“It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible”
E.B. White
Before ever setting foot on Manhattan, in my mind there was already a topography of New York filled with familiar landmarks: Central Park where Rachel, Ross, & co. frolicked in front of a fountain… marble halls of the Met where Pierce Brosnan and snuck away with a Monet… busted Williamsburg sidewalks where Francie Nolan came of age, Katz’s Deli in Soho where Meg Ryan had a climactic pastrami, and the Queensboro bridge, where Fitzgerald claims one can see New York for the first time again and again. New York City is the stage for world’s dreams and the landscape of the American imagination. I had moved from suburban Texas to rural New Hampshire for college. From the great plains hinterlands, I crossed the Appalachian range, and even three hundred miles away, Dartmouth was still close enough to the metropolis to be well in its gravitational orbit. Long before I graduated or knew what I wanted to do with my life, I knew I wanted to live in New York.
I got my degree and moved to the city, full of the wide-eyed wonder of a twenty-two year old from the flyover suburbs. New York has a way of infusing banal activities with energy and meaning, just by sheer merit of location. In my first year here, I commuted each day from my Upper East apartment to my Midtown office. At 7:30, I would pack myself into the sardine can that is a rush-hour express train. I would take it down two long hopping stops to Grand Central, the labyrinth train terminal buried under fifty-nine stories of the MetLife building. If I’m in a rush to get to work, I would descend even further underground for the 7 train transfer so as to emerge closer to the office. In that first summer of 2011, at the hairpin turn of the pedestrian ramp winding down to the platform, there was always a young violinist in a sundress playing Mendelssohn or Paganini, always playing with a childlike joy and an ethereal smile. Thousands of midtown commuters couldn’t help but smile at this ray of joy in the midst of a busy beehive. When the weather turned cold, the ramp emptied out, and the soundtrack of my commute went silent again but for footsteps and screeches of subway cars on rails. If I was in no rush, and the weather was inviting, I would get out at Grand Central for a longer walk. I took a circuitous way out of the station so I could walk through the breathtaking main concourse: 35,000 square foot of beaux-arts splendor, light streaming in from twenty-four massive windows, the overhead drape of an enormous teal rendition of the night sky, full of constellations, that seemed somehow grander than the real sky. At the very center, the iconic information booth with its beautiful brass clock on top; a tableau that co-starred with the likes of Cary Grant and Judy Garland on the silver screen. In New York, proximity to so many places filled with history and stories, imbued something as ordinary as my morning commute with a feeling of significance.
After two years, I moved to California to grow budding yeast on plates and practice my pipetting technique. I said goodbye, with not just a little bit of sadness, to the city I had always dreamed of living in. Life takes unexpected turns, and a year later, I’m moving back to banks of the Hudson. It was then, in the summer of 2014, that I picked up Mike Wallace and Edwin Burrow’s 4.7 lb history of New York City, which they dubbed “Gotham” (the book stops somewhat abruptly in 1898, apparently you have to crack 5 lbs to get to the 20th century). It seemed somehow appropriate, as I prepared to call New York home again, to also start an intimidating project of a 1,400-page history of the city. Any city of ten million may ultimately be unknowable, but surely 1,400 pages should make a dint in my ignorance. While I was away though, people I was close to had moved away, and other friends had since newly arrived. Familiar haunts had come and gone as well. My favorite restaurant was a cozy 12-seater with lime green wallpaper, nestled in a semi-basement floor on East 92nd street. The perfectly named “Square Meal” had closed just a few months into my California foray. The Continental, a grungy dive in the East Village where practically every young professional here in their 20’s circa 2010 had taken more $2 shots they should have, had also closed. The city I came back to was not the city I had left. Making my way through “Gotham” gave me some comfort with this fact. I read about the countless rebirths and new incarnations of the city, from Lenape country to Dutch settlement to English trading town to the first capital city of the newly minted republic. It seemed deeply written in New York’s DNA to change at a dizzying pace, remaking itself before you have time to get your bearings to the previous incarnation. The book reassured me that New York’s mercurial nature is perhaps its most constant character.
“Gotham” was a lovely companion to living in New York. Passages on Lenape hunting practices paired well with long runs up west-side drive. When I joined a Dutch Reformed church in Park Slope, I was reminded of chapters on early dutch settlers. House parties in Stuy Town recalled the biography of Peter Stuyvesant. And sunny weekend picnics in Prospect Park’s Long Meadow called to mind the account of Washington’s retreat from Mount Prospect. The book also uncovered backstories of the little corners of the city I came to know intimately. I learned that my first apartment on East 85th Street used to mark the dividing line between a pigless downtown, where tenement dwellers were banned from raising pigs, and a northern porker’s paradise. I learned that when I moved to a soulless glass and steel Williamsburg apartment (the ones that were popping up like mushrooms in the 2010’s), a century ago the neighborhood refined the lion’s share of sugar and oil for the country. I learned that Brooklyn hipsters, with their love of tight jeans, beards, and fixed-gear bikes, resembled nothing less than the 19th century New York dandies who favored tight pants, spectacles, mismatched clothing, and purebred racehorses.
Picking up a 1,400-page book is daunting (literally “heavy lifting”), but I wasn’t on a deadline, so I settled into a rhythm, and the tome began to feel like a familiar companion. For such a long book, Gotham is surprisingly readable. At the end of the day however, one has to include a whole lot of detail to fill up 1,400 pages. More often than not, the details are joyful and interesting, but inevitably at times it veers into tedium. On most days, I would find at least 15 minutes to knock out a a few pages. When my enthusiasm sapped, I stepped away for weeks, sometimes months. But it felt comforting knowing that I could always come back to this sprawling story. I admit, not everyone will find reading a 1,400-page history cover-to-cover… fun. But as Wallace himself explains, the book can just as easily be read in bites and chunks of your choosing, almost as a reference. Each chapter is sufficiently modular, and they all stand on their own as vignettes of a particular slice of New York in a particular time.
I spent another four years in New York, and in 2018 I packed up to move again, this time to the Midwest. It would have felt appropriate to finish the book as I said goodbye for the second time, but I had over 400 pages left! I kept reading, and two years later, life decided to keep me in Chicago instead of taking me back east. Nonetheless, almost exactly six years after picking it up, I finally finished “Gotham.”
New York is a difficult city to be in. It’s epic in proportion, bustling, and anonymous; even as a resident it’s sometimes hard to feel like you truly belong here, like you’re really a part of the city and not just some anonymous bystander. For many, New York means breakneck pace, shoebox apartments, and urban loneliness in the thickets of the concrete jungle. I was lucky to have had a different experience. Instead of a incoherent mess of humanity, for me the streets of New York are filled with personal and intimate memories. And I also had Wallace and Burrow to thank for making New York a little less strange and mysterious, and a little more knowable. From each chapter I learned about communities in my neighborhood before me, how skyscrapers, parks, and subways were built, and how the politicos, captains of industry, and immigrants of New York shaped the city in their image.
PS: in the fall of 2017, around back when I was on page 800 in the fall of 2017, Mike Wallace published volume II. The story picks up from 1898 to 1919 in the follow-up “Greater Gotham,” weighing in at a svelte 4.6 lbs. For now I’m in no rush to dive back in, maybe the time will be right if or when I move back to New York in some later chapter of my life.
Jack Wang 