Pluralities of print

Where to begin a discussion of “New York's cultures of print”? A logical starting point might be the national magazines founded in the city around the turn of the nineteenth century, large-format monthlies like Munsey's (1889-1921), Collier's (1888-1919), and McClure's (1893-1911). These popular publications drew on New York's cutting-edge publishing technology and marketing savvy, as well as on the city's wealth of journalistic talent, to help bring into being a national middle-class reading public. Their inheritors were the “smart” magazines of the 1920s and 30s - Smart Set (1900-30), Vanity Fair (1913-36), The New Yorker (1925-present), and Esquire (1933-present) - dedicated to bringing New York's culture and style to the hinterlands. Significantly, these publications began the segmentation of the national public by targeting a niche audience with high education and income levels for the advertisers of luxury goods.

To get the full flavor of New York's cultures of print, however, we should juxtapose these frankly commercial endeavors with their more bohemian counterparts. Although they were scattered around the US and Europe, plenty of the “little magazines” that shaped the roaring twenties and radical thirties made their homes in New York, including The Dial (a revived and revised version of the Boston Transcendentalist publication of the same name, 1916-29), The Seven Arts (1916-17), The Masses (1911-17), and The New Masses (1926-48). They were succeeded by the Beat and progressive publications that hallmarked the mid-century “mimeograph revolution.” Devoted to journalism, poetry, and other forms of word and print art, downtown publications like Gilbert Sorrentino’s Neon (1956–60), Diane di Prima’s The Floating Bear (1961–68), and Ed Sanders’s Fuck You/a Magazine of the Arts (1962–65) helped to defi ne a downtown print culture that saw itself as aesthetically, economically, and politically distinct from the publishing mainstream ensconced in midtown.

Something which concerns themselves

The French traveler and critic Alexis de Tocqueville likely had in mind New York City theaters like the Bowery and the Park when he wrote, in Democracy in America (1835), that

Tocqueville's description indicates the ways in which the early theater in New York (as in larger cities such as London or Paris) both accommodated all classes and segregated them in carefully demarcated architectural spaces, the “pit” on the floor and the private “boxes” - belonging to wealthy subscribers - above and to the sides. He doesn't mention the third space common to early New York theaters, the “gallery,” made up of balcony seating that reached up to nosebleed heights, including a “third tier” that often housed prostitutes and their customers. The “gallery gods,” young workingclass patrons, were commonly understood to rule theaters by threatening to shower food or even furniture on performers or viewers in other portions of the house.

Like a stranger suddenly sidling up as you walk down Broadway, or perhaps some young eccentric sitting alone at a bar determined to bend your ear a little, Herman Melville's novel of 1851, Moby-Dick, introduces itself to readers in an abrupt but engaging manner. Through a narrator named Ishmael, Melville gives voice to a modern consciousness as original as any in American literature. It is a voice as startling and unselfconscious as the manner in which people sometimes talk to themselves as they walk crowded streets of modern cities, or wander crowded thoughts of modern life.

Though Melville will devote most of his novel’s great length to a whaling enterprise and shipboard life, the first chapter of Moby-Dick remains anchored in a brief tour of lower Manhattan (see Figure 5 ).

At the conclusion of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), the gentlemen of the Welland-Mingott clan gather in Newland Archer's library, and their talk turns to the social disintegration implied in the rise of that “foreign upstart,” Julius Beaufort. Lawrence Lefferts, the perennial (and hypocritical) defender of “society,” thunders: “If things go on at this pace . . . we shall see our children fighting for invitations to swindlers' houses, and marrying Beaufort's bastards.” Only a chapter (and twenty-six years) later, Lefferts's quintessential articulation of Old New York embattlement is driven home by the revelation that Newland Archer's eldest son plans to do just that. For The Age of Innocence, “Beaufort's bastards” come to stand for illegitimacy legitimized by the passage of time: more specifically, they speak to a struggle over manners staged through generational change. Like many New York novels of the turn of the twentieth century, Wharton's novel frames the rapid social change of the era in generational terms: cultural conflict comes off as family squabble. As the discussion of Beaufort's bastards suggests, generational change stages intimate clashes between what is and is not culturally acceptable, all while troubling existing divisions between what is “family” and what is “foreign,” what is private and what is public. “Manners,” in this sense, become the battleground through which turn-of-the-century New York writers bring cultural difference home; in particular, New York novels of manners reckon with such cultural difference by recognizing it as an inescapable force of historical change.

“Now Dick had listened to all this conversation. Being an enterprising young man, he thought he saw a chance for a speculation, and determined to avail himself of it. Accordingly he stepped up to the two just as Frank's uncle was about leaving, and said, “I know all about the city, sir; I'll show him around, if you want me to.”

The gentleman looked a little curiously at the ragged figure before him.

What is it that the Kander and Ebb song says about New York City? “If I can make it there, / I'd make it anywhere.” From its origins as a Dutch mercantile center to its modern incarnation as the financial center of the United States and a target for the terrorists of 9/11, New York, as the song suggests, has held a special place in the country's national mythology.

In an 1862 article in the Brooklyn Standard, Walt Whitman imagined, less than four decades hence, Brooklyn's prominence among the cities of the world. At the time of his writing, Brooklyn was the United States' third largest city. Home to more than 260,000 people, Brooklyn rivaled New York, its neighbor across the East River, in size, industry, and population. Residents lived and worked on densely populated streets designed in 1839 as a grid; they rode the numerous ferries that daily crossed the East River. In an earlier article in the six-month series entitled “Brooklyniana,” Whitman envisioned among future generations a widespread interest in the narratives of Brooklyn's diverse inhabitants, their stories of daily life, “personal chronicles and gossip,” and most of all their “authentic reminiscences” and “memoirs” of urban life. Whitman was prescient. 1 Although it is no longer its own city – the consolidation into Greater New York City occurred in 1898 – Brooklyn’s inhabitants and landscape are a recognizable and indeed iconic element of American arts and letters.

New York, more than any other city, unapologetically names its center for theater and drama: Broadway is the axis surrounded by concentric rings of off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway - marking, respectively, mainstream, margin, and fringe. Anything beyond the shores of Manhattan is designated, sometimes with condescension, “regional theater.”

Lesbian and gay drama maps onto this topography. The history of scripted live performances by or about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in New York City is the history of a vexed relationship with Broadway, the mainstream visibility it offers, and the politics and aesthetics it polices. Broadway is an object of desire, a longed-for sign of success that can seduce theater practitioners toward conservative aesthetics and politics, away from radical experimentation and social engagement. Broadway spotlights a few extraordinarily talented queer playwrights - often but not always white gay men - while routinely eclipsing equally brilliant people of color, white lesbians, and feminists of all stripes. But theater practitioners who refuse and are refused by Broadway have created other venues, and the syncopation between these sites and Broadway, between the experimental and the established, characterizes New York's theater scene.

Prior to the twentieth century, plays incorporating cross-dressing were common, but a critical mass of plays that included identifiably non-heterosexual characters first emerged in the 1920s. The first of this cluster, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance , was a Yiddish-language play about a Jewish brothel-keeper whose daughter has an affair with a prostitute . God of Vengeance opened on the Lower East Side before it was translated into English and moved to the Apollo Theater on Broadway in 1923.

In the final chapter of Chang-rae Lee's first novel, Native Speaker (1995), the protagonist, a Korean American named Henry Park, thinks about the streets of Flushing, Queens, and why he loves them:

The novel's epigraph comes from Whitman's poem “The Sleepers”: “I turn but do not extricate myself, / Confused, a past-reading, another, but with darkness yet.” The lines are drawn from a passage in which the poem's narrator has just imagined “a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea,” a swimmer who is ultimately dashed to death against the rocks: “Swiftly and out of sight is borne the brave corpse.” Lee's novel, like Whitman's poem, is haunted by loss, occurring in the aftermath of the death of the narrator's son, Mitt, who is inadvertently suffocated at the bottom of a “dog pile” of neighborhood boys. Despite the bitter memories that they evoke, the streets of Flushing remain a source of hope and promise for Henry Park.

When a Jewish boy marries a Catholic girl we can expect laughs aplenty, and maybe some tears along the way: and so it proved in Abie's Irish Rose, a wildly successful play by Anne Nichols, which had a triumphant five-year run on Broadway from 1922. By 1927 there had been over 2,000 performances on Broadway and more than 11,000 performances world-wide, including a notable five-year run in the West End of London. At no time was it regarded as anything other than popular schlock. Nichols's characters speak with stage Irish and Yiddish accents richly larded with New Yorkese: vell (well), goil (girl), dose (those), pizziness (business), tink (think), nize (nice), mudder (mother), strit (street), hoits (hurts), spik (speak), pliz (please), vant (want), don'd (don't), peefle (piffle). Solomon Levy, Abie's father, summons a “texes keb” (taxi cab), and so on. The dilemmas of ethnic difference are settled with comic deftness when Rose cooks kosher food for her Abie, and makes a ham for her friends.

Abie's Irish Rose is a commercial product of American popular culture. It is also a prism in which powerful cultural forces - ethnic relations, the impact of mass immigration, and the cross-generational complexities of assimilation - are refracted, exaggerated, and also unexpectedly clarified. Popular culture is perhaps more comfortable than “high” culture with the interplay of cultural production and the immigrant experience. (It took several generations of ethnic jokes, we might say, to make Call It Sleep possible.) I take the broad ethnic comedy of Nichols’s play to constitute a fable of tolerance. In the face of great cultural pressures for assimilation, her play offered Jewish audiences, and not just Jews, a way to manage that pressure. It opened a little window for tolerance.

As Whitman himself suggests, the pleasure he took in New York City was something more than a happy backdrop for his real work as a poet. It was, rather, fundamental to his attempt to imagine - and to enact - a democratic poetics that would find its basic resources in the unacknowledged though universal fact of humans having bodies, and its site, as it were, in the dense interactions of such bodies made possible in the most populous cities, New York above all. It is in this sense that, despite his strong attachment to the category of the nation as a whole and his repeated thematization of regional vignettes, Whitman is also, centrally, an urbanist - and one grounded in the specific urban locale of Manhattan. For it is in the daily life available in cities like Manhattan that, according to Whitman, one can best “absorb” and be absorbed by the largest number of other people - that one can try on, learn from, identify with other subjectivities, other concretely embodied modes and styles of life. This is perhaps why Whitman uses the word “inspiriting” to describe his experience of “the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never ending human currents” on Broadway.

“DISTRESSING,”

This notice, published in the October 26, 1809 issue of the New York paper the Evening Post, was followed by subsequent announcements from the landlord of the Columbian Hotel, who threatened to sell a “very curious kind of a written book” that had been found in the aforementioned Knickerbocker's rooms, as payment for rent the missing man owed him. The ads were a hoax, the landlord fictional, but the book was quite real. It was made available for sale in New York City on December 6, 1809, with the title

The narrator of this daunting tome was given as “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” he of the cocked hat and unpaid bills (see Figure 2 ). The real author is much more familiar to posterity: it was a 26-year-old Washington Irving.

In the mid-1940s, the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell created a 93-year old resident of the South Street Seaport named Hugh G. Flood - not quite antediluvian and not quite postdiluvian, either. He was a “tough Scotch-Irishman,” a composite of “several old men” Mitchell knew from the Fulton Fish Market. The “truthful rather than factual” sketches Mitchell wrote about Mr. Flood were “stories of fish-eating, whiskey, death, and rebirth.” The title character, an inveterate consumer of freshly imported seafood, dispenses wisdom on topics such as the medicinal properties of oysters (including where to find the best ones in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn) and complains that scientists have ruined the most basic foods (he gives Mitchell's narrator the inside scoop on where to find a decent, old-fashioned loaf of bread on Elizabeth Street). Like Mitchell's other writing for the New Yorker, these stories featured people and places representative of older, threatened, but persistent remnants of the city's past. Mitchell's Mr. Flood is a “retired house-wrecking contractor,” a participant in the never-ending capitalist ritual of tearing things down to put new things up: “creative destruction,” as the economist Joseph Schumpeter, a contemporary of Mitchell's, put it.

In 1828, James Kirke Paulding summarized the changes that New York had undergone since September 1664, when the Dutch had surrendered to the forces of James Stuart, Duke of York. Paulding's account is still disquietingly relevant today:

Harlem, the first neighborhood famed as a global black metropolis, has stood for a century as this country's largest and most iconic black community. When this once white neighborhood became a black one, however, it was the sixth home in New York for African Americans before law and custom began to allow them access to the entire city. I often joke that whenever Europe sailed off to discover the rest of the world there was always an African aboard. In the case of New York, this was doubly true. A black Portuguese navigator came up the Hudson in 1525, and in 1613 Jan Rodriguez, a free black sailor, was dropped off from a Dutch trader on Manhattan and stayed.

The African influence on New York has its origins in the steady stream of people of African descent imported by the Dutch as slaves to build New Amsterdam. During the mid-1600s some held in bondage were freed and given land to provide a buffer zone against attacks from Native Americans at the northern end of New Amsterdam. When the British took over in 1664, thousands more captives were imported directly from West Africa into slavery in New York and a more repressive bondage than under the Dutch. The earliest African communities were near the present African Burial Ground and in the Five Points area. After the draft riots of 1863 a residential area known as “Little Africa” was in the West Village (until about 1890), and others developed in Brooklyn. From the 1880s until about 1910, most African Americans moved into the Tenderloin along Eighth and Ninth Avenues from 23rd Street to 42nd and San Juan Hill, between 58th and 65th Streets on the West Side.

As one of Amy Lowell's young Harvard acolytes left Boston for a new life in Greenwich Village, the poet sent him off with this warning: “The only thing I beg of you is not to be fooled by Greenwich Village. There are no good people there. They are just failures who agreed to admire each other, since the world refuses to do it for them.” Lowell had good reason to distrust the denizens of Greenwich Village. Though they shared similar artistic tastes and a similar drive to reform American literature, their ends differed dramatically. Lowell's was a conservative, anti-unionist, capitalist, pro-war mindset. The bohemians of the Village, on the other hand, believed in free love, labor reform, socialism, and pacifism. And yet Lowell's snide admonition, however unwittingly, gets at one of the most compelling paradoxes of bohemian Greenwich Village: a belief in failure as the only real mark of success in an America that the activists, anarchists, feminists, artists, writers, and poets who made it their home saw as increasingly smug, acquisitive, and anti-intellectual. Where Lowell notoriously pitched her writing to the general public, working to make the avant-garde accessible and commercially lucrative, the Villagers reveled in rejection by this same audience. They believed art could enlighten minds, shatter social prohibitions, even ameliorate inequities among the classes, and when middle-class audiences responded to their work with confusion and derision, they felt confident they had hit their mark. In rejecting the bourgeois desires of mainstream America, with its hunger for social position and material success, they turned the Village into a place where art reigned supreme as the highest, most noble human achievement.

“Because a June thunderstorm had washed out the railroad tracks ahead, the pleasure party would not be able to reach Saratoga that evening. Fortunately, a stone's throw from the stalled train was a hotel. It looked improbably grand, but the travelers - Harry Masters; his wife, Clara; and their friend Edward Ashburner - decided to stay there for the night. They were going to be roughing it. Despite the eight columns in the hotel's portico, the bedding turned out to have bugs, and the other guests were not the sort of people Harry and Clara Masters socialized with back in the city.

Ashburner, who was from England, was still learning the customs of the American leisure class. During dinner he observed a new one. All the guests ate at a common table, and in order to shut out the diners not of “our set,” Harry and Clara spoke French. They spoke it rather freely, in fact - so freely that a man across the table began to stare. Ashburner was afraid that the staring man spoke French too and didn't like what he was hearing. But then the man ate some pound cake and cheese, together, and Ashburner knew they were safe.

So went the class war in mid-nineteenth-century New York. If you live in dread that the syrup will trickle over and contaminate the bacon, now you know why.

Harry, Clara, and Edward are fictional characters created by a writer named Charles Astor Bristed in 1850. Two years earlier, Bristed had inherited a Manhattan house, ninety city lots, and a country seat from his grandfather, John Jacob Astor, at his death the richest man in America.