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These new helmsmen of land and sea and air are the creatures of ( manding time, their senses extended in the antennules of a hundred struments. So they must necessarily regard the city a little as the gunn officer does his target; but they too feel its magnetism. It comes to t
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METROPOLIS AND HER CHILDREN
uveler a great way off, like the intimation of any other dense human egagement. The expectant nerves contract, the mind is sensitized in ad- vice. A familiar visitor, a New Yorker, waits for the sense of the city's niumed envelopment; but the bus passenger coming down over the Bos- En1 Post Road from New England watches traffic slow and thicken as the evirons towns become larger, draw together, give off the effect of a Obsker life. There is a moment in which he asks himself: "Are we in the cy yet ? Is this New York?" The visitor by rail, if he approaches from the suth, may get hardly a glimpse of the towers before he tunnels under the river and coasts to a stop along the platform at Pennsylvania Station. (ming in from the north, he cannot help but be struck by the infinite peblo of the Bronx.
But to the traveler by air, especially from the north or east, the city apears with the instancy of revelation: the slowly crinkling samite of its r ers and New York Harbor vaporous beyond, the Bronx splayed out ad interwoven with the tight dark Hudson Valley foliage, Brooklyn and Teens and Staten Island dispersed in their enormous encampments about te narrow seaward-thrusting rock of Manhattan. Seen thus from above, te pattern of the island suggests a weirdly shaped printer's form. It is as the lead rules had been picked out for avenues between the solid lines c type which are buildings. The skyscrapers-those characters too pointed t be equalized by the wooden mallet of the makeup man-prickle up apng the lower rim of Central Park, through the midtown section, and rost densely at the foot of the island.
These last are what the homebound traveler by water sees as his vessel cmes through the Narrows into the Lower Bay, a journey and journey's ed which has always somehow the quality of a public triumph. There sind the inconceivable spires of Manhattan-composed, repeating the thrust torch of Liberty, at first almost without the sense of great weight, te distraction of archaic and heterogeneous detail. The forms of "gypsum ostals," a giant's cromlech, a mass of stalagmites, "the Cathedrals and Great White Thrones of the National Parks," an Arizona mesa, a "ship living stone," a petrified forest, "an irregular tableland intersected by sadowy cañons," a mastodon herd, "a pin-cushion," the Henry Moun- tns in Utah, "a vertical aggregation," dividends in the sky: such meta- Hors reflect its diversity of association. As Melville's Redburn indicates, te term skyscraper itself-a noun full in the homely tradition of the merican vernacular-was once synonymous with moon-sail and cloud- ker as the name for a ship's topmost kites.
IO CONTEMPORARY SCENE
Le Corbusier, celebrated French architect in the International sty refers to this massed upthrust as "the winning of a game: proclamat by skyscraper." And in the third book of Jules Romains' Psyché, Pie Febvre thinks of it as "a rivalry of tumefactions constructed in haste on rock of Manhattan, a typical fragment of American unreality." Taken gether, both images-a sense of the grandiose subjective exemplified architectural terms, and the perhaps consequent suggestion of imperfec realized forms-help to clarify a profound intimation of the familiar perienced by many travelers, even those who have no acquaintance w the city. In one of the Regional Plan volumes, this intimation is drar. tized, simply enough, by photographs on facing pages: one of lov Manhattan, the other of Mont-Saint-Michel, the ancient fortress rock France, a cluster of towers about which the tides swirl like level a lanches.
The visual analogy is striking, but it does not end there. The image the medieval castle-town has gone deep into the consciousness of weste man. Preserved in masonry at Mont-Saint-Michel and Carcassonne, st ized in the perspectives of a hundred medieval and Renaissance painte translated into fantasy in the fairy tales of Andersen and Perrault a the towers of Cloud Cuckoo Land, popularized in the colors of Dulac a Rackham and Parrish and the mass-production lampshade, it reappears the apparition of lower Manhattan evoked by the new technology: { medieval image of power, the infantile or schizoid fantasy of withdraw the supreme image of escape to the inaccessible.
The Concept of the City
Historically, as Robert L. Duffus points out in Mastering a Metropol cities "have tended to grow up around something-a fortification, temple, a market-place, a landing-place." In other words, the selection site and arrangement have usually been determined by a choice of soc function, a definite cultural emphasis. Sometimes it was relatively ac dental. On the principle that travelers may be customers, a market tor grew up at a crossroads. The walled towns of the Middle Ages, usua grouped about a castle for efficient defense, retained to some extent the lir of a military camp; but the exigencies of space within the walls made i a certain homogeneous and charming irregularity. The radial plans of t Renaissance, of which Karlsruhe is the most striking example, probat developed from the Greek and Roman cities clustered around a cent:
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staple or forum, although they retained some of the medieval irregu- lagities.
Pi Parallel with the unplanned growth of cities, there has always been a o dition of planned cities, conceived either as Utopias-by Plato in his bublic, More in his Utopia, Campanella in his City of the Sun, Bellamy ecghis Looking Backward, Samuel Butler in his Erewhon, to name only a fre- or by architects and city planners for actual realization in stone and mortar. The geometrical design for Alexandria, and Wren's project for vb rebuilding of London after the great fire were examples of this kind. astable among them was the plan for Washington. Challenged by the un- lospectedly possible, Jefferson studied the city patterns of Europe and with dashington and L'Enfant evolved the American capital city.
But it is significant that in general the tradition of abstract design, sur- ing through the Renaissance, through Karlsruhe and Palladio and ren into the era of L'Enfant's Washington and Haussmann's renovation 20 Paris, is basically eclectic, corresponding almost exactly to the ana- enistic revivals of the classic orders or the Gothic in architecture. But the nteticism is not merely negative; it implies a basic disregard of the primacy cultural function, of the possible and fruitful coordination between count and function and environment in a new order of the city.
ars In any case, for good or ill, planned cities did not by any means repre- it the dominant mode in urban evolution. If there was one, it can only called agglomeration; the gathering of flies around a stain of honey. bre often than not, that honey was commerce, additionally sweetened by perquisites of a capital city. Philip II, for example, deliberately built the municipal strength of Paris as an offset to the challenge of the oles, thus contributing to the new nationalism and the upswing of the borchant classes. Tudor London, clamorous with trades and spiky with the ona sts of ships, added central cells of industry to the commercial swarming the city. After the great fires of the next century, Wren suggested that herever possible industries should be relocated on the outer margins of J: city-a recommendation seconded by Walter Curt Behrendt and the tonew York Regional Plan in the 1930's.
The advent of what Sir Patrick Geddes called the paleotechnic period, letly in the 19th century, with its criteria of absolute utilitarianism, egidually created the inhuman ratholes of London and Glasgow and fErmingham and New York and Berlin-that "home city of the rent bar- becks." Dickens described a composite of industrial cities as Coketown. n : had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling
12 CONTEMPORARY SCENE
dye"; and "the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness contained several large streets all very like one another, inhabited people exactly like one another, who all went in and out at the si 2 hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements to do the sa work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorr and every year the counterpart of the last and the next."
New York City, of all the great communities in the modern wo has been most acted upon by the agencies incident to the 19th ceni revolution in industry and techniques, most subject to the devastal consequences of 19th century laissez faire and the tensions of ex sively rapid growth, most influenced by the multiplication and hyj trophy of functions, most compromised by a street plan which un. some of the inconvenient features of the rigidly classical and the narro utilitarian, most unstable in the number and distribution of its populati most opportunistic in land uses, most anarchic in the character of building, and most dynamic in the pulse and variety of its living w
In a history of some 330 years, of which hardly more than a century been taken up with major growth, New York has somehow condensed . accommodated the stresses of 20 centuries in the evolution of Rome Paris. Such drastic foreshortening exacted a price and developed an portunity. The price was paid and is being paid in the primary concept of the city as merely an accumulation: the largest size, the greatest num (even of units of quality), and the highest speed. It was paid in the r lessness-and the complementary meliorism that all this would somel right itself-of what may be called the utilitarian imperative, which off waterside areas from public use, gobbled up available park sites, da ered blocks with sunless tenements and no less sunless apartment houo made night and day indistinguishable under the overhanging scarps lower Manhattan, fostered duplication and peculation and high taxes municipal government, and centered a terrific volume of traffic in a 1 sectors already overburdened by subway and elevated concentration, lack of through highways and the density of building.
These became commonplaces, even rules of thumb. At a certain po the practical effect was that a man could not go to the theater or vis: friend without a wholly disproportionate expenditure of time, ener ingenuity and money. But in the deepest sense-the sense, that is, which these processes were at once an expression and reflection of New Yorker's cultural attitude toward his city-such factors tended
ex
tent
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METROPOLIS AND HER CHILDREN
Prome psychological vested interests. The healthy dynamism of a develop- metropolis was perpetuated as neurotic action for its own sake. The ginal necessity of enduring noise, dirt, conflict, confusion as symptoms transitional phase developed into a taste for the mindless intoxicant #sensation. Tall buildings convenient for intracommunication in such cavities as finance became tall buildings for the sake of mere height and aglory. In fine, the psychology of swift growth-its quick sense of the Mgedient, its prompt resource, its urgent energy, its prodigality in human ette, its impatience with deeper interrelationships and effects, by-prod- tc; or details-was carried over and intensified in a period which de- ended consolidation, an assay of cultural attitudes and values, planning, hnew concept of the city.
y 1938 the signs of this new attitude were already sharply manifest. trang before that, in 1931, Thomas Adams could write: "There is no city The world that has a greater influence than New York. . . All over this optinent it is imitated, even where it is said to be feared. Men say New rk is a warning rather than an example, and then proceed to make it example. Outside America, New York is America, and its skyscraper a d bol of the spirit of America. It is not only the largest city in the meld, it is the greatest and most powerful city that is not a capital of a non." There were jeremiads and panegyrics; this was a temperate state- ent of the fact.
u All through the 1920's, New York had been not only the symbol of emerica but the daemonic symbol of the modern-the fortunate giant in neilyouth, the world city whose past weighed least heavily upon its future. chEl not Paul Morand testified that the latest skyscraper was always the s,e? It was a city infallible in finance, torrential in pace, unlimited in ource, hard as infrangible diamonds, forever leaping upon the mo- rait beyond. "You can get away with anything," said Ellen Thatcher in xon Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, "if you do it quick enough." aged-with its dividend, sensation-became the master formula in every n, man activity and technique: Wall Street, dancing, crime, the theater, truction, even death. "Don't get much time to sleep," said a Broad- pa soda clerk. "I have to sleep so fast I'm all tired out when I get up in morning." This was rueful Eddington, the telescoping of time and nale-a cliché of the period-in terms of the wear and tear on human iskabolism. Photographers, draughtsmen, commentators all attempted to ofth this loud moment or to translate it in terms of indefinite extension. devi aseptic skyscraper city, an immense machine for living, was projected
14 CONTEMPORARY SCENE
by such draughtsmen and writers as Hugh Ferriss, Sheldon Cheney, F mond Hood and Norman Bel Geddes (of whom an anonymous sati remarked in 1937 that he suffered from "an edifice complex").
In this period too New York had broken out full sail as the Ameri capital of the arts and a world capital of major importance. This wa: itself an extraordinary phenomenon. Other large, recently colonial ci -Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, even Mexico City-had sho no such versatile and autochthonous upsurge. It could be explained ( in part by a reference to great concentration of wealth and commerc as usual, a concentration in which artists had little share and aga which, for the most part, they swung the shoulder of revolt. This cult definition came out of the native genius of the city itself and was ins rably collateral with it. To a remarkable degree, the formulation and terpretation of that genius became the first task of the artist in New Y
Historians of another age may find the cultural rivalries of the Eas seaboard cities in the middle of the 19th century as fruitful a source social interpretation as their contests in trade. Philadelphia had rece Charleston and Baltimore settled into their graceful mold. But Bostor Van Wyck Brooks has superbly recreated it in The Flowering of 1 England, produced a culture articulated in all its parts. It is necessar indicate more closely here the relative scale of that culture. Its per symbol, perhaps, was the figure of Hawthorne confronting the Ma Faun. Its faithfulness to a special Anglo-American tradition at once fined its limits and committed it to contest with the assimilative turbul of its more democratic neighbor to the southward. Even in Emerson, haps, there was something of the merely benign clergyman; ever Thoreau, a little of the truant schoolboy decorating his metaphorical at Walden with the knickknacks of Athens and Rome. And even in E Dickinson's triumph of the microcosmic, it was possible to feel the se child who withdraws from the world to thread in quietude the qu silver necklaces of the imagination. The neat coherence of parts, the ¿ scholars competing for the prizes of the intelligence, the inflexibilit ethical referrents, the absence of that excess which is also the evidenc supreme vitality, the frugality and unanimity of pattern-all these ' the sedate lamplight of a provincial culture, a culture comparable to of Ghent in the late 14th century or 18th century Dublin and Stockh
But there were giants to the southward-men who had consorted the buffalo and leviathan, who were privy to enormous griefs and € sies, who had faced the tremendous gales of the world in their most
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METROPOLIS AND HER CHILDREN 15
egrative onslaught. These men-Whitman and Melville-were of an- her breed, another stature; and they proclaimed themselves men of Man- tan. They came of the same Dutch-English stock, bred by that Empire te through which the commerce of the nation had begun to pour. Moby ck appeared in 1851, Leaves of Grass in 1855. Both books were shunned excoriated. Then and later, the culture of New York resembled the hultuous cross-rips of Hell Gate. Museums, opera, the theater, libraries, cure halls, schools, the superb education of street and waterfront: these re lavishly available, and Whitman in particular made good use of them. : the dominant tenor of the city was savage in its commercial excesses, enous in land use (though the salvaging of Central Park began a few rs before the Civil War) and brutal in its disregard for health, ameni- , the elementary kindness of life. The deeper significance of such per- alities as Whitman and Melville is that they were archetypes of the 's character-to-be. Their decisive feeling for the supreme importance, frequent nobility of the common man, their immersion by choice in hopes and occupations-these were as foreign to the men of Boston, h their uneasy self-awareness in the role of scholar-gentlemen, as they ild have been to that earlier New Yorker, the James Fenimore Cooper b wrote The American Democrat.
He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New k," said Lewis Mumford, "touches, whether he knows it or not, Walt hitman." Certainly it was Whitman who conceived the city as an image he democratic process-an historic reversal, it may be noted, of Thomas erson's primary design. The city spoke out of Whitman's fiber: out of broadest and most intimate lines of A Broadway Pageant and Crossing oklyn Bridge, out of
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
but of
. .. submit to no models but your own O city !
in Democratic Vistas he faced all the implications of his image: splen- in the amplitude and onrush, "the sparkling sea-tides" and "masses of color" which were New York, but confession that to the cold eye ap- noseted "pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity" and
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16 CONTEMPORARY SCENE
the rest, even to a degree beyond the average of mankind. But there w poets to be called up, poets to make "a literature underlying life"; fertilize it, to create again and again the corrective vision of the city in order more nobly human than itself. Whitman said it and said it plain:
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.
Did he not help to make good his own words?
But in its essence, Whitman's concept of New York as a symbol of democratic maelstrom was a neo-romantic one. It rejoiced in the splen of the fact, hewed close to it, made it Homeric. But was it not, even that society of transitional latitude, precisely a begging of the question to what means were to be applied to the creation of what forms for w ends-ends, that is, which might be translated concretely from the abstr liberty, equality, fraternity, plenty? Affirmation of greatness to nurt greatness, exultation in diversity for the use and promise of diversity, ceptance of barbarous poverty and wrong in the name of a more hum future, faith in the destiny of the free man intermingling freely with fellows: these demanded a confident and practical vision of the city ? whole-a vision broader than Campanella's, as instrumental as the ) chine lathe-formulated and canalized in terms of New York's own na function and genius.
On the contrary, Whitman's noble disorder, with its hospitality to ev thing human, tended to emphasize precisely those impulses toward oriented mass, energy, diversity which came to their anarchic ultimate the end of the 1920's. It was Whitman's dynamic, with its dramatizal of the common impulse, that prevailed in the evolving folkways of York. Even in 1937, the city was most often presented in terms of sp energy, quantity rather than as a correlative for human use and aspirat Nor is it enough to point out, as Marie Swabey does in Theory of Democratic State, that the natural criteria of democracy are predomina quantitative. The confusion inheres in the fact that big numbers have often been used as if they were equivalent to definitions of qualit as if a tremendous number of housing units, even slum dwellings, sc how indicated a corresponding total of human happiness.
Side by side with the most devouring greed, it has almost always } possible to find a superb generosity of life in New York-even, in the 1930's, signs of a nascent change of heart. If the vainglory of power gan to give way a little to the order of a genuine and mature society, t
METROPOLIS AND HER CHILDREN 17
kre men to be thanked for it-too many names for this place. These were men who created and recreated values; who translated those values, der one form or another, into instruments of civic welfare; and who rolemented the common aspiration. Together with that aspiration, the th of their vision and accomplishments determined the living concept »New York: that basic unity, that prerequisite and final virtue of per- os, which must be vital to the coherence of any human organization.
There were engineers-the Roeblings of Brooklyn Bridge, Clifford M. Alland of the Holland Tunnel, Nelson P. Lewis of the Board of Esti- nte and Apportionment, Singstad and Amman of the Port Authority- yose probity blossomed in highways and tunnels, or in the piers and ales of a bridge: such a bridge as Hart Crane had envisaged, a figure of h flight of time and the passage of mankind across the gulf. Stubborn ads and lone fighters-John Peter Zenger of the New York Weekly crnal, whose trial in 1735 vindicated free expression in the press; Nast Parkhurst and the Lexow Committee; Seabury and the City Affairs Inmittee of the 1920's-these and a hundred others struck for the in- ity of a free commonwealth. Scientists and research technicians, who ked with sludge digestion tanks and chlorination and polyphase alter- ars, created a fresh environment available to the social imagination of mmpler culture. A John Dewey reground the tools of the mind; a Thor- Veblen challenged the directions of American civilization, especially ale directions which New York had long controlled.
A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum ey" in Stephen Crane's exact nightmare of the slums; John Dos Pas- Ellen Thatcher murmured: "I think that this city is full of people ting inconceivable things"; and Thomas Wolfe's Eugene Gant cried: pud, cruel, everchanging and ephemeral city, to whom we came once 'n our hearts were high .. . " These were novelists answerable to the th of the living. There were men who created vivid museums, set up cral schools, fought to establish capable hospitals. Even politicians who ped for nothing but their own advantage sometimes inadvertently con- i ited to the civic total, as Tweed did in setting out the pleasant boule- along Broadway north of Sixty-Fifth Street, later routed by the sub- a,
ainters and photographers-Albert Ryder and Thomas Eakins, the an- ors; Steiglitz and Paul Strand and Berenice Abbott; the genre work of n, Glenn Coleman, Reginald Marsh, Lawson, Glackens, Kenneth Hayes er; John Marin's vision of the skyscrapers in a vibrating rondure of
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18 CONTEMPORARY SCENE
forms; Demuth's My Egypt and Billings' and Sheeler's stylization of dustrial masses-these and others literally created the human face of city for the endowment of its citizens. The work of Hardenbergh R. H. Hunt, among the older men, and of McKim and Stanford Whit the 1890's; Goodhue's churches and Snyder's neo-Gothic schools; the buildings of Ely Jacques Kahn; the skyscraper designs of Harvey W Corbett and Raymond Hood; the model apartment groups laid out Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, which helped to anticipate the Fed Government's plans for housing developments in the 1930's: these among the factors that made New York architecture the most exciting various, if not always the soundest, in the world. Too, Whitman had poets-not often prophets, but men and women who struck a dark acc tory music from the city's agonism: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Cr Louise Bogan, Archibald MacLeish, Horace Gregory.
Forecast by such lively wine salesmen of the arts as James Huneke more thorough school of cultural commentators whose origins were ma literary set out in the early 1920's to reexamine the pattern of New \ as a prefiguration of the new America. Randolph Bourne's voice, and : books as Harold Stearns' Civilization in the United States, Waldo Fra Our America, Paul Rosenfeld's Port of New York, Van Wyck Bro America's Coming of Age and William Carlos Williams' In the Amer Grain managed to make themselves heard above the noise of traffic. L Mumford's broad and precise imagination, the warmth and vitality of interpenetrating sense of the whole distinguished half a dozen volu that culminated in the definitive Technics and Civilization and The ture of Cities. There were, finally, the innumerable common heroes in patient and immense body of the city: the workers in laboratories and pitals who died of X-ray burns or a finger pricked at an autopsy; the eter tumbled from his hawk's perch, falling voiceless and alone; ora helmeted sandhogs coughing with silicosis or twisted with the bends; the men who could work no more, the unremembered ones Stephen C found in the city's scratch houses in An Experiment in Misery, whose cessors were still there when Joseph Mitchell published his sketch, A ( Night Downtown, in 1938.
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