of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. I left, in April of 1957, a floor-through apartment on West Thirteenth Street, and return, when I do, to midtown hotels and the Upper East Side apartments of obliging friends. The Village, with its bookstores and framer’s shops, its bricked-in literary memories and lingering bohemian redolence, is off the track of a professional visit—an elevator-propelled whirl in and out of high-rise offices and prix-fixe restaurants. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying that the disadvantages of New York life which led me to leave have intensified rather than abated, and that the city which Le Corbusier described as a magnificent disaster is less and less magnificent.
Always, as one arrives, there is the old acceleration of the pulse—the mountainous gray skyline glimpsed from the Triboro Bridge, the cheerful games of basketball and handball being played on the recreational asphalt beside the FDR Drive, the startling, steamy, rain-splotched intimacy of the side streets where one’s taxi slows to a crawl, the careless flung beauty of the pedestrians clumped at the street corners. So many faces, costumes, packages, errands! So many preoccupations, hopes, passions, lives in progress! So much human stuff, clustering and streaming with a languid colorful impatience like the pheromone-coded mass maneuvers of bees!
But soon the faces and their individual expressions merge and vanish under a dulling insistent pressure, the thrum and push of congestion. As ever more office buildings are heaped upon the East Fifties—the hugest of them, the slant-topped white Citicorp building, clearly about to fall off its stilts onto your head—and an ever-greater number of impromptu merchants spread their dubiously legal wares on the sidewalks, even pedestrian traffic jams. One is tripped, hassled, detoured. Buskers and beggars cram every available niche. The sidewalks and subway platforms, generously designed in the last century, have been overwhelmed on both the minor and major entrepreneurial scales. The Manhattan grid, thatfine old machine for living, now sticks and grinds at every intersection, and the discreet brownstones of the side streets look down upon a clogged nightmare of perpetual reconstruction and insolent double parking. Even a sunny day feels like a tornado of confusion one is hurrying to get out of, into the sanctum of the hotel room, the office, the friendly apartment. New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space—only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. While popular journalism focuses on the possible collapse of Los Angeles and San Francisco into chasms opened by earthquakes, here on the East Coast, on its oblong of solid granite, the country’s greatest city is sinking into the chasm of itself.
Hardened New Yorkers will sniff, What else is new? Their metropolis has been a kind of vigorous hell since the days of the Five Points and the immigrant-packed Lower East Side. Its vitality and glamour are ironically rooted in merciless skirmish and inconvenient teeming; a leering familiarity with crowdedness and menace is the local badge of citizenship, and the city’s constant moral instruction features just this piquant proximity of rich and poor—the Park Avenue matron deftly dodging the wino on his grate, the high-skirted hooker being solicited from the black-windowed limousine. In a city that rises higher and digs deeper than any other, unchecked ascents and descents rocket side by side, exhilaratingly. In the noonday throng on Fifth Avenue near Forty-second Street, I once saw a nearly naked man, shirtless and barefoot and sooty from his place of subterranean rest, scuttle along in a pair of split overalls that exposed his buttocks, and everyone’s eyes but mine were expertly averted. Mr. Sammler reflects, in Saul Bellow’s late-Sixties novel of Manhattan, “You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from
Always, as one arrives, there is the old acceleration of the pulse—the mountainous gray skyline glimpsed from the Triboro Bridge, the cheerful games of basketball and handball being played on the recreational asphalt beside the FDR Drive, the startling, steamy, rain-splotched intimacy of the side streets where one’s taxi slows to a crawl, the careless flung beauty of the pedestrians clumped at the street corners. So many faces, costumes, packages, errands! So many preoccupations, hopes, passions, lives in progress! So much human stuff, clustering and streaming with a languid colorful impatience like the pheromone-coded mass maneuvers of bees!
But soon the faces and their individual expressions merge and vanish under a dulling insistent pressure, the thrum and push of congestion. As ever more office buildings are heaped upon the East Fifties—the hugest of them, the slant-topped white Citicorp building, clearly about to fall off its stilts onto your head—and an ever-greater number of impromptu merchants spread their dubiously legal wares on the sidewalks, even pedestrian traffic jams. One is tripped, hassled, detoured. Buskers and beggars cram every available niche. The sidewalks and subway platforms, generously designed in the last century, have been overwhelmed on both the minor and major entrepreneurial scales. The Manhattan grid, thatfine old machine for living, now sticks and grinds at every intersection, and the discreet brownstones of the side streets look down upon a clogged nightmare of perpetual reconstruction and insolent double parking. Even a sunny day feels like a tornado of confusion one is hurrying to get out of, into the sanctum of the hotel room, the office, the friendly apartment. New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space—only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. While popular journalism focuses on the possible collapse of Los Angeles and San Francisco into chasms opened by earthquakes, here on the East Coast, on its oblong of solid granite, the country’s greatest city is sinking into the chasm of itself.
Hardened New Yorkers will sniff, What else is new? Their metropolis has been a kind of vigorous hell since the days of the Five Points and the immigrant-packed Lower East Side. Its vitality and glamour are ironically rooted in merciless skirmish and inconvenient teeming; a leering familiarity with crowdedness and menace is the local badge of citizenship, and the city’s constant moral instruction features just this piquant proximity of rich and poor—the Park Avenue matron deftly dodging the wino on his grate, the high-skirted hooker being solicited from the black-windowed limousine. In a city that rises higher and digs deeper than any other, unchecked ascents and descents rocket side by side, exhilaratingly. In the noonday throng on Fifth Avenue near Forty-second Street, I once saw a nearly naked man, shirtless and barefoot and sooty from his place of subterranean rest, scuttle along in a pair of split overalls that exposed his buttocks, and everyone’s eyes but mine were expertly averted. Mr. Sammler reflects, in Saul Bellow’s late-Sixties novel of Manhattan, “You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from
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