The Atlantic | December 1970 | A Day in the City

From the archives:

"America's Heart" (February 1999)
"New York's story is the nation's ... The city was the birthplace of window shopping, American bohemia, the Associated Press, and the hot dog." Timothy J. Gilfoyle reviews Edwin G. Burrows's and Mike Wallace's Gotham.

From Atlantic Unbound:

Flashbacks: "Loving and Hating New York" (November 28, 2001)
Reflections on New York City from the turn of the century to the 1990s.

Dispatches: "Ground Zero, the Day After" (September 19, 2001)
A pilgrimage to the "ash-covered canyon" that was once the World Trade Center. By Petra Bartosiewicz.

The Atlantic Monthly | December 1970

A Day in the City

by L.E. Sissman

.....

Up at ten after long night's talk with New Canaan host and hostess. Cutting up old touches (con man's argot, that). Shower. Shave. Dress. November morn. Rime of frost on still-green grass outside. Eat big breakfast fixed by host. Smoke, talk. Who's for New York? Everybody.

Pile into host's huge Plymouth station wagon. Down thumping slabs of Merritt Parkway. Trees in median almost full-grown. Saplings when I was a kid. Road seemed wider then. Down twisting Hutchinson River Parkway, another wonder of the 30s. Lanes hardly one car wide. Still lots of trees in Westchester. Down Thruway to Major Deegan. Crags topped with fantastical high rises, housing projects, pillared institutions. Tangle of Harlem River ramps and bridges at Throgs Neck. Arcs and diagonals of ramps like GM World of Tomorrow at World's Fair, 1939. South Bronx buildings, all brick, tumble down to river's edge. Dale Oldsmobile, Stadium Motel. Down East River Drive. Dynasties of Queens on left, gutted cars in dead-end streets on right. Hospital complex. Low-income housing. Playgrounds; kids with footballs. Windowless shells of tenements in East Hundreds followed by luxury-apartment towers clinging to eastern cliffs of island. Turn off Drive in Fifties.

Across town: double-parkers, women walking poodles, town houses with miraculous cream fronts, boys on delivery trikes, many tiny ethnic restaurants. New buildings still going up in spite of slump; who rents all those square feet of space?

Up Madison. More old buildings here. Fewer stone facings, more brick fronts. Adland upstairs, ads' grist downstairs: clothes, cutlery, cameras, luggage, pipes, lamps, chinaware, boutique, boutique, boutique. Approaching Whitney. Spot parking place on side street. Park. Air outside is raw, dank, smoggy. Wind with a winter knife. Chatter of wives' heels on sidewalk. Past Gristede's, bar, boutique, boutique. Into ugly front of Whitney. Pay; ride cattle-car elevator, huge and barn-smelling, to Eakins retrospective. Fellow passengers young, old, bearded, eccentrically dressed, armored in art lore. Lore of the jungle. Eyes—suspicious, appraising—throw curves at fellow passengers. Everybody out for Eakins.

Tall, cool, dark galleries not crowded; show nearing end. Paintings in roughly chronological sequence. Apprentice sketches: powerful, almost allegorical Nude Woman Seated, Wearing a Mask, like some negative figure of Justice. Early sporting paintings: scullers in crosslight of sunset. First great portraits. Masterpiece of his thirties, The Gross Clinic. Surgeons in frock coats operate in amphitheater; patient's wife cringes, tiers of students watch, godlike figure of Dr. Gross, bloody scalpel in bloody hand, looms over all. Museum-goers study painting respectfully, impassively, at distance. Two tiny Oriental children get in close, examine it minutely, marveling at blood.

More portraits. Worn, downcast, handsome face of Mrs. John H. Brinton. Portrait of a Lady with a Setter Dog: Mrs. Thomas Eakins, slight, beautiful, and pained. The Agnew Clinic, masterpiece of his forties. Surgeons in white gowns now (1889), still no rubber gloves; Dr. Agnew benignly presiding over mastectomy. More portraits, honest, blunt, unsettling. William H. Macdowell, artist's father-in-law. Mrs. Samuel Murray, cool and plain. Mrs. Thomas Eakins, older, more heroically aware of death. The subjects, poised in the pain and assurance of their Victorian stations, look out at the viewers, mobile, frivolous, anxious, self-concerned, the nineteenth century judging the twentieth.

The last portrait: Dr. Edward Anthony Spitzka, 1913. Terrifying. Eyes dark blanks. Cheeks raw gouges. Unfinished, the art historians say, because of Eakins' failing eyesight and waning health. But almost the beginning of a new style, a new statement of life and its consequences.

"Tourists! Peasants!"

Down in the elevator. Lunch in the Museum cafeteria. Decent and cheap, especially for New York. A tour of a prefab contemporary house set up in the courtyard. Junk-art furniture. Junk-art art. Cramped Pullman kitchen. Dark, small-windowed bedroom. Sterile white walls. Insult to human dignity.

Into the car; back to East River Drive via 42^nd Street. Past the UN, its timeless monolith already dating badly. Past Stuyvesant Town, now middle-aged and sooty. Under the bridges, recoiling from the mass of wrecked cars at the base of the Manhattan, nodding with the pleasure of unchange in the sunlight on the cables of the Brooklyn. Past Park Row, its newspapers long gone, its buildings still the same. Down under Battery Park, up on the West Side Highway, confronted by the absurdly high twin red-and-silver towers of the World Trade Center, still being built. No spires, no masts, no setbacks: only the almost infinite tapering up of parallel lines, ugly, unnerving, and repeated for overemphasis.

We dive into the financial district. Streets of unremembered narrowness; buildings with granite flanks of unremembered size. On Cortlandt Street, a drunken red-haired mulatto woman in a green top and tangerine bell-bottoms tacks up the sidewalk, accosts a black man on the corner of Broadway, who turns her down. Streets otherwise empty; Saturday afternoon. Trinity aloof and deserted. No soul on Wall Street the day after a twenty-one-million-share trading day. No one on Pine Street. No one in Fraunces Tavern. Peace.

Up the West Side again, by the scattered ruin of Washington Market, and into the Village. Dense crowds here: the Village of the forties and fifties exploding in quantity, not in kind. More of the same: more chair stores, door stores, junk shops, antique shops, food shops, jewelry stores, clothing stores, off-off theaters, restaurants, bars. More artists, writers, painters, students, hangers-on, neat pretty girls, sloppy pretty girls. More cars. More motorbikes. More trucks. More cop cars. On Sixth below Eighth Street, a solid block of sidewalk hawkers selling leather goods, bomb-shaped candles, hashish pipes, art jewelry, head goods. Most hawkers young, male, skinny, bearded, hillbilly-hatted, in blue jeans. Most customers the same.

We park and walk through Washington Square. Old Village hand—horn-rims, pipe in belt, space shoes—picks us up, points out sights, recommends restaurants. We tell him we're going to Lüchow's. "Tourists! Peasants!" he says, inoffensively, and loses self in crowd. Lüchow's. Glad to see us. No reservation needed. Seated at once in front room. Room half empty, but still early. String band in back room plays waltzes, alternates with German brass band. Reminds me of uniformed German bands tramping through slums, playing for pennies during Depression, when I was a kid. We drink, watch diners drifting in. Odd mixture: few tourists, many aspiring young couples in far-out clothes but far from with it, many middle-aged, middle-class foursomes running to fat and running to mod. Next to us, four older businessmen—needle trades? retailers?—settling down to serious drinking, talk, heavy eating. We order fairly elaborate meals at quite moderate prices. The food comes; it's good and we're hungry. We eat too much, then eat too-rich desserts.

Out on the sidewalk. Academy of Music, where I used to watch real vaudeville twenty years ago. Klein's. On the Square. The Square itself, an American Hyde Park packed with dissident speakers till a few years ago. Now quiet, except for the cars. Not many passersby. Chill air laced with smog. I cough.

Into the car again; up Fourth Avenue, retitled Park Avenue South but no more gracious for that. Around Gramercy Park, not a hair changed in three decades and quiet as the graves of its old architects. Uptown to Grand Central, a frieze of ill-assorted flashing and unwinking lights. Across 42^nd Street again and up the Drive. United Nations Plaza wheels away, followed by Sutton Place and Gracie Mansion, embowered in leafless trees. East Harlem follows. At the northeast tip of the island, I look back. A million lights reflecting green on the low cloud. All of the towers we once looked up to now oppressing us. I face front again, looking backward less and less these days, looking forward to a nightcap in the transient camp of Fairfield County. It's been a long day in the city.

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