November 28, 2013
It occurs to me, thinking about the number of allusions I have made to the neighborhoods of Manhattan that shaped me, that so many of those neighborhoods either do not exist anymore, or have lost their neighborhood character.
Robert Moses destroyed working-class the neighborhoods of the Bronx around the Cross Bronx Expressway and other thoroughfares to northern New York. The exigencies of maintaining an economically sustainable city are doing the rest in 2013.
Yorkville, that German and Central European area whose hub was 86th Street from Third Avenue to the East River, is gone, replaced by high-rises that face each other like plates in a dishwasher. Gone is Elk Candy, that temple of the art of marzipan; Gone is Ideal Restaurant, right next door, with its Yankee Pot Roast and baked beans. Gone is Café Geiger and Die Kleine Konditorei, two high-toned German restaurant-cafés modeled on the Viennese. Gone are the German and German-Jewish bakeries, patronized by one and all, selling stollen, danish, kuchen, French crullers and apple turnovers. My parents were great fans of all of this viennoiserie, preferring them to the exquisite pastries to be had from the fine French patisseries: Dumas and Bonté in particular. (Dumas was on Lexington between 92nd and 93rd, while Bonté was on Third Avenue in the 60s.)
Gone are the German-Jewish owned shops on the Upper West Side: glaziers, hardware store owners, liquor shops, delicatessens. Gone are the cafeterías owned by Cubans that dotted Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. Gone are the all-night bagel bakeries, gone are most of the Italian pastry shops, with their ice--ees, cremolata, and spumoni (--although di Roberti's on First Avenue between 11th and 12th is still doing a good business).
Gone is the life of the distinct villages of Manhattan. What has replaced them are units commercial and residential managed to extract the maximum profitability. After 9/11/2001 the future of New York became conclusively verticalized: more apartments in high-rises built by eager developers would be purchased by young people in the highest-paying jobs in law and investment banking; purchased by more people seeking either to escape onerous taxes in foreign jurisdictions or very wealthy individuals.
The logic is unassailable: New York has endured "boom and bust" cycles throughout its history, and any city manager who can find a way to meet the payroll for the uniformed services and keep the city safe is going to keep New York attractive to cooperative and condominium owners. The price of paying that bill and skirting the fiscal crises that almost brought New York to its knees is a city where the middle-class (let alone the unsubsidized working class) is disappearing.
Walking in Central Park yesterday and taking in the view of Upper Fifth Avenue from about 100th Street, I was struck by the sight of a new, super-tall high-rise apartment building with a banner at its top. The banner gives the phone number to call for "Rentals" in block letters. What is striking about the panorama of the area is that the building is so out of scale with the rest of the buildings. A bit farther on, another high-rise pushed up.
The streetscape of the metropolis has been altered and will continue to be altered, with the result that New York will be more gleaming and vertical. What I always liked about the city before its latest incarnation was that you could escape that verticality by going to one of the neighborhoods, places where people who lived in tenements and old brownstones still put out folding chairs in the summer, when they didn't sit on the stoop.
Escape from the verticality that makes New York what it is in the minds of the world is no longer the option it was: --which may explain the popularity of Brooklyn, which is much harder to navigate, but whose axis remains largely horizontal.
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