The Crucible of Contradictions, Identity, Class, and Alienation in New York City

“ Or, if they change, they change together as one creature—be he millionaire or Hebrew shop-keeper, doctor of divinity or manager of comic opera. For, of all men under the sun, the New Yorker is a type; acutely suspicious of and instinctively opposed to anything independent of the type. Hence, in spite of the vast numbers of different peoples brought together on Manhattan Island, we find not a community of Americans growing cosmopolitan, but a community of cosmopolitans forced to grow New Yorkers. ”

“ And yet there was something about New York that was new and mysterious; its life was extraordinarily exhilarating. So many ten-thousands went to work and came from work every day at the same hours, it was like gazing upon the Creation to watch them. They lost their individuality, their human, insignificant (?) individuality, in the mass, and became a part of Adam's seed. Country people were less interesting than these New Yorkers, because country people were more independent. New Yorkers never looked at each other, but they felt each other ”

“ It is, and always will be, one of the appalling sights of New York to me—the spectacle of the helplessness, the wistfulness, of all those poor New York people without one another. Sometimes the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine of crowds. It seems to be a part of the ceaseless crowd action or crowd corrosion on the sense of identity in the human spirit that the man who lives in crowds should grow more dull and more literal about himself every day. He becomes a mere millionth of something. ”

“ But to apply it throughout a whole quarter of a city, or even throughout the endless vistas of a great American street, would be simply maddening. Better the most heaven-storming or sky-scraping audacity of individualism than any attempt to transform New York into a Fourierist phalanstery or a model prison. ”

“ Each of these huge constructed and compressed communities, throbbing, through its myriad arteries and pores, with a single passion, even as a complicated watch throbs with the one purpose of telling you the hour and the minute, testified overwhelmingly to the character of New York—and the passion of the restless analyst, on his side, is for the extraction of character. ”

“ Nature abhors these complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any high point, this city of New York, yonder city of London, the western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep each other in countenance, and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of the time. ”

“ His knowledge of the city, its big and little secrets, its whys and wherefores, its entangled virtue and vice, its secret ways from respectability to shame, its strange bedfellows, the standards of honor among the corrupt and the mental sophistries of the strong, was profound. For him the baffling brownstone mask of New York did not exist. People instinctively trusted him. Criminals told him true stories in restaurants where few could venture; women of all sorts and conditions, passing before him for grave or minor offenses, often returned for advice or relief from blackmailing conditions. ”

“ It is a fact that no Golden Age exists on the other side of the water; that vice and crime have their penalties in America as well as in Europe; and that some of the worst features of the Old World are reproduced in the New. With all the desire that we may possess to take a sanguine view of things, there is something peculiarly hopeless about the condition of this class at New York, which in such a favourable state of society, and at such an early period of American history, has sunk so very low. The existence of a "dangerous class" at New York is now no longer denied. ”

“ Petite, plump feet that have always had the carriage at the door, eh? A nigger in this country never says another nigger is better looking than he; when he means that, he says he's whiter. See? Well, you can think that way of beauty it' you like. I prefer something more than the mere earmarks of uselessness and the enviousness of the underdog in my conception of it. I wouldn't give any East Side mother's wrinkled face and hard hands for all the beauties on Fifth Avenue."
"But, my dear man," Mr. Vanhoesen said, "you'll admit that New York is ugly." ”

“ I said aloud. “This New York that dabbles its slime of sordidness and snobbishness on every flower in the garden of human nature. New York that destroys pride and substitutes vanity for it. New York with its petty, mischievous class-makers, the pattern for the rich and the 'smarties' throughout the country. These 'cut-out' minds and hearts, the best of them incapable of growth and calloused wherever the scissors of conventionality have snipped.”
I took from my pocket the picture of Anita I always carried. ”

“ Depicts life in New York's poorest immigrant quarters and tenements—in its reality because he saw it as an insider, the denizens of the slums and the Underworld shamefacedly veiling the fundamental facts of their existence from charity and sociological investigators, but admitting the author to everything because he mingled with them as a non-intellectual and fairie. ”

“ In these circles in New York we are spared the humiliating spectacle of men of genius or intellect cringing and uneasy in the presence of their patronising inferiors, whom birth or wealth may have placed socially above them. Of course there is society in New York where the vulgar influence of money is omnipotent, and extravagant display is fashionable ”

“ And after all, the abominations of New York’s politics are only a few degrees more repellent than the cruelties and pusillanimities of her self-styled patrician horde. The highest duty of rich people is to be charitable; in New York the rich people make for themselves two highest duties, to be fashionable and to be richer—if they can. ”

“ Even the Hudson and the Susquehannah,—perhaps the Potomac itself,—had often risen to drown out the Gods of Walhalla, and one could hardly listen to the Götterdammerung in New York, among throngs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms of nervous excitement that toned down to musical philistinism at Baireuth, as though the Gods were Bavarian composers. New York or Paris might be whatever one pleased,—venal, sordid, vulgar,—but society nursed there, in the rottenness of its decay, certain anarchistic ferments, and thought them proof of art. ”

“ NEW YORK is not merely a melting pot for the poor and the humble of the lands of the earth. In its capacious depths, unknown and unsuspected, float atoms of an entirely different sort: human beings with the blood of the high-born and lofty in their veins, derelicts swept up by the varying winds of adversity, adventure, injustice, lawlessness, fear and independence. ”

“ Those who were too negligent, or too selfish to notice them as children, will be fully aware of them as men. They will vote—they will have the same rights as we ourselves, though they have grown up ignorant of moral principle, as any savage or Indian. They will poison society. They will perhaps be embittered at the wealth and the luxuries they never share. Then let society beware, when the outcast, vicious, reckless multitude of New York boys, swarming now in every foul alley and low street, come to know their power and use it! ”

“ It is through the operations of law that mankind is ground to powder; it is by the prostitution of the rights of the masses, by men who pretend to be their representatives and are not, that misery, starvation and death fill the largest space in the news channels of every land.
In New York City—where the intelligence, the enterprise, the wealth and the christianized humanity of the New World are supposed to have their highest exemplification—men, women and children die by the thousands, starved and frozen out of the world! ”

“ But New York society of to-day is known to all readers of Sunday papers. They know it as an institution in which the prevalence of gigantic fortunes has made its atmosphere uncongenial for all who are not conspicuously rich. And while the valid claims of birth and breeding and culture have thus been crowded out at one gate of the social arena, the influences which have forced an entry at the other end in company with the mere millions, have all been vulgarizing influences. Society is no longer certain that it is the genuine article. ”

“ Whether humanity is more depraved in a city than in a village, still remains an open question; but I have uniformly found that in both, the old and the young evince the same predilection for what is evil, and the same antipathies to what is pure; and if left without any enlightening and regenerating process, will bear a striking resemblance to each other in the great outlines of their moral character. Observation proves, I think, that the city, by its more varied attractions, facilitates the broader and more marked development of the essential depravity of our common nature. ”

“ He stepped out on Fifth Avenue; and though a warm June wind blew balmily up from Washington Square, his heart was chill within him. He shivered as he wondered what he was to do now. He knew no one in New York, and he had not a cent in his pocket.
In his youth he had expected to inherit a fortune, and so he learned no trade and studied no profession. He had taught himself how to be idle elegantly; he had never planned how to earn his own living. ”

“ She didn't, in the first place, so much as know who he was—by which he meant know who and what it was to be a White-Mason, even a poor and a dear and old one, "anyway." That indeed—he did her perfect justice—was of the very essence of the newness and freshness and beautiful, brave social irresponsibility by which she had originally dazzled him: just exactly that circumstance of her having no instinct for any old quality or quantity or identity, a single historic or social value, as he might say, of the New York of his already almost legendary past ”

“ You know, also, that often the typical New-Yorker is not proud of the city of his choice, and not so loyal to it as we could wish. He has no abiding concern for this maligned and misunderstood town of ours; he does not thrill with pride at the sight of its powerful and irregular profile as he comes back to it across the broad river; nor is his heart lifted up with joy at the sound of its increasing roar, so suggestive and so stimulating. But we have a firm affection for New York, you and I, and a few besides; we like it for what it is; and we love it for what we hope to see it. ”

“ One need not wonder very long that nearly every man one knows in New York is at best a mere cheered-up and plucky pessimist. Of course one has to go down and see one’s favourite New Yorker, one needs to and wants to, and one needs to get wrought in with him too, but when one gets home, who is there who does not have to get free from his favourite New Yorker, shake himself off from him, save his soul a little longer? “Men are cheap,” it keeps saying over and over to one,—a New York soul does. It keeps coming back—whispering through all the aisles of thought. ”

“ He positively cherished in fact, as against the too inveterate gesture of distressfully guarding his eyeballs—so many New York aspects seemed to keep him at it—an ideal of adjusted appreciation, of courageous curiosity, of fairly letting the world about him, a world of constant breathless renewals and merciless substitutions, make its flaring assault on its own inordinate terms. ”

“ New York presented a spectacle of material display such as he had never known existed. The carriages on Fifth Avenue, the dinners at the great hotels, the constant talk of society functions in the newspapers, made his brain dizzy. He was inclined to idle about the streets, to watch the handsomely dressed crowds, to consider the evidences of show and refinement everywhere, and he came to the conclusion that he was not living at all, but existing. Art as he had first dreamed of it, art had seemed not only a road to distinction but also to affluence. ”

“ There is no beauty, there is only intensity. And a city like New York can claim their enthusiasm, not because it is a harmonious unit functioning in such a way as to produce the most widely developed type of human life (which they know well enough it is not) but because it is so intensely, so characteristically, itself.
The negative quality in the criticism of the Seven Arts group is caused by their hankering after traditional beauty, beauty with the connotations which the word has traditionally held. ”

“ It may be that the second and third generations of immigrants, born on the East Side, are true New Yorkers, just as a vanishing generation of elderly men and women on Murray Hill and the Avenue are true New Yorkers. But the great majority of New York's five millions cherish in their hearts either the memory or the hope of some spot far away to which they give the allegiance of home love. ”

“ Still, folks can be lonesome in New York.”
“Perhaps. But really I don’t see how. With all the whirl and the crowds and the glorious excitement. The feeling that one is at the very heart, the center of everything!” ”

“ But there is a sense in which New York is always new; in the sense that it is always being renewed. A stranger might well say that the chief industry of the citizens consists of destroying their city; but he soon realises that they always start it all over again with undiminished energy and hope. ”