AT midnight on River Avenue in The Bronx right behind Yankee Stadium, a swirling crowd cohered into a joyous mob to demonstrate their glee at the team’s World Series victory (and to hurl comically obscene imprecations at the Atlanta Braves and its star player, Chipper Jones).
As the gathering gained steam, someone yelled out the words “New York!” And for a moment, the crowd abandoned its various chants to shout the name of the city in which we were all standing – a city whose renaissance could not be more appropriately represented than by the re-emergence of the Yankees as the dominant team in baseball.
If the Yankees are the team of the century, then New York is the city of the century – for reasons both good and bad. It was only in the early years of the 20th century that New York truly became the dominant city in the United States (throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it was in competition with Boston and Philadelphia for the honor). The unification of the five boroughs in 1898 had a lot to do with it. So too did the 1904 opening of the subways, which would soon evolve into the most comprehensive public-transit system the world had ever seen.
But the key to the city’s pre-eminence had to do with two forces often considered a liability in these times: immigration and growth. The overwhelming majority of immigrants from Europe in the first two decades of the 20th century came through New York and transformed it utterly.
And they stayed in large measure because of the city’s growth as an economic power, which sucked up labor as fast as workers came into the city. So labor-intensive was this growth that even women and teenagers could find work at the drop of a hat.
Were they exploited, these workers? Of course, and the horrific circumstances under which many of them labored remain one of the great shames of the city’s history. The immigrants, many of whom were fleeing oppressive circumstances, crowded into theaters where they wept while overwrought performers sang in their native tongues about the glories of the motherland they had left behind.
But they wanted to be Americans – actually, what they really wanted was to be considered New Yorkers, which to them was the same thing. The insult that people like my grandmother, an immigrant from Galicia, most dreaded was being called a “greenhorn” – someone whose accent, dress and habits marked her as foreign-born and bred.
But my grandmother and millions of people like her brought a vitality and diversity to the city that gave it a character unlike any other in the world. That, together with the city’s amazing infrastructure and its ceaseless economic growth, gave all New Yorkers a sense that they were a part of something genuinely exceptional – the creation of a world capital.
The other great world capitals were many centuries or millennia old, with the ruins to prove it. New York was genuinely new, and a new city needed new people, new heroes, a new social dynamic.
Even the poorest New Yorkers had the sense that though they might be cogs in a machine, perhaps their children would grow up to redesign the machinery and run it for their benefit and the benefit of people like them.
The civic pride was real and it was widespread. Most people say that the place they live is the most wonderful place on earth, but they usually say it defensively and then start to attack other, more indisputably wonderful places to prove they’re not that wonderful after all. Other cities in America created so-called “booster” organizations in which they labored to convince outsiders (and their own residents) that they were glorious centers of culture and decorum.
New Yorkers needed no boosterism. Its residents knew without question that their city was the most wonderful place on earth in the literal meaning of the word “wonderful” – that from the skyscrapers to the Brooklyn Bridge to Broadway, it was full of wonders.
Nothing showed it better than the New York Yankees – for almost four decades a team of accomplishment so superior that there was something almost soulless about its uninterrupted excellence. And when New York City began to turn sour in the 1960s, so did the Yankees. From 1964 until 1976, the great Yankee machine rusted out, hitting bottom when the city went broke in 1975.
Even when the team recovered in 1977 and won the World Series, the response was near-tragic. Fans stormed the field, vandalizing the stadium, ripping up the turf. Who can forget the sight of Reggie Jackson punching his way into the dugout – fending off the out-of-control fans of his own team? That image captured the unfortunate reality of the new New York City. It had become ungovernable.
The city’s renaissance in the 1990s was mirrored in the Yankee renaissance – a confident and likable team, playing in a newly safe Bronx neighborhood where fans could dance and sing at midnight together without fear of a riot. The recovery of New York City has been a reassertion of the city’s greatness and its standing as the true capital of the world. The Yankees are the ambassadors of that heartening and important message.
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E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com