when such documents -- especially from people who would otherwise be confined to anonymity in history's dustbin -- somehow manage to survive.
Later last night, Gwenwald, a librarian at New Paltz, told me about the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a project she's been long affiliated with, located in a Park Slope brownstone. I'll have to add it to our list of NYC resources.
It will probably be late in the summer before I have something intelligent to say about these two new New York novels, so I'll just remark now that I'm not sure, yet, what to make of the media attention these books have received in the last few months, and often in the name of "the New York novel." Is there something about our current moment (other than the obvious post-9/11 moment we've not yet escaped) that makes audiences particularly receptive to a New York novel? Or is it just typical NYC narcissism -- and the fact that a lot of the media I consume is local or otherwise NYC-centric -- that makes these books stand out from all the other novels released this year? Are there other new novels receiving equal press that just aren't on my radar?In any case, Netherland, I've come to understand from the reviews, is a post-9/11 novel that makes the city's multi-borough, multicultural subculture of cricket a major vehicle for contemplating cosmopolitan friendship in the new millennium. Here's a quick roundup of the commentary that has me so hopeful about it: Dwight Garner, a senior editor at the Times Book Review, declares upfront that this is not "the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror," but nonetheless names it "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell." The curmudgeon-critic James Wood, writing in this week's The New Yorker, marks it as the best postcolonial novel in recent memory and suggests that "[p]erhaps Joseph O'Neill is the writer this city has been awaiting: born in Ireland [to an Irish father and Turkish mother], reared in Holland, educated in England, and resident in Manhattan." And New York Mag, noting that "Netherland Is Everywhere," wonders how long it will take before the hipsters start playing cricket in droves. Everyone makes the requisite nod to The Great Gatsby.
Can it possibly live up to the hype?
Today's Times has a tour through NYC's Rauschenberg holdings by Roberta Smith, the paper's chief critic. It opens with the point that the artist not only epitomized (some would say dominated) the post-War NYC art world, but that he insistently drew on -- and gave back to -- the city as well. The piece begins: "Robert Rauschenberg, who died Monday at age 82, is part of the cultural mythos of postwar New York. He regularly exhibited new work here for more than 56 years, which must be some kind of record. It extended from his first solo show at the Betty Parsons gallery in 1951 to the debut of his 2007 "Runts" series at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea in January. ... Many of the materials for Mr. Rauschenberg's found-object wizardry came directly from the sidewalks, gutters and trash bins of New York. Most of the images he used were lifted from its magazines and newspapers and mirrored the look and pulse of urban life." She goes on to tell you where you can find work on display -- and which institutions own the most stuff of his. The rest of the article is here.Her invocation of his relationship to print media serves as a reminder that few contemporary artists can be said to have worked so fervently in so many media -- or to have made the concept of distinct media problematic. And not just in his refusal to differentiate between painting and sculpture, as in the "combines." Yesterday's paper had a piece on his contributions, largely in collaboration with Merce Cunningham, to the city's dance world. David Byrne writes in, reminding us that he even designed album sleeves for popular NYC bands like Talking Heads. He pushed video projection ahead of its time. NPR's obit closes with music he recently composed.
I love the story about his first trip to a museum in the midst of a rural Texas childhood, when, looking at Blue Boy, he first realized that artists existed -- that it was possible to be an artist. He spent the rest of his life grappling with that realization and in doing so serves as a model for anyone else who wants to wake up and make things -- or to make up things -- and look at them with new eyes or ears.
The artist Robert Rauschenberg, subject of one of my favorite New York biographies, is dead at 82. The Times appreciation here. The Combines show, which I saw here and in LA, was without a doubt one of the best shows I'd ever seen -- and as good as it was it benefited from being seen in different venues.