City on a Grid: How New York Became New York

 Cyclists who’ve ridden through New York and London will notice the difference between their streets, same thing with Rome, Milan, and Tokyo. You’ll see how US cities are plotted on a grid of perpendicular lines, like a giant chessboard, while old cities are not. European and Asian cities plotted their streets along valleys, streams, and hills, while the founding fathers wanted the whole of the USA plotted on a grid.  It would become a fundamental influence of American urban planning.

    Prior to reading Gerard Koeppel’s City on a Grid I read an earlier book called The Greatest Grid, which includes photographs of Manhattan when it was just farmland. While the earlier book is strictly visual, City on a Grid dives into the scientific origins of America’s gridded cities. Koeppel gives a more historical bend on the grid, which originated in Europe. It was a circular form that would begin with a fort on a hill (typical of Europe) and the town would be settled around it in a circular formation. The difference, according to the author, is that European cities were rarely confined to an island like Manhattan. I don’t necessarily agree with this, because Venice is an island and the streets are somewhat gridded, though the alleys are hard to navigate. However, compared to Manhattan, Venice is a labyrinth. The Paris of today has its origins in urban planning, when Baron Haussmann bulldozed through the Victor Hugo Paris of alleys and warrens in favor of spacious boulevards. The older streets, left untouched, still follow the old pattern.

    The first chapters of the book discuss political wrangling and finance problems, because in the early days of the nation, Congress had less authority to tax the people, so it was harder to get Federal money for anything. As for the city, the streets of downtown Manhattan used the old English survey, which what they still follow.  Try navigating below City Hall Park and you’ll find yourself in a rabbit warren. Koeppel also goes into the origin of the names, such as Delancey, a pro-Loyalist banker who had his lands confiscated, and the Bowery, originally Pete Stuyvesant’s “boerie,” or farm. Canal Street wasn’t really a canal, as the name suggests, but a drainage ditch for the polluted Collect Pond. If you’re interested in how the streets got their names, there are many websites devoted to city street necropsy.

    Much of the city’s grid had to do with the need for housing. Tall buildings were unpopular in the days before elevators, and it was the gradual development of steel girders, heavy equipment, and elevator safety brakes that made the skyscrapers possible. These building projects would not have been possible if they weren’t on a grid. Like I said before, finance was a big part of it, because businessmen needed the large buildings. Neither the wealthy nor the poor wanted smelly ponds and canals, so there was both financial and political incentive to fill them in. Yet in the end, the biggest obstacle is always where to get the money. At no time in history did the Americans ever like taxes.

Scar Tissue

The first quarter of this book is a hair-raising adventure. Kiedis is a kid who is born and raised to party; his father is a drug dealing hippie who lives with a stable full of groupies and that sums up the kid’s life. He and his father both get into acting, then lose their gigs because they’re both undisciplined.  He grows up manic, fearless, stupid, adventurous, and eccentric at the same time. It’s both frightening and hilarious to read about.

   Being an outsider is a common theme in this book. He goes from hippie kid in Michigan, transplanted to Los Angeles, to poor kid in a rich-kid school, to a long-haired Californian in a school full of Michigan farmboys. Fortunately for him, his father is good friends with Sonny Bono, so he makes good use of their guest room, refrigerator, and their address so he can go to a good high school. Eventually he wears out his welcome with Sonny, thanks to his rude-kid attitude, but I’ll not spoil the plot on what happens at the fur vest mansion. Then comes the school full of weirdo misfits, some of whom would eventually join Kiedis’ band.

  Scar Tissue reminds me of Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle where the crazy parents keep the family on the move through America’s poor towns. The only difference is that the poor town in Scar Tissue also has a thriving art and music scene, and he’s in no hurry to leave or see the world. As for his constant drug use, he has his father’s stash to keep him high 24 hours a day, so it’s not like he has to deal it to support his habit. Nor does he have to go into dangerous neighborhoods to buy the drugs, so there’s no danger to scare him straight. After high school he cheats his way into UCLA, snorts cocaine, steals his textbooks, steals his meals from the cafeteria, snorts some more cocaine, so it’s no surprise that he likes living in Los Angeles. Who wouldn’t? He’s a loser, don’t get me wrong, but what he has going for him is the constant freedom to keep losing.

    The tone of the story shifts, however, once he leaves UCLA. We get into the L.A. rock scene, and his life no longer consists of vegetating at his father’s house and getting high, interspersed with being a troublemaker at school. He now spends his time hanging out at the numerous run-down rock venues, interspersed with getting high and shoplifting for food. His father, scared straight by an LAPD raid, gets out of drug dealing and becomes a starving actor again. At the time of this story (circa 1983) the city was still on the downscale side and the cheap rents meant that anyone could open a music venue if you got the permits. The rock fans had less money to spend, so if you couple all that together, you can see how there were plenty of clubs to perform at. You didn’t have all the upscale restaurants driving rents up.

    Each part of the book can really stand on its own; the dysfunctional family, the crazy childhood, the starving actor, the starving rock musician. Unlike most rock star autobiographies, this one has been print since it came out, so there’s got to be a reason people love this book. I suspect it’s just as much about the wildness of Los Angeles as it is about music. Like that famous line from the song Californication, the city is “the end of the world and all of Western civilization,” or as Kenneth Anger put it, “a dusty tin lizzy trail on the edge of Manifest Destiny.”

If you travel from the place where the USA began, Los Angeles is the last stop on the route.

Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel

   For a New Yorker, few things could be cooler than living in the Chelsea Hotel, residence of great artists, writers, and underground filmmakers. The place is adorned with great artwork, and the owner, a sentimentalist despite himself, used to let eccentric people live there without paying the rent. It was the home of Andy Warhol’s superstars, and residents included (at different times) Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendricks, Dylan Thomas, and Dee Dee Ramone. From the get go, Nicolaia Rips makes her status clear; she grew up in the Chelsea Hotel, but she wasn’t invited to any cool parties or treated like royalty. If you think this is about a kid who grows up in the Warhol crowd, think again, because she’s too late. Warhol was long dead by the time she was born, and the Chelsea residents she writes about are all old. She’s the daughter of eccentric weirdos and the kids at her school all have rich celebrity parents. She’s a free-range kid who doesn’t fit in with the socially precocious and over-sophisticated children of the elite. She’s born into an artsy crowd that’s dying off.

    While this may sound harsh, keep in mind that she was born around 1998, so by that time there weren’t a lot of less-affluent educated families in the area anymore. She makes a horrible impression on her first day of kindergarten because (a) she doesn’t know how to read yet, and (b) her parents haven’t hired a million tutors to teach her Chinese, opera singing, and how to play the harp. She’s basically a kid, that’s it, but her classmates have been taught to be little grownups with fancy manners. When she causes a disaster at a rich upstate pool party, I wanted to cheer.

    Rips exposes the city elite’s self-delusion of talent. She has a dance teacher who’s obsessed with the avante-garde, and on the first day of class the child is ridiculed for wearing a tutu. The dance program is all “modern” dancing, while the teacher despises kids who want to learn ballet or tap. When I read this chapter, the first thing that entered my mind was Holden Caulfield. The teacher has the same mindset, ranting about “phonies” and overcome with grandiose views of herself, even though she’s only a dance teacher for six-year-olds. Holden would’ve thought she was a genius for turning up her nose at conventional arts, but his sister Pheobe would probably have seen right through her. As for her classmates, the parents are like something out of The Nanny Diaries, pushing their kids to do activities that aren’t age-appropriate.

    A lot of the blame goes to the author’s own nutty parents. They don’t get her to school on time, and she nearly gets held back, though her father has plenty of time to play pranks on the local dry cleaners. She gets into LaGuardia High School, that is good, but she still doesn’t fit in. Most of the white kids in the city by 2012 came from rich families. There aren’t a lot of kids in the city who come from families that are educated by not wealthy. It seems as though her parents were steering her towards kids who came from rich families, rather than the ones that have decent social skills. Not all city kids are rich or sophisticated; as a private tutor I saw every kind of city kid, and not all of them push their children to excel.

   Trying to Float is a great memoir, a cross between the manic Eloise and the cynical Holden Caulfield. Unlike most memoirs about crazy childhoods, it’s written by an 18 year old, so everything that happens here is still fresh in her mind. There were other children who lived in the Chelsea, like actress Gabby Hoffman, but she left around 1990. I was there twice in my life, once for a friend’s party in one of the rooms, and once while my apartment was being fumigated. Based on what I remember, I would like to have read a better description of the building, the famous art collection, the other things about the neighborhood. The problem is that when you’re a kid you don’t observe things the way an adult would, so it’s difficult to understand the mood.

    Kids who grow up in Manhattan are often classed as spoiled and socially precocious, though the author doesn’t fit the stereotype. When compared to other similar writers, she could be part of what I call the “why is that kid here” school of memoir writing. Dalton Conley, author of Honky, was the only white kid in a Lower East Side housing project (obviously not sophisticated) and his memoir is all about social class structure. Then there’s The Basketball Diaries, where the working-class Jim Carrol attends Trinity School, plays basketball, and does heroin. As for MacCaulay Culkin, he hasn’t written a memoir, but his childhood on the Upper East Side involved dysfunctional parents and squalor. Let’s face it, growing up in Manhattan is great or horrible. Trying to Float pulls no punches and gives us both.

    My research into the author tells me that her book began with complaints. Someone advised her to write them all down, and the long collection of gripes became her memoir. Currently she and her family live on the Upper East Side while the Chelsea Hotel is being renovated, and according to her, the neighborhood has nothing to do. I didn’t like it much myself when I lived there 17 years ago, and I don’t like it much now.

   I wonder if people like her parents would’ve been better off in the Westbeth building, where most of the artists lived. There would’ve been a lot more kids there, and she wouldn’t have been such a misfit. Something tells me Rips will publish another memoir later on. I look forward to it.

Digestate: A Food Anthology

In this anthology from Birdcage Bottom Book, 40 artists draw tales of food and eating. A babysitter, aggressive in her vegan philosophy, tells her poor little charge the real story of the three little pigs. Yes, it’s scary, and yes, he gets nightmares. Ben Snakepit’s story about punk rock vegans is simple and funny, while his drawings are minimal but focused, like Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi. Hazel Newlevant’s story Soul Food is all about food laws in different societies, with a solid story and good artwork, it could be the start of a full-length book. Newlevant’s style is similar to Lucy Knisley’s French Milk, but without all the narcissism and self-indulgence. Best of all, it makes me hungry!

   Marek Bennett goes international for his story. He travels to see his hillbilly cousins, in Slovakia, and sees how they’re eating habits are somewhat Spartan, right down to the way they butcher a bull. A local farm, restricted by lack of funds, is considered “organic” by European Union standards and makes a fortune selling meat to Italy. Unfortunately the meat is too pricey for any of the locals, as Slovakia has few jobs and everyone’s leaving. The story is great, but I’m not sure about portraying the people as rabbits. It may have worked in Maus, but here there’s no reason for it.

    Alex Robinson, of Box Office Poison and Too Kool 2 Be Forgotten, draws a comic about picky eating. I was glad to see something by Alex Robinson, I’ve always been a big fan of his. 

Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century

 Every city has its own unique public housing and problems that go with it. New York City has huge high-rises in bad areas, where land is nonetheless at a premium. Chicago had the Robert Taylor high-rises far from the city center, on a strip of land that nobody wanted. New Orleans had the Iberville Houses, only four stories high, and possible the very first of its kind in the USA. Boston had Old Colony, London had Broadwater Farm, and Paris has its “banlieues.” Wherever you go, public housing usually stinks. The questions of this book are as follows; why do they stink, and were there any that worked?

    Nicholas Bloom begins with the Depression in the USA, a time when everyone in the USA was broke and desperate for work. In NYC, the crumbling fire-trap tenements needed to be torn down, and with Hoovervilles springing up in Central Park, there was also a need for cheap apartments. Under Mayor LaGuardia there was a lengthily study of this problem, and it led to the founding of NYCHA. The New York City Housing Authority would start with just a few buildings, and for the most part it went well. But as the years went by, NYCHA would build many more buildings and become less adept at managing them.

    Bloom defines NYCHA as having higher standards than other cities, but staying cheap without going shoddy. New York City’s public housing does have a higher standard than Chicago, as with the poorly-built projects like James Honer, Robert Taylor, Ida Wells, and Cabrini-Green. Soviet visitors to Chicago once remarked on the poor quality of the Honer buildings, and how such terrible construction would cost a Soviet architect his job (and possible his life too) if he were to skimp on quality. Under Federal laws, the buildings couldn’t be far-off from the main parts of the city, or in an area badly-served by transit. This meant that to cram more people in, NYCHA had to use the high-rise approach, which didn’t foster a sense of neighborhood.

    Robert Moses also comes into play here. He didn’t want the public housing in the outer-reaches of the city; that would necessitate bringing public transport all the way to the suburbs. He also designed the Patterson Houses to be occupied by two-parent families, no single moms, prospective tenants had to show their marriage certificate to get in. The wicked Robert Moses thought such a rule would keep unruly tenants out, and for a while, he was right. But here’s where the problem started, one which nobody anticipated. Once the small 1950’s houses came within their means, the regular working people left the projects, replaced by Black and Puerto Rican families. The next wave of tenants didn’t meet the “21 traits” of Robert Moses, and there weren’t enough gainfully-employed two-parent families to fill the buildings. Single mothers on welfare with unruly kids moved in.

    Compared to Chicago’s housing and the Pruitt-Igoe houses in St. Louis, NYCHA buildings worked. But just because they’re still standing doesn’t mean they’re any good. They still look horrible, and they still diminish the sense of neighborhood. But unlike the extensive South Side of Chicago, NYC land is limited and costly. That’s the only reason the tenants in the worst buildings don’t move out. Did NYC public housing really work? Maybe, at first, it did.

Latino Politics in America

   John Garcia begins with a 2006 protest against an anti-immigrant Bill (not designed to be anti-immigrant, but the de-facto outcome would be) that would set harsh penalties for entering the country illegally. Since the biggest source of immigration to the USA is Latin America, such a Bill would have a tremendous bearing, and not a good one, on the Latino demographic. The author defines Latinos as a people that share language, cultures, habits, values, and while subgroups exist, he focuses on the ties that bind.

    Garcia uses two maps of Latino population in the USA to illustrate the shift. In one map, the majority is in Florida, Texas, the Southwest, and New York. But in the map that shows population growth, the concentration in the Southeastern states. In the chapter on Culture & Demographics, he shows how Argentines and Continental Spanish are the wealthiest, while Latinos from Honduras and Guatemala are on the bottom. This isn’t surprising to me, because Argentina has a notoriously well-educated population and most Argentines are of German or Italian origin.

    As far as political organization goes, Garcia doesn’t find much of it until late. In the Rust Belt, Latino workers would simply have joined whatever labor unions represented their industry. There were some earlier groups, like the LULAC in Texas in the 1920’s, and the Little Schools program of the 1950’s, which worked to improve the English skills of preschool-age kids. Most of these groups were benevolent societies, rather than political ones on par with the NAACP. When the mass deportations occurred in the Great Depression, there was little support for Latinos in the media, no Mexican-American version of the NAACP or CORE to speak out on their behalf. In Florida there have been many Cuban-American lobbyist groups, but their interest is strictly for the benefit of Cuban refugees.

    Garcia makes good use of charts in this book, because a lot of the issues discussed here are regional. The biggest concentration of Latino immigrants is obviously in the areas closest to Mexico, and these states will be effected the most through immigration reform. Though not mentioned in this book, there was an earlier one called Lone Star State which delved into the subject of Latino politics. According to that book, Texas is no longer the right-wing Republican state it had been when George W. Bush was governor. With an increase in Latino legislators, there has been greater advocacy for peoples’ rights in education, health, social services, and criminal justice reform.

Robert Frank: In America

Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, always a keen observer of the mundane, spent 1956-1957 documenting the USA. His photos from this journey became a book called The Americans, though others from the project were not published for another 20 years. This current book, In America, includes his earlier photos from 1949-1956, taken across the USA, that didn’t make it into his first.

    The first two photos in this book are of old men in California, and they have the quality of snapshots, with no attention to framing. However, what they lack in composition, they more than make up for by capturing the mood. In the photo, titled Main Street California 1956, a hunched old man in an ill-fitting suit shuffles across the street, looking like a hobo. He’s the only guy in the photo, alone in a vast expanse of auto dealerships and drug stores, oblivious to his surroundings. His hand in his pocket makes him the air of a country bumpkin, and you can see the chain of a pocket watch hanging from his belt. Maybe he really was a country bumpkin? Maybe he came to California during the Great Depression and never lost his country habits? Maybe he even arrived as a hobo? He’s a sharp contrast to the man in the second photo, wearing a tailored white suit and hat and riding a bike, his chin up in the air. Yet even that photo is funny, because few men commuted by bike in the 1950’s.

    Differences abound; the people of New York, Chicago, and Miami are well dressed, compared to the slovenly unwashed people of North Carolina. The Detroit auto workers wear short-sleeve open-collar shirts, baseball caps, and have an “I don’t give a damn” attitude. The city people in Frank’s pictures obviously pay more attention to their hair, clothing, and grooming habits, a trait that I still see today. During a visit to Wilmington, Delaware, I saw how the locals dress like construction workers, in baggy jeans and chunky shoes, even on weekends, while New Yorkers wear tight-fitting clothes and high heels (even the men). From these photos, you can tell the difference in the habits of the city and country people, along with the way their careers effect their manner, which has not changed in the years since. However, one difference I see between the 50’s and today is how the people age. There’s a photo of a man in a gray suit and hat, in the club car of a train, and he looks to be at least 60. But was he? Could he have been younger? Nowadays, men who grew up in the 1970’s don’t look old, at least not the way their ancestors did. Furthermore, I have to wonder whether the wealthier classes were truly happy. Is the gray-suited man in the train satisfied with his life? Those of you who read the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit ill know how dissatisfying life was for the white-collar man. Were the slovenly Detroit auto worker in a better mood? They would have made just as much money as the gray-suited salaryman, and if not, Detroit’s auto workers could still buy houses on their salaries. As for the social class differences, the wealthy-looking ones don’t all look happy.

    Some photos in the book are risqué, like the one of the Puerto Rican transvestites in New York. Others capture the racial attitudes of the south, like the one of the Black woman holding a White baby. Frank said he was shocked at the racism of the south; White women wouldn’t think twice about trusting a Black woman with their kids, but they wouldn’t let her sit on the same park bench. I’m sure there was class conflict in Frank’s native Switzerland, but the skin color issue would’ve made American racism more evident. Then again, if Frank had visited London at the time, would he have commented on the racial segregation there? Or the segregation in Paris? Racial segregation is not restricted to the USA.

    I first saw Robert Frank’s work at the Whitney Museum in 1996, in an exhibit titled Robert Frank: Moving Out. The exhibit was placed simultaneously as another one, about Beat culture in the 1950’s. Perhaps Robert Frank’s photos captured both mainstream and fringe in American society? Was it because he wasn’t American? In a trend started by Alexis De Tocqueville 120 years earlier, he joins the ranks of Europeans who document American life, with the awe and disgust of an impartial outsider. Frank’s photos capture the peoples’ way of life, and leaves the viewer to draw conclusions.is hotos from

   

  

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