NYC-2030 Gothamitis-New Yorker Article

[Rod Hagen]

Expanded into a long Form, this brief NewYorker article could be Great:

 

GOTHAMITIS

by Adam Gopnik

Issue of 2007-01-08

Posted 2007-01-01

 

It is a sign of the times—which, a Greenwich Village bard once told us, change—that two former mayors of New York may run for President next year, and no one thinks that either candidacy is even slightly a joke. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is thinking of running, as a Republican, and current Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who will be a former by then, may run as a None of the Above. This isn’t just news; it’s news. When, in the early nineteen-seventies, Mayor John Lindsay ran for the Presidency, his candidacy had about all the credibility that George W. Bush’s would have today if he ran for mayor of Baghdad-on-the-Hudson (or Baghdad-on-the-Euphrates, for that matter).

 

What makes the idea of ascending from City Hall to the White House possible is the transformation of New York in the past twenty years—one of the largest civic transformations in American history, and certainly the most unexpected. (Theories credit everything from bright new waves of immigrants to grim forced marches of incarceration, and the sociologists can’t decide which is right.) Just a few weeks ago, Mayor Bloomberg went out to the site of the 1964 World’s Fair and made a peppy speech to introduce a new plan for the city, and what it ought to be like in 2030. He recited the roster of accomplishments that are by now as familiar as the stops on the No. 6 train: unemployment is the lowest it has been in years, the streets have never been cleaner, crime has never, or rarely, been rarer, and the city, which was shrinking, is growing—there will be about nine million New Yorkers a quarter century from now. More kids are graduating from high school, affordable housing is being built—not enough, but more than anywhere else in the country. The city’s bond rating is up, and the money we get from it is going down into a new subway.

 

It is hard for people who don’t know what the city was like in the seventies or the early eighties to understand not only how different it seemed then but how tragically insoluble its problems were believed to be. (Lindsay’s biography was called “The Ungovernable City.”) As Bloomberg said in his speech, New York’s decline and fall was for a long while taken for granted, as a fact of nature—and it is a useful reminder to pious liberals of the limits of liberal pieties that the unobtainable cure turned out to be a lot less hard to find than those pieties claimed. A series of booms, better policing, an insistence that the city’s problems were things to be solved rather than fled: all this helped the transformation. Despite even 9/11—which turned out to change almost nothing in the city’s interplay of money and manners—New York is in good shape, and getting better.

 

Most of the new plan for the future is admirable, and a lot of it is unexpectedly far-seeing and enlightened. The Mayor believes not just in growth but in green growth: the city will now have a Sustainability Advisory Board. We are already cleaning up the pipes that bring water to town from the reservoir, and are fooling around in Queens with soybean-based biofuels to warm our apartments organically. Of the perils of global warming, Bloomberg said, “It’s called global warming, but the impact can be local,” and he detailed a scheme to keep us from being washed away by another Katrina.

 

What seemed a little odd about the plan, and the speech, though, is that the one thing that leaves many New Yorkers worried, or at least uneasy, was nowhere mentioned—perhaps because the Mayor doesn’t notice it, perhaps because that worry is a little metaphysical and almost poetic, resistant to oratory or city budget numbers. It is the sense that the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face.

 

This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

 

By a city we don’t mean, or just mean, a place where many people live; we mean a place where many kinds of people live, all more or less on top of each other. Though Mrs. Astor knew nothing of the Lower East Side, and the Lower East Side could only dream of Mrs. Astor, they were still nodes on one grid. In the course of any even semiconscious wandering through the city—much less the kind of conscious wondering that marks the city’s poetry and literature from Walt Whitman to Alfred Kazin and beyond—each group bumped visually and tangibly into the other. Only twenty-five years ago, a walk from Tribeca to SoHo and the Lower East Side would show as many kinds and classes—rich, aspiring, immigrant—as it had a century before; now that walk is likely to show only the same six stores and the same two banks and the same one shopper.

 

New York, as generations have been taught by the late Jane Jacobs, is a self-organizing place that fixes itself. But let the additional truth be told that though the life of the block is self-organizing, the block itself that lets life happen was made by the hand of a city planner. As the Mayor said, and knows, what we want the city to look like in 2030 will depend on the rules we make now. Aggressive policies for housing, especially low-income housing; a reasonable process of review to help neighborhoods remain neighborhoods; a less passive welcome to every form of monster store; more support for tenants and small merchants—all of these things are worth arguing for, and legislating for, too. This mayor, who came to power as the ultimate entrepreneurial capitalist, has been willing to impose rules—from banning smoking in bars to cutting out the trans fats in pastries—that make the city the kind of place he thinks it ought to be.

 

The New York we imagine in 2030 is bound to be as different as this one is from the city we had in 1976, but we want it to be recognizably New York, mixed up, fragrant, and hopeful—middle-class in character, avant-garde in invitation, a place for plain people and pilgrims and plutocrats alike. The Mayor has promised a “major public outreach effort” to hear what people want, and one of the things that most ordinary New Yorkers want is to feel at home in their city, and only the regulating structure of the city itself can make that possible. It would not be the least of ironies in this still ironic but no longer entirely cynical city if this most capitalist-minded and free-market of mayors left as his legacy a reminder of the inestimable value of good government.

[+ Lucky]

Okay, Rod, I'll bite. How could the article be "Great" if it were expanded into a longer form? What is wrong with the article now that it is not "Great?" Aren't most New Yorker articles already too long?

If the article were about Pinkberry, would you have liked it better? Since it is not "Great" already, why did you post it?

[+ Charlie]

The article does contain one factual error: Bloomberg will still be mayor by the time of next year's presidential election campaign--unless he resigns--because the next mayoral election in NYC is in 2009.

[Luv2play]

I was struck by the statement that more affordable housing is being built in New York than any other place in America. Is this true? I realize that there is a bit of a real estate meltdown in many parts of the country, which may yet turn into a major downturn, or may not. My impression is that New York, and particularly Manhatten, has not been overly affected.

 

But is new housing being built for the middle-class that Bloomberg sees as the future hope for the city? And if so, where? Surely not in Manhatten, where a two bedroom apartment goes for $1million on average. My impression was that new apartments in Brooklyn were also getting pricey. As for the other buroughs, I don't have a good feel as I have never been in those places except getting to and from the airports.

 

Manhatten stretching from the lower east side to Harlem has undergone major gentrification since the 1970's when I first started visiting the city. But as this process completes itself, where do the middle-class go? If they can't afford to live in the city, will their jobs disappear as they do? Or will there just be more and more bridge and tunnel folk who come into the city to work each day and take their 1 hour commutes to go home at night?

[Rod Hagen]

>better? Since it is not "Great" already, why did you post it?

 

Because it's interesting, but a smart friend pointed out to me that we only have a sense of what the author thinks NYC has lost in its "improvements", and I'd like that loss laid out more, followed by what residents and government can do to repair what was lost and protect what is threatend. So, it's enough to get readers thinking, but given the constraints of where in the magazine it ran (the front), it's not enough to stand on its own.

[Rod Hagen]

And it's interesting too because as NYC goes, so goes the nation.

[+ Charlie]

I, too, am curious about where this "affordable" housing is being built, and for whom. I'll bet it's not in Manhattan.

[+ Lucky]

For some more info on the subject:

http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/issueoftheweek/20060918/200/1977