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http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,622057,00.html
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The new New York
We all know that after September 11, New York will never be the same
again. But the same as what? Tom Wolfe says the city has changed
beyond all recognition in the past few years
Tom Wolfe
Thursday December 20, 2001
The Guardian
Has it been duly recorded that everything in New York changed just
before September 11? Granted, it's hard to get the picture here in
the Afghan glare of the TV set, but it looks like this: 18 months
before 9/11 and the death storm of ashes that rolled uptown from the
World Trade Centre, all of lower Manhattan's artists' quarters -
SoHo, NoHo, WeVar, TriBeCa, the Village and Little Italy - were
already history.
The last stronghold, WeVar, a decrepit old warehouse area that was
home to a hive of artists' lofts west of Varick Street and south of
the Canal Street exit of the Holland tunnel, was finally overrun by
investment bankers
, Silicon Alley then-fat cats and real-estate developers in the spring of 2000.
Construction elevators started whining up and down the sides of the warehouses, and
the victors' banners proclaimed FOR SALE NOW: HISTORIC OL
D NEW YORK LOFT CONDOMINIUMS.
The usual droves of young artists - from the California Institute of the Arts to the
Rhode Island School of Design and every MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programme in between
- still arrive to storm the Manhattan art scene,
but can no longer get even remotely within rent range and wind up in Williamsburg and
Jersey City.
Twenty months before 9/11, Wall Street was already history, too. Wall Street hadn't
been Wall Street since December 31 1999, when Nasdaq started the street's great
migration to Times Square. Reuters, Morgan Stanley, Lehma
n Brothers, Bear Stearns and Ernst & Young soon followed their lead. Today,
out-of-town financial types must be perplexed to find the mighty Morgan Stanley
shank-to-flank with a pink-neon girlie bar called Runway 69.
A year before 9/11, that old standby of New York humour, folklore, fiction and drama -
"the shrink", the Freudian psychiatrist with the couch - had already gone the way of
the Irish cabbie with the cap over one eye. When
neuroscientists Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University and Eric Kandel of Columbia
won the Nobel Prize in 2000 (along with Arvid Carlsson of Germany) for discoveries
about how information actually circulates inside the
brain, physiology and not Freud was king. The New York teaching hospitals were now
training psychiatrists who had actually been introduced to brain functions and the
central nervous system.
As the witticism went, going to a Freudian psychiatrist was like going to "a
cardiologist who only knows about broken hearts and valentines". The psychiatrist who,
in an ABC News conversation with Peter Jennings, referred
to the World Trade Centre as two towering "phallic symbols" subjected to "symbolic
castration" came off as quaint. He would have done better on The Sopranos, the show
that hasn't yet got the word about yackety-yak therap
y.
Twenty months before 9/11, the Democratic party "organisation", ruler of the city for
half a century, had disintegrated thanks to, of all things, an oversupply of populous
racial and ethnic minorities, and wound up like t
he Republican party and Liberal party "organisations". The term limits that cleansed
the city council slates for the 2001 races were the mopping-up operation. Politicians
still ran successfully under the Democratic party
banner, but only because they were neighbourhood warlords who had to call themselves
something.
Ten months before 9/11, New York City's architects, who only yesterday had battled so
gloriously and avant- gardely as the Whites (Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, John
Hejduk et al) versus the Greys (Michael Graves, Jaquel
in Robertson, Robert Stern et al), had already given up the cutting edge because they
could no longer find one. When Cathy Lang Ho and Raul A Barreneche set out to do a
book on the edgiest residential designs in North Ame
rica (House: American Houses for the New Century), they could find only three New York
architects with houses actually built or under construction that deserved any such
adjective: Toshiko Mori, Steven Holl and Michael Mc
Donough with his cyberspatial "e-house2000" (for e-nergy, the e-nvironment and
e-xciting) in the upper Hudson Valley near New Paltz, built with Scada software
enabling the owner to (among other techie things) turn on the
dishwasher from Tokyo.
Two years before 9/11, contemporary American art, which in market terms had never
recovered from the stock-market and commercial real-estate nose dives of the early
1990s, went into sleep mode. Since the Brooklyn museum's
noisy Sensations show (all Brits) in 1999, the only thing causing anybody in the art
world to open even one eye has been the wildfire rumour of a guerrilla art happening
known as Meat Shower in a Brooklyn loft, at which
brave and doggedly un-clothes-conscious art worldlings ventured into a room wherein
rained a drizzle of raw meat droplets created by high-speed electric deli knives
shaving sides of beef.
A full four years before 9/11, New York law enforcement had entered a new time zone:
the epoch of the Latino cop. Irish cops still dominated the upper and older ranks of
the NYPD, and they would show the world their legen
dary courage once again on 9/11, but the new legends were Latin. As a member of the
brass at 1 Police Plaza, Irish himself, put it: "We still recruit Irish cops, but half
of them are from the suburbs. These days, if you w
ant a real old-fashioned Irish cop, you hire a Puerto Rican."
Eight years before 9/11, financial services and commercial real estate were superseded
as driving forces in the New York economy by the restaurants appearing in bold face in
the Zagat restaurant guide. The exodus of corpo
rations from New York during the near-depression of 1992-95 was staunched by a single
thing: lunch. The CEOs would do anything rather than give up the daily celebrations of
their eminence at eateries in the town where the
wining and dining were as good azagats. (I know, I know; just read it out loud.) The
case could be made that any post-9/11 federal appropriations to prop up business in
New York should go first to the places where you ca
n get Chilean sea bass with a Georgia plum marmalade glaze on a bed of mashed Hayman
potatoes laced with leeks, broccoli rabe and emulsion of braised Vidalia onions
infused with marsala vinegar.
Four months before 9/11, figures came in to back up what every teacher and principal
in the public-school system already knew: New York's great new wave of immigration is
not black or Latino, much less Middle Eastern or E
uropean, but Asian, and especially south-east Asian.
Over the decade of the 1990s, the number of white students declined 10% (177,000 to
160,000), while the number of black students rose 4 % (354,000 to 367,000), Hispanic
students 22% (325,000 to 397,000) - and Asian studen
ts 67% (73,000 to 122,000). Brainy tyros they were, too. Each newly created trade
school in the system had to enrol its share of students with below-par reading scores.
Old hands knew that the trick was, in the words of o
ne assistant principal, to "go down the lists and check off every Asian name you come
to. If they have low scores, all that means is they just came through immigration.
Give them six months, and they'll lift your whole bo
at for you."
At least three years before 9/11, the mating game in New York got turned on its head.
By this past summer, the ratio of girls to boys in Manhattan was so girl-heavy that
boys no longer even bothered expending the time and
energy required to chat girls up in bars. They just handed every likely lovely their
business card and waited for the calls, which they got with an almost lust-busting
inevitability. The mantra for such young men about t
own had always been: "You can't be too rich or too thin." Last summer, they were all
enrolling in fitness centres that looked like cocktail lounges with exercise machines,
and the mantra went: "Pecs, abs, delts, lats, obl
iques, traps and quads - you can't be too rich or too ripped."
Now that's change.
The changes to look for next? It's hard not to see them coming. The girls will either
read The Rules, which say that girls must never ring up boys, or else move to Boston
and Cambridge, where, for some reason, when Cupid
strikes, the targets stay struck and get married. New York's Asians will finally
become a bloc no politician can write off, which will be obvious to all when the
mayors start making ritual visits - and they will - to the
other side of the international date line. Meanwhile, Latinos will take their turn
dominating the ranks of public employees, from the marriage-bureau clerks to the
school principals, just like the Irish, Italians, Jews an
d African-Americans before them. The Asians will get theirs later.
The artists and architects will finally shake the overvalued urge known as "style" and
head in a revolutionary direction known as "content". The cabbie and the shrink will
be succeeded as New York characters by the house-
call computer swami and the diversity consultant. The bond market will become a
heaving crap shoot. The ageing, flimsy glass-box office buildings of midtown and lower
Manhattan will house artists' studios. (Nice light, bu
t don't give up your lease in Jersey City yet.)
One thing won't change: lunch.
� Tom Wolfe, 2001
Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
End<{{{
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