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February 5, 1995

The 10 Best Books About New York

By SAM ROBERTS

HE present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost," the

essayist John Jay Chapman wrote when the 20th century was still
young, when the past was decidedly less remote and not long after he suffered a
mental breakdown and left the city.

No single book can capture the essence of New York, past and present. Ten
books, collectively, can. But which 10 constitute a secular, literary New York
Canon?

Harold Bloom, the Yale humanities professor, imposed this standard for the
books and authors he admitted into his book, "The Western Canon": that they
be authoritative, sublime, representative and distinguished by "a mode of
originality that either cannot be assimilated or that so assimilates us that we
cease to see it as strange."

The trove of written words about New York compensates for the fact that no
one book encapsulates them all. The challenge is not in finding 10 but in
choosing only 10. Here, true to form, no two New Yorkers would agree.

Where is Harold Robbins's "Stone for Danny Fisher"? "The Bridge," by Gay
Talese? Jimmy Breslin's "World Without End, Amen"? Or Henry James's
"Revisiting New York"? Where are James Baldwin, O. Henry, Louis
Auchincloss or the columnist Murray Kempton?

For that matter, why limit the list just to books? What about Walt Whitman's
paeans to New York Harbor? Or Ralph Fasanella's urban folk art? Aren't "West
Side Story," "Manhattan," "Marty" and "Do the Right Thing" as revealing of
New York as any book? What about "All in the Family" and "N.Y.P.D. Blue"
on television?

And what about all those priceless quips and commentaries about New York
that have been immortalized in books of quotations: Ambrose Bierce's
definition of Mammon as the god of the world's leading religion whose "chief
temple is in the holy city of New York." Or Mayor John F. Hylan's assessment
that "we have had all the reform that we want in this city for some time to
come." Or Will Rogers's response to the shooting of four innocent bystanders in
a single day: "Amazing. It's kind of hard to find four innocent people in New
York." (And would any New York Canon be complete without Dr. Kenneth T.
Jackson's "Encyclopedia of New York City," which is to be published later this
year?)

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Our New York canon is large-bore: little pieces adding up to a grander context.
The list is meant to be encompassing, but not complete. It is representative and
intended to be sensitive to the city's extraordinary diversity in perspectives --
ideological, racial, ethnic, sexual -- but it is not the product of a committee or
based on a quota.

Rather, the aim is to create a composite reflection of how New York got this
way, how its bridges and subways were built, how its power structure and
political culture evolved, how its pastiche of unique neigh-borhoods developed,
collapsed and rose again, and how some of its citizens survive on the bottom
rung and others succeed or fail on the top.

These 10 books weave stories of money, ambition, romance, savvy and the
human vitality that, in the end, may be the city's greatest resource.

"The literary canon does not baptize us into culture; it does not make us free of
cultural anxiety," Professor Bloom wrote. "Rather, it confirms our cultural
anxieties, yet helps to give them form and coherence."

A coherent vision of the past is vital to any understanding of the present, but it
is not easy to achieve in a city that proceeds at a breathless pace. Day by day,
the pool of reading matter grows, providing competition for our time and ample
material for a canon. New Yorkers without perspective need to compile one.

Let the debate begin.

THE POWER BROKER

By Robert A. Caro
Vintage Books, 1975

Theodore H. White coined the phrase. Robert Moses personified it. And Robert
A. Caro appropriated it as the title of his epic biography of the man who,
perhaps more than any single individual in this century, changed the face of
New York.

The book is a compelling rejoinder to prevailing cynicism that it makes no

difference who wins because the rest of us lose anyway. "The Power Broker"
spares no one, the press included, in its searing, if often one-sided, analysis of
how Moses parlayed a series of seemingly obscure appointive jobs in city and
state government (chairman of the State Power Authority and of the Triborough
Bridge and Tunnel Authority, among others) into an empire that overwhelmed
mayors and governors.

He practiced bulldozer diplomacy that, even as it created an impressive

network of parks and highways, destroyed stable neighborhoods and
accelerated middle-class flight to the undeveloped suburbs. Beyond the
physical legacy, accomplished in an era unfettered by environmental laws and
other legal impediments, was a political one: The popular backlash against his
arrogance all but guaranteed that no successor would be granted the same

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leeway as the single-minded man whose favorite aphorism was, "If the ends
don't justify the means, what does?"

THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

By Tom Wolfe
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987

Stock broker Sherman McCoy's nightmare detour onto the mean streets of the
South Bronx sets the stage for this apocalyptic caricature of greed and its
consequences in 1980's New York. Mr. Wolfe's novel of the city of ambition
was inspired by vivid extremes between poverty and wealth -- extremes that so
widened that by the end of the decade the income gap in Manhattan was even
greater than in Guatemala.

"The period was so much like the 1920's in that it became perfectly O.K. to
flaunt wealth," Mr. Wolfe has said. He was prescient: the stock market collapse
sent McCoy's colleagues reeling (although, despite his travails, McCoy still
made a killing when he had to dispose of his Park Avenue apartment), and race
dominated city politics (note the election of David N. Dinkins in 1989 as the
city's first black mayor).

The morality play was rife with insights: the lunacy of a restaurant that took no
reservations and kept patrons waiting in their limousines for a table, or the
populist verdicts that elevated some criminals to folk heroes. "In a civil case,"
Mr. Wolfe wrote, "a Bronx jury is a vehicle for redistributing the wealth."

His research produced characters whose identities were so thinlyveiled (a judge

patterned after Justice Burton Roberts and a lawyer after Edward Hayes) that
they publicly basked in their fictional roles.

BEYOND THE MELTING POT

By Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan
M.I.T. Press, 1963

Israel Zangwill perpetrated the "melting pot" myth in his turn-of-the-century

play of the same name. No book did more to destroy the myth than "Beyond
the Melting Pot." Professors Glazer and Moynihan deconstructed the notion
that successive waves of immigrants were seamlessly absorbed into a
homogenized whole, declaring instead that "ethnicity was the organizing unit of
New York politics."

If some of their judgments seem too sweeping, they made a compelling case for
each and for the role of political parties in assimilating successive groups of
immigrants.

"The classic heterogeneity of great cities has been limited to the elite part of the
population," they wrote, but "the heterogeneity of New York is of the masses."
Even after the book was updated in 1970, Professor Glazer lamented that he

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had been laboring under a "New York illusion" that American-born blacks
would replicate the immigrant experience and graduate from the ghetto. Ethnic
identity, he said, "is pretty thin gruel compared to race."

Less durable was their assessment of Italian-Americans, whose cultural and

social style, they said, produced attractive families, friendships and
neighborhoods, though "somehow the ethos has not gone beyond that to create
a presumption of leadership in city affairs."

THE W.P.A. GUIDE

TO NEW YORK CITY
Pantheon, reissued in 1982

Don't expect to find Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 49th Street,
where this book says it is. This guide to 1930's New York is valuable as
evidence of how much the city has changed in 60 years and how much has not.
It is filled with history, trivia and insights that reduce the city to human scale.

The collaborators viewed their challenge as keeping pace "with a dynamic

metropolis that overnight replaces a century-old institution with a new triumph
to modernity." But William H. Whyte suggests that the guide was "more a
precious document to be preserved than a packet of information to be updated."

Of the old Madison Square Garden, it revealed: "On a good night, patrons eat
12,000 hot dogs, washed down with 1,000 gallons of beer and soda pop, while
60 private policemen, unarmed, are stationed there to prevent disorder."

MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND

By Claude Brown
Macmillan, 1965

This brutally honest autobiography of a black man growing up in Harlem

during the 1940's and 1950's is a scorching profile in survival against the odds.
Each petty crime, each brush with brutality, each encounter with the pimps and
junkies who inhabit his world poses the book's underlying question: How did
Claude Brown survive?

"Manchild" is dedicated to Eleanor Roosevelt and to the Wiltwyck School she

founded for troubled youngsters, but he explains that he was ultimately saved
only because he decided to save himself from a society of lost souls.

Reciting a litany of rebellion against the white establishment, he wrote: "I was
rebelling every time I went to some place like the Children's Center, like the
Youth House, like Wiltwyck, like Warwick. I was rebelling, man. And all I met
in there were other young, rebellious cats who couldn't take it either.

"But nobody was winning. That revolution was hopeless. The cats who had
something on the ball and they could dig it in time, they stopped. They stopped.
They didn't stop being angry. They just stopped cutting their own throats."

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THE GREAT SCHOOL WARS:

NEW YORK CITY, 1805-1973
By Diane Ravitch
Basic Books, 1974

Diane Ravitch wrote this comprehensive account only five years after New
York was riven by yet another school war -- this one pitting a predominantly
white teachers' union against parents, mostly black or Hispanic, who demanded
a greater voice in the politics of education.

The book lacks stridency; it provides solid perspective on a series of conflicts

that she traced to a school war between the Protestant establishment and
immigrant Irish Catholics, which ultimately led to the establishment of a Board
of Education and of a decentralized system that was vulnerable to abuse by
ward bosses. So much for panaceas, whether invoked for the first time in the
19th century or reinvented in the 20th. And so much for education, which,
perpetually, seems to have played a subordinate role to politics.

Still, the author remained optimistic, maintaining that the "effort to advance
comity -- (that basic recognition of differences in values and interests and of
the desirability of reconciling those differences peacefully) -- has always been
at the heart of public education."

DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS

By Piri Thomas
Alfred A. Knopf, 1967

Complete with a glossary of slang and Spanish terms, this gritty

autobiographical account of growing up in East Harlem cries out plaintively:
"I'm here, and I want recognition." And a way out.

Mr. Thomas's mean streets are the ghetto and he is no dispassionate tour guide
(so vivid are his accounts that the book was banned by a school district in
Flushing, Queens). His itinerary includes the underside of El Barrio's rooftops
and barrooms, its low life and the convicts he befriends and his fears in the
prison where he served six years for armed robbery. Mr. Thomas's account may
seem dated, even stereotypical. But his pain and lack of self-pity resonate in an
enduring struggle for social mobility and against the siren call of quick cures.
"The worlds of home and school were made up of rules laid down by adults
who had forgotten the feeling of what it means to be a kid but expected a kid to
remember to be an adult -- something he hadn't gotten to yet," Mr. Thomas
wrote. "The world of street belonged to the kid alone. There he could earn his
own rights, prestige, his good-o stick of living. It was like being a knight of old,
like being 10 feet tall."

WORLD OF OUR FATHERS

By Irving Howe
Simon and Schuster, 1976

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Generational conflict, Irving Howe wrote in his richly anecdotal narrative of

the assimilation of Eastern European Jewry, is "central to the experiences of all
immigrant groups." Similarly, conflict over ethnic succession has been central
to the metamorphosis of New York. Mr. Howe's history, which closes with the
equally seismic shift to the suburbs, helps the reader understand both conflicts.

His book helps preserves a vanishing culture. Some of it has been absorbed into
the New York idiom, just as every immigrant group before and since has
contributed flavor to the ethnic stew. Other aspects of that culture, from the
icons of the Yiddish theater to the suffering of Lower East Side mothers
deserted by their husbands, have been all but forgotten, and bear remembering.

TIME AND AGAIN

By Jack Finney
Simon & Schuster, 1970

Whether Si Morley really walked out of his 20th century apartment one night
and stepped back into time is any reader's guess. But his escapades into the
wood-cut world of the late 19th century in Jack Finney's "illustrated novel"
makes for a diverting mystery and an instructive, if sometimes sanitized,
travelogue in the Flatiron district and beyond. (Morley's Victorian vision was of
a thriving New York, not of the tenements that Jacob Riis was chronicling
during the same period.)

"I've tried to be factually accurate," Mr. Finney wrote in a footnote, though he

acknowledges fudging the date that the Dakota opened and suggests that his
obsession with the minutia of other places or events "becomes time-wasting
foolishness, but fun." Not all the illustrations in "Time and Again" represent the
1880's, Mr. Finney wrote, but "before 1900 things didn't change so fast as now
-- one more reason why Si so wisely decided to stay back there."

HERE IS NEW YORK

By E. B. White
Warner Books, 1949

This slender volume is a classic of simplicity and grace, a love poem to a city
where no one should come to live, White wrote, "unless he is willing to be
lucky."

It is a timeless book that casually examines the three New Yorks, of the native-
born, the commuter, and the out-of-towner, and concludes, reassuringly given
the grousing more than four decades later, that "the city has never been so
uncomfortable, so crowded, so tense."

In his foreword, White wrote that much had changed even in the few months
since he had written his ode. "I wrote not only during a heat wave but during a
boom. The heat has broken, the boom has broken, and New York is not quite so
feverish now as when the piece was written. The Lafayette Hotel, mentioned in
passing, has passed despite the mention. But the essential fever of New York

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has not changed in any particular, and I have not tried to make revisions in the
hope of bringing the thing down to date. "To bring New York down to date," he
wrote, "a man would have to be published with the speed of light."

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