After the Second World War, everything seemed to change at once. The shifting texture of experience is captured in the writing of Joseph Mitchell, the famous New Yorker correspondent who painted the city in the ordinary speech of its inhabitants. Mitchell’s profiles captured the last gasps of a localized economy—saloon culture before the suburbanization and consolidation of the brewing industry encouraged private drinking at home; theater culture before the television fostered media behemoths and private, passive audiences. Ellery Thompson, who commanded a small fishing trawler out of Stonington, Connecticut, dragged the bottom of Long Island Sound for flounder, depositing the catch each day at the Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan, much as had his ancestors for three hundred years.5Joseph Mitchell, “Dragger Captain,” in Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories (New York: Vintage, 2008), 537–73. The postwar reorganization of the fishing industry to suit the goals of international capital ended these traditions. When a German submarine torpedoed the coal ship Black Point in Block Island Sound in 1945, or when the crew of the Nathaniel B. Palmer was blown to pieces by a depth charge they pulled in with their fishing nets, it might have been a symbol that the old ways were about to collapse.
By the mid-1950s, factory trawlers, gargantuan vessels that scooped up fish in previously unimaginable quantities, processing and freezing them without ever returning to shore, began to appear from Europe, financed by the likes of Unilever.6William W. Warner, Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1983), vii–xii. By the time the North American countries extended their jurisdictions to banish the foreign trawlers, it was too late. In the hands of domestic fishermen, the seaborne assembly line had the same effect, working in tandem with nitrogen pollution to collapse fish stocks and destroy the industry. When Mitchell profiled the shad fishermen who staked their nets to the bottom of the Hudson, in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge, he may have realized only dimly that he was creating a snapshot of the last people who would ever do this.7Joseph Mitchell, “The Rivermen,” in Up in the Old Hotel, 574–619. As it had for the Staten Island oyster and lobster fishers whose livelihoods were cancelled by water pollution by 1920, or the strawberry farmers whose crops were poisoned by the smelting plants across the Arthur Kill in New Jersey, the remaking of production in the image of capital destroyed one version of the web of life that the industry hoped to appropriate.
As late as the 1950s, horse trails criss-crossed Staten Island. Once Robert Moses connected the island with the rest of the city with what was then the longest suspension bridge in the world so that highway traffic could reach New England without traversing Manhattan Island, the conquest of a farming and maritime community by the logic of the suburb was assured.8Gay Talese, The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). As a result of such decisions, repeated over and over at a world scale, New York’s relationship to water has changed, the sea gone from lifeblood to existential threat.
Mitchell was the kind of writer who could only grieve, could only look backwards. Like most of Mitchell’s subjects, Thompson was a holdout, an irregular chunk of the past lodged in a present whose restless wind erodes most such crags, leaving behind smooth, interchangeable surfaces, objects that one cannot grasp. Mitchell invariably trained his eye on such characters—superannuated fishing captains, junk-shop proprietors, circus freaks, alcoholic writers stuck on Chapter One, wispy vestiges of conquered political machines, saloon keepers who refused to install cash registers. This heroic unwillingness to let the past go is quixotic, deluded, pernicious, or indispensable, depending on how one understands the forces annihilating it. If history is, as Walter Benjamin argued, a catastrophe, then fixing one’s eyes on the past, as does his angel of history, becomes a defensible political strategy, if only provisionally.
The reality is that in New York we do this all the time, since what we love about the city is what has, for a series of murky reasons, resisted the nauseating breeze of a progress that is killing us. We bask in those practices that defy subsumption, that refuse to be erased in the name of the bloodless rationalization dreamt by capital. To the degree that anyone still loves New York, it is because the city resists the relentless erosion of the sense of locality, of place, that elsewhere disintegrates under waves of abstraction, and retains what feels impossible elsewhere—the possibility of spontaneous encounter, of a non-regimented life. In this sense, New York is untimely. We may have cause to wonder whether, paradoxically, it is in the city, or, more precisely, in this city that the old ways are best preserved.
The Fabrication of Progress
If there has ever been a human incarnation of the business of rationalization, which aims for cleanliness but is not itself clean, which must tarry with the human in order to neutralize the human, it was Robert Moses. Thumb through his papers, deposited in what seem like millions of folders at the New York Public Library, and before long you are soaked in the will of the cajoler familiar from the pages of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. Paging through the Triborough Authority’s yearbooks, I came across my own block, reduced to a tabula rasa in 1960. “DEMONSTRATION OF BLIGHT,” read the heading.