"The Rough Adventure of the Street ..."
Charyn, Jerome
Cities, like dreams," Calvino tells us, "are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything...
...Harlem is like a burnt-out Vietnamese village with bits of decoration at its borders...
...Danny Kaye...
...The British took it from them, renamed the island, but they couldn't really turn it 624 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS into an English town...
...Under the streets there's an entire system of abandoned subway stations, abandoned tunnels, abandoned tracks, a Plutonian world that mocks all the massive building above ground...
...They'd fled the Old World during potato famines, until there were more Irish in New York than in all of Dublin...
...Or stroll down Ninth Avenue, which hasn't been gentrified, and one can still feel an electric charm, a sense of neighborhood with some of the anarchy a street ought to have...
...It looks and feels like a home for androids...
...They lived in their own little Breweries...
...They are splendid attempts at order in a disordered world...
...And suddenly New York was a Jewish-Italian town...
...Fannie Brice...
...Yet those are the lucky ones, in a way...
...Cities, like dreams," Calvino tells us, "are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else" (Invisible Cities...
...They charged fortunes for tiny houses and tents...
...At the very point of their "apotheosis," the Jews in New York have become a dying breed...
...Lauren Bacall...
...In New York, an "address" is harder and harder to find, particularly for Latinos and blacks...
...No one really listens...
...Visit Mafia country in Bath Beach, where the young bloods stand in front of restaurants wearing their silkiest shirts...
...New York had its own peculiar babble, its own peculiar tongue...
...Because underlying the city's fabric is a kind of dream song that doesn't pay much attention to FALL • 1987 625 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS spectacular rises and falls...
...The old and the young mixing, mingling, with all kinds of quarrels and courtship rites...
...It was a magic harbor...
...It's part of the same metaphysics...
...There was arson...
...Black children ride on the trains, beating out songs on their seats, "rapping" about those moonscapes they live in...
...Diane Arbus...
...Somehow it always stank of wealth...
...0 626 • DISSENT FALL • 1987 • 627...
...And then . . . . The Italians and the Russian Jews arrived...
...But it doesn't matter...
...The middle class have become their own small underprivileged country...
...A few of the children become graffiti artists, breakdancers, or comedians, like Eddie Murphy, but the rest are stranded on their moonscapes: concrete bunkers we call housing developments...
...Lucky Luciano...
...But not even all that glass, that constant duplication of boxes shooting into the sky, can destroy the anarchy that exists inside Manhattan's grid...
...But the Irish ran New York...
...They never entered Wall Street...
...Corner groceries are a relic of a different past...
...Robert De Niro...
...Pluto prefers his own republic...
...And the Italians are sinking into the suburbs...
...With Arnold Rothstein...
...There was highway robbery in the halls...
...Go up to the Grand Concourse and discover Art Deco buildings that some merchant prince built for his favorite daughter fifty years ago...
...It's no accident that the worst gangs the world has ever seen came out of an old slophouse called the Brewery over a hundred and fifty years ago...
...Martin Scorsese...
...The Irish moved out of the Brewery, entered politics, and soon controlled the town...
...The realtors and the young rich want to sculpt the city into a fairyland of fashion shops...
...The island always withstood authority and centers of power, even if it was King George's own capital of British America during the Revolutionary War...
...Shoemakers disappear...
...They built, its underground railroads and its bridges...
...They would steal your money and give your daughter a jar of milk...
...But there was an anarchy in King George's village that went much deeper than any idea of the Crown...
...Tory landlords discovered the miracle of real estate...
...They never conquered Manhattan...
...It was a "housing project" in lower Manhattan for poor blacks, the immigrant Irish, dwarfs, beggars, the lame, and the blind...
...And so we have a fake seaport, a convention center that looks like an isolated tomb of glass, a vertical shopping mall at Herald Square that has its own imbecilic theme song: whole floors dedicated to different city neighborhoods...
...It can never be adequately defined or circumscribed, because it's a city that didn't grow out of an idea that made practical sense...
...There was rape...
...They weren't land speculators or millionaires...
...It has all the arrogance and snobbery of a small village, and the pure delight of an empire sitting by the sea...
...It was a mythical landscape: Europe's dream and desire of a fabulous kingdom, a kingdom of unlimited wealth...
...A few yards from the Yale Club is a door that leads to an "outland" of tunnels under Grand Central Station...
...John Gotti...
...It's a type of murderous energy that has little to do with race or religion, City Hall, or the New York Stock Exchange...
...Norman Mailer...
...There were at least two murders a night inside the Brewery...
...Who goes there...
...And it didn't matter who were its kings...
...THE CAROLINE or THE BEVERLY will be chiseled in stone above the front door . . . . Museums and opera houses cannot get you into the blood of a town...
...And so, it would seem, this endless construction, the desire to build vertical and horizontal towers, and entomb ourselves in glass, has a chance of turning Manhattan into a moonscape for the rich...
...At least they have an address...
...There's even a Burma Road...
...Travel to the Lower East Side, where the Chinese, the Latinos, and elderly Jews occupy the parks and the streets as if they'd all come out of a single crib...
...Every block in Manhattan needs an ice-cream parlor...
...As the poor multiply, so do the rich...
...Ed Koch . . . . But the honeymoon is over...
...Irish spinster ladies taught in the schools...
...Its tenants managed to survive . . . except for those two murders a night...
...New York is the ultimate dream city: monstrous, rude, gentle, brilliant, and dumb...
...There was child prostitution...
...If you want to "discover" New York, go into the dunes: visit those caves in the South Bronx where breakdancing began as ritualized warfare between rival gangs...
...But we have to be Marco Polo in Manhattan, and risk that rough adventure of the street...
...It was a village that grew into a gigantic Monopoly board...
...A black man I discovered selling tiny bottles of perfume outside on the corner seemed to have much more expertise and enthusiasm than any of the human mannequins behind those glass walls...
...The Tories danced on this island throughout most of the revolution, while American soldiers died on prison ships in the harbor...
...Now, in 1987, New York wears an odd metaphysical mask: blacks have grown invisible...
...Irish priests invented their own little Vatican...
...Barbara Streisand...
...Arthur Miller...
...The Dutch arrived like phantoms, thinking they were traders, and did not realize that they'd been seduced by a very strange island...
...They scratched, they starved, they finagled, they married, they stole, they died, they danced with the Irish, and then pushed the Irish out of the way...
...And yet somehow the Brewery learned to police itself...
...But this new world of New Amsterdam and New York wasn't so readily decipherable...
...Who wants to build low-income housing when realtors can make fortunes building towers for the rich...
...Now we have the Chinese, the Koreans, Cambodians, West Indian blacks . . . and God knows what complexion New York will have in fifty years...
...The Irish didn't have palaces on Fifth Avenue...
...They fashioned its day-to-day existence...
...Calvino is right, of course...
...Irish gangs destroyed their Republican rivals and transformed the Democrats into a party of immigrants and thieves...
...They managed politics, the police, and crime...
...A Chinese mayor in 2035 will have to live with the same anarchy that tugs at the city's heart...
...For a while it seemed as if the Irish had established their own state on the island of Manhattan...
...Or go to Brighton Beach, where the Russian Jews have descended, drinking borscht and wearing 1950s' American clothes...
...There were mad, raving songs...
...They built a tiny settlement at the edge of the island, called it New Amsterdam, and forgot they'd ever left home...
...New York has always been a curious mixture of law and disorder...
...It had convicts, rabbis, merchants, witches, soldiers, slaves...
...Various drifters have their own "streets" within these tunnels...
...The English, the Dutch, or even the French, who could have crept down from Canada (New France) to steal the whole pie...
...The thieves were often compassionate...
...Fiorello LaGuardia (who was Italian and Jewish...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
