Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas

1) "A city is a machine with innumerable parts made by the accumulation of human gestures, a colossal organism forever dying and being born, an ongoing conflict between memory and erasure, a center for capital and for attacks on capital, a rapture, a misery, a mystery, a conspiracy, a destination and point of origin, a labyrinth in which some are lost and some find what they're looking for, an argument about how to live, and evidence that differences don't always have to be resolved, though they may grate and grind against each other for centuries. Nonstop Metropolis is the last volume in a trilogy of atlases exploring what maps can do to describe the ingredients and systems that make up a city and what stories remain to be told after we think we know where we are. The project began in my hometown, San Francisco, and went onward to New Orleans, where I'd been drawn to report on Hurricane Katrina and stayed to fall in love with the various kinds of warmth and presence there, the way people show up. It was inevitable that the third city would be my mother's hometown, New York."

2) "New York, as we talked to David van der Leer and Sarah Farwell at Van Alen Institute, an architectural forum in Manhattan, came to seem like a huge heart forever pumping an exceptionally fluid population in and out of the city. When your heart stops, you die; the city never stops; and New York in particular is a nonstop metropolis, throbbing and rushing at all times of day and night."

3) "The old notion of the central city as a place where bohemia and dissent thrive has been withering away as cities become enclaves of the affluent and the corporate—or empty zones. Many of the condominiums and luxury apartments are often unoccupied, either because they're not primary residences, or because they're places to park money for the transnational super-wealthy or their corporations. In the thicket of super-high-rises going up near Central Park South, it's anything but rare to read of apartment sales like the $95 million recently fetched by the penthouse at 432 Park Avenue, a ninety-six-story needle in the sky. That particular building, with over 400,000 square feet of usable interior space, contains only 104 units for people to live in. But as Fortune magazine reported of those units' owners-oil magnates from the Middle East, Chinese and Russian oligarchs, billionaires from Latin America—they 'all have one thing in common: More money than they know what to do with and a desperation to get as much of it out of their home countries as possible.' The tower casts a shadow on Central Park, making it all too perfect an emblem of the sacrifice of the public to the private in the neoliberal age."

4) "[This] was a town founded by liberal traders, not religious zealots. Compared with their European contemporaries, the seventeenth-century Dutch were much less given to discriminating against anyone with coins to pay. And that ethos remained key to a town whose first permanent foreign trader was a Hispaniola-born mulatto called Rodrigues, whom the Dutch left to set up shop by the Battery in 1614, and where in 1654 twenty-three Sephardic bankers fleeing Catholic Brazil came to forge the first Jewish community in the northern Americas. The English, who took over the colony and renamed it New York in 1664, were less tolerant. But plenty of Dutch and other traders remained, and so too did something of their willingness in 1657 to hear a 'remonstrance' concerning local Quakers, insisting not merely that they should be allowed to worship as they pleased, but that all followers of all faiths be allowed the same freedom. New York remained a market town uniquely open to people of all lands for commerce—unless, of course, they were commerce. For enslaved Africans were present from the start. When Peter Stuyvesant decreed that a high spiked fence be built along New Amsterdam's northern edge in 1653, it was the 'Company's Negroes' who built the rampart giving Wall Street its name. Where Wall Street abutted the East River, the English built an auction block, from which thousands of slaves were bought or loaded onto boats in the 170os, bound for southern slave ports or for the Caribbean."

5) "The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the most New York places for many reasons, but one of them is because if you sit there long enough, everyone in New York will pass by, from dowagers to schoolkids to tourists to locals to the young woman I once saw spend several minutes unsuccessfully trying to vomit in front of the temple, on the grounds that it was imperialist."

6) "The shadow city of tunnels that brings water into New York extends as far down into the earth as the Chrysler Building is high. The shadow city of electricity stretches as far away as the La Grande hydroelectric project located on the Canadian taiga, a complex that spreads out across as much space as the entire state of New York. The first year that Hydro-Québec—which owns the plant—began controlled flows down the Caniapiscau, 10,000 caribou drowned trying to migrate across the now-unfamiliar, much larger river that the dam had created. Was that New York's fault? Hydro-Québec said no. Some New Yorkers wondered anyway. How connected were studio apartments with television sets and Mixmasters to the lives of caribou?"

7) "In a subtler way, names perpetuate the gendering of New York City. Almost every city is full of men's names, names that are markers of who wielded power, who made history, who held fortunes, who was remembered; women are anonymous people who changed fathers' for husbands' names as they married, who lived in private and were comparatively forgot-ten, with few exceptions. This naming stretches across the continent; the peaks of many western mountains have names that make the ranges sound like the board of directors of old corporations, and very little has been named for particular historical women, though Maryland was named after a Queen Mary who never got there. Just as San Francisco was named after an Italian saint and New Orleans after a French king's brother, the duc d'Orléans, so New York, city and state, were named after King Charles I's brother, the duke of York (later King James II), when the British took over the region from the Dutch. Inside this city and state named for a man, you can board the 6 train at the northern end of the line in Pelham Bay, named after a Mr. Pell, in a borough named for a Swedish man, Jonas Bronck, and ride the train down into Manhattan, which is unusual in the city for retaining an indigenous name (the Bronx was said to be named Rananchqua by the local Lenape, Keskeskeck by other native groups). There the 6 travels down Lexington Avenue, parallel to Madison Avenue, named, of course, after President James Madison."

8) "Out on the quiet sidewalk, I looked around. No one was waiting to accost me. I stared up at the building and the darkness in the windows tugged at me—were people up there waiting for hands willing to work on the Sabbath? Would they shout for assistance if they saw me? The only sound I heard was the whistle of a wind that rushed down to push me along, as if someone had whispered that I was late. Suddenly these sidewalks where I had walked dozens of times before became a place more revealing, and more mysterious. New York City does that to you—it sneaks up on you. It sneaks up on you and promises that there is always more to see, to hear, to know. It surprises you with its inexhaustibility. At the same time, it reminds you that there is much that is hidden, because of the basic algebra in which knowledge equals identity. Behind what is revealed lie layers of national histories and cultural rituals and religious traditions and family lore. The city is a fossil record, and every layer you peel back exposes another layer whose contours reveal only our limitations in knowing the city. And yet, New York is as ready to give of itself as it is apt to withhold itself. Nowhere is this tendency to announce its marvels while simultaneously whispering its secrets as interwoven as within its immigrant communities."

9) "Late in the 196os the RAND Corporation, the Defense Department's research center, opened up an urban subsidiary. In the early Nixon years, governments at every level were cutting social services, but all of them were uneasy about charges of racism. It then became an intellectual problem to find a formula for service cuts that didn't look blatantly racist. RAND's idea was to base all service policy on gains or losses in population. In neighborhoods that were losing people, cities would have a supposedly color-blind way to cut. In neighborhoods losing lots of people, the cuts could be wholesale. The Bronx seems to have been one place this formula was tested: in the years the South Bronx was burning down, and people were fleeing the fires, the Bronx lost a third of its fire services. Touché! Observers of the Bronx's troubles, including many New Yorkers, developed an elaborate vocabulary of deflection and denial, which very soon would be used against New York itself. 'What's wrong with these people? Why are they doing this to themselves?' Magic words like these transform victims of misery and misfortune into perverse perpetrators of malice. Social scientists got millions of dollars in grants, from foundations and federal agencies, to explore the character defects of poor people from the Bronx that led them—here was another dehumanizing cliché of those days—'to foul their own nest.' No one found an answer, maybe because there's really no way to imagine hundreds of thousands of people burning down their homes and getting themselves and their children killed. The mayor's Arson Task Force, probably New York's most thoroughly New Left government agency, and an unlikely ally, the insurance industry, proposed to change the questions and to shift the focus from the tenants to the landlords. The giant insurance companies, which had bought up Bronx insurance pools in the pastoral early 1960s, suffered enormous losses there in the 1970s. Finally, in the early 1980s, the big companies resolved together to stop paying claims on tenement fires. All at once, as if by magic, tenement fires ceased. In the last year of payoffs, the Bronx lost about 1,300 buildings to fire. In the first year without payoffs, it lost 12. In the second year, it lost 3. Isn't it nice when, as happens every now and then, very complex human questions have very simple answers and when the answers keep poor people in their homes, not put out in the street?"

10) "The mighty Laurentide ice sheet carved vast landscapes—the Finger Lakes, the Hudson River Valley—but it ground to a halt in Brooklyn. Evidence of its defeat is all around us. The ice mass was like a titanic bulldozer thrown into reverse, and that left behind a great pile of crap—what we know today as Long Island."