A lecture I presented at the 2018 meeting of the H. L. Mencken Club:
Is New York Still a City?
by James Kalb
We’re here at the conference to talk about whether America is still a nation. On this panel we’re discussing the limits of democratic pluralism. So I’ll discuss whether New York is a city these days, or whether it’s too plural and egalitarian for that.
Definitions
Whether New York is a city sounds like a silly question. The dictionary defines a city as “an inhabited place of greater size, population, or importance than a town or village.” New York is evidently all that, so case closed. Or so it seems.
But current definitions tend to be NewSpeak. “Nation” is now defined as “a community of people composed of one or more nationalities and possessing a more or less defined territory and government.” If that’s correct, it’s not clear what this conference is about. The meaning of words relating to the topic has become so vague there’s not much to discuss.
So I’d like to turn to an older conception of city. The word comes from Latin civitas, “the social body of the citizens, united by law.” Related words include civic, civil, and civilization. All those things were thought to have an essential connection to cities.
So a city is a community defined by a people and their laws. In classical antiquity it was considered the basic community larger than the family. When Aristotle said man is a political animal he meant that man is an animal that lives his proper life in the community of the polis, which is Greek for city.
Nature and limitations
So on that older definition a city needs a certain unity and definition. That’s why cities made a big point of distinguishing citizens and non-citizens. And it’s one reason cities had walls.
All that means something. Suppose there were a megalopolis from Boston to Washington, divided for administrative convenience into districts centered on areas of somewhat greater density. Would each district be a city? It seems doubtful. There wouldn’t be much unity or definition, so they wouldn’t look like cities.
Or looking at the question from the other direction, would a collection of gated communities that live by online commerce and have very little to do with each other constitute a city? It’s doubtful, even if they shared utilities and trash collection.
The traditional Middle Eastern city was a bit like that. People lived in walled quarters defined by nation and religion. There was also a bazaar, a palace, and a military camp, but not much connection between government and people and not much civic life except the occasional riot. So there might have been a wall around the whole thing, but it wasn’t the classical idea of a city.
New York
To move on to New York.
It was once clearly a city. The fluidity of population and devotion to commerce made community a bit thin, but the state of communication, transportation, and political organization meant people had to hang together and deal with each other. So it was a functioning community.
Washington Irving became famous for giving it a semi-mythological history. The history wasn’t very serious, but people liked it because it served a purpose. It helped define the place.
It even developed an aristocracy that produced high-toned writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton. Neither hung around town much, and the aristocracy couldn’t maintain its position because of all the new money, but it did exist for a while.
In general, though, New York has been notable for change more than coherent culture. At its peak it had a certain romance, but that had to do with energy and enterprise rather than tradition, culture, refinement, or solidity. People were impressed by the skyscrapers, the bustle of humanity, the Great White Way, and so on.
They were also impressed by the mixture of everything and the variety of neighborhoods. There were Jewish intellectuals, old-line WASPs, beatniks and bohemians, various immigrants, and lots of middle-class and working-class people, all in different parts of town.
People found it fascinating. They watched movies set in New York, read O. Henry, and looked at Ashcan School paintings. The place had a character of its own that was accentuated by the pause in immigration between the ’20s and the ’60s. There were Broadway musicals and jazz clubs. There were neighborhoods and bars where artists and intellectuals hung out and new movements got started. The results weren’t great art, great thought, or great literature, and they didn’t get better as time went by, but they were something.
I should mention that some people found it intolerable. New York at its peak was still a city without much civilization. The age of fascination with New York was also the age of literary exiles to Europe.
The end of classic New York
The modern exciting New York didn’t last any longer than the Old New York of Washington Irving or Edith Wharton’s aristocratic New York. Things don’t last there. When Park Slope writer Kay Hymowitz wrote a book about Brooklyn recently she found she had to mention “creative destruction” on every other page.
The destruction has been real, more real than the creativity. The Wikipedia article on New York culture doesn’t mention any new artistic movements emerging in the city after punk rock, hip hop, and graffitti in the 1970s. That might be just as well judging by the nature of those movements and the general direction things were going. But what we’re left with after that for cultural excitement mostly seems to have to do with food, pop culture, high-end consumption choices, and new frontiers in political correctness. And none of it has much to do with New York in particular.
What changed?
So what happened to bring to an end the city of showgirls, smart-alecky cab drivers, Greenwich Village beatniks, Uptown WASPs, and so on?
The change was partly economic. In the 60s every problem in America landed on New York. Manufacturing moved out, “urban problems” moved in, liberals lost touch with reality, and the cost of social services and municipal salaries went through the roof. The population dropped by more than a tenth, and the city faced bankruptcy.
Mayor Koch, financial restructuring, and the stock market boom of the 80s restored some stability, but the city didn’t really right itself until Giuliani became mayor in 1993. That’s when bridges and subways were fixed, streets and parks became safe, and business could have trash hauled without paying off the Mafia.
The new New York
Ever since, New York has become constantly richer, more cosmopolitan, more diverse, and more boring.
Putting Rudy aside, the biggest changes have been brought by global finance, post-60s immigration, and post-70s gentrification, which means an invasion by floods of well-heeled young people from elsewhere who don’t have many children and like to live close to the center of things. Instead of stubborn American problems, New York has become a recipient of global wealth and fluidity.
So the city today is awash in money and foreigners. New construction is everywhere. We have mobs of foreign tourists and expats. Classic New York neighborhoods have been swallowed up by hipsters, yuppies, and arrivals from abroad. Real estate and the financial industry continue to spew out multi-millionaires. Districts of abandoned factories and warehouses keep turning into offices, co-op apartments, locavore restaurants, and expensive chain stores.
Manhattan’s Little Italy is a few tourist restaurants and heritage cheese shops in a much-expanded Chinatown. Young white professionals and their offspring populate playgrounds in Harlem. The outer boroughs are peopled by Bengalis, Fukienese, Koreans, Arabs, and Latin Americans of various nationalities. The barbers aren’t Italians any more, they’re not even eastern Europeans, they’re Jews from Uzbekistan. And the greater part of Manhattan south of Harlem—the Upper West and Lower East Sides, NoHo and SoHo, the garment, flower, and meatpacking districts, the East and West Village, the Wall Street area—is merging into a single glossy business, entertainment, residential, and shopping district.
It’s spread to Brooklyn, of course. The block where I live there was mostly notable into the 90s for street life, drugs, blocked-up buildings, and Al Sharpton, who lived in the next habitable building to our house. Now it has an offshoot of a well-known Austin barbecue joint on one corner, a fancy Persian restaurant next door, another fancy eatery at the other end of the block, and until recently an artisanal mayonnaise shop a couple blocks further on.
Not even Bill de Blasio, a man symbolizing the reaction against 20 years of relative competence and ideological rationality in City Hall, has been able to slow the tide of money and cosmopolitanism.
Cultural consequences
All this counts as the new vibrancy, the sort of thing the characters on Girls want a piece of, but it’s the new sameness. Like every place else, New York is becoming a locally-themed version of the global city, a place for tourists, high-end consumers, and international business, with immigrant service workers living somehow in places no one visits.
The city’s become repetitious in a way it never was before. One bank branch, high-end chain store, or hipster neighborhood is like another. But who else can afford the rents? Normal people with families don’t live in Manhattan. On weekends most of it looks like a high-end dating bar. Some of the tonier areas have actually gone dead in the evening, because apartments are owned by absentee foreigners who see them as places to park money and seek refuge if things turn sour back home.
A great deal remains, of course. We still have endless museums, libraries, performances, parks, beaches, botanical gardens, theaters, old-line clubs, learned societies, and associations of every kind.
We also have 800 languages, nine Chinatowns, endless blocks of bars and restaurants, and vast tracts in the outer boroughs where no one who reads the New York Times ever goes.
What’s it all for?
Put it all together and there’s no shortage of high and low class pursuits. If you want chamber music, sports, hot dog eating contests, traditional Catholicism, Uzbek cuisine, or free semi-professional opera, you can find it easily.
But the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Jumbling things together doesn’t polish them, and the city mostly makes people worse at what they are. In New York as elsewhere in the United States Latin American culture runs downhill. Yuppies and hipsters grow sillier and more self-involved. South Asian food stores stock fewer basic ingredients and more mixes and junk food. Ethnic parades are a stage for bad conduct that ranges from drunken boorishness on Saint Paddy’s Day to murder at the West Indian Day Parade.
General reflections
All that suggests basic problems. The city is loaded with theaters, concert halls, museums, art galleries, and universities. Lots of artists, writers, musicians, actors, and dancers make their livings there. And it’s a world center of journalism, publishing, and broadcasting.
So in a sense it’s a big cultural center. But the culture isn’t exactly a culture since it doesn’t have much of a connection to people who live there. It’s more a specialized business or profession. The result is that there’s little that is distinct from what’s found elsewhere. It’s all hooked into the same commercial, electronic, and grant networks as everywhere else.
New York now makes everything from everywhere immediately available. That sounds wonderful, but it means the place has no culture of its own. Infinite diversity abolishes character. There used to be stock New York figures—the Irish cop, the outer boroughs cabbie—but no more. A yuppie or a Pakistani cab driver in New York is the same as anywhere else. Even New York accents are vanishing.
Human consequences
So what do you have instead of a culture in a city that’s not really a city but is more like a physical realization of the Internet?
What you have more and more is the urban equivalent of Twitter and Amazon.
Many New Yorkers are good people — kind, honest, wise, perceptive, public-spirited, amusing, and what not else. But without civilized order none of it goes anywhere. Particulars cancel each other out. They dissipate and vanish without effect.
What’s left is a mass of people trying to make their way in a world without community and without any idea what community might be. What passes for public life becomes a mass of impulses, hatreds, frauds, power grabs, and delusions that oscillate between conflict and temporary equilibrium.
There’s also lots of insanity. When Obama got elected people in my neighborhood partied in the streets all night. The world had been made new. When Trump won there were public meetings in churches in which well-intentioned high-functioning people shared their fears that vans were going to come and cart them off to camps. That really happened.
Conclusions
But it’s not just New York. Electronic media are turning the world into a global metropolis, a sort of virtual New York that incorporates Delhi, Shanghai, and Mexico City.
The Internet makes everything immediately available wherever you are. And the world’s imitating the Internet. My wife and I were in Istanbul lately. It turned out our Air B&B was in a hipster neighborhood. There were lots of vegan restaurants and signs in English not directed toward foreigners.
So the physical New York, the virtual New York, and the global New York are becoming harder to distinguish from each other. But what does that make any of them? No one can say, so each can construct the reality for himself. Or get it constructed for him by someone else. I think that explains a lot of today’s public life. Nothing’s real, and nothing stays what it is.
What to do?
Complaining doesn’t do a lot of good. Life goes on. People live their everyday lives, some well and some badly.
Even if the world is paved with asphalt or dissolved into electronics the grass pops up and breaks through here and there. Nature reasserts herself. But what can we do to encourage that?
In the 60s people used to say “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Today the best advice is probably to turn off, tune out, and read a book, or maybe drop into whatever’s actually going on right around you. Anything, so long as it’s more solid than virtual reality.
It seems doubtful that gestures of resistance will have major effect any time soon. Trump’s better than Hilary, but I doubt he’ll transform anything basic. High-minded people say that art and beauty will save us. That’s not likely. Others call for a religious revival.
The problems are entirely basic, and anything that goes deep enough to reverse them is likely to take a very long time and involve a great many unexpected developments. No doubt that will happen, because nothing lasts forever, especially lunacy. But for now it seems we’re stuck with gestures, palliatives, makeshifts, and the attempt to live well in truly odd times.