The Humanity of the City

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (excerpts) - Walt Whitman

1

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

2

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

3

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

5

What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.

7

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious;
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?

It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;
I am he who knew what it was to be evil;
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant;
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting.

9

It is not you alone, nor I alone;
Not a few races, nor a few generations, nor a few centuries; It is that each came, or comes, or shall come, from its due emission,
From the general centre of all, and forming a part of all.

“The real New York is disappearing.” New Yorkers seem to enjoy few things more than debating how much their city is in decay, how much its true character or nature is under assault and how much ground it is losing in that fight. The old New York small business owners are being driven out of business by the invasion of suburban-style box stores and bank branches. Wealthy white families who have moved into Harlem are calling the police to complain about the noise from the long-standing drum circle concerts in Marcus Garvey Park. And in a city with thousands of family-owned Italian restaurants, an Olive Garden lurks seductively in the corner of Times Square, beckoning tourists astray with its sordid proffering of unlimited breadsticks. An Olive Garden! At least the prostitutes and drug dealers of years past weren’t trying to pass themselves off as legitimate businesses, and at least some of their customers had the basic decency to feel ashamed for patronizing them.

The truth is, though, that New York has always been disappearing in this way. One of the world’s most notorious slums in the 19th century, the Five Points, was centered at what is now essentially the courts and government office buildings around Centre Street. The Upper West Side, whose sidewalks are now synonymous with groups of small children and big dogs, was once so equated with roving gangs of street toughs that Bernstein could simply use the title West Side Story and everyone knew what would be depicted. Greenwich Village has gone from the headquarters of the bohemian revolution to a place for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd to go bar-hopping. Even amongst the apparent botoxed unchangeability of the Upper East Side, about all that’s left of the once-massive German community around 86th Street in Yorkville is the Heidelberg Tavern.

And if Walt Whitman stood at the dock for the Brooklyn Ferry today, he would be confronted with many more unfamiliar sights than familiar ones. While Whitman was alive when the Brooklyn Bridge was built, he never could have imagined it would lead to the death of the ferry; the only crowds thronging the ferry landing these days are lining up for ice cream (though he would no doubt be pleased to find his poem inscribed on the landing itself). It would not have occurred to him that the only masts of ships that he would see would be the tourist attractions at South Street Seaport. He would be surprised by the new skyline, defined by the Empire State Building, the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building; he would not be surprised to still catch himself looking for where the Twin Towers used to define that skyline, the way many of us who lived here before 2001 sometimes still are.

But Whitman would be able to deal with that, I think, because he understood that what is unchangeable about New York, what defines its character and identity and authenticity, is its humanity, not its physicality. Neighborhoods may change, buildings may disappear, but human nature doesn’t change and how human beings relate to one another rarely changes. What is constant about New York is its social character in how it deals with human nature, and I think it is in that character that its greatness lies.

What resonates the most for me in New York is that we have a holistic concept of our character here. Most cities have some version of trying to emphasize what is beautiful or successful or impressive about them and downplay the rest. In New York, we obviously celebrate the ultra-successful: the entrepreneurs, the artists, the money managers, the political leaders. But New York genuinely values its shadow side and the people who embody it by having visibly “knitted the old knot of contrariety”: the misanthropes and the eccentrics on the sidewalks and subways; grumpy old men in diners; little old ladies who run you down with their shopping carts; rude cab drivers with a death wish; hustlers hawking knock-offs on Canal Street or playing three-card monte on side streets.

Why? Because they ensure that New York is one of the most truly human places on earth: a place of astounding achievement and spectacular failure, a place of soaring hopes and grinding despair, a place where the personification of graceful beauty may sit next to the personification of awkward ugliness on the subway. There really is nowhere else in the United States, and precious few in the world, where all the different facets of humanity are brought together so closely for so much of the time.

That is why the underlying threat that most concerns New Yorkers is homogenization. We don’t want to be a place where only the best is on display, where everything is designed and therefore expected to be convenient and sanitized and predictable. New York’s adamancy about that helps us acknowledge and what Whitman admits: it is not upon us alone that the dark patches fall. It is very easy to forget that, especially in places whose whole ethos is designed to deny the presence of dark patches. But New York helps us remember that all of us experience those times when the best we’ve done seems blank and suspicious, our greatest thoughts as meager and laughable, that none of the dark things about human nature are wanting in any of us. It is not any of us alone, and each of us comes from all and forms a center of all. I think that’s why New Yorkers have such a strong sense of shared identity, why people love this city with a love that I’ve never seen the equal of anywhere in the world (and I’ve traveled and lived widely). Yes, we have all kinds of subsets of race and class and neighborhood and baseball team affiliation. But all of us are New Yorkers, because all of us are human. And New York is nothing if not deeply, broadly, fully human, and I can't imagine it won't stay that way.

What is it, then, between us? Well, there's always something. But whatever it is, it avails not.


P.S. - my e-mail address for this blog is tenniswiththenetdown@gmail.com, a reference to a quote by Robert Frost: “writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” So there’s a bit of irony here, given that Whitman is often known as the father of free verse. But while Whitman can be rambling and narcissistic at his worst, at his best I think he suggests that tennis with the net down is a whole different game that only looks easy to play until you try it.