In a single week earlier this month, I dined at three great restaurants in what was once the culinarily bleak Financial District, rode the J train through formerly scary neighborhoods to a family occasion in Richmond Hill, Queens, and checked out beautiful new buildings in a rejuvenated block of Harlem.
The old Gotham matters a lot to me, a Brooklyn-born New Yorker who witnessed Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Ocean Hill section decline so badly in the 1950s that my family fled to Long Island. I returned to Brooklyn and Manhattan in time for the boroughs’ abandonment to crime and physical collapse in the 1970s-early ’90s. And I’ll be forever haunted by 9/11, which seemed to leave downtown, if not the entire city, for dead.
Yet here we are, a city that has never been so much in demand. In my 67-year lifetime, the five boroughs have never been so full: Our population is soaring toward 9 million; most parts of town bustle with energy and investment; and crime has fallen to historic lows.
I marvel over the blossoming. I can walk down the Hull Street block where I grew up without fearing for my life — which wasn’t the case 25 years ago when it was strewn with empty lots and menace lurked behind every parked car.
Now, an enthralling new book makes clear that I’m not alone in my home-town infatuation. “Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York” (Spiegel & Grau) by New York magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson lends nuance, texture and historical perspective to my impression that New York City has never been so appealing or life-affirming as it is today.
That truth is somehow, infuriatingly, lost on many native-born New Yorkers of every political stripe — from Mayor de Blasio (who didn’t protest when one of his inauguration speakers described the city as a “plantation”) to President Trump (who’s threatening to cut off our federal aid). It’s fashionable to snark that the Big Apple, behind the veneer of gleaming towers and artsy espresso stands, is rotten to the core.
Davidson isn’t out to rebut anyone but instead presents the city’s current condition in the context of its history and unceasing cycles of upheaval and renewal. His book focuses mainly on eight areas that illustrate, in different ways, New York’s extraordinary capacity to regenerate after decades of irrelevance, crisis or catastrophe: the Financial District, the Seaport and the Brooklyn waterfront, the World Trade Center, West Chelsea and the High Line, 42nd Street, the Upper West Side, upper Manhattan’s Sugar Hill and the South Bronx.
“No neighborhood in New York has changed identities so profoundly” as West Chelsea and the High Line, Davidson writes. After dutifully evoking the passage of freight trains along 11th Avenue and then the elevated trestle, he takes us on a thrill ride through the area’s multiple lives, many of them sordid — such as the 1980s merger of the Meatpacking District with the rough-trade gay-flesh market.
Today, of course, it’s a thriving crossroads of art, architecture and affluence that isn’t to everyone’s taste. But in New York, nothing is forever — “the High Line may be almost done, but its story is far from over, because the city that changes around it is a story that never folds.”
It’s fashionable to snark that the Big Apple, behind the veneer of gleaming towers and artsy espresso stands, is rotten to the core.
Urbanologists and sociologists by the score insisted that 9/11 would spell the end of downtown and perhaps the whole city. Ha! The Financial District that once closed up at 5 p.m. is home today to more than 60,000 who fill the streets 24-7.
But Davidson reminds us that overcoming catastrophe was nothing new to Wall Street’s environs. The horrific fire of 1835 was as devastating to the city of its time as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, he writes. Downtown has always “been shaped by crisis and rebirth: the Depression, the fiscal crisis of 1975, the 9/11 attacks, the financial meltdown of 2008, Hurricane Sandy. Each time, the city has retooled.”
Along the way, small victories helped offset the blows until longer-term solutions could be found. Who knew that the collapse of shipping in the 1950s allowed “a coterie of virtually indigent artists” including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly and James Rosenquist, to establish a creative colony on Coenties Slip, to make “new art out of fragments and memories of a New York that was constantly slipping away?”
Looking at 42nd Street — long “an artery or sordid drear” that was “pounded by hookers, con men, addicts and pickpockets” — Davidson muses, “Is there any human activity that architecture can’t elevate?” Masterpieces such as Grand Central Terminal, the New York Public Library, the Chrysler Building — even the brightly-lit drama of seedy Times Square — proclaimed “the city’s nimbleness, its ability to navigate the chaotic present” without utterly relinquishing its past.
Davidson’s lifelong home neighborhood, the arts-and-culture driven Upper West Side, has morphed in desirable and undesirable ways from boom to bust to boom. Older Jewish residents are still haunted by the Holocaust; newer arrivals by memories of the late-20th century, when it was one of the city’s most dangerous places to live. While the Upper West Side’s physical appearance hasn’t changed too much, its energy and economic patterns have. It’s much more expensive than it ever was yet still home base — even after an “influx of bankers” — to “the foot soldiers of New York’s creative economy” including editors, choreographers and percussionists.
Change is more often than not for the best, even when it grows out of tragedy.
Davidson breaks up the chapters on neighborhoods with “Interlude” essays on topics like the city’s skyline, apartments and streets. Writing on the new skyscrapers that dwarf the Empire State Building, Davidson singles out the blue-tinted One57 for ridicule, claiming it resembles “Darth Vader dressed up for a charity ball.” But then he refreshingly, albeit grudgingly, admits that the Rafael Viñoly-designed 432 Park Avenue — a 1,400-foot-tall, concrete-clad condo tower that dominates “the city’s silhouette as forcefully as a campanile looms over an Italian hill town” and is regarded by many as an atrocity — “grew on me as it grew.” It did the same for me.
Yes, some consequences of change have been “disastrous,” the book reminds us. The city’s resources and pleasures are unevenly available to its myriad constituencies. Remorseless, often cruel change is the city’s destiny. But change is more often than not for the best, even when it grows out of tragedy.
Davidson reminds us that predictions of New York’s doom have been around since the days of Dutch rule. Many creative geniuses deplored the changes they witnessed in their own time. The great novelist Henry James returned in 1904 after living in Europe for 20 years. He hated most of what he saw — especially skyscrapers, monstrosities of no value “save the commercial at any cost” and a blight on a gentler skyline previously dominated by Trinity Church. “James was eloquently, spectacularly wrong,” Davidson chuckles.
We all have our loves and hates. I’ll forgive Davidson’s embrace of bike lanes for his ecstatic portrait of our aging, glorious “megalopolis” that “convinces the world that it is young again . . . a place of myth and magic and possibility.”