Berman in The Forest of Symbols

All ThaI Is Solid Dlells
IUloAir
The Experience
Marshall Berman of Modernity
l PENGUIN BOOKS
286 ALL THAT Is SoLID MELTS INTO AfR
moral imagination and courage of these little men surge up sud

denly, like the Admiralty's golden needle piercing through the
Petersburg fog. In a moment it is gone. swallowed up by dark and
murky history; but its vividness and radiance remain to haunt the
bleak air.
This trip through the mysteries of St. Petersburg. through its
dash and interplay of experiments in modernization from above
and below, may provide clues to some of the mysteries of political
and spiritual life in the cities of the Third World-in Lagos. Bra
silia. New Delhi. Mexico City-today. But the clash and fusion of
modernities goes on even in the most fully modernized sectors of
u
today's world; the Petersburg influenza infuses the air of New
York. of Milan. of Stockholm. of Tokyo, of Tel Aviv, and ifblows
on and on. Petersburg's little men, its "state nomads without
home," find themselves at home everywhere in the contemporary
In the Forest of
world. 69 The Petersburg tradition, as I have presented it. can be
uniquely valuable to them. It can provide them with shadow pass SYlllbols: SOllle Notes
ports into the unreal reality of the modern city. And it can inspire
them with visions of symbolic action and interaction that can help
them to act as men and citizens there: modes of passionately in
on Modernislll in
tense encounter and conflict and dialogue through which they can
at once assert themselves and confront each other and challenge New York
the powers that control them all. It can help them to become, as The City of the Captive Globe . .. is the capital of Ego, where science,
Dostoevsky'S Underground Man claimed (and desperately hoped) art, poetry and forms of _dness compete under ideal conditions to
to be, both personally and politically "more alive" in the elusively invent, destroy and restore the world ofphenommo.l reality.
shifting light and shadow of the city streets. It is this prospect · .. Manhattan is the product of an unformuWed theory,
above all that Petersburg has opened up in modern life. Manhattanism, whose program {is] to exist in a world totally
fabricated by man, to live inside fantasy • ... The entire city became a
factory of manmade nperience, where the real and natural ceased to
exist.
· .• The Grid's two-dimensional discipline creates undreamt-of
freedom for three-dimensional anarchy ... the city can be at the same
time ordered andJluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.
· .. a mythical island where the invention and testing ofa
metropolitan life-styk, and its attendant architecture, could be
pursued as a colkdive experiment . •. a GalajHJgos Island of new
technologies, a new chapter in the survival of the fittest, this time a
battk among species of machines. ...
-Rem Koolhaas, D,/irioru NIIVI YorA
287
288 ALL THAT Is SOLID MELTS INTO AIR Modernism in New York 289
Out for G wtJli, ofter G weelr in bed, been conceived and executed not merely to serve immediate eco
1firul tlmn teGring up pGn of my bIoclr nomic and political needs but, at least equally important, to dem
Arul, chilkd throagh, daud Grullonely, join the doun onstrate to the whole world what modern men can build and how
111 meelr Gttitrules, WGtching the h~e C1'Gne
modern life can be imagined and lived.
Fumbk lUKllriously in the filth ofyeGrs. .•.
Many of the city'S most impressive structures were planned spe
As usUGl itt New Yorlr, everything is tom down cifically as symbolic expressions of modernity: Central Park, the
Before you have IaGd time to cGrefor it. ... Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, Manhattan's
many skyscrapers, Rockefeller Center and much else. Other areas
You would thid the simpk fGet of IaGving lo:sted of the city-the harbor, Wall Street, Broadway, the Bowery, the
ThreGteMd our cities liTre mysterious fires.
Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Harlem, Times Square, Mad
-James Merrill, "An Urban Convalescence"
ison Avenue-have taken on symbolic weight and force as time
"You troce out SlrG;,ht lines,fiU up tile hoks Gnd level up tile went by. The cumulative impact of all this is that the New Yorker
grourul, Grul tile result is nihilism!" (From Gn Gngr'j speech of G greGt finds himself in the midst of a Baudelairean forest of symbols. The
Guthori" who well presiding on G Commission to report on plo:,., for presence and profusion of these giant forms make New York a
nlmsion.) rich and strange place to live in. But they also make it a dangerous
1 replied: "£%cuse me, but tlaGt, properly speGlring, is just wlaGt our place, because its symbols and symbolisms are endlessly fighting
worlr should be." each other for sun and light, working to kill each other off, melting
-I.e Corbusier, TIN Cay 01 Tomorr_ each other along with themselves into air. Thus, if New York is a
forest of symbols, it is a forest where axes and bulldozers are
always at work. and great works constantly crashing down; where
ONE OF the central themes of this book has been the fate of "all pastoral dropouts encounter phantom armies, and Love's Labour's
that is solid" in modern life to "melt into air." The innate Lost interplays with Macbeth; where new meanings are forever
mism of the modern economy, and of the culture that grows springing up with, and falling down from, the constructed trees.
this economy, annihilates everything that it creates-physical I will begin this section with a discussion of Robert Moses, whose
vironments, social institutions. metaphysical ideas, artistic visions, career in public life stretched from the early 1910s to the late
moral values-in order to create more, to go on endlessly 1960s, who is probably the greatest creator of symbolic forms in
the world anew. This drive draws all modern men and women twentieth-century New York, whose constructions had a destruc
its orbit, and forces us all to grapple with the question of what tive and disastrous impact on my early life, and whose specter still
essential, what is meaningful, what is real in the maelstrom haunts my city today. Next, I wiII explore the work of Jane Jacobs
which we move and live. In this final chapter, I want to put and some of her contemporaries. who. locked in combat with
in the picture. to explore and chart some of the currents that Moses, created a radically different order of urban symbolism in
Howed through my own modern environment, New York the 1960s. Finally, I will delineate some of the symbolic forms and
and given form and energy to my life. environments that have sprung up in the cities of the 1970s. As I
For more than a century, New York has served as a center develop a perspective on the urban metamorphoses of the past
international communications. The city has become not merely a four decades, I will be painting a picture in which I can locate
theater but itself a production, a multimedia presentation myself, trying to grasp the modernizations and modernisms that
audience is the whole world. This has given a special resonance: have made me and many of the people around me what we are.
and depth to much of what is done and made here. A great
of New York's construction and development over the past
needs to be seen as symbolic action and communication:
290 ALL THAT Is SoUD MELTS INTO AIR Modernism in New York 291
The Bronx's dreadful fate is experienced. though probably not

understood. by hundreds of thousands of motorists every day. as
I. they negotiate the Cross-Bronx Expressway. which cuts through
the borough's center. This road. although jammed with heavy
traffic day and night. is fast, deadly fast; speed limits are routinely
Robert Moses: The transgressed. even at the dangerously curved and graded entrance
and exit ramps; constant convoys of huge trucks, with grimly ag
Expressway World gressive drivers. dominate the sight lines; cars weave wildly in and
out among the trucks: it is as if everyone on this road is seized with
W/am you ctpet'ate in an overhilt metropolis, yoululVfI to Iuu:A your a desperate. uncontrollable urge to get out of the Bronx as fast as
way wit" a mflat ax. wheels can take him. A glance at the cityscape to the north and
/'m jlllt loi,., to leep rig"t on build;,.,. You do tile best you can to south-it is hard to get more than quick glances, because much of
,tctp it. the road is below ground level and bounded by brick walls ten feet
-Maxims of Robert Moses
high-will suggest why: hundreds of boarded-up abandoned
buildings and charred and burnt-out hulks of buildings; dozens of
••• SIIe it was put me 'traig"t
about t"e city w"m I ,aid, it
blocks covered with nothing at all but shattered bricks and waste.
Ten minutes on this road. an ordeal for anyone. is especially
maAe, me iU to ,ee t"em run up dreadful for people who remember the Bronx as it used to be:
a nfIW bridge liM that in a few mont'" who remember these neighborhoods as they once lived and
and I can't find time even to let thrived. until this road itself cut through their heart and made the
a booA written. They haw t"e power, Bronx. above all. a place to get out of. For children of the Bronx
t"at', all, ,lie replied. That', what you all
like myself. this road bears a load of special irony: as we race
want. Ifyou can't Iflt it, czcAnowkdge through our childhood world, rushing to get out. relieved to see
the end in sight. we are not merely spectators but active partici
at lea,t w"at it is. And they're not pants in the process of destruction that tears our hearts. We fight
,oi,., to giw it to you. back the tears. and step on the gas.
-William Carlos Williams, "The Flower"
Robert Moses is the man who made all this possible. When I
heard Allen Ginsberg ask at the end of the 1950s. "Who was that
What ","ia of c - ' and aluminum luu:led ctpm t"eir sAuIls
and ate up their brain' and imagination' ... sphinx of cement and aluminum." I felt sure at once that, even if
Moloc" Who'fI buildi,." are judgment! the poet didn't know it. Moses was his man. Like Ginsberg's "Mo
-Allen Ginsberg. "How." loch. who entered my soul early," Robert Moses and his public
works had come into my life just before my Bar Mitzvah. and
helped bring my childhood to an end. He had been present all
AMONG THE many images and symbols that New York has along, in a vague subliminal way. Everything big that got built in
uted to modern culture. one of the most striking in recent or around New York seemed somehow to be his work: the Tribor
has been an image of modern ruin and devastation. The ough Bridge. the West Side Highway, dozens of parkways in
where I grew up. has even become an international code word Westchester and Long Island, Jones and Orchard beaches.
our epoch's accumulated urban nightmares: drugs, gangs, innumerable parks. housing developments. Idlewild (now Ken
murder. terror. thousands of buildings abandoned. nei2hbor-:: nedy) Airport. a network of enormous dams and power plants
hoods transformed into garbage- and brick-strewn near Niagara Falls; the list seemed to go on forever. He had gen
erated an event that had special magic for me: the 1939-40 namite blasts and tremors, the wild, jagged crags of rock newly
World's Fair, which I had attended in my mother's womb, and torn, the vistas of devastation stretching for miles to the east and
whose elegant logo, the trylon and perisphere, adorned our apart west as far as the eye could see-and marvel to see our ordi
ment in many forms-programs, banners. postcards. ashtrays nary nice neighborhood transformed into sublime, spectacular
and symbolized human adventure. progress. faith in the future. ruins.
all the heroic ideals of the age into which I was born. In college, when I discovered Piranesi, I felt instantly at home.
But then. in the spring and fall of 1953. Moses began to loom Or I would return from the Columbia library to the construction
over my life in a new way: he proclaimed that he was about to ram site and feel myself in the midst of the last act of Goethe's Faust.
an immense expressway. unprecedented in scale. expense and dif (You had to hand it to Moses: his works gave you ideas.) Only
ficulty of construction. through our neighborhood's heart. At first there was no humanistic triumph here to offset the destruction.
we couldn't believe it; it seemed to come from another world. First Indeed, when the construction was done, the real ruin of the
of all. hardly any of us owned cars: the neighborhood itself. and Bronx had just begun. Miles of streets alongside the road were
the subways leading downtown. defined the flow of our lives. Be choked with dust and fumes and deafening noise-most strik
sides. even if the city needed the road-or was it the state that ingly, the roar of trucks of a size and power that the Bronx had
needed the road? (in Moses' operations, the location of power and never seen, hauling heavy cargoes through the city, bound for
authority was never clear. except for Moses himself)-they surely Long Island or New England, for New Jersey and all points south,
couldn't mean what the stories seemed to say: that the road would all through the day and night. Apartment houses that had been
be blasted directly through a dozen solid. settled, densely popu settled and stable for twenty years emptied out. often virtually
lated neighborhoods like our own; that something like 60.000 overnight; large and impoverished black and Hispanic families,
working- and lower-middle-class people. mostly Jews. but with fleeing even worse slums, were moved in wholesale, often under
many Italians. Irish and Blacks thrown in. would be thrown out of the auspices of the Welfare Department, which even paid inflated
their homes. The Jews of the Bronx were nonplussed: could a rents, spreading panic and accelerating flight. At the same time,
fellow-Jew really want to do this to us? (We had little idea of what the construction had destroyed many commercial blocks. cut oth
kind of Jew he was. or of how much we were all an obstruction in ers off from most of their customers and left the storekeepers not
his path.) And even if he did want to do it. we were sure it couldn't only close to bankruptcy but, in their enforced isolation, increas
happen here. not in America. We were still basking in the after ingly vulnerable to crime. The borough's great open market. along
glow of the New Deal: the government was OUT government. and it Bathgate Avenue, still flourishing in the late 1950s, was decimated;
would come through to protect us in the end. And yet, before we a year after the road came through, what was left went up in
knew it. steam shovels and bulldozers were there, and people were smoke. Thus depopulated, economically depleted, emotionally
getting notice that they had better clear out fast. They looked shattered-as bad as the physical damage had been the inner
numbly at the wreckers. at the disappearing streets. at each other. wounds were worse-the Bronx was ripe for all the dreaded spi
and they went. Moses was coming through. and no temporal or rals of urban blight.
spiritual power could block his way. Moses seemed to glory in the devastation. When he was asked,
For ten years. through the late 1950s and early 1960s. the center shortly after the Cross-Bronx road's completion, if urban express
of the Bronx was pounded and blasted and smashed. My friends ways like this didn't pose special human problems, he replied im
and I would stand on the parapet of the Grand Concourse. where patiently that "there's very little hardship in the thing. There's a
l74th Street had been, and survey the work's progress~the im little discomfort and even that is exaggerated." Compared with his
mense steam shovels and bulldozers and timber and steel beams. earlier, rural and suburban highways, the only difference here was
the hundreds of workers in their variously colored hard hats. the that "There are more houses in the way ... more people in the
giant cranes reaching far above the Bronx's tallest roofs. the dy- way-that's all." He boasted that "When you operate in an over
294 ALL THAT Is SoLID MELTS INTO AIR Modernism in New York 295
built metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax." I The, Rockies."2 Moses struck a chord that for more than a century has
subconscious equation here-animals' corpses to be chopped up been vital to the sensibility of New Yorkers: our identification with
and eaten, and "people in the way"-is enough to take one's progress, with renewal and reform, with the perpetual transfor
breath away. Had Allen Ginsberg put such metaphors into his mation of our world and ourselves-Harold Rosenberg called it
Moloch's mouth, he would have never been allowed to get away "the tradition of the New." How many of the Jews of the Bronx,
with it: it would have seemed, simply, too much. Moses' flair for hotbed of every form of radicalism, were willing to fight for the
extravagant cruelty, along with his visionary brilliance. obsessive sanctity of "things as they are"? Moses was destroying our world,
energy and megalomaniac ambition, enabled him to build, over yet he seemed to be working in the name of values that we our
the years, a quasi-mythological reputation. He appeared as the selves embraced.
latest in a long line of titanic builders and destroyers, in history I can remember standing above the construction site for the
and in cultural mythology: Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Baron Cross-Bronx Expressway, weeping for my neighborhood (whose
Haussmann, Joseph Stalin (although fanatically anti-communist. fate I foresaw with nightmarish precision), vowing remembrance
Moses loved to quote the Stalinist maxim "You can't make an ome-" and revenge, but also wrestling with some of the troubling ambi
lette without breaking eggs"), Bugsy Siegel (master builder of the guities and contradictions that Moses' work expressed. The Grand
mob, creator of Las Vegas), "Kingfish" Huey Long; Marlowe's Concourse, from whose heights 1 watched and thought, was our
Tamburlaine, Goethe's Faust, Captain Ahab, Mr. Kurtz, Citizen borough's closest thing to a Parisian boulevard. Among its most
Kane. Moses did his best to raise himself to gigantic stature, and striking features were rows of large, splendid 1930s apartment
even came to enjoy his increasing reputation as a monster, which houses: simple and clear in their architectural forms, whether geo
he believed would intimidate the public and keep potential oppo metrically sharp or biomorphically curved; brightly colored in con
nents out of the way. trasting brick, offset with chrome, beautifully interplayed with
In the end, however-after forty years-the legend he culti large areas of glass; open to light and air, as if to proclaim a good
vated helped to do him in: it brought him thousands of per""",,,' life that was open not just to the elite residents but to us all. The
enemies, some eventually as resolute and resourceful as style of these buildings, known as Art Deco today, was called "mod
himself, obsessed with him, passionately dedicated to bringing the ern" in their prime. For my parents, who described our family
man and his machines to a stop. In the late 1960s they finally proudly as a "modern" family, the Concourse buildings repre
succeeded, and he was stopped and deprived of his power to build. sented a pinnacle of modernity. We couldn't afford to live in them
But his works still surround us, and his spirit continues to haunt -though we did live in a small, modest, but still proudly "modern"
our public and private lives. building, far down the hill-but they could be admired for free,
It is easy to dwell endlessly on Moses' personal power and style. like the rows of glamorous ocean liners in port downtown. (The
But this emphasis tends to obscure one of the primary sources of buildings look like shell-shocked battleships in drydock today,
his vast authority: his ability to convince a mass public that he was while the ocean liners themselves are all but extinct.)
the vehicle of impersonal world-historical forces, the moving spirit As I saw one of the loveliest of these buildings being wrecked
of modernity. For forty years. he was able to pre-empt the vision for the road, I felt a grief that, I can see now, is endemic to modern
of the modern. To oppose his bridges, tunnels, expressways, hous life. So often the price of ongoing and expanding modernity is the
ing developments, power dams, stadia. cultural centers, was-or destruction not merely of "traditional" and "pre-modern" institu
so it seemed-to oppose history. progress, modernity itself. And tions and environments but-and here is the real tragedy-of
few people, especially in New York, were prepared to do that. everything most vital and beautiful in the modern world itself.
"There are people who like things as they are. I can't hold out any Here in the Bronx, thanks to Robert Moses, the modernity of the
hope to them. They have to keep moving further away. This is urban boulevard was being condemned as obsolete, and blown to
great big state, and there are other states. Let them go to the pieces, by the modernity of the interstate highway. Sic transit! To
be modern turned out to be far more problematical. and jumps, pinball machines. honky-tonks. loudspeakers, hot-dog
perilous. than I had been taught. stands, neon signs; no dirt, random noise or disarray.* Hence.
even when Jones Beach is filled with a crowd the size of Pittsburgh.
What were the roads that led to the Cross-Bronx Expressway? its ambience manages to be remarkably serene. It contrasts radi
The public works that Moses organized from the 1920s onward cally with Coney Island, only a few miles to the west, whose mid
expressed a vision-or rather a series of visions-of what modern dle-class constituency it immediately captured on its opening. All
life could and should be. I want to articulate the distinctive forms the density and intensity, the anarchic noise and motion, the seedy
of modernism that Moses defined and realized. to suggest their vitality that is expressed in Weegee's photographs and Reginald
inner contradictions. their ominous undercurrents-which burst Marsh's etchings. and celebrated symbolically in Lawrence Fer
to the surface in the Bronx-and their lasting meaning and value Iinghetti's "A Coney Island of the Mind," is wiped off the map in
for modern mankind. the visionary landscape ofJones Beach. t
Moses' first great achievement. at the end of the 1920s. was the What would a Jones Beach of the mind be like? It would be hard
creation of a public space radically different from anything that to convey in poetry, or in any sort of symbolic language that de
had existed anywhere before: Jones Beach State Park on Long pended on dramatic movement and contrast for its impact. But we
Island, just beyond the bounds of New York City along the Atlan can see its forms in the diagrammatic paintings of Mondrian. and
tic. This beach, which opened in the summer of 1929. and recently later in the minimalism of the 1960s, while its color tonalities be
celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. is so immense that it can easily long in the great tradition of neoclassical landscape. from Pous
hold a half million people on a hot Sunday in July without any sin to the young Matisse to Milton Avery. On a sunny day. Jones
sense of congestion. Its most striking feature as a landscape is its Beach transports us into the great romance of the Mediterranean.
amazing clarity of space and form: absolutely flat. blindingly white of Apollonian clarity, of perfect light without shadows, cosmic ge
expanses of sand, stretching forth to the horizon in a straight wide ometry. unbroken perspectives stretching onward toward an infi
band, cut on one side by the clear, pure, endless blue of the sea, nite horizon. This romance is at least as old as Plato. Its most
and on the other by the boardwalk's sharp unbroken line of brown. passionate and influential modern devotee is Le Corbusier. Here,
The great horizontal sweep of the whole is punctuated by two in the same year that Jones Beach opened. just before the Great
elegant Art Deco bathhouses of wood, brick and stone, and half Crash, he delineates his classic modern dream:
way between them at the park's dead center by a monumental
columnar water tower, visible from everywhere. rising up like a If we compare New York with Istanbul, we may say that the
skyscraper, evoking the grandeur of the twentieth-century urban one is a cataclysm. and the other a terrestrial paradise.
forms that this park at once complements and denies. Jones Beach New York is exciting and upsetting. So are the Alps; so is a
offers a spectacular display of the primary forms of nature tempest; so is a battle. New York is not beautiful, and if it stimu
earth. sun, water, sky-but nature here appears with an abstract lates our practical activities, it wounds our sense of happiness....
horizontal purity and a luminous clarity that only culture can cre
ate. • Sut American enterprise never gives up. On weekends a continuous procession
of small planes cruise just above the shoreline. skywriting or bearing banners to
We can appreciate Moses' creation even more when we realize proclaim the glories of various brands of soda or vodka, or roller discos and sex
(as Caro explains vividly) how much of this space had been swamp clubs. of local politicians and propositions. Not even Moses has devised ways to zone
and wasteland, inaccessible and unmapped, until Moses got there. business and politics out of the sky.
t Coney Island epitomizes what the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas calls "the culture
and what a spectacular metamorphosis he brought about in barely of congestion." Dtliriqw NnIJ ror': A Retrospective Manifuto for Manhattan. especially
two years. There is another kind of purity that is crucial to Jones 21-65. Koolhaas sees Coney Island as a prototype. a kind of rehearsal, for Manhat
Beach. There is no intrusion of modern business or commerce tan's intensely vertical "city of towers"; compare the radically horizontal sweep of
Jones Seach. which is only accentuated by the water tower, the one vertical structure
here: no hotels, casinos, ferris wheels. roller coasters. parachute allowed.
A city can overwhelm us with its broken lines; the sky is torn able only through the mediation of that other symbol so dear to
by its ragged outline. Where shall we find repose? ... Gatsby: the green light. His parkways could be experienced only
As you go North, the crocketed spires of the cathedrals reHect in cars: their underpasses were purposely built too low for buses
the agony of the flesh, the poignant dreams of the spirit, hell and to dear them, so that public transit could not bring masses of
purgatory, and forests of pines seen through pale light and cold
people out from the city to the beach. This was a distinctively
mist.
Our bodies demand sunshine.
techno-pastoral garden, open only to those who possessed the lat
There are certain shapes that cast shadows.' est modern machines-this was, remember, the age of the Model
T -and a uniquely privatized form of public space. Moses used
Le Corbusier wants structures that will bring the fantasy of a se physical design as a means of social screening, screening out all
rene, horizontal South against the shadowed. turbulent realities those without wheels of their own. Moses, who never learned to
the North. Jones Beach. just beyond the horizon of New York's drive, was becoming Detroit's man in New York. For the great
skyscrapers, is an ideal realization of this romance. It is ironic that, majority of New Yorkers. however. his green new world offered
although Moses thrived on perpetual conflict, struggle, Sturm only a red light.
Drang, his first triumph, and the one of which he seems to be
proudest half a century later, was a triumph of luxe, calme et vnlupti. Jones Beach and Moses' first Long Island parkways should be
Jones Beach is the giant Rosebud of this Citizen Cohen. seen in the context of the spectacular growth of leisure activities
Moses' Northern and Soutbern State parkways, leading from and industries during the economic boom of the 1920s. These
Queens out to Jones Beach and beyond, opened up another di Long Island projects were meant to open up a pastoral world just
mension of modern pastoral. These gently flowing, artfully land beyond the city limits, a world made for holidays and play and fun
scaped roads, although a little frayed after half a century. are still -for those who had the time and the means to step out. The
among the world's most beautiful. But their beauty does not (like metamorphoses of Moses in the 1930s need to be seen in the light
that of, say, California's Coast Highway or the Appalachian Trail) of a great transformation in the meaning of construction itself.
emanate from the natural environment around the roads: it During the Great Depression, as private business and industry
springs from the artificially created environment of the roads collapsed. and mass unemployment and desperation increased.
themselves. Even if these parkways adjoined nothing and led no construction was transformed from a private into a public enter
where, they would still constitute an adventure in their own right. prise, and into a serious and urgent public imperative. Virtually
This is especially true of the Northern State Parkway, which ran everything serious that was built in the 1930s-bridges. parks.
through the country of palatial estates that Scott Fitzgerald had roads, tunnels, dams-was built with federal money. under the
just immortalized in The Great Gatsby '" (1925). Moses' first Long auspices of the great New Deal agencies, the CWA, PWA, CCC,
Island roadscapes represent a modern attempt to recreate what FSA. TVA. These projects were planned around complex and
Fitzgerald's narrator, on the novel's last page, described as "the old well-articulated social goals. First. they were meant to create busi
island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, ness. increase consumption and stimulate the private sector. Sec
green breast of the new world." But Moses made this breast avail ond, they would put millions of unemployed people back to work,
and help to purchase social peace. Third. they would speed up,
* This generated bitter conRict with the estate owners, and enabled Moses to win a concentrate and modernize the economies of the regions in which
reputation as a champion of the people's right to fresh air. open space and the
freedom to move. "It was exciting working for Moses." one of his engineers remi they were built, from Long Island to Oklahoma. Fourth. they
nisced half a century later. "He made you feel you were a part of something big. It would enlarge the meaning of "the public," and give symbolic
was you fighting for the people against these rich estate owners and reactionary demonstrations of how American life could be enriched both ma
legislators.... It was almost like a war." (Caro. 228. 273) In fact. however. as Caro
shows. virtually all the land Moses appropriated consisted of small homes and family terially and spiritually through the medium of public works. Fi
farms. nally, in their use of exciting new technologies, the great New Deal
projects dramatized the promise of a glorious future just emerging and ill-paying, because they had some vision of the work as a
over the horizon, a new day not merely for a privileged few but whole. and believed in its value to the community of which they
for the people as a whole. were a part.
Moses was perhaps the first person in America to grasp the The tremendous public acclaim that Moses received for his work
immense possibilities of the Roosevelt administration's commit on the city'S parks served him asa springboard for something that
ment to public works; he grasped, too, the extent to which the meant far more to him than parks. This was a system of highways.
destiny of American cities was going to be worked out in Washing parkways and bridges that would weave the whole metropolitan
ton from this point on. Now holding a joint appointment as City area together: the elevated West Side Highway, extending the
and State Parks Commissioner, he established close and lasting ties length of Manhattan, and across Moses' new Henry Hudson
with the most energetic and innovative planners of the New Deal Bridge. into and through the Bronx, and into Westchester; the
bureaucracy. He learned how to free millions of dollars in federal Belt Parkway, sweeping around the periphery of Brooklyn, from
funds in a remarkably short time. Then, hiring a staff of first-rate the East River to the Atlantic, connected to Manhattan through
planners and engineers (mostly from off the unemployment lines), the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (Moses would have preferred a
he mobilized a labor army of 80,000 men and went to work with a bridge), and to the Southern State; and-here was the heart of the
great crash program to regenerate the city's 1700 parks (even system-the Triborough Project, an enormously complex network
more rundown at the nadir of the Depression than they ate today) of bridges and approaches and parkways that would link Manhat
and create hundreds of new ones, plus hundreds of playgrounds tan, the Bronx and Westchester with Queens and Long Island.
and several zoos. Moses got the job done by the end of 1934. Not These projects were incredibly expensive, yet Moses managed to
only did he display a gift for brilliant administration and execu talk Washington into paying for most of them. They were techni
tion, he also understood the value of ongoing public work as public cally brilliant: the Triborough engineering is still a classic text
spectacle. He carried on the overhauling of Central Park, and the today. They helped, as Moses said, to "weave together the loose
construction of its reservoir and zoo, twenty-four hours a day. strands and frayed edges of the New York metropolitan arterial
seven days a week: floodlights shined and jackhammers reverber tapestry," and to give this enormously complex region a unity and
ated all through the night, not only speeding up the work but coherence it had never had. They created a series of spectacular
creating a new showplace that kept the public enthralled. new visual approaches to the city, displaying the grandeur of Man
The workers themselves seem to have been caught up in the hattan from many new angles-from the Belt Parkway, the Grand
enthusiasm: they not only kept up with the relentless pace that Central, the upper West Side-and nourishing a whole new gen
Moses and his straw bosses imposed but actually outpaced the eration of urban fantasies. * The uptown Hudson riverfront, one
bosses, and took initiative, and came up with new ideas, and of Moses' finest urban landscapes, is especially striking when we
worked ahead of plans, so that the engineers were repeatedly realize that (as Caro shows, in pictures) it was a wasteland of ho
forced to run back to their desks and redesign the plans to take boes' shacks and garbage dumps before he got there. You cross
account of the progress the workers had made on their own.~ This the George Washington Bridge and dip down and around and
is the modern romance of construction at its best-the romance
celebrated by Goethe's Faust, by Carlyle and Marx, by the con ,.. On the other hand. these projects made a series of drastic and near-fatal incur·
structivists of the 1920s, by the Soviet construction films of the sions into Manhattan's grid. Koolhaas, Delirious New York. 15. explains incisively the
importance of this system to the New York environment: "The Grid's two-dimen
Five-Year Plan period, and the TVA and FSA documentaries and sional discipline creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The
WPA murals of the later 1930s. What gave the romance a special Grid defines a new balance between control and decontrol .... With its imposition,
reality and authenticity here is the fact that it inspired the men Manhattan is forever immunized against any [further) totalitarian intervention. In
the single block-the largest possible area that can fall under architectural control
who were actually doing the work. They seem to have been able to -it develops a maximum unit of urbanistic Ego." It is precisely these urban ego·
find meaning and excitement in work that was physically gruelling boundaries that Moses' own ego sought to sweep away.
slide into the gentle curve of the West Side Highway, and the lights Moses received a further apotheosis at the 1939-40 New York
and towers of Manhattan flash and glow before you, rising above World's Fair, an immense celebration of modern technology and
the lush greenness of Riverside Park, and even the most embit industry: "Building the World of Tomorrow." Two of the fair's
tered enemy of Robert Moses-or, for that matter, of New York most popular exhibits-the commercially oriented General Motors
-will be touched: you know you have come home again, and the Futurama and the utopian Democradty-both envisioned ele
city is there for you, and you can thank Moses for that. vated urban expressways and arterial parkways connecting city
At the very end of the 1930s, when Moses was at the height of and country, in precisely the forms that Moses had just built. Spec
his creativity, he was canonized in the book that, more than any tators on their way to and from the fair. as they Howed along
other, established the canon of the modern movement in architec Moses' roads and across his bridges, could directly experience
ture, planning and design: Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time and Ar something of this visionary future, and see that it seemed to work.*
chitecture. Giedion's work, first delivered in lecture f()rm at Moses, in his capacity as Parks Commissioner, had put together
Harvard in 1938-39, unfolded the history of three centuries of the parcel of land on which the fair was being held. With lightning
modern design and planning-and presented Moses' work as its speed, at minimal cost, with his typical fusion of menace and fi
climax. Giedion presented large photos of the recently completed nesse, he had seized from hundreds of owners a piece of land the
West Side Highway, the Randall's Island cloverleaf, and the "pret size of downtown Manhattan. His proudest accomplishment in this
zel" interchange of the Grand Central Parkway. These works, he affair was to have destroyed the notorious Flushing ash heaps and
said, "proved that possibilities of a great scale are inherent in our mounds of garbage that Scott Fitzgerald had immortalized as one
period." Giedion compared Moses' parkways to cubist .paintings, of the great modern symbols of industrial and human waste:
to abstract sculptures and mobiles, and to the movies. "As with
many of the creations born out of the spirit of this age, the mean a valley of ashes-a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat
ing and beauty of the parkway cannot be grasped from a single into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the
point of observation, as was possible from a window of the chateau forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with
at Versailles. It can be revealed only by movement, by going along a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crum
in a steady flow, as the rules of traffic prescribe. The space-time bling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars
feeling of our period can seldom be felt so keenly as when driv crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and
ing."5 comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with
Thus Moses' projects marked not only a new phase in the mod leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens
their obscure operations from your sight. [The Creal Calsby, Chap
ernization of urban space but a new breakthrough in modernist ter 2]
vision and thought. For Giedion, and for the whole generation of
the 1930s-Corbusierian or Bauhaus formalists and technocrats,
Marxists, even agrarian neopopulists-these parkways opened up Moses obliterated this dreadful scene and transformed the site into
a magical realm, a kind of romantic bower in which modernism the nucleus of the fairgrounds, and later of Flushing Meadow
and pastoralism could intertwine. Moses seemed to be the one Park. This action moved him to a rare effusion of Biblical lyricism:
public figure in the world who understood "the space-time con • Walter Lippmann seems to have been one of the few who saw the long-range
ception of our period"; in addition, he had "the energy and en implications and hidden costs of this future. "General Motors has spent a small
thusiasm of a Haussmann." This made him "uniquely equal, as fortune to convince the American public," he wrote. "that if it wishes to enjoy the
full benefit of private enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will ha"e to rebuild its
Haussmann himself had been equal, to the opportunities and cities and its highways by public enterprise." This apt prophecy is quoted by Warren
needs of the period," and uniquely qualified to build "the city of Susman in his fine essay "The People's Fair: Cultural Contradictions of a Consumer
the future" in our time. Hegel in 1806 had conceived of Napoleon Society," included in the Queens Museum's catalogue volume, Dawn of a New Day:
The New YorA: World's Fair, 1939140 (NYU. 1980).25. This volume, which includes
as "the Weltseele on horse"; for Giedion in 1939, Moses looked like interesting essays by several hands. and splendid photographs, is the best book on
the Weltgeist on wheels. the fair.
304 . ALL THAT Is SoLID MELTS INTO AIR Modernism in New York 305
he invoked the beautiful passage from Isaiah (61:1-4) in which hatred for actual people was one of the fatal hazards of modern
"the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; politics. During the New Deal period, Moses managed to maintain
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty a precarious balance between the poles and to bring real happiness
to the captives. and the opening of the prison to those that are not only to "the public" he loved but also to the people he loathed.
bound; ... to give unto them beauty for ashes ... [so that] they But no one could keep up this balancing act forever. "I'll get them!
shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many genera I'll teach them!" The voice here is unmistakably that of Mr. Kurtz:
tions." Forty years later. in his last interviews, he still pointed to "It was very simple," Conrad's narrator says, "and at the end of
this with special pride: I am the man who destroyed the Valley of every idealistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying,
Ashes and put beauty in its place. It is on this note-with the like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the
fervent faith that modern technology and social organization could brutes!''' We need to know what was Moses' equivalent for Mr.
create a world without ashes-that the modernism of the 1930s Kurtz's African ivory trade, what historical chances and institu
came to an end. tional forces opened up the floodgates of his most dangerous
Where did it all go wrong? How did the modern visions of the drives: What was the road that led him from the radiance of "give
1930s turn sour in the process of their realization? The whole story unto them beauty for ashes" to "you have to hack your way with a
would require far more time to unravel, and far more space to tell, meat ax" and the darkness that deft the Bronx?
than I have here and now. But we can rephrase these questions in Part of Moses' tragedy is that he was not only corrupted but in
a more limited way that will fit into the orbit of this book: How did the end undermined by one of his greatest achievements. This was
Moses-and New York and America-move from the destruction a triumph that, unlike Moses' public works, was for the most part
of a Valley of Ashes in 1939 to the development of far more invisible: it was only in the late 1950s that investigative reporters
dreadful and intractable modern wastelands a generation later began to perceive it. It was the creation of a network of enormous.
only a few miles away? We need to seek out the shadows within the interlocking "public authorities," capable of raising virtually un
luminous visions of the 1930s themselves. limited sums of money to build with. and accountable to no exec
The dark side was always there in Moses himself. Here is the utive, legislative or judicial power.'
testimony of Frances Perkins. America's first Secretary of Labor The English institution of a "public authority" had been grafted
under FDR, who worked closely with Moses for many years and onto American public administration early in the twentieth cen
admired him all her life. She recalls the people's heartfelt love for tury. It was empowered to sell bonds to construct particular public
Moses in the early years of the New Deal, when he was building works-e.g.• bridges, harbors, railroads. When its project was com
playgrounds in Harlem and on the Lower East Side; however, she pleted, it would charge tolls for use until its bonds were paid off;
was disturbed to discover, "he doesn't love the people" in return: at that point it would ordinarily go out of existence and turn its
public work over to the state. Moses, however, saw that there was
It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the no reason for an authority to limit itself in time or space: so long
welfare of the people .... To him, they were lousy, dirty people. as money was coming in-say, from tolls on the Triborough
throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. ''I'll get them! I'll teach Bridge-and so long as the bond market was encouraging, an
them!" He loves the public. but not as people. The public is ... a authority could trade in its old bonds for new ones, to raise more
great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed. it needs to money. to build more works; so long as money (all of it tax-ex
be aired. it needs recreation. but not for personal reasons-just empt) kept coming in, the banks and institutional investors would
to make it a better public." be only too glad to underwrite new bond issues, and the authority
could go on building forever. Once the initial bonds were paid off,
"He loves the public, but not as people": Dostoevsky warned us there would be no need to go to the city, state or federal govern
repeatedly that the combination of love for "humanity" with ments, or to the people, for money to build. Moses proved in court
that no government had any legal right even to look into an au modernism makes a dramatic new departure: the development of
thority's books. Between the late I 930s and the late 1950s, Moses modernity has made the modern city itself old-fashioned, obsolete.
created or took over a dozen of these authorities-for parks, True, the people, visions and institutions of the city have created
bridges, highways, tunnels, electric power, urban renewal and the highway-"To New York ... must go the credit for the crea
more-and integrated them into an immensely powerful machine. tion of the parkway."" Now, however, by a fateful dialectic, be
a machine with innumerable wheels within wheels, transforming cause the city and the highway don't go together, the city must go.
its cogs into millionaires, incorporating thousands of businessmen Ebenezer Howard and his "Garden City" disciples had been sug
and politicians into its production line, drawing millions of New gesting something like this since the turn of the century (see above,
Yorkers inexorably into its widening gyre. Chapter IV). Moses' historical mission, from the standpoint of this
Kenneth Burke suggested in the 1930s that whatever we might vision, is to have created a new superurban reality that makes the
think of the social value of Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, Rockefel city's obsolescence clear. To cross the Triborough Bridge, for Gie
ler's and Carnegie'S work in creating these giant complexes had to dion, is to enter a new "space-time continuum," one that leaves the
be rated as triumphs of modern art. Moses' network of public modern metropolis forever behind. Moses has shown that it is
authorities clearly belongs in this company. It fulfills one of the unnecessary to wait for some distant future: we have the technol
earliest dreams of modern science, a dream renewed in many ogy and the organizational tools to bury the city here and now.
forms of twentieth-century art: to create a system in perpetual Moses never meant to do this: unlike the "Garden City" think
motion. But Moses' system, even as it constitutes a triumph of ers, he genuinely loved New York-in his blind way-and never
modern art, shares in some of that art's deepest ambiguities. It meant it any harm. His public works, whatever we may think of
carries the contradiction between "the public" and the people so them, were meant to add something to city life, not to subtract the
far that in the end not even the people at the system's center-not city itself. He would surely have recoiled at the thought that his
even Moses himself-had the authority to shape the system and 1939 World's Fair, one of the great moments in New York's his
control its ever-expanding moves. tory, would be the vehicle of a vision which, taken at face value,
If we go back to Giedion's "bible," we will see some of the deeper would spell the city's ruin. But when have world-historical figures
meanings of Moses' work which Moses himself never really ever understood the long-range meaning of their acts and works?
grasped. Giedion saw the Triborough Bridge, the Grand Central In fact, however, Moses' great construction in and around New
Parkway, the West Side Highway, as expressions of "the new form York in the 1920s and 30s served as a rehearsal for the infinitely
of the city." This form demanded "a different scale from that of greater reconstruction of the whole fabric of America after World
the existing city, with its nus corridors and rigid divisions into small War Two. The motive forces in this reconstruction were the mul
blocks." The new urban forms could not function freely within the tibillion-dollar Federal Highway Program and the vast suburban
framework of the nineteenth-century city: hence, "It is the actual housing initiatives of the Federal Housing Administration. This
structure of the city that must be changed." The first imperative new order integrated the whole nation into a unified flow whose
was this: "There is no longer any place for the city street; it cannot lifeblood was the automobile. It conceived of cities principally as
be permitted to persist." Giedion took on an imperial voice here obstructions to the flow of traffic, and as junkyards of substandard
that was strongly reminiscent of Moses' own. But the destruction housing and decaying neighborhoods from which Americans
of the city streets was, for Giedion, only a beginning: Moses' high should be given every chance to escape. Thousands of urban
ways "look ahead to the time when, after the necessary surgery has neighborhoods were obliterated by this new order; what happened
been performed, the artificially swollen city will be reduced to its to my Bronx was only the largest and most dramatic instance of
natural size." something that was happening all over. Three decades of mas
Leaving aside the quirks in Giedion's own vision (What mak~ sively capitalized highway construction and FHA suburbanization
any urban size more "natural" than any other?), we see here how would serve to draw millions of people and jobs, and billions of
308 ALL THAT Is SoLID MELTS INTO AIR
Modernism in New York 309
dollars in investment capital, out of America's cities. and plunge vision and initiative and become an Organization Man; we came to
these cities into the chronic crisis and chaos that plague their in know him as New York's Captain Ahab at a point when. although
habitants today. This wasn't what Moses meant at all; but it was still at the wheel. he had lost control of the ship.
what he inadvertently helped to bring about. * The evolution of Moses and his works in the 1950s underscores
Moses' projects of the 1950s and 60s had virtually none of the another important fact about the postwar evolution of culture and
beauty of design and human sensitivity that had distinguished his society: the radical splitting-off of modernism from moderniza
early works. Drive twenty miles or so on the Northern State Park tion. Throughout this book I have tried to show a dialectical inter
way (1920s), then turn around and cover those same twenty miles play between unfolding modernization of the environment
on the parallel Long Island Expressway (1950sl60s), and wonder particularly the urban environment-and the development of
and weep. Nearly all he built after the war was built in an indiffer modernist art and thought. This dialectic, crucial all through' the
ently brutal style, made to overawe and overwhelm: monoliths of nineteenth century, remained vital to the modernism of the 1920s
steel and cement. devoid of vision or nuance or play. sealed off and 1930s: it is central in joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's Waste Land and
from the surrounding city by great moats of stark empty space. Doblin's Berlin, Alexanderplatz. and Mandelstam's Egyptian Stamp,
stamped on the landscape with a ferocious contempt for all natural in Leger and Tatlin and Eisenstein, in William Carlos Williams
and human life. Now Moses seemed scornfully indifferent to the and Hart Crane, in the art of john Marin and joseph Stella and
human quality of what he did: sheer quantity-of moving vehicles. Stuart Davis and Edward Hopper, in the fiction of Henry Roth
tons of cement. dollars received and spent-seemed to be all that· and Nathanael West. By the 1950s, however, in the wake of
drove him now. There are sad ironies in this. Moses' last, worst Auschwitz and Hiroshima, this process of dialogue had stopped
phase. dead.
The cruel works that cracked open the Bronx ("more people in It is not that culture itself stagnated or regressed: there were
the way-that's all") were part of a social process whose dimen plenty of brilliant artists and writers around, working at or near
sions dwarfed even Moses' own megalomaniac will to power. By the peak of their powers. The difference is that the modernists of
the 1950s he was no longer building in accord with his own visions; the 1950s drew no energy or inspiration from the modern envi
rather, he was fitting enormous blocks into a pre-existing pattern ronment around them. From the triumphs of the abstract expres
of national reconstruction and social integration that he had not sionists to the radical initiatives of Davis, Mingus and Monk injazz,
made and could not have substantially changed. Moses at his best to Camus' The Fall, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Malamud's The
had been a true creator of new material and social possibilities. At Magic Barrel, Laing's The Divided Self, the most exciting work of
his worst, he would become not so much a destroyer-though he this era is marked by radical distance from any shared environ
destroyed plenty-as an executioner of directives and imperatives ment. The environment is not attacked, as it was in so many pre
not his own. He had gained power and glory by opening up new vious modernisms: it is simply not there.
forms and media in which modernity could be experienced as an This absence is dramatized obliquely in what are probably the
adventure: he used that power and glory to institutionalize mo two richest and deepest novels of the 1950s, Ralph Ellison's Invisi
dernity into a system of grim, inexorable necessities and crushing ble Man (1952) and Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959): both these
routines. Ironically. he became a focus for mass personal obsession books contained brilliant realizations of spiritual and political life
and hatred, including my own, just when he had lost personal as it had been lived in the cities of the recent past-Harlem and
Danzig in the 1930s-but although both writers moved chronolog
• Moses at least was honest enough to call a meat ax by its real name, to recognize ically forward, neither one was able to imagine or engage the pres
the violence and devastation at the heart of his works. Far more typical of postwar
planning is a sensibility like Giedion's, for whom. "after the necessary surgery has ent, the life of the postwar cities and societies in which their books
been performed, the artificially swollen city will be reduced to its natural size." This came out. This absence itself may be the most striking proof of the
genial self-delusion, which assumes that cities can be hacked to pieces without blood spiritual poverty of the new postwar environment. Ironically, that
or wounds or shrieks of pain. points the way forward to the "surgical precision"
bombing of Germany, Japan. and. later, Vietnam. poverty may have actually nourished the development of modern
310 ALL THAT Is SoLlO MELTS INTO AIR Modernism in New York 311
ism by forcing artists and thinkers to fall back on their own re trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is
sources and open up new depths of inner space. At the same time, everywhere about us! ...
it subtly ate away at the roots of modernism by sealing off its Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a
imaginative life from the everyday modern world in which actual consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me OUt
men and women had to move and live. 1I of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in
The split between the modern spirit and the modernized envi Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
ronment was a primary source of anguish and reflection in the
later 1950s. As the decade dragged on, imaginative people became There are many remarkable things happening here. Ginsberg is
urging us to experience modern life not as a hollow wasteland but
increasingly determined not only to understand this great gulf but
as an epic and tragic battle of giants. This vision endows the mod
also, through art and thought and action, to leap across it. This
ern environment and its makers with a demonic energy and a
was the desire that animated books as diverse as Hannah Arendt's
world-historical stature that probably exceed even what the Robert
The Human Condition, Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself,
Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death, and Paul Goodman's Grow Moseses of this world would claim for themselves. At the same
time, the vision is meant to arouse us, the readers, to make our
ing Up Absurd. It was a consuming but unconsummated obsession
selves equally great, to enlarge our desire and moral imagination
shared by two of the most vivid protagonists in the fiction of the
to the point where we will dare to take on the giants. But we cannot
late 1950s: Doris Lessing's Anna Wolf, whose notebooks over
do this until we recognize their desires and powers in ourselves
flowed with unfinished confessions and unpublished manifestos
"Moloch who entered my soul early." Hence Ginsberg develops
for liberation, and Saul Bellow's Moses Herzog, whose medium
was unfinished, unmailed letters to all the great powers of this structures and processes of poetic language-an interplay between
world. luminous Hashes and bursts of desperate imagery and a solemn,
Eventually, however, the letters did get finished, signed and repetitive, incantatory piling up of line upon line-that recall and
delivered; new modes of modernist language gradually emerged. rival the skyscrapers, factories and expressways he hates. Ironi
at once more personal and more political than the language of the cally, although the poet portrays the expressway world as the
19505, in which modern men and women could confront the new death of brains and imagination, his poetic vision brings its under
physical and social structures that had grown up around them. In lying intelligence and imaginative force to life-indeed, brings it
this new modernism, the gigantic engines and systems of postwar more fully to life than the builders were ever able to do on their
construction played a central symbolic role. Thus, in Allen Gins own.
berg's "Howl": When my friends and I discovered Ginsberg's Moloch, and
thought at once of Moses, we were not only crystallizing and mo
bilizing our hate; we were also giving our enemy the world-histor
What sphinx of cement and aluminum hacked open their skulls
and ate up their brains and imagination? ... ical stature, the dreadful grandeur, that he had always deserved
Moloch the incomprehensible prison I Moloch the crossbone soul but never received from those who loved him most. They could
less jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose build not bear to look into the nihilistic abyss that his steam shovels and
ings are judgment! ... pile drivers opened up; hence they missed his depths. Thus it was
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose only when modernists began to confront the shapes and shadows
skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! of the expressway world that it became possible to see that world
Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch for aU it was.·
whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Did Moses understand any of this symbolism? It is hard to know.
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton
treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! * For a slightly later version of this confrontation, very different in sensibility but
invincible madhouses! granite cocks! equal in intellectual and visionary power, compare Robert Lowell's "For the Union
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, Dead," published in 1964.
312 ALL THAT Is SOLID MELTS INTO ArR Modernism in New York 313
In the rare interviews he gave during the years between his en -What' Mr. Iha., allted.
forced retirement 10 and his death at ninety-two. he could still ex -A Ihout in the Itreet, St~ a'lllwered.
plode with fury at his detractors. overflow with wit and energy and -James Joyce. Ulyues
tremendous schemes. refuse. like Mr. Kurtz, to be counted out

(ul'lI carry out my ideas yet .... I'll show you what can be done. I amlor a" art tltat leU, ,ou the time 01 day, or where such and
such a street il. I am lor an art that helfl' old ladies across the street .
. . . I will return ... I ..."). Driven restlessly up and down his
-Clae. Oldenburg
Long Island roads in his limousine (one of the few perquisites he
has kept from his years of power). he dreamt of a glorious
hundred-mile ocean drive to whip the waves, or of the world's
longest bridge connecting Long Island with Rhode Island across THE EXPRESSWAY world. the modern environment that emerged
the Sound. after World War Two, would reach a pinnacle of power and self
This old man possessed an undeniable tragic grandeur; but it is confidence in the 1960s, in the America of the New Frontier, the
not so clear that he ever achieved the self-awareness that is sup Great Society, Apollo on the moon. I have been focusing on Robert
posed to go with that grandeur. Replying to The Power Broker, Moses as the New York agent and incarnation of that world, but
Moses appealed plaintively to us all: Am I not the man who blotted Secretary of Defense McNamara. Admiral Rickover, NASA Direc
out the Valley of Ashes and gave mankind beauty in its place? It is tor Gilruth, and many others. were fighting similar battles with
true, and we owe him homage for it. And yet, he did not really equal energy and ruthlessness, far beyond the Hudson, and in
wipe out the ashes. only moved them to another site. For the ashes deed beyond the planet Earth. The developers and devotees of the
are part of us. no matter how straight and smooth we make our expressway world presented it as the only possible modern world:
beaches and freeways. no matter how fast we drive-or are driven to oppose them and their works was to oppose modernity itself. to
-no matter how far out on Long Island we go. fight history and progress, to be a Luddite, an escapist, afraid of
life and adventure and change and growth. This strategy was ef
fective because. in fact. the vast majority of modern men and
women do not want to resist modernity: they feel its excitement
3. and believe in its promise, even when they find themselves in its
way.
Before the Molochs of the modern world could be effectively
The 1960s: A Shout in the fought. it would be necessary to develop a modernist vocabulary
of opposition. This is what Stendhal. Buechner. Marx and Engels,
Street Kierkegaard. Baudelaire, Dostoevsky. Nietzsche, were doing a
century ago; it is what Joyce and Eliot, the dadaists and surrealists,
Kafka, Zamyatin, Babel and Mandelstam, were doing earlier in
-Hutory, St.1wn laid, U a "irhtmGre froM which I am tryi", to
tn.IIGU.
our century. However, because the modern economy has an infi
From tlte lil4yJield tlte ",' railed a Ihout. A whim", whUl": pl. nite capacity for redevelopment and self-transformation, the mod
-rite
lie"
Wltat if that "ifhtmG,., ,aw .10" a bGel
wa" wa",
01tlte C,.,ator a,., "ot our Mr.iHa., Mid. AU
ernist imagination, too, must reorient and renew itself again and
again. One of the crucial tasks for modernists in the 1960s was to
hutory mowl toward one pl, tlte lJI4JIif"tatio" 01 God. confront the expressway world; another was to show that this was
St~ jerud hil th."", toward tlte wi"..." layi",: not the only possible modern world, that there were other, better
-Tltat iI God. directions in which the modern spirit could move.
Hoora,! A,! W/trrwlteel I invoked Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" at the end of the last chapter
to show how. toward the end of the 1950s. modernists were begin community planning. This is true, and admirable, but it suggests
ning to confront and combat the expressway world. But this proj only a small part of what the book contains. By quoting Jacobs at
ect could not go very far unless the new modernists could generate length in the next few pages, I want to convey the richness of her
affirmative visions of alternate modern lives. Ginsberg and his thought. I believe that her book played a crucial role in the devel
circle were in no position to do this. "Howl" was brilliant in un opment of modernism: its message was that much of the meaning
masking the demonic nihilism at the hean of our established soci for which modern men and women were desperately searching in
ety, and revealing what Dostoevsky a century ago called "the fact lay surprisingly close to home, dose to the surface and imme
disorder lhat is in actuality the highest degree of bourgeois order." diacy of their lives: it was all right there, if we could only learn to
But all Ginsberg could suggest as an alternative to lifting Moloch dig. 11
to Heaven was a nihilism of his own. "Howl" began with a desper Jacobs develops her vision with a deceptive modesty: all she is
ate nihilism, a vision of "angel headed hipsters ... the best minds doing is talking about her everyday life. "The stretch of Hudson
of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk
naked. I dragging through the negro streets at dawn looking for ballet." She goes on to trace twenty-four hours in the life of her
an angry fix." It ended with a sentimental and sappy nihilism, an street and, of course, of her own life on that street. Her prose
all-embracing mindless affirmation: "The world is holy! The soul often sounds plain, almost artless. In fact, however, she is working
is holy! ... The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! I within an important genre in modern art: the urban montage. As
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy!" etc., etc. we go through her twenty-four-hour life cycle, we are likely to
But if the emerging modernists of the 1960s were going to turn experience a sense of deja vu. Haven't we been through this some
the world of Moloch and Moses around, they would have to offer where before? Yes, we have, if we have read or heard or seen
something more. Gogol's "Nevsky Prospect," Joyce's Ulysses, Walter Ruttmann's Ber
Before long they would find something more, a source of life lin, Symphony of a Great City, Dziga Vertov's Man with the Mow
and energy and affirmation that was just as modern as the express Camera, Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. Indeed, the better we
way world, but radically opposed to the forms and motions of that know this tradition, the more we will appreciate what Jacobs does
world. They would find it in a place where very few of the mod with it.
ernists of the 1950s would have dreamt of looking for it: in the Jacobs begins her montage in the early morning: she enters the
everyday life of the street. This is the life that joyce's Stephen street to put out her garbage and to sweep up the candy wrappers
Dedalus points to with his thumb. and invokes against the official that are being dropped by junior high school students on their way
history taught by Mr. Deasy, representative of Church and State: to school. She feels a ritual satisfaction from this, and, as she
God is absent from that nightmarish history. Stephen implies, but sweeps, "I watch the other rituals of morning: Mr. Halpert unlock
present in the apparently inchoate random shouts that drift in ing the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe
from the streets. Wyndham Lewis was scandalized by this concep Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the
tion of truth and meaning, which he disparagingly called "plain delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair,
manism." But this was exactly Joyce's point: to sound the untapped Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire that proclaim that the
depths of the cities of the plain. From Dickens' and Gogol's and hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's superintendent
Dostoevsky's time, up to our own, this is what modernist human depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the
ism has been all about. stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English his
If there is one work that perfectly expresses the modernism of mother cannot speak."
the street in the 1960s, it is Jane Jacobs' remarkable book The Death Interwoven with these known and friendly faces, there are
and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs' work has often been appre hundreds of strangers passing through: housewives with baby car
ciated for its role in changing the whole orientation of city and riages, teenagers gossiping and comparing their hair, young sec
retaries and elegant middle-aged couples on their way to work. in mind in his cryptic suggestion that God was out there, in the
workers coming off the night shift and stopping by the corner bar. "shout in the street."
Jacobs contemplates and enjoys them all: she experiences and However, the makers of the post-World War One "modern
evokes what Baudelaire called the "universal communion" avail movement" in architecture and urbanism turned radically against
able to the man or woman who knows how to "take a bath of this modern romance: they marched to Le Corbusier's battle cry,
multitude." "We must kill the street." It was their modern vision that
By and by, it is time for her to rush off to work. "and 1 exchange triumphed in the great wave of reconstruction and redevelopment
my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro. the short, thick-bodied. white that began after World War Two. For twenty years, streets every
aproned fruit man who stands outside his door a little up the where were at best passively abandoned and often (as in the
street, his arms folded, his feet planted. looking solid as earth Bronx) actively destroyed. Money and energy were rechanneled to
itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up the street, then look back the new highways and to the vast system of industrial parks, shop
to each other and smile. We have done this many a morning for ping centers and dormitory suburbs that the highways were open
more than ten years, and we both know what it means: All is well." ing up. Ironically. then, within the space of a generation, the
So it goes as Jacobs takes us through the day and into the night, street, which had always served to express dynamic and progres
bringing the children home from school and the adults back from sive modernity, now came to symbolize everything dingy, disor
work. bringing forth an abundance of new characters-business derly, sluggish, stagnant, worn-out, obsolete-everything that the
men, longshoremen, young and old bohemians, scattered solitar dynamism and progress of modernity were supposed to leave be
ies-as they come to and pass along the street in search of food or hind.·
drink or play or sex or love. In this context, the radicalism and originality of Jacobs' work
Gradually the life of the street subdues. but it never stops. "I should be clear. "Under the seeming disorder of the old city," she
know the deep night ballet and its seasons beSt from waking long says-and "old" here means nineteenth-century modern. the re
after midnight to tend a baby. and sitting in the dark, seeing the mains of the city of the Haussmann age-
shadows and hearing the sounds of the sidewalk." She attunes
herself to these sounds. "Sometimes there is sharpness and anger. Under the seeming disorder of the old city is a marvelous order
or sad, sad weeping ... about three in the morning, singing. very for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the
city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use,
good singing." Is that a bagpipe out there? Where can the piper
bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all
be coming from. and where is he going? She'll never know; composed of movement and change. and although it is life. not'
but this very knowledge, that her street's life is inexhaustibly art. we may fancifully call it the art form of the city. and liken it
rich, beyond her (or anyone's) power to grasp, helps her sleep to the dance.
well.
This celebration of urban vitality, diversity and fullness of life is Thus we must strive to keep this "old" environment alive, because
in fact, as I have tried to show, one of the oldest themes in modern it is uniquely capable of nourishing modern experiences and val
culture. Throughout the age of Haussmann and Baudelaire, and • In New York, this irony had a special twist. Probably no American politician
well into the twentieth century, this urban romance crystallized incarnated the romance and the hopes of the modern city as well as AI Smith, who
around the street, which emerged as a primary symbol of modern used as the anthem for his 1928 presidential campaign the popular song "East Side,
West Side, All around the town ... We'll trip the light fantastic on the sidewalks of
life. From the small-town "Main Street" to the metropolitan "Great New York." It was Smith, however, who appointed and ardently supported Robert
White Way" and "Dream Street," the street was experienced as the Moses, the figure who did more than anyone else to destroy those sidewalks. The
medium in which the totality of modern material and spiritual 1928 election returns showed that Americans were not ready or willing to accept
the sidewalks of New York. On the other hand, as it turned out, America was only
forces could meet. dash, interfuse and work out their ultimate tOO glad to embrace "the highways of New York" and to pave itself over in their
meanings and fates. This was what Joyce's Stephen Dedalus had image.
ues: the freedom of the city. an order that exists in a state of dancers filling up the floors; sometimes dancers would move di
perpetual motion and change, the evanescent but intense and rectly into New York's streets, and onto its bridges and roofs, in
complex face-to-face communication and communion. of what teracting spontaneously with whoever and whatever was there.
Baudelaire called the family of eyes. jacobs' point is that the so This new intimacy between the life of the dance and the life of
called modern movement has inspired billions of dollars' worth of the street was only one aspect of a great upheaval that was going
"urban renewal" whose paradoxical result has been to destroy the on through the 19605 in nearly every genre of American art. Down
only kind of environment in which modern values can be realized. on the Lower East Side, across town from Jacobs' neighborhood.
The practical corollary of all this-which sounds paradoxical a~ though apparently unknown to her, just as she was finishing her
first, but in fact makes perfect sense-is that in our city life, for book. imaginative and adventurous artists were working to create
the sake of the modern we must preserve the old and resist the an art that would be, as Allen Kaprow said in 1958, "preoccupied
new. With this dialectic, modernism takes on a new complexity and and even dazzled by the space and objects of everyday life, either
depth. our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty
Reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities today, we can Second Street." 12 Kaprow, jim Dine, Robert Whitman, Red
find many apt prophecies and intimations of where modernism Grooms, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg and others were moving
would be going in the years to come. These themes were not gen away not only from the pervasive 1950s idiom of abstract expres
erally noticed when the book came out, and, indeed, jacobs may sionism but from the flatness and confinement of painting as such.
not have noticed them 'herself; still, they are there. jacobs chose, They experimented with a fascinating array of art forms: forms
as a symbol for the vibrant fluidity of street life, the activity of that incorporated and transformed non-art materials, junk, debris.
dance: "we may .. , call it the art form of the city, and liken it to and objects picked up in the street; three-dimensional environ
dance," specifically "to an intricate ballet in which the individual ments that combined painting, architecture and sculpture-and
dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miracu sometimes theater and dance as well-and that created distorted
lously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole." In (usually in an expressionistic way) but vividly recognizable evoca
fact, this image was seriously misleading: the years of elite disci tions of real life; "happenings" that reached out of the studios and
plined training required for this sort of dance. its precise struc galleries directly into the streets, to assert their presence and un
tures and techniques of movement, its intricate choreography, dertake actions that would both incorporate and enrich the streets'
were worlds away from the spontaneity, openness and democratic own spontaneous and open life. Grooms's Burning Building of 1959
feeling of the jacobean street. (which prefigures his spectacular Ruckus Manhattan of the mid
Ironically, however, even as jacobs assimilated the life of the 1970s) and Oldenburg'S The Street: A Metamorphic Mural of 1960,
street to the dance. the life of modern dance was striving to assim long since disassembled but preserved on film, are among the most
ilate the street. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Merce exciting works of those heady days. In a note to The Street, Olden
Cunningham and then younger choreographers like Twyla Tharp burg said with a bittersweet irony typical of this art, "The city is a
and the members of the Grand Union built their work around landscape well worth enjoying-damn necessary if you live in the
non-dance (or, as it was later called, "anti-dance") movements and city." His quest for urban enjoyment took him in peculiar direc
patterns; randomness and chance were often incorporated into tions: "Dirt has depth and beauty. I love soot and scorching." He
choreography, so that the dancers would not know at the start how embraced "the city filth. the evils of advertising. the disease of
their dance was going to end; music was sometimes dropped, to be success, popular culture."
replaced by silence, static from the radio or random street noise; The essential thing, Oldenburg said, was to "look for beauty
found objects played a central role in the scene-and sometimes where it is not supposed to be found." I~ Now this last injunction
found subjects as well, as when Twyla Tharp brought in a street has been an abiding modernist imperative since the days of Marx
brotherhood of graffitists to fill up the walls in counterpoint to her and Engels, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Baudelaire and Courbet. It
took on a special resonance in the New York of the 1960s because, and murals, saturating the streets with "political-erotical-mystical"
unlike the physically and metaphysically expansive "Empire City" images and sounds, embroiling themselves with "the everyday
that had inspired earlier generations of modernists, this was a New crap" and at least sometimes coming out on top, though sometimes
York whose whole fabric was beginning to decay. But this very mystifying themselves and everyone else as to which way was up.
transformation that made the city appear rundown and archaic, Thus modernism returned to its century-old dialogue with the
especially when compared with its more "modern" suburban and modern environment, with the world that modernization had
Sun belt competitors, gave it a special poignancy and radiance for made.·
the emerging makers of modern art. The emerging New Left learned much from this dialogue, and
..I am for an art," Oldenburg wrote in 1961, "that is political eventually contributed much to it. So many of the great demon
erotical-mystical. that does something other than sit on its ass in a strations and confrontations of the I960s were remarkable works
museum. I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday of kinetic and environmental art, in whose creation millions of
crap and comes out on top. I am for an art that tells you the time anonymous people took part. This has often been noticed, but it
of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that must also be noticed that the artists were there first-here, as
helps old ladies across the street." 14 A remarkable prophecy of the elsewhere, unacknowledged legislators of the world. Their initia
metamorphoses of modernism in the 1960s, when an enormous tives showed that obscure and decaying old places could turn out
amount of interesting art in a great many genres would be both to be-or could be turned into-remarkable public spaces; that
about the street and, sometimes. directly in the street. In the visual urban America's nineteenth-century streets, so inefficient for mov
arts. I have already mentioned Oldenburg. Segal, Grooms, et al.; ing twentieth-century traffic, were ideal media for moving twen
Robert Crumb would emerge in this company toward the end of tieth-century hearts and minds. This modernism gave a special
the decade. richness and vibrancy to a public life that was growing increasingly
Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Godard, in Breathless, .Vivre sa Vie, Une abrasive and dangerous as the decade went on.
Femme Est Une Femme, made the Paris street an active and central Later, when the radicals of my generation sat down in front of
character, and captured its fluctuating light and jagged or fluid troop trains, stopped business at hundreds of city halls and draft
rhythms in ways that astounded everyone and opened up a whole boards, scattered and burned money on the floor of the Stock
new dimension in film. Such diverse poets as Robert Lowell, Ad· Exchange, levitated the Pentagon, performed solemn war memo
rienne Rich. Paul Blackburn. John Hollander, James Merrill, Gal· rials in the midst of rush hour traffic, dropped thousands of card
way Kinnell, placed the city streets (especially but not exclusively board cluster bombs on the Park Avenue headquarters of the
those of New York) at the center of their imaginative landscapes: company that made the real ones, and did innumerable other bril
indeed, it can be said that the streets erupted into American poetry liant or stupid things, we knew that the experiments of our gen
at a crucial moment. just before they would erupt into our politics.
Streets also played crucial dramatic and symbolic roles in the • The claim that the street, missing from the modernism of the 19505, becomes an
increasingly serious and sophisticated popular music of the 1960s: active ingredient in the modernism of the '60s. does not hold up in all media. Even
in the forlorn '50s. photography continued to nourish itself on the life of the streets,
in Bob Dylan (42nd Street after a nuclear war in "Talkin' World as it had done since its inception. (Note, too, the debuts of Robert Frank and
War Three Blues," "Desolation Row"), Paul Simon, Leonard William Klein.) The second-best street scene in American fiction was written in the
Cohen ("Stories of the Street"), Peter Townshend, Ray Davies, Jim '50s-though it was written about the '30s: 125th Street before and during the
Harlem riot of 1935, in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The best scene, or series of
Morrison, Lou Reed, Laura Nyro, many of the Motown writers, scenes, was written in the '30s: East 6th Street, heading toward the river, in Henry
Sly Stone and many more. Roth's Ca.U It Slell/'. The street becomes a vital presence in the very different sensi
Meanwhile, a multitude of performing artists surged into the bilities of Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg at the very end of the decade, in poems
like Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," which both belong
streets playing and singing music of every kind, dancing, perform to the transitional year 1959. Exceptions like these should be noted, but 1 don't
ing or improvising plays, creating happenings and environments think they negate my argument that a big change went on.
322 Au THAT Is SoUD MELTS INTO AIR
eration's modern artists had shown us the way: shown how to patterns, textiles, quilts and rooms possessed not only aesthetic
recreate that public dialogue which, since ancient Athens and je value in their own right but also the power to enrich and deepen
rusalem, has been the city's most authentic reason for being. Thus modern art. For anyone who had encountered the jacobs persona,
modernism in the 1960s was helping to renew the embattled and the author of The Death and Life, at once lovingly domestic and
abandoned modern city. even as it renewed itself. dynamically modern, this possibility made instant sense. Thus she
There is another crucial prophetic theme in jacobs' book that no nourished not only a renewal of feminism but also an increasingly
one seems to have noticed at the time. The Death and Life of Great widespread male realization that, yes, women had something to
American Cities gives us the first fully articulated woman's view of tell us about the city and the life we shared, and that we had
impoverished our own lives as well as theirs by not listening to
the city since jane Addams. In one sense jacobs' perspective is
even more fully feminine: she writes out of an intensely lived them till now.
jacobs' thought and action heralded a great new wave of com
domesticity that Addams knew only at second hand. She knows
munity activism, and activists. in all dimensions of political life.
her neighborhood in such precise twenty-four-hour detail because
she has been around it all day. in ways that most women are nor These activists have very often been wives and mothers. like ja
mally around all day. especially when they become mothers, but cobs. and they have assimilated the language-celebration of the
hardly any men ever are, except when they become chronically family and neighborhood. and their defense against outside forces
unemployed. She knows all the shopkeepers. and the vast informal that would shatter their life-that she did so much to create. But
social networks they maintain, because it is her responsibility to some of their activities suggest that a shared language and emo
take care of her household affairs. She portrays the ecology and tional tone may conceal radically opposed visions of what modern
phenomenology of the sidewalks with uncanny fidelity and sensi life is and what it should be. Any careful reader of The Death and
tivity. because she has spent years piloting children (first in car Life of Great American Cities will realize that jacobs is celebrating the
riages and strollers, then on roller skates and bikes) through these family and the block in distinctively modernist terms: her ideal
troubled waters. while balancing heavy shopping bags, talking to street is full of strangers passing through. of people of many dif
neighbors and trying to keep hold of her life. Much of her intel ferent classes, ethnic groups, ages, beliefs and life-styles; her ideal
lectual authority springs from her perfect grasp of the structures family is one in which women go out to work. men spend a great
and processes of everyday life. She makes her readers feel that deal of time at home, both parents work in small and easily man
women know what it is like to live in cities, street by street, day by ageable units close to home, so that children can discover and grow
day. far better than the men who plan and build them.'" into a world where there are two sexes and where work plays a
jacobs never uses expressions like "feminism" or "women's central role in everyday life.
rights"-in 1960 there were few words that were remoter from jacobs' street and family are microcosms of all the diversity and
current concerns. Nevertheless, in unfolding a woman's perspec fullness of the modern world as a whole. But for some people who
seem at first to speak her language. family and locality turn out to
tive on a central public issue, and in making that perspective rich
be symbols of radical anti-modernism: for the sake of the neigh
and complex, trenchant and compelling, she opened the way for
borhood's integrity, all racial minorities. sexual and ideological
the great wave of feminist energy that burst at the end of the
decade. The feminists ofthe 1970s would do much to rehabilitate deviants, controversial books and films. minority modes of music
and dress, are to be kept out; in the name of the family, woman's
the domestic worlds. "hidden from history," which women had
created and sustained for themselves through the ages. They economic, sexual and political freedom must be crushed-she
would argue, too, that many of women's traditional decorative must be kept in her place on the block literally twenty-four hours
a day. This is the ideology of the New Right. an inwardly contra
... Contemporaneous with jacobs' work. and similar in texture and richness. is the dictory but enormously powerful movement as old as modernity
urban !iaion of Grace Paley (whose stories are set in the same neighborhood), and, itself, a movement that utilizes every modern technique of public
an ocean away, Doris Lessing.
324 ALL THAT Is SOLID MELTS INTO AIR
ity and mass mobilization to turn people against the modern ideals earlier poor immigrants had found, were departing or disappear
of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. ing. (This was symbolized in New York by the closing of the Brook
What is relevant and disturbing here is that ideologues of the lyn Navy Yard, once the city's largest employer.) Many of them
New Right have more than once cited Jacobs as one of their patron found themselves desperately poor, chronically unemployed, at
saints. Is this connection entirely fraudulent? Or is there some once racial and economic outcasts, an enormous lumpenproletariat
thing in Jacobs that leaves her open to this misuse? It seems to me without prospects or hopes. In these conditions, it is no wonder
that beneath her modernist text there is an anti-modernist subtext, that rage, despair and violence spread like plagues-and that
a sort of undertow of nostalgia for a family and a neighborhood in hundreds of formerly stable urban neighborhoods all over
which the self could be securely embedded, ein'feste Burg, a solid America disintegrated completely. Many neighborhoods, includ
refuge against all the dangerous currents of freedom and ambi ing Jacobs' own West Village, remained relatively intact, and even
guity in which all modern men and women are caught up. Jacobs, incorporated some blacks and Hispanics into their families of eyes.
like so many modernists from Rousseau and Wordsworth to D. H. But it was clear by the late 1960s that, amid the class disparities
Lawrence and Simone Weil, moves in a twilight zone where the and racial polarities that skewered American city life, no urban
line between the richest and most complex modernisPl and the neighborhood anywhere, not even the liveliest and healthiest,
rankest bad faith of modernist anti-modernism is very thin and could be free from crime, random violence, pervasive rage and
elusive, if indeed there is a line at all. fear. Jacobs' faith in the benignness of the sounds she heard from
There is another order ofdifficulty in Jacobs' perspective. Some the street in the middle of the night was bound to be, at best, a
times her vision seems positively pastoral: she insists, for instance, dream.
that in a vibrant neighborhood with a mixture of shops and resi What light does Jacobs' vision shed on the life of the Bronx?
dences, with constant activity on the sidewalks, with easy surveil Even if she misses some of the shadows of neighborhood life, she
lance of the streets from within houses and stores, there will be no is marvelous at capturing its radiance, an inner as well as outer
crime. As we read this, we wonder what planet Jacobs can possibly radiance that class and ethnic conflict might complicate but could
have been thinking of. If we look back a little skeptically at her not destroy. Any child of the Bronx who goes through Hudson
vision of her block, we may see the trouble. Her inventory of the Street with Jacobs will recognize, and mourn for, many streets of
people in her neighborhood has the aura of a WPA mural or a our own. We can remember attuning ourselves to their sights and
Hollywood version of a World War Two bomber crew: every race, sounds and smells, and feeling ourselves in harmony with them
creed and color working together to keep America free for you even if we knew, perhaps better than Jacobs knew, that there was
and me. We can hear the roll call: "Holmstrom ... O'Leary ... plenty of dissonance out there as well. But so much of this Bronx,
Scagliano ... Levy ... Washington ..." But wait-here is the our Bronx, is gone today, and we know we will never feel so much
problem: there is no "Washington" in Jacobs' bomber, i.e., no at home anywhere again. Why did it go? Did it have to go? Was
blacks on her block. This is what makes her neighborhood vision there anything we could have done to keep it alive? Jacobs' few
seem pastoral: it is the city before the blacks got there. Her world fragmentary references to the Bronx display a Greenwich Vil
ranges from solid working-class whites at the bottom to profes lager's snobbish ignorance: her theory, however, clearly implies
sional middle-class whites at the top. There is nothing and no one that shabby but vibrant neighborhoods like those of the central
above; what matters more here, however, is that there is nothing Bronx should be able to find the inner resources to sustain and
and no one below-there are no stepchildren in Jacobs' family of perpetuate themselves. Is the theory right?
eyes. Here is where Robert Moses and his Expressway come in: he
In the course of the 1960s, however, millions of black and His turned potential long-range entropy into sudden inexorable catas
panic people would converge on America's cities-at precisely the trophe; destroying scores of neighborhoods from without, he left
moment when the jobs they sought, and the opportunities that it forever unknown whether they would have collapsed or re
newed themselves from within. But Robert Caro, working from a childhood was full of radicals-their only complaint was that the
Jacobean perspective, makes a powerful case for the inner dream wasn't being fulfilled, that people weren't able to move fast
strength of the central Bronx, had it only been left to itself. In two or freely or equally enough. But when you see life this way, no
chapters of The Power Broker, both entitled "One Mile," Caro de neighborhood or environment can be anything more than a stage
scribes the destruction of a neighborhood about a mile from my along life's way, a launching pad for higher flights and wider orbits
own. He begins by painting a lovely panorama of this neighbor than your own. Even Molly Goldberg, earth goddess of the Jewish
hood, a sentimental but recognizable blend of Jacobs' Hudson Bronx, had to move. (After Philip Loeb, who played Molly's hus
Street with Fiddler on the Roof Caro's evocative power sets us up band. had been moved-by the Blacklist-off the air and. soon
for shock and horror when we see Moses on the horizon moving after. off the earth.) Ours was, as Leonard Michaels put it. "the
inexorably ahead. It appears that the Cross-Bronx Expressway mentality of neighborhood types who, quick as possible, got the
could have been slightly curved around this neighborhood. Even hell out of their neighborhoods." Thus we had no way to resist
Moses' engineers found it feasible to reroute. But the great man the wheels that drove the American dream, because it was driving
would not have it: he deployed every form of force and fraud, us ourselves-even though we knew the wheels might break us.
intrigue and mystification, at his command, obsessively deter All through the decades of the postwar boom, the desperate en
mined to grind this little world into dust. (When Caro asked him ergy of this vision, the frenzied economic and psychic pressure to
twenty years later how come a leader of the people's protest had move up and out, was breaking down hundreds of neighborhoods
suddenly caved in, Moses' reply was cryptic but gloating: "After he like the Bronx, even where there was no Moses to lead the exodus
was hit over the head with an ax.") 15 Caro's prose becomes incan and no Expressway to make it fast.
descent, and utterly devastating, as he shows the blight spreading Thus there was no way a Bronx boy or girl could avoid the drive
outward from the Expressway, block by block, year by year, while to move on: it was planted within us as well as outside. Moses
Moses, like a reincarnated General Sherman run wild in the streets entered our soul early. But it was at least possible to think about
of the North, blazed a path of terror from Harlem to the Sound. what directions to move in, and at what speed, and with what
All Caro says here seems to be true. And yet, and yet, it is not human toll. One night in 1967, at an academic reception, I was
the whole truth. There are more questions we need to ask our introduced to an older child of the Bronx who had grown up to be
selves. What if the Bronxites of the 19505 had possessed the con a famous futurologist and creator of scenarios for nuclear war. He
ceptual tools, the vocabulary, the widespread public sympathy, the had just come back from Vietnam, and I was active in the anti-war
flair for publicity and mass mobilization, that residents of many movement, but I didn't want trouble just then, so I asked about his
American neighborhoods would acquire in the 1960s? What if, like years in the Bronx instead. We talked pleasantly enough, till I told
Jacobs'lower Manhattan neighbors a few years later, we had man him that Moses' road was going to blow every trace of both our
aged to keep the dread road from being built? How many of us childhoods away. Fine, he said, the sooner the better; didn't I
would still be in the Bronx today, caring for it and fighting for it understand that the destruction of the Bronx would fulfill the
as our own? Some of us, no doubt, but I suspect not so many, and Bronx's own basic moral imperative? What moral imperative? I
in any case-it hurts to say it-not me. For the Bronx of my youth asked. He laughed as he bellowed in my face: "You want (0 know
was possessed, inspired, by the great modern dream of mobility. the morality of the Bronx? 'Get out, schmuck, get outl' " For once
To live well meant to move up socially, and this in turn meant to in my life, 1 was stunned into silence. It was the brutal truth: I had
move out physically; to live one's life close to home was not to be left the Bronx, just as he had, and just as we were all brought up
alive at all. Our parents, who had moved up and out from the to, and now the Bronx was collapsing not just because of Robert
Lower East Side, believed this just as devoutly as we did-even Moses but also because of all of us. It was true, but did he bave to
though their hearts might break when we went. Not even the rad laugh? 1 pulled back and went home as he began to explain Viet
icals of my youth disputed this dream-and the Bronx of my nam.
heart of the traffic, bringing the gigantic engines to a stop. or at
Why did the futurologist's laughter make me want to cry? He
was laughing off what struck me as one of the starkest facts of least radically slowing them down.
modern life: that the split in the minds and the wound in the
hearts of the men and women on the move-like him. like me
were just as real and just as deep as the drives and dreams that
made us go. His laughter carried all the easy confidence of our
official culture. the civic faith that America could overcome its
inner contradictions simply by driving away from them.
3.
As I thought this over. it made me see more dearly what my
friends and I were up to when we blocked traffic throughout the The 1970s: Bringing It All
decade. We were trying to open up our society's inner wounds, to
show that they were still there. sealed but never healed, that they
were spreading and festering, that unless they were faced fast they
Back Home
would get worse. We knew that the glittering lives of the people in 10m 0 potriot-oftM Fourteenth Word, Brooklyn, where I wos
the fast lane were just as deeply maimed as the battered and buried roised. TM rest of tM United Stotes doesn't exist for me except as
lives of the people in the way. We knew, because we ourselves were ideo, or history, or literoture. ...
just learning to live in that lane, and to love the pace. But this In m, dreoms I come bock to tM Fourteenth Word, os 0 poronoioc
meant that our project was shot through with paradox from the returns to his obsessions. ...
TM plasm of the drCIGm is tM poin of separation. TM dreom lives
start. We were working to help other people, and other peoples

blacks, Hispanics, poor whites. Vietnamese-to fight for their on ofter tM bod, is buried.
-Henry Miller. Bklel SlJring
homes, even as we fled our own. We, who knew so well how it felt
to pull up roots, were throwing ourselves against a state and a To pull ,ourself up ", ,our own root,; to eot tM lost meol in ,our old
social system that seemed to be pulling up, or blowing up, the neighborhood• .•.
roots of the whole world. In blocking the way. we were blocking
our own way. So long as we grasped our self-divisions. they infused To rereod tM instructions on ,our polm; to find there how 1M Ii/eline,
the New Left with a deep sense of irony, a tragic irony that fwoken, lui.,its direction.
-Adrienne Rieh. "Shooting Script"

haunted all our spectacular productions of political comedy and
melodrama and surreal farce. Our political theater aimed to force PhwJS(..ph, is reGlly Iaomesieiness, on urge to be ot home everywhere.
the audience to see that they. too, were participants in a develop Where, then, ore we goi"l' Alwa,s to our home.
ing American tragedy: all of us, all Americans, all moderns. were -Novalil. Fragrrt/!'llU
plunging forward on a thrilling but disastrous course. Individually

and collectively. we needed to ask who we were and what we
wanted to be, and where we were racing to, and at what human
cost. But there was no way to think any of this through under I HAVE depicted the conflicts of the 1960s as a struggle between
pressure of the traffic that was driving us all on: hence the traffic opposed forms of modernism, which I described symbolically as
had to be brought to a halt. "the expressway world" and "a shout in the street." Many of us
So the 1960s passed. the expressway world gearing itself up for who demonstrated in those streets allowed ourselves to hope, even
ever more gigantic expansion and growth, but finding itself at as the trucks and police bore down on us. that out of all these
tacked by a multitude of passionate shouts from the street. individ struggles a new synthesis might someday be born, a new mode of
ual shouts that could become a collective call. erupting into the. modernity through which we all could harmoniously move, in
330 ALL THAT Is SoUD MELTS INTO AIR
which we all could feel at home. That hope was one of the vital the extensive debate over the meaning of modernity in the 1960s.
signs of the '60s. It did not last long. Even before the decade One of the last interesting entries in this debate, and perhaps a
ended, it was clear that no dialectical synthesis was in the works. kind of memorial to it, was entitled "Literary History and Literary
and that we should have to put all such hopes on "Hold," a long Modernity," by the literary critic Paul De Man. For De Man, writ
hold, if we were going to get through the years ahead. ing in 1969, "the full power of the idea of modernity" lay in a
It was not just that the New Left fell apart: that we lost our "desire to wipe out whatever came earlier," so as to achieve "a
knack for being simultaneously on the road and in the way, and radically new departure. a point that could be a true present." De
so, like all the brave modernisms of the 1960s, broke down. The Man used as a touchstone of modernity the Nietzschean idea (de
trouble went deeper than that: it soon became clear that the ex veloped in The Use and Abwe of History, 1873) that one needs to
willfully forget the past in order to achieve or create anything in
pressway world, on whose initiative and dynamism we had always
counted, was itself beginning to break down. The great economic the present. "Nietzsche's ruthless forgetting,the blindness with
boom that had gone on beyond all expectations, for a quarter of a which he throws himself into action lightened of all previous ex
century after the Second World War, was coming to a close. The perience, captures the authentic spirit of modernity." In this per
combination of inflation and technological stagnation (for which spective, "modernity and history are diametrically opposed to one
the still-unending Vietnam war was largely to blame), plus a devel another." 16 De Man gave no contemporary examples, but his
oping world energy crisis (which we could ascribe in part to our scheme could easily embrace all sorts of modernists working in the
spectacular success), was bound to take its toll-though no one 1960s in a great variety of media and genres.
could tell in the early 1970s how high that toll would be. There was Robert Moses, of course, hacking his expressway
The end of the boom did not endanger everyone-the very rich world through the cities, obliterating every trace of the life that
were pretty well insulated, as they usually are-but everyone's was there before; Robert McNamara, paving over the jungles of
vision of the modern world and its pos!)ibilities has come to be Vietnam for instant cities and airports, and bringing millions of
reshaped. Horizons for expansion and growth abruptly shrank: villagers into the modern world (Samuel Huntington'S strategy
after decades of being flooded with energy cheap enough and of "forced modernization") by bombing their traditional world into
abundant enough to create and recreate the world endlessly anew. rubble; Mies van der Rohe, whose modular glass boxes, identical
modern societies would now have to learn fast how to use their everywhere, were coming to dominate every metropolis, equally
diminishing energies to protect the shrinking resources they had oblivious to every environment, like the giant slab that springs up
and keep their whole world from running down. During the pros in the midst of the primitive world in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. But
perous decade after the First World War, the reigning symbol of we must not forget the apocalyptic wing of the New Left in its
modernity was the green light; during the spectacular boom that terminal delirium circa 1969-70, glorying in visions of barbarian
followed the Second World War, the central symbol was the fed hordes destroying Rome, writing "Tear Down the Walls" on all the
eral highway system, in which the driver could go from coast to walls, and going to the people with the slogan "Fight the People."
Of course, this was not the whole story. 1 argued above that
coast without encountering any traffic lights at all. But the modern
some of the most creative modernism of the 1960s consisted of
societies of the 1970s were forced to live in the shadow of the
"shouts in the street," visions of worlds and values that the trium
speed limit and the stop sign. In these years of reduced mobility.
modern men and women everywhere had to think deeply about phant march of modernization was trampling down or leaving
how far and in what directions they wanted to go, and to search behind. Nevertheless, those artists, thinkers and activists who chal
for new media in which they could move. It is out of this process lenged the expressway world took for granted its inexhaustible
of thought and searching-a process that has only just begun energy and inexorable momentum. They saw their works and ac
that the modernisms of the 1970s have come. tions as antitheses, locked in a dialectical duel with a thesis that was
To show how things have changed, I want briefly to go back to striving to silence all the shouts and wipe all the streets off the
The homes toward which today's modernists orient themselves are
modern map. This struggle of radically opposed modernisms gave
the life of the 1960s much of its coherence and excitement. far more personal and private spaces than the expressway or the
What happened in the 1970s was that, as the gigantic motors of street. Moreover, the look toward home is a look "back," backward
economic growth and expansion stalled, and the traffic came close in time-once again radically different from the forward move
to a stop, modern societies abruptly lost their power to blow away ment of the modernists of the highway, or the free movement in
their past. All through the 1960s, the question had been whether all directions of the modernists of the street-back into our own
they should or shouldn't; now, in the 1970s, the answer was that childhood, back into our society'S historical past. At the same time,
modernists do not try to blend or merge themselves with their past
they simply couldn't. Modernity could no longer afford to throw
-this distinguishes modernism from sentimentalism-but rather
itself into "action lightened of all previous experience" (as De Man
to "bring it all back" into the past, that is, to bring to bear on their
put it), to "wipe away whatever came earlier in the hope of reach
past the selves they have become in the present, to bring into those
ing at last a true present ... a new departure." The moderns of
old homes visions and values that may clash radically with them
the 1970s couldn't afford to annihilate the past and present in
and maybe to re-enact the very tragic struggles that drove them
order to create a new world ex nihilo; they had to learn to come to
from their homes in the first place. In other words, modernism's
terms with the world they had, and work from there.
rapport with the past, whatever it turns out to be, will not be easy.
Many modernisms of the past have found themselves by forget
ting; the modernists of the 1970s were forced to find themselves My second symbol is implicit in the title of this book: All That Is
by remembering. Earlier modernists have wiped away the past in Solid Melts into Air. This means that our past, whatever it was, was
order to reach a new departure; the new departures of the 1970s a past in the process of disintegration; we yearn to grasp it. but it
lay in attempts to recover past modes of life that were buried but is baseless and elusive; we look back for something solid to lean
not dead. This project in itself was not new; but it took on a new on, only to find ourselves embracing ghosts. The modernism of
urgency in a decade when the dynamism of the modern economy the 1970s was a modernism with ghosts.
and technology seemed to collapse. At a moment when modern One of the central themes in the culture of the 1970s was the
society seemed to lose the capacity to create a brave new future, rehabilitation of ethnic memory and history as a vital part of per
modernism was under intense pressure to discover new sources of sonal identity. This has been a striking development in the history
life through imaginative encounters with the past. of modernity. Modernists today no longer insist, as the modernists
In this final section, I will try to characterize several of these of yesterday so often did, that we must cease to be Jewish, or black,
imaginative encounters, in various media and genres. Once again, or Italian, or anything, in order to be modern. If whole societies
can be said to learn anything, the modern societies of the 1970s
I will organize my discussion around symbols: the symbol of home,
seemed to have learned that ethnic identity-not only one's own
and the symbol of ghosts. The modernists of the 1970s tended to
but everyone's-was essential to the depth and fullness of self that
be obsessed with the homes, the families and neighborhoods they
modern life opens up and promises to all. This awareness brought
left in order to be modern in the modes of the 1950s and '60s.
to Alex Haley's Roots and, a year later, Gerald Green's Holocaust
Hence I have entitled this'section "Bringing It All Back Home."*
audiences that were not only immense-the largest in the history
of television-but actively involved and genuinely moved. The
• I have borrowed this title from a work of the 19605, Bob Dylan's album Bringing
It AU Back HO'HU!, Columbia Records, 1965. This brilliant album, perhaps Dylan's responses to Roots and Holocaust, not only in America but around
best, is full of the surreal radicalism of the late '60s. At the same time, its title and the world, suggested that, whatever qualities contemporary man
the titles of some of its songs-"Subterranean Homesick Blues," "It's Alright, Ma. kind may lack, our capacity for empathy was great. Unfortunately,
I'm Only Bleeding"-express an intense bond with the past. parents, home. that
was almost entirely missing in the culture of the 1960s, but centrally present a presentations like Roots and Holocaust lack the depth to transform
decade later. This album may be re-experienced today as a dialogue between the empathy into real understanding. Both works present extrava
'60s and the '70s. Those of us who grew up on Dylan's songs can only hope that he gantly idealized versions of the familial and ethnic past, in which
might learn as much from his 1960s work as we have learned from it.
Modernism in New York 3!15
!1M ALL THAT Is SoLID MELTS INTO AIR
all ancestors are beautiful, noble and heroic, and all pain and hate split or diffused in a dozen directions, like a cubist mask, or Pi
and trouble spring from groups of oppressors "outside." This con casso's Girl Before a Mirror; but, in their tradition, she transforms
tributes less to a modern ethnic awareness than to the traditional disintegration into a new form of order that is integral to modern
genre of family romance. art.
But the real thing could also be found in the 1970s. The single An equally powerful confrontation with home, and with ghosts,
most impressive exploration of ethnic memory in this period, I took place in the Performance Group's trilogy, Three Places in
believe, was Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior. For King Rhode Island, developed between 1975 and 1978. These three plays
ston, the essential image of the familial and ethnic past is not roots are organized around the life of one member of the company,
but ghosts: her book is subtitled "Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Spalding Gray; they dramatize his development as a person, a
Ghosts." 17 Kingston's imagination is saturated with Chinese history character, an actor, an artist. The trilogy is a kind of Recherche du
and folklore, mythology and superstition. She conveys a vivid Temps Perdu in the tradition of Proust and Freud. The second and
sense of the beauty and wholeness of Chinese village life-her most powerful play, Rumstick Road,18 first performed in 1977, fo
parents' life-before the Revolution. At the same time, she makes cuses on the malaise and gradual disintegration of Gray's mother,
us feel the horrors of that life: the book begins with the lynching Elizabeth, culminating in her suicide in 1967; the play enacts
of her pregnant aunt, and proceeds through a nightmarish series Gray's attempts to understand his mother, his family, and himself
of socially enforced cruelties, abandonments, betrayals and mur as a child and as an adult, to live with what he knows and with
ders. She feels haunted by the ghosts of victims past, whose bur what he will never know.
dens she takes on herself by writing of that past; she shares her This anguished quest has two outstanding precursors, Allen
parents' myth of America as a country of ghosts, multitudes of Ginsberg's long poem "Kaddish" (1959) and Peter Handke's no
white shadows at once unreal and magically powerful; she fears vella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972). What makes Rumstick Road
her parents themselves as ghosts-after thirty years, she is still not especially striking. and gives it the distinctive stamp of the 1970s,
sure that she knows these immigrants' real names, and hence re is the way it uses the ensemble acting techniques and multimedia
mains uncertain of her own-haunted by ancestral nightmares art forms of the 1960s to open up new depths of personal inner
that it will take her whole life to wake up from; she sees herself space. Rumstick Road incorporates and integrates live and recorded
metamorphosing into a ghost, losing her embodied actuality even music, dance, slide projection, photography, abstract movement,
as she learns to walk tall in the ghost world, "to do ghost things complex lighting (including strobes), videotaped sights and
even better than ghosts can"-to write books like this. sounds, to evoke different but intersecting modes of consciousness
Kingston has the ability to create individual scenes-whether and being. The action consists of direct addresses by Gray to the
actual or mythical, past or present, imagined or directly experi audience; dramatizations of his reveries and dreams (in which he
enced-with a remarkable directness and luminous clarity. But sometimes plays one of the phantoms that haunt him); taped in
the relationship between the different dimensions of her being is terviews with his father, his grandmothers, with old friends and
never integrated or worked out; as we lurch from one plane to neighbors from Rhode Island, with his mother's psychiatrist (in
another, we feel that the work of life and art is still in process, that which he mimes his words as they come over the tape); a slide
she is still working it through, shuffling her vast cast of ghosts show depicting the family and its life over the years (Gray is both
around in the hope of finding some meaningful order in which a character in the pictures and a sort of Our ToUnt narrator and
she can stand firmly at last. Her personal, sexual and ethnic iden commentator); some of the music that meant most to Elizabeth
tities remain elusive to the end-in just the way that modernists Gray, accompanied by dance and narration.
have always shown that modern identity is bound to be e1usive All this goes on in an extraordinary environment. The stage is
but she shows great courage and imagination in looking her ghosts divided into three equal compartments; at any given moment ac
in the face and fighting to find their proper names.. She remains tion will be going on simultaneously in two, and sometimes in all.
At the center, brought forward, is an audiovisual control booth brace the depths of his or her individual life. Works like Rumstick
inhabited by a shadowy technical director; directly beneath the Road show the creative directions in which this evolution can go.
booth is a bench that sometimes functions as a psychiatrist's couch, One of the central themes in the modernism of the 1970s was
where Gray alternately plays a therapist (or "examiner") and var the ecological idea of recycling: finding new meanings and poten
ious patients. On the audience's left. recessed in depth to form a tialities in old things and forms of life. Some of the most creative
room. is an enlargement of the Gray family house on Rumstick recycling of the 1970s, all over America, went on in the sort of
Road, where many scenes take place; sometimes the wall becomes dilapidated neighborhoods that Jane Jacobs celebrated in the early
blank, and the room appears to be an inner chamber of Gray's 1960s. The difference a decade makes is that the initiatives that
mind in which various ominous scenes are played out; but even seemed like a delightful alternative in the boom times of 1960 have
when the house's image is absent, its aura lingers on. On the au come to be felt as a desperate imperative today. Our largest and
dience's right is another deep room with a large picture window, perhaps our most dramatic urban recycling has gone on precisely
representing Gray's own room in the old house. Dominating this where Spalding Gray's life cycle was first publicly performed: the
room for most of the play is a huge red-domed inflatable tent, lit lower Manhattan neighborhood now known as SoHo. This district
from inside, magically and menacingly suggestive (a whale's belly? of nineteenth-century workshops, warehouses and small factories
a mother'S womb? a brain?); much action goes on, in or around between Houston and Canal streets was literally anonymous;. it
this tent, which looms forth as a spectral character in its own right. had no name until about a decade ago. After World War Two,
Late in the play, after Gray and his father have finally talked about with the development of the expressway world. this district was
his mother and her suicide, the two of them together lift the tent widely written off as obsolete, and the planners of the 1950s slated
through the window and out of the room: it is still visible, and it for destruction.
weirdly luminous, like the moon, but it is at a distance now, and in It was scheduled to be razed for one of Robert Moses' most
perspective. cherished projects, the Lower Manhattan Expressway. This road
Rumstick Road suggests that this is the kind of liberation and would have slashed dean across Manhattan Island, from the East
reconciliation that is possible for human beings in the world. For River to the Hudson. and torn down or sealed off large parts of
Gray, and for us insofar as we can identify ourselves with him, the South and West Village, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower
the liberation is never total; but it is real, and earned: he has not East Side. As plans for the expressway gathered momentum, many
merely looked into the abyss but gone into it and brought its industrial tenants left the area, anticipating its destruction. But
depths up into the light for us all. Gray's fellow actors have helped then, in the early and mid-1960s, a remarkable coalition of diverse
him: their intimacy and mutuality, developed through years of and generally antagonistic groups-young and old, radical and
work as a dose ensemble, are absolutely vital in his labor of discov reactionary, Jews, Italians, WASPs, Puerto Ricans and Chinese
ering and facing and being himself. Their collective production fought fervidly for years and finally. to their amazement, won and
dramatizes the ways in which theatrical collectives have evolved wiped Moses' project off the map.
over the past decade. In the intensely political ambience of the This epic triumph over Moloch left a sudden abundance of
1960s, when ensemble groups like the Living Theater, the Open prime loft space available at unusually low rents, which turned ONt
Theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe were among the to be ideal for New York's rapidly growing artist population. In
most exciting things in American theater, their collective works the late 19605 and early 19705, thousands of artists moved in and,
and lives were presented as ways out of the trap of privacy and within a few years, turned this anonymous space into the world's
bourgeois individuality, as models of the communist society of the leading center for the production of art. This amazing transfor
future. In the relatively apolitical 1970s, they evolved from com mation infused SoHo's dreary and crumbling streets with a unique
munist sects into something like therapeutic communities whose vitality and intensity.
collective strength could enable each member to. grasp and em- Much of the neighborhood's aura arises from its interplay be
338 ALL THAT Is SoUD MELTS INTO AIR Modernism in New York 339
tween its nineteenth-century-modern streets and buildings and the about ten feet across and about thirty-five feet high, aligned like a
late-twentieth-century-modern art that is created and displayed jagged "H." It is as solid as sculpture can get, yet ghostly in several
inside them. Another way to see it might be as a dialectic of the ways: its capacity to change shapes, depending on our point of
neighborhood's old and new modes of production: factories that view; its metamorphoses of color, luminous bronze gold at one
produce cord and rope and cardboard boxes and small engine and angle or moment. turning into an ominous leaden gray a brief
machine parts, that collect and process used paper and rags and moment or movement away; its evocation of the steel skeletons of
scrap. and modes of art that collect and compress and connect all the skyscrapers around it. of the dramatic skyward thrust that
and recycle these materials in very special ways of their own. modern architecture and engineering made possible. of the ex
SoHo has also emerged as an arena for the liberation of women pressive promise that all these buildings once made during their
artists, who have burst on the scene with unprecedented numbers, brief skeletal phase. but that most of them blatantly betrayed once
talent and self-~onfidence. and fought to establish their identity in they were complete. Once we can touch the sculpture. we nestle
a neighborhood that was fighting to establish its own. Their indi into the corners of its H-form and feel ourselves inside a city
vidual and collective presence is at the heart of SoHo's aura. Early . within a city, perceiving the urban space around and above us with
one fall evening, I saw a lovely young woman in a glamorous red a special clarity and vividness. yet protected from the city's shocks
wine-colored suit. clearly returning from "Uptown" (a show? a by the piece's mass and strength.
grant? a job?) and climbing the long flights of stairs to her loft. In TWU is sunken into a small triangular plaza on which there is
one arm she supported a big bag of groceries, with protruding nothing else-except for a little tree, apparently planted when the
French bread. while on the other. balanced delicately on her shoul sculpture was installed, and oriented to it. frail in its branches yet
der, was a great bundle of stretchers five feet long: a perfect lush in its leaves, and bearing a single large, lovely white flower at
expression, it seemed to me, of the modern sexuality and spiri the summer's end. This work is located a little off the beaten path,
tuality of our time. But just around the corner, alas, has lurked but its presence has begun to create a new path, drawing people
another archetypally modern figure, the real estate man. whose magnetically into its orbit. Once there, they look. louch, lean, nes
frantic speculations in the 1970s have made many fortunes in tle, sit. Sometimes they insist on participating more actively in the
SoHo, and driven from their homes many artists who could not work, and inscribe their names or beliefs on its sides-UNO FU
hope to afford the prices that their presence helped to create. TURE" was recently inscribed in letters three feet high; in addi
Here. as in so many modern scenes, the ambiguities of develop.. tion, the lower facades have turned into something of a kiosk,
ment roll on. decked with innumerable pleasant and unpleasant signs of the
Just below Canal Street, SoHo's downtown boundary,the walker times.
heading north or south, or coming up out of the IRT subway at Some people are angry at what seems to them the desecration of
Franklin Street, may be startled to glimpse what first appears to be a work of fine art. It seems to me, however, that all that the city
a ghost building. It is a large vertical three-dimensional mass. has added to TWU has brought out its special depths, which would
shaped vaguely like the skyscrapers around it; only. as we ap never have emerged if it had lain untouched. The accumulated
proach. we find that as we switch angles it seems to move. At one layers of signs, periodically torn or burned off (whether by the
moment it seems to be tilting over like the Leaning Tower of Pisa; city, by Serra himself, or by solicitous spectators, I cannot tell) but
move over to the left. and it seems to be pitching forward almost perpetually renewed, have created a new configuration, whose
on top of us; swing around a little more, and it is gliding ahead contours suggest a jagged urban skyline six or seven feet high, far
like a ship sailing into Canal Street. It is Richard Serra's new cor darker and denser than the vast field above. The density and in
ten steel sculpture, named TWU in honor of the Transit Workers' tensity of the lower level (the part that people can reach) has trans
Union, which was on strike when the work was installed in the formed this section into a parable of the building-up of the
spring of 1980. It consists of three immense steel. rectangles. each modern'city itself. People are constantly reaching higher, striving
Modernism in New York. 341
340 ALL THAT Is SOLID MELTS INTO AUt
and the industrialist. Ecology and industry aren't one-way streets.
to make their marks-do they stand on each other's shoulders? Rather, they should be crossroads. Art can help to provide the
and there are even, twelve or fifteen feet high. a couple of gobs of needed dialectic between them.'"
red and yellow paint, ftung dramatically from somewhere below
-are they parodies of "action painting"? Smithson was forced to travel great distances into America's Mid
But none of these efforts can be more than glimmers in Serra's western and Southwestern wilderness; he didn't live to see an im
great bronze sky soaring above us all, a sky made more glorious mense wasteland open up in the Bronx. an ideal canvas for his art,
than ever in opposition to the darker world we construct below. virtually at his front door. But his thought is full of clues as to how
TWU generates a dialogue between nature and culture. between we might proceed there. It is essential, he would surely say, to
the city's past and present-and its future, the buildings still in accept the process of disintegration as a framework for new kinds
girder form, still infinite in potential-between the artist and his of integration, to use the rubble as a medium in which to construct
audience, between all of us and the urban environment that ties new forms and make new affirmations; without such a framework
aU our lifelines together. This process of dialogue is what the mod and such a medium, no real growth can take place.* The second
ernism of the 1970s at its best was about. medium 1 want to use is the historical mural. Murals thrived in the
Having come this far, I want to use this modernism to generate WPA period, when they were commissioned to dramatize political
a dialogue with my own past, my own lost home, my own ghosts. I and generally radical ideas. They came back strong in the 1970s,
want to go back to where this essay started, to my Bronx. vital and ofteR financed by federal CET A money. In accord with the gen
thriving only yesterday, ruins and ashen wilderness today. Can eral spirit of the 1970s, recent murals emphasized local and com
modernism make these bones live? In a literal sense, obviously not: munal history rather than world ideology. Moreover-and this
only massive federal investment. along with active ~nd energetic appears to be a 1970s innovation-these murals were often exe
popular participation. can really bring the Bronx back to life. But
cuted by members of the community whose history they evoke, so
modernist vision and imagination can give our maimed inner cities that people can be at once the subjects, objects and audience of
something to live for, can help or force our non-urban majority to art, uniting theory and practice in the best modernist tradition.
see their stake in the city's fate. can bring forth its abundance of The most ambitious and interesting community mural of the '70s
life and beauty that are buried but not dead. seems to be Judith Baca's emerging Great Wall of Los Angeles.
As I confront the Bronx, I want to use and fuse two distinct Earthworks and community murals provide the media for my
media which ftourished in the 1970s. one only recently invented, Bronx modernist dream: The Bronx Mural.
the other quite old but lately elaborated and developed. The first The Bronx Mural, as I imagine it, would be painted onto the
medium is called "earthworks" or "earth art." It goes back to about brick and concrete retaining walls that run alongside most of the
the beginning of the 1970s. and its most creative spirit was Robert eight miles of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, so that every automo
Smithson, who was killed tragically at the age of thirty-five in a bile trip through and out of the Bronx would become a trip into
plane crash in 1973. Smithson was obsessed with man-made ruins: its buried depths. In the places where the road runs close to or
slag heaps,junkyards. abandoned strip mines. exhausted quarries, above ground level, and the walls recede, the driver's view of the
polluted pools and streams. the junk heap that occupied the site of Bronx's past life would alternate with sweeping vistas of its present
Central Park before Olmsted arrived. Throughout the early 1970s.
Smithson traveled up and down the country trying in vain to inter • Finally. at the end of the 1970s. some local authorities and art commissions began
est corporate and government bureaucrats in the idea that to respond, and some impressive works of earth art have begun to get built. This
emerging great opportunity also presents great problems. pUIS artists in conflict
with environmentalists. and leaves them open to a charge of creating a merely
One practical solution for the utilization of devastated areas cosmetic beauty that disguises corporate and political rapacity and brutality. For a
would be land and water re-cyding in terms of "earth art." ... lucid account of the ways in which earth artists have posed and responded to these
Art can become a resource that mediates between the ecologist issues. see Kay Larson. "It's the Pits." Village Voice, 2 September 1980.
342 Au. THAT Is SoUD MELTS INTO Alit
ruin. The mural might depict cross-sections of streets, of houses, ment houses, schoolyards, kosher butcher shops, appetizing and
even of rooms full of people just as they were before the Express candy stores. Barnett Newman, Stanley Kubrick, Clifford Odets,
way cut through them all. Larry Rivers, George Segal. Jerome Weidman, Rosalyn Drexler,
But it would go back before this, to our century's early years. at E. L. Doctorow, Grace Paley, Irving Howe, would all be there;
the height of the Jewish and Italian immigration, with the Bronx along with George Meany, Herman Badillo, Bella Abzug and
growing along the rapidly expanding subway lines, and (in the Stokely Carmichael; John Garfield, Tony Curtis' Sidney Falco,
words of the Communist Manifesto) whole populations conjured out Gertrude Berg's Molly Goldberg, Bess Myerson (an iconic monu
of the ground: to tens of thousands of garment workers, printers, ment to assimilation, the Bronx's Miss America, 1945), and Anne
butchers, house painters, furriers, union militants, socialists, an Bancroft; Hank Greenberg, Jake La Motta. Jack Molinas (was he
archists, communists. Here is D. W. Griffith, whose old Biograph the Bronx's greatest athlete. its most vicious crook, or both?); Nate
Studio building still stands, solid but battered and neglected, at the Archibald; A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times and his sister,
Expressway's edge; here is Sholem Aleichem, seeing the New the communist leader Ruth Witt; Phil Spector, Bill Graham. Dion
World and saying that it was good, and dying on Kelly Street (the and the Belmonts. the Rascals, Laura Nyro. Larry Harlow, the
block where Bella Abzug was born); and there is Trotsky on East brothers Palmieri; Jules Feiffer and Lou Meyers; Paddy Chayev
164th Street, waiting for his revolution (did he really playa Rus sky and Neil Simon; Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, Garry
sian in obscure silent films? we will never know). Now we see a Winogrand, George and Mike Kuchar; Jonas Salk, George Wald,
modest but energetic and confident bourgeoisie, springing up in Seymour Melman, Herman Kahn-all these, and so many more.
the 1920s near the new Yankee Stadium, promenading on the Children of the Bronx would be encouraged to return and put
Grand Concourse for a brief moment in the sun, finding romance themselves in the picture: the Expressway wall is big enough to
in the swan boats in Crotona Pllrk; and not far away, "the coops," hold them all; as it got increasingly crowded, it would approach
a great network of workers' housing settlements, cooperatively the density of the Bronx at its peak. To drive past and through all
building a new world beside Bronx and Van Cortlandt parks. We this would be a rich and strange experience. Drivers might feel
move on to the bleak adversity of the 1930s, unemployment lines, captivated by the figures, environments and fantasies on the
home relief, the WPA (whose splendid monument, the Bronx mural, ghosts of their parents, their friends. even of themselves,
County Courthouse, stands just above the Yankee Stadium), radi like sirens enticing them to plunge into the abyss of the past. On
cal passions and energies exploding, street-corner fights between the other hand, so many of these ghosts would be urging and
Trotskyites and Stalinists, candy stores and cafeterias ablaze with driving them on, dying to leap into a future beyond the Bronx's
talk all through the night; then to the excitement and anxiety of walls and join the stream of traffic on the way out. The Bronx
the postwar years, new affluence, neighborhoods more vibrant Mural would end at the end of the Expressway itself, where it
than ever, even as new worlds beyond the neighborhoods begin to interchanges on the way to Westchester and Long Island. The end,
open up, people buy cars, start to move; to th~ Bronx's new im the boundary between the Bronx and the world, would be marked
migrants from Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Trinidad, new shades with a gigantic ceremonial arch. in the tradition of the colossal
of skin and clothes on the street, new music and rhythms, new monuments that Claes Oldenburg conceived in the 1960s. This
tensions and intensities; and finally, to Robert Moses and his dread arch would be circular and inflatable, suggesting both an automo
road, smashing through the Bronx's inner life, transforming evo bile tire and a bagel. When fully pumped up, it would look indi
lution into devolution, entropy into catastrophe, and creating the gestibly hard as a bagel. but ideal as a tire for a fast getaway; when
ruin on which this work of art is built. soft. it would appear leaky and dangerous as a tire but, as a bagel,
The mural would have to be executed in a number of radically inviting to settle down and eat.
different styles. so as to express the amazing variety of imaginative I have portrayed the Bronx of today as a scene of disaster and
visions that sprang from these apparently uniform streets, apart- despair. All that is certainly there. but there is much more. Get off
the Expressway, and go south a mile or SO, or half a mile north -and indeed, are coming-through industrial and social recon
toward the Zoo; drive in and out through streets whose names struction. Manufactured in black, but painted over in broad, vivid
are posted at the soul's intersections-Fox, Kelly, Longwood, abstract-expressionist slashes and Recks-hot red, yellow and
Honeywell, Southern Boulevard-and you will find blocks that green on one side, facing west, and pink, sky-blue and white on
feel so much like blocks you left long ago, blocks you thought had the sunrise side-it symbolizes the ways, different but perhaps
vanished forever, that you will wonder if you are seeing ghosts equally valid ways, in which the people of the South Bronx, work
or if you yourself are a ghost haunting these solid streets with the ing within their new forms, can bring the world to life. These
phantoms of your inner city. The faces and signs are Spanish, but people, unlike the downtown audience for Serra's TWU, have left
the vibrancy and friendliness-the old men in the sun, women Ferrer's gateway undisturbed by graffiti; but it appears to be a
with shopping bags, kids playing ball in the street-feel so close to popular object of proud contemplation on the street. It may be
home that it is easy to feel as if you had never left home at all. helping people who are going through a crucial, excruciating pas
Many of these blocks are so comfortably ordinary that we can sage in their history-and in ours-get a grip on where they are
almost feel ourselves blending in, nearly lulled to sleep-till we going and who they are. I hope it is helping them; I know it is
turn a corner and the full nightmare of devastation-a block of helping me. And it seems to me that this is what modernism is all
black burnt-out hulks, a street of rubble and glass where no man about.!11
goes-surges up in front of us and jars us awake. Then we may
begin to understand what we saw on the street before. It has taken I could go on talking about more exciting modernist works of
the most extraordinary labors to rescue these ordinary streets from the past decade. Instead, I thought to end up with the Bronx, with
death, to begin everyday life here again from the ground up. This an encounter with some ghosts of my own. As I come to the end of
collective work springs from a fusion of the government's money this book, I see how this project, which consumed so much of my
with the people's labor-"sweat equity," it is called-and spirit. 20 time, blends into the modernism of my times. I have been digging
It is a risky and precarious enterprise-we can feel the risks when up some of the buried modern spirits of the past, trying to open
we see the horror just around the corner-and it takes a Faustian up a dialectic between their experience and our own, hoping to
vision, energy and courage to carry through. These are the people help the people of my time create a modernity of the future that
of Faust's new town, who know that they must win their life. and will be fuller and freer than the modern lives we have known till
freedom every day anew. now.
Modern art is active in this work of renewal. Among the pleasant Should works so obsessed with the past be called modernist at
resurrected streets we find an enormous steel sculpture towering all? For many thinkers, the whole point of modernism is to clear
several stories into the sky. It suggests the forms of two palm trees the decks of all these entanglements so that the self and the world
leaning expressionistically against each other and forming a gate can be created anew. Others believe that the really distinctive
way arch. This is Rafael Ferrer's "Puerto Rican Sun," the newest forms of contemporary art and thought have made a quantum
tree in New York's forest of symbols. The arch leads us to a net leap beyond all the diverse sensibilities of modernism, and earned
work of garden plots, the Fox Street Community Garden. This the right to call themselves "post-modern." I want to respond to
piece is at once imposing and playful; standing back, we can ad these antithetical but complementary claims by reviewing the vi
mire its Calderesque fusion of massive forms and sensuous curves. sion of modernity with which this book began. To be modern, 1
But Ferrer's work gains special resonance and depth from its re said, is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to
lationship to its site. In this mostly Puerto Rican and overwhelm find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and re
ingly Caribbean neighborhood, it evokes a tropical paradise lost. newal. trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be
Fabricated of industrial materials. it suggests that the joy and sen part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a
suality that are available here in America. in the Bronx, must come modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom,
to make its rhythms one's own, to move within its currents in collective hope for us all? I have tried to describe some of the
search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom. of justice, diverse initiatives of the past decade in a way that would bring out
that its fervid and perilous flow allows. their common core and would help some of our multitude of iso
The modern world has changed radically in many ways over the lated people and groups realize that they have more kindred spir
past two hundred years; but the situation of the modernist. trying its than they think. But whether they will in fact affirm these
to survive and create in the maelstrom's midst. has remained sub human bonds, and whether their affirmation will lead to any sort
stantially the same. This situation has generated a language and of communal or collective action, I cannot pretend to know. Maybe
culture of dialogue, bringing together modernists of the past, the the moderns of the 1970s will rest content in the artificial inner
present and the future, enabling modernist culture to live and light of their inflated domes. Or maybe, someday soon, they wiII
thrive even in the most dreadful of times. All through this book, I lift the domes through their picture windows, open their windows
have tried not only to describe -modernism's life of dialogue but to to one another, and work to create a politics of authenticity that
carry it on. But the primacy of dialogue in the ongoing life of will embrace us all. If and when this should happen, it will mark
modernism means that modernists can never be done with the the point when the modernism of the 1980s will be under way.
past: they must go on forever haunted by it. digging up its ghosts, Twenty years ago, at the end of another unpolitical decade, Paul
recreating it even as they remake their world and themselves. Goodman heralded a great wave of radicals and radical initiatives
If modernism ever managed to throw off its scraps and tatters that were just coming to life. What was the relationship of this
and the uneasy joints that bind it to the past. it would lose all its emerging radicalism, including his own, to modernity? Goodman
weight and depth, and the maelstrom of modern life would carry argued that if young people today found themselves "growing up
it helplessly away. It is only by keeping alive the bonds that tie it to absurd," with no honorable or even meaningful life to grow into,
the modernities of the past-bonds at once intimate and antago the source of the trouble "is not the spirit of modern society";
nistic-that it can help the moderns of the present and the future rather, he said, "it is that this spirit has not sufficiently realized
to be free. itself." 23 The agenda of modern possibilities that Goodman
This understanding of modernism should help us clarify some brought together under the title of "The Missed Revolutions" is as
of the ironies of the contemporary "post-modern" mystique. 22 I open and as pressing as ever today. In my presentation of moder
have argued that the modernism of the 1970s was distinguished nities of yesterday and today, I have tried to point out some of the
by its desire and power to remember. to remember so much of ways in which the modern spirit may go on to realize itself tomor
what modern societies-regardless of what their ideologies and row.
who their ruling classes are-want to forget. But when contempo What about the day after tomorrow? Ihab Hassan, ideologue of
rary modernists lose touch with and deny their own modernity, post-modernism, laments modernity's stubborn refusal to fade
they only echo the ruling class self-delusion that it has conquered out: "When will the Modern Period end? Has a period ever waited
the troubles and perils of the past, and meanwhile they cut them so long? Renaissance? Baroque? Classical? Romantic? Victorian?
selves off, and cut us off, from a primary source· of their own Perhaps only the Dark Middle Ages. When will Modernism cease
strength. and what comes thereafter?"24 If the overall argument of this book
There is another disturbing question that needs to be asked is right, then those who are waiting for the end of the modern age
about the modernisms of the 1970s: Taken together. do they add can be assured of steady work. The modern economy is likely to
up to anything? I have been showing how a number of individuals go on growing, though probably in new directions, adapting itself
and small groups have confronted their own ghosts, and how, out to the chronic energy and environmental crises that its success has
of these inner struggles, they created meaning, dignity and beauty created. Future adaptations will require great social and political
for themselves. All well and good; but can these personal, familial, turmoil; but modernization has always thrived on trouble, on an
local and ethnic explorations generate any sort of larger vision or atmosphere of "everlasting uncertainty and agitation" in which. as
the Communist Manifesto says, "all fixed, fast-frozen relations ...

are swept away." In such an ambience, the culture of modernism
will go on developing new visions and expressions of life: for the
Doles
same economic and social drives that endlessly transform the PREFACE TO THE PENGUIN EDITION: THE BROAD AND
world around us, both for good and for evil, also transform OPEN WAY
the inner lives of the men and women who fill this world and make I. On post-modernism in the 1980s. see, for example, Hal Foster, editor, The Anti
it go. The process of modernization, even as it exploits and tor Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Bay Press, 1983); New German Critique, #22
ments us, brings our energies and imaginations to life, drives us to (Winter 1981) and #33 (Fall 1984); Andreas Buyssen, After the Great Divide: Mod
erni.sm, Ma5S Culture.I'ostmodernism (Indiana. 1986); Peter Dews, editor, Autonomy
grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to and Solidarity: Interviews with}iirgen Habermas (Verso/New Left. 1986), especially
strive to make it our own. I believe that we and those who come the editor's introduction; and Jurgen Habermas. The Philosophical Discourse of
after us will go on fighting to make ourselves at home in this world, Modernity (1985), translated by Frederick G. Lawrence (M IT, 1987).
2. Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979),
even as the homes we have made. the modern street, the modern translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jame
spirit, go on melting into air. son (Minnesota, 1984),31.37,41.
INTRODUCTION: MODERNITY-YESTERDAY, TODAY AND

TOMORROW
I. Emile, ou De l'Education, 1762, in the Bibliotheque de la PI~iade edition of
Rousseau's Oeuvres Complites (Paris: Gallimard, I959fO, Volume IV, For
Rousseau's image of Ie tourbillon social, and how to survive in it, Book IV, page
551. On the volatile character of European society, and the revolutionary
upheavals to come, Emile, 1,252; 111,468; IV, 507-08.
2. Julie, ou Ia Nou~/le Heloise, 1761, Part II, Letters 14 and 17. In Oeuvres Com
plites. Volume II, 231-36, 255-56. I have discussed these Rousseauan scenes
and themes from a slightly different perspective in The Politics of Authenticity
(Atheneum, 1970), especially 113-19, 163-77.
3. "Speech at the Anniversary of the People'S Paper," in Robert C. Tucker, editor.
The Mar.r:-Engels Reader, 2nd edition (Norton, 1978).577-78. This volume will
be cited hereafter as MER.
4. MER, 475-76. I have slightly altered the standard translation, which was made
by Samuel Moore in 1888.
5. The passages quoted are from Sections 262, 223 and 224. Translations are by
Marianne Cowan (1955; Gateway, 1967), pages 210-11. 146-50.
6. "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910," by Umberto Bocdoni et a!. Trans
lated by Robert Brain, in Umbro Apollonio. editor, Futurist Manifestos (Viking,
1973),25.
7. F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909," translated
by R. W. Flint. in Futurist Manifestos, 22.
8. Marineui. "Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine," from Wpr, the
World's Only Hygiene, 1911-15. in R. W. Flint. editor and translator, Marinetti:
Selected Writings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972),90-91. For a spirited (if
partisan) treatment of futurism in the context of the evolution of modernity,
see Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Praeger, 1967),
99-137.
9. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hili paperback. 1965),
80.
10. "The Modernization of Man," in Myron Weiner. editor, Modn-nization: The
Dy1Iamics of Growth (Basic Books, 1966), 149. This collection gives a good pic
ture of the mainstream American paradigm of modernization in its heyday.
349
368 Notes Notes 369
Jewish soldier, whose great-grandchildren might well have followed that spee 17. WOJIlt,In Warrior: MtffllDirs of a GiriJlood Among Ghosts (Knopf, 1976; Vintage.
ter to haunt Karlinsky in his class.) 1977). The themes of this book are further developed. with more historical
sweep but less personal intensity. in a sort of sequel. China Mm (Knopf, 1980).
V. IN THE FOREST OF SYMBOLS 18. A script of Rumsticl« Rood is reprinted. along with directorial notes by Elizabeth
LeCompte and a few dim photographs. in Pnforming Am Journal, III, 2 (Fall
I. These statements are quoted by Robert Caro in his monumental study, The 1978). TIu! Drama Review #81 (March 1979) offers notes on all three plays by
POW" Broker: Robtrt Moses and llu! FaU of New Yorh <Knopf. 1974), 849, 876. Gray and James Bierman, along with excellent photographs.
The "meat ax" passage is from Moses' memoir, Public Worhs: A Dangerous TraM 19. Untitled Proposals, 1971-72. in TIu! Wr1ti~ of Raberl Smithson: EssaJS and
(McGraw-Hili. 1970). Moses' appraisal of the Cross-Bronx Expressway occurs IUustratioru;edited by Nancy Holt (NYU, 1979),220-21. For Smithson's urban
in an interview with Caro. TIu! Po'Wn' Broker is the main source for my narrative visions, see his essays "Ultra-Modeme," "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic.
of Moses' career. See also my article on Caro and Moses. "Buildings Are New Jersey," and "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape," all
Judgment: Robert Moses and the Romance of Construction," RamfJam, March in this volume.
1975, and a further symposium in the June issue. 20. See the volume lJn.wtalionlR,surrtction: TIu! South BTonx, prepared by the
2. Speech to the Long Island Real Estate Board, 1927, quoted in Caro. 275. Bronx Museum of the Arts in the winter of 1979-80. This volume gives·an
3. TIu! City of T071IOTTow, 64-66. See Koolhaas, 199-223, on Le Corbusier and excellent account both of the dynamics of urbicide and of the beginnings of
New York. reconstruction.
4. For details of this episode. Caro, 368-72. 21. ~ Carter Ratcliff, "Ferrer'S Sun and Shade," in AT! in Aml!Tica (March 1980),
5. Space, Time and Architecture, 823-32. 80-86, for a perceptive discussion of this piece. But Ratcliff does not notice
6. Frances Perkins, Oral History Reminiscences (Columbia University Collec that. intertwined with the dialectics of Ferrer's work. this work's site-Fox
tion). quoted in Caro, 318. Street in the South Bronx-has an inner dialectic of its own.
7. A definitive analysis of public authorities in America can be found in Anne 22. For a brief discussion. see Introduction. note 24.
marie Walsh, TIu! Public's Businm: TIu! Politics and Practices of Government Cor 23. Growing Up Absurd: Problnru of Youth in Organiud Society (Random House.
porations (MIT, 1978), especially Chapters I. 2. 8. II. 12. Walsh's book contains 1960), 2!'0.
much fascinating material on Moses, but she places his work. in a broad insti 24. Paracrilicisms: Srom Speculations of the Tifruls, 40.
tutional and social context that Caro tends to leave out. Robert Fitch, in a
perceptive 1976 essay, "Planning New York," tries to deduce all Moses' activi
ties from the fifty-year agenda that was established by the financiers and offi
cials of the Regional Plan Association; it appears in Roger Alcaly and David
Mermelstein, editors. TIu! Fiscal Crisis ofAmfflcan Ci~s (Random House, 1977),
247-84.
8. Space. Time and Archittcturt, 831-32.
9. On the problems and paradoxes of that period. the best recent discussion is
Morris Dickstein's essay "The Cold War Blues," which appears as Chapter 2 in
his Gates of ErUn. For interesting polemic on the 19505. see Hilton Kramer's
attack on Dickstein. "Trashing the Fifties," in the N~Yor' Times Boolc Revi~.
10 April 1977, and Dickstein's reply in the issue of 12June.
10. A detailed account of this affair can be found in Caro, 1132-44.
II. TIu! Death and Lift of Great American Ci~s (Random House and Vintage. 1961).
The passages that follow are from pages 50-54. For interesting critical discus
sion of Jacobs' vision, see, for instance, Herbert Gans, "City Planning and
Urban Realities," Commentary, February 1962; Lewis Mumford, "Mother Ja
cobs' Home Remedies for Urban Cancer," Tht New Yorher, I December 1962,
reprinted in TIu! Urban ProsfHd (Harcourt, 1966); and Roger Starr, TIu! Living
End: The City and Its Critics (Coward-McCann. 1966).
12. Quoted in Barbara Rose, Ckus Oldmburg (MOMA/New York Graphic Society,
1970).25, 33.
13. Note to TIu! Street exhibition. quoted in Rose, 46.
14. Statement for the catalogue of his "Environments, Situations, Spaces" exhibi
tion. 1961. quoted in Rose, 190-91. This statement. a marvelous fusion of
Whitman with dada. is also reprinted in Russell and Gablik, Pop AT! RtrkJined.
97-99.
15. Quoted in Caro. 876.
16. In Blindness and Insight. 147-48.

Berman in The Forest of Symbols

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All ThaI Is Solid Dlells

moral imagination and courage of these little men surge up sud

The Bronx's dreadful fate is experienced. though probably not

tremendous schemes. refuse. like Mr. Kurtz, to be counted out

TM plasm of the drCIGm is tM poin of separation. TM dreom lives

start. We were working to help other people, and other peoples

-Adrienne Rieh. "Shooting Script"

plunging forward on a thrilling but disastrous course. Individually

the Communist Manifesto says, "all fixed, fast-frozen relations ...

INTRODUCTION: MODERNITY-YESTERDAY, TODAY AND

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Berman in The Forest of Symbols

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Berman in The Forest of Symbols

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

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Did you find this document useful?

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Berman in The Forest of Symbols

Uploaded by

Copyright:

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What is the main topic discussed in the text?

What is the main topic discussed in the text?

What places does the author mention as examples of modernization?

What places does the author mention as examples of modernization?

All ThaI Is Solid Dlells

moral imagination and courage of these little men surge up sud­

The Bronx's dreadful fate is experienced. though probably not

tremendous schemes. refuse. like Mr. Kurtz, to be counted out

TM plasm of the drCIGm is tM poin of separation. TM dreom lives

start. We were working to help other people, and other peoples­

-Adrienne Rieh. "Shooting Script"

plunging forward on a thrilling but disastrous course. Individually

the Communist Manifesto says, "all fixed, fast-frozen relations ...

INTRODUCTION: MODERNITY-YESTERDAY, TODAY AND

You might also like

moral imagination and courage of these little men surge up sud

start. We were working to help other people, and other peoples