I
n 2000, Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace published the first volume of Gotham, a compelling and garlanded work of history that told the story (in 1,400 pages) of New York’s first three centuries, from its founding in 1624 to 1898. Wallace alone has now produced the second, Greater Gotham, but this 1,200-page doorstopper covers only a 20-year period—from 1898, when Manhattan absorbed Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island into one mega-city, to 1918. This new compendium seems not so much written as compiled by a band of researchers. It lacks the narrative thrust that made the first volume so engaging.
Wallace has grand plans, as befits a self-described Marxist. He tries with some success to use the growth of Manhattan as a financial center to write not just New York’s history but the history of the American and transatlantic economies. Greater Gotham opens with chapters on mergers and acquisitions, describing the roles of J.P. Morgan and other New York financiers in the consolidation of vast new national corporations. It’s only in chapter three that we get to New York City in 1898 and the possibility that at last the book will tell an actual tale. But Wallace fumbles the story of Andrew H. Green, the primary force behind the consolidation of the city and “arguably,” in the words of the historian Kenneth Jackson, “the most important leader in Gotham’s long history.”
Green, an early proponent of historic preservation, led the city’s revival in the 1870s after it had been laid low by the Boss Tweed Ring (Tweed and his cronies had looted Manhattan’s finances). This goes unmentioned by Wallace, who picks up the story in the 1890s when Manhattan, competing with London, feared being overtaken by the rapidly growing Chicago. Wallace suggests that Green’s efforts at political consolidation were a mere extension of the corporate consolidations he describes in the opening chapter. But by the 1890s, Green had become a critic of the giant corporations, which had, he said, “invaded every field of work and every sphere of business.” In the cities, “people live, move and have their being by sufferance of the corporate power.” Wallace’s hunger to place an ideological overlay on the classic American hunger to be “the biggest” blinds him to the simple truth about Green.
The book becomes a tiresome meld of textbook and encyclopedia, with the entries organized in chronological order. There are accounts of muckrakers, the struggles for political power, the boom in skyscrapers, the physical growth of the city, Broadway, unions, radicals, feminists and blacks, art, and the ethnic hostilities unleashed by World War I. Wallace, the left-wing moralist, slants the accounts to decry what he sees as the insidious influences of rampant capitalism.
I write as a native New Yorker whose left-wing grandfather—Harry Fein, a staunch Social Democrat and vice president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—had a more sophisticated view. An active critic of sweatshops, he nonetheless loved America. An escapee from czarist Russia, he cherished the freedoms he found in New York. They allowed him to move from the Lower East Side to the Bronx. As a boy, I sat on the steps listening to him and his friends, gathered in his sunken living room on the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, bemoaning the outcome of the Russian Revolution. My grandfather and his friends saw an irresolvable tension between the values of socialism and the virtues of individual freedom. Wallace never grasps this tension. When all is said and done, Greater Gotham is long on pages and short on insights.
T
he blogger Jeremiah Moss has produced a similarly left-wing book, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul—a blend of memoir, chronicle, and elegy for a city he never knew firsthand. Moss is the pen name of Griffin Hansbury, a psychoanalyst and social worker who came to Gotham’s East Village only in 1993 from a small town in Western Massachusetts.
Hansbury had already developed a strong emotional attachment to his imagined ideal of New York. And he arrived with a built-in sense that the great days of New York, the years when punk rock blared from CBGB’s on the Bowery and the promise of sexual adventure emanated from the aura of the Village’s legendary locales, had passed. The malevolence that destroyed his vision was gentrification. Here the two books, the history of the late-19th- and early-20th-century capitalist metropolis and the memoir of the late-20th- and early-21st-century capitalist revival, are thematically joined. Both Wallace and Moss believe that capitalism is a dangerous and destructive force. But only Moss indulges in nostalgie de la boue.
What Moss sees as Gotham’s carnivalesque glory was experienced by others as a time of torment and danger. In the early 1990s, the sidewalk in front of Cooper Union’s engineering building in the East Village (where I taught at the time) was filled with blankets covered with stolen goods sold by grifters. As a result, a top-tier school enormously attractive because of its (then) free tuition was repelling parents who came to visit. But nothing could be done, “explained” the pre-Giuliani NYPD, because there were books displayed on the blankets—and the American Civil Liberties Union had informed the cops that clearing the blankets would therefore violate free speech.
The same hesitant police officers are depicted by Jeremiah Moss as storm troopers when, at the instigation of nearby Puerto Rican mothers led by Councilman Antonio Pagan, they attempted to reclaim the public space in Tompkins Square Park in 1988. Mothers and their children had been driven from their benches and playgrounds by hustlers, anarchists, junkies, and squatters. The police moved in to clear out the vagrants who had taken over. What followed was a criminal riot, which Moss—who was far away—depicts as an act of anti-authoritarian resistance.
Moss, besotted with his fantasy New York, sees the police action as an example of official intolerance. But as the linguist George Jochnowitz notes, Tompkins Square had, before it was invaded by the precursors of Antifa, “been known as Four Language Park,” where one could speak to others in Ukrainian, Polish, Yiddish, and Italian. “These ethnics did not force their cultures on others,” Jochnowitz has written. “They were willing to live and let live.” What changed was the rise of a lower-class cultural imperialism in which graffiti and boom boxes sent out the message, “I live in a slum and so do you.”
Moss isn’t all wet, however. Manhattan during the Bloomberg years and since has become far more homogenized. It’s hard not to miss the Roseland Ballroom—but the same can’t be said for the Bowery flophouses. At one point, Bleecker Street, once famous for its Zito’s bakery and the quirky Aphrodesia Herbs, sported no fewer than six Marc Jacobs boutiques in a four-block stretch. All across Manhattan, mom-and-pop stores have been displaced by innumerable drugstores, Gaps, Starbucks, and Chase banks. But what was the alternative? Moss, like Wallace, avoids the topic of the city’s unavoidable tension. It exists to produce wealth. That wealth pays for social services even as it displaces the poor.
My grandfather would plotz if he could see the new Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. It’s still overrun with people. But now they’re not buying fruit from carts or household fabrics. Instead they’re dancing and singing at places like the three-story Rockwood Music Hall. Yes, capitalism generates problems. But while neither Wallace nor Moss will acknowledge it, that’s a problem that can be endured. If my left-wing grandfather were alive, he’d see it as progress—of sorts.
