Tag Archives: brooklyn

Empire State Diaries

I. A Dream Forgotten

Upstate New York, like New England outside of its better-known vacationlands, has the gentle shabbiness of a place beloved but somewhat past its prime. Country lanes meander through small hamlets, the federal and colonial homes dotting the way often in need of a coat of paint or a new roof. But they are still stately, still have something to say: we are at the root of Yankee thrift and economy, the foundations of American union and democratic culture, they suggest with a noble air. This is a realm of front porches and village greens and quaint shops at the hearts of towns, the sorts of places Frank Capra had it mind when he made “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

That idyll is not today’s American Dream, at least not outside the minds of a few nostalgic liberals drawn to northern woods and cozy studies. It has instead drifted south and west, toward glazed boomburbs and three-car attached garages and laminate flooring and inoffensive greige tones. Those markers of modern middle class achievement are in rare supply in Durham and Middleburgh and Esperance and other quaint communities on my road north from New York City.

It is baffling how far the communal ideal has fallen away, I muse as I wind past apple orchards and gentle babbling brooks. Tocqueville’s democracy is moribund, shunted aside by the race westward, the founders turned into deracinated oracles rather than people of a time and place. The Greeks told us this would happen to our young democracy, though there are surges of resistance here and there; maybe anger about data centers can do what a thousand exhortations over the value of civic engagement cannot. But so often now we hope not for ancient Athens reborn, but for benevolent emperors.

I waver about the magnitude of the loss. A transcontinental state cannot be governed by a small town council; the complexity of our world demands some level of specialization and expertise. The Empire State, as its nickname implies, was in on the game from the start. But the gap between founding dreams and present realities demands far more attention than it gets.

Over the course of this long weekend I read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, an acerbic window into the stifling, hierarchal world of 1870s New York. Of course I would argue our present world has its own stifling hierarchies that have the added defect of trying to pretend they are not what they are. The grip of old New York came down over time, just as our current hierarchies are starting to crumble some, too. In both cases it is worth noting the passing, and a smart conservative mind will skeptically eye what may come next. But mourn it not: instead, rescue what is worth rescuing. Take that road trip through the Catskills, appreciate the older wisdom, and bring along what you can.

II. Pastime

Cooperstown, some three and a half miles north of New York City, shows what one of these rural Northeastern towns can be when given a source of eternal life. Blessed by the foresight of some 1930s boosters who rode the myth of Abner Doubleday as baseball’s inventor, this little town at the end of a fingerling lake is home to a hall of fame for America’s most history-obsessed sport. Roll the James Earl Jones voiceover: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.”

I join several thousand 12-year-olds and their handlers on the streets of Cooperstown on a Friday afternoon in August. The Hall of Fame does its duty, delivers the history, provides appropriate nuance as it navigates the stickiness of gambling and steroids. My favorite parts go deep into the players, with exhibits on Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron and their humble roots, Americans from different generations who came up from different dark places to do the impossible. There are exhibits on Black baseball and Latino baseball and women in baseball (feat. Duluth-Superior Duke Ila Borders), while the 12-year-olds are most absorbed by the Shohei Otani homage already on display. The Hall itself is a bit stiff but iconic, subject to the whims of the baseball writers guild that still controls its gates but appropriately grand for a sport passed down for generations.

Two days later, here in the present without the plaques to Ruth or DiMaggio or even Jeter to carry them, the Yankees are in good form in the Bronx. The mid-2020s Bronx Bombers are entertaining but flawed, top-heavy and afraid to disrupt the status quo. But at least this gives the kids some chances, from the revelations of Cam Schlittler and Ben Rice to the halting promise of George Lombard and Spencer Jones. Recent years have taught me to check my enthusiasm; the days of Yankee inevitability are long gone. But with a loaded rotation and the looming return of Aaron Judge and a pillow-soft American League, I can’t help but dream. To be a baseball fan is to be trained in the art of eternal hope, sometimes against all odds.

I complete my pastime pilgrimage by peeking at the old site of Ebbets Field in Flatbush. A dated apartment tower rises, its baseball history forgotten. The cushy Brooklyn half a mile away in Park Slope fades away into generic big city soup, though construction is afoot here within easy walking distance of Prospect Park. In nearby Green-Wood Cemetery and other resting places, fans of Dem Bums may be turning in their graves at what the Dodgers have become since they decamped for sunnier climes. Baseball, like America, has at times rolled by like an army of steamrollers, matching a nation’s southward and westward turn.

III. Class Traitors

I take a presidential tour down the Hudson, an artery of old American (and Dutch!) power before the region lurched into its present state. Half an hour south of Albany is Lindenwald, the estate of Martin Van Buren. Van Buren was a forgettable president, but his legacy lives on: he furnished his predecessor, Andrew Jackson, with the machinery that became the Democratic Party. This tavernkeeper’s son organized the rabble into the first true populist force in American politics, which has become a throughline ever since. But give Van Buren credit: he was a fervent abolitionist, firmly resistant to adding Texas as a slave state, and later a founder of the Free Soil Party, a forerunner to the Republicans. Populism and principled institution-building can indeed go hand-in-hand when truly harnessed.

An hour further south is a better-known presidential retreat: Hyde Park, the lifelong home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sits in stately repose on a sprawling estate. Here the trend started by Van Buren reached its apogee, a New York patrician who rallied the masses in the face of the Depression and wielded more power than any American in history. He put his commanding majorities in Congress put to work remaking the way the federal government worked, and he played a geopolitical chess game that positioned the United States to rewrite the world order in the aftermath of great calamity. For over half a century we lived in a world FDR wrote into being, and parts of it carry forward today, high points of a bygone era.

It has been a slow fade since. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, when he battled Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination in 1964 and was asked if he could summon the old establishment to support his campaign, quipped that his advisors were looking at it. After him, a western frontier mentality took control of Republican politics, Roosevelt noblesse oblige thrown aside for a libertarian-inflected vision of freedom, and American politics followed a nation’s gaze southward and westward.

By the 1980s, New York had decided it could play this free market game too, and it united its old prestige with cutthroat capital to rebuild its power on the national stage. A straightforward reading has Donald Trump as a child of this moment; he can come off as a perversion of the old New York politics, a local aristocrat who vibed with a restive populace and invented himself as a tribune of the people. But the old world was gone before he took the stage; there was a clean split between New Deal New York and the post-80s flourishing of fluid capital and yuppies and hipsters and the city’s rebirth as a vibrant, wealthy, fun place to be. Sure, Trump is a child of both these eras, but his mind was formed by the interregnum between them: 1970s New York, an era of crime and fire and unquestioned sense of decline. This is a lesson of New York dating back to Gatsby: as much as a man may enjoy the glittering city, his deepest convictions are formed by the scars. Trump, unlike Roosevelt or Rockefeller, wears his acutely.

IV. Infrastructure

Between Cooperstown and my trip south along the Hudson, I spend a night in Albany. It’s not a place I need to spend a lot of time, but I have a nibbling desire to see its centerpiece, the Empire State Plaza. I wander it at night after a few beers and find myself more awed than I expected to be by this American Brasilia, bathed in purple light. Nelson Rockefeller’s forum to American glory is a monumental modernist work, emblematic of a national apogee and yet more than a hint anachronistic, a nod to an era that was but no longer is. I admire the vision; no state capitol complex has a unifying grandeur that can compete. But yet it is at once too much and a time capsule to an era, an imperial peak of a very specific style, back when an ambitious governor could steamroll neighborhoods and displace 7,000 people to build what he pleased.

After the diversion to see the presidential homes, my ride back into the city is one of beautiful serendipity. It owes this delight to the Roosevelt era: I take the Taconic State Parkway, a pinnacle of midcentury civic infrastructure. On this freeway there is not a truck to be seen, no roadside development save a few quaint old waysides: just a four-lane ribbon shooting gracefully up and down hills through a protected corridor of woods, clean down from the Taconic Mountains east of Albany to the Westchester suburbs. It is one thing to be a country that builds grand things to meet a specific moment, like the Empire State Plaza; it is another to be one that builds beautiful things to last, like the Taconic State Parkway. I would argue our inability to build much of anything these days is a direct product of our loss of the latter.

Will the murmured desire for a new era of American building come to anything? Zohran Mamdani, at least, wants to start by actually fixing a slice of the nightmare that is the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. (This trip is an object lesson for me on how horrifically difficult it is to travel north to south on the west side of Long Island.) It is a tiny slice, but it is something, and the first hint of a politics that reaches toward civic greatness in building things for people. If this is what democratic socialism can look like in practice, I might yet get on board with the revolution.

V. Brooklyn Baby

I have been to New York a half-dozen times and have never seen a Broadway show, never been to the Statue of Liberty, and never been up a skyscraper. Times Square, to me, is a place where people go to take Instagram pictures, not to actually do anything. Central Park is grand and timeless and I appreciate its function in this city, but I have an affinity for parks that are wilder than Frederick Law Olmsted’s rolling greens.

What New York is to me, other than the home to a few old friends and a baseball team I like, is the best example of urban life achievable in America. Streets teem with energy, neighborhoods cohere into communities, and even in an era where living in New York takes more and more money, it forges and re-forges identities in a way few cities can. Here one can walk to nearly any cuisine in the world, bask in a park with grand monuments, wander around and pick up all the basic needs on a casual afternoon. Unlike other American cities with density, Brooklyn is filled with children, with families who have the money to choose other lives but have no desire to say goodbye to all this. The subway, even in our stare-at-our-phones era, is alive with chatter. Forget the laments of the anonymous and soulless city: this is a place with genuine community, the urban dance first captured by Jane Jacobs and preserved, sometimes all too self-consciously, by New Yorkers ever since.

In New York I feel both very poor and as I live a life of great comfort, all at once. People will put up with a lot to live here, and the city makes them do so. The very notion of owning a car is a source of struggle for one couple I dine with. Buying real estate is nearly laughable. Even in a well-appointed apartment the kitchen is cramped and the water takes a few minutes to warm up and the guest bedroom is accessible only by re-entering the common stairwell where a bust of Nefertiti graces the fireplace. Here 1,700 square feet is a palace, though in this particular case it does in fact resemble a palace, with grand ceilings and ornate woodwork and scenes from Rome and Venice frescoed above the fireplaces and the built-ins, and golden hour pouring in through the Tiffany windows over the fainting couch.

But drift out, just live in a few square miles of Brooklyn for a few days, and it all makes sense. My old roommate Tim and his partner Anika are in Park Slope, the Brooklyn ideal, a land of leafy streets and grand brownstones and books left out on the sidewalk for anyone to take, along with the world’s snobbiest co-op. It is a short walk to Brooklyn’s lungs at Prospect Park, or over to the Grand Army of the Republic Plaza, which is helpful in my quest for the world record for most quadriga sightings in a single year. I run down to Green-Wood Cemetery, a retreat where New York’s dead lie in peace behind their gothic gates, at rest beneath their mausoleums with a view off toward the towers of Lower Manhattan to the north. I eat Indian and Mexican and good ice cream and a tower of seafood in Downtown Brooklyn. Most museums are alas closed on my free Monday, but I compile a list for next time: the Brooklyn Museum, the botanical garden, the transit museum. I learn of color palettes, befriend the cats, settle in each night on an air mattress beneath the 20-foot ceiling and chandelier. Fortunes may rise and fall and tastes may come and go, but New York is eternal.

Empire State of Mind

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.

–Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

It started with a baseball team, but it came to mean much more than that. New York has always held a special allure for me, a certainty that the universe revolved loosely around a constellation of stars somewhere between the World Trade Center and Times Square and Central Park and a ballpark at 161st Street in the Bronx. For my entire adult life, I have read a New York newspaper daily and a New York magazine weekly; the tales of some of the figures most dear to me, from Gatsby all the way down to my own scribbled notes, try to find their way through it. New York is a cultural touchstone with an infinite ability to attract the best and bring out the fullest, often flawed but always possessed of an undying allure.

Labor Day weekend of 2021 is a curious time to visit New York. I arrive amid an ongoing pandemic that has ravaged this city harder than most. As I take the train in from the Newark airport, floodwaters from the freak remains of Hurricane Ida loiter on New Jersey roads, the planes and trains that fuel the beast cut off until the day before my arrival. A somber mood lingers at the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers, and in the immediate aftermath of the end(?) of the 9/11 Era’s misbegotten wars. When I pop out of Penn Station, the streets seem almost sedate. Where’s that frenetic, addicting pace I remember from the past?

And yet this is the perfect time to head to the center of the American imperium. I’ve kept up an aggressive travel pace over this past year and a half, but these journeys have been solitary, or at least involved trips with other people into natural solitude. I am hungry for a trip in and among people, raring to once again sample the full range of humanity, to stride down famed streets and pay homage at some of its shrines. My host and I will fill every moment of my 70 hours in New York, put on double-digit miles in less-than-ideal shoes, drink it all in as I know we can.

That host is Andrew, my Georgetown friend and Minneapolis roommate currently wrapping up a one-year stint as a New Yorker. He has temporary lodging in Carroll Gardens, which sits a few neighborhoods south of the Brooklyn Bridge. This is my first time exploring Brooklyn, an urbanist’s feverish fantasy made real. It is a step below Manhattan overload, with dense, historic homes, many carved up into smaller units that nonetheless still feel like familiar neighborhoods. Shops and restaurants sprout up on corners, all within walking distance, and narrow streets dotted with new outdoor seating and bike lanes calm the traffic and make it easy to cycle or scoot around the borough. Here are some Caribbean neighborhoods, there historically black Bedford-Stuyvesant, Russians down on the south end, the liberal elite doing their things in Park Slope, Italians living out that New York stereotype from a different area; no matter the business, Latin music is probably pumping out of it, because the Hispanics are everywhere too. Free-range children make the streets their own, and give it an urban life that one cannot find in adult playground cities like San Francisco. After time in New York, several friends observe, the streets anywhere else feel dead.

Andrew and I take on New York in full: bagels for breakfast and pizza for one dinner, staying out later than our 30-year-old bodies would normally allow. The first night takes us to a Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant, where the molé and the accompanying mezcal flight brings about a bliss powerful enough to overcome the stench of the Gowanus Canal. On the second, after the pizza, we head out on the town in Williamsburg: a lucky seat at the Four Horsemen and a sample from its famed for its natural wine list, and a nightcap at a German beer hall. We are old by Billyburg standards, but we can still make our way among the cool kids. On our final night we traverse the borough by foot, from Carroll Gardens straight over to our final stops in Bed-Stuy, with Park Slope and Prospect Park to distract us on the way. This is the only way to travel, no moment wasted, no chance to observe left unused.

As my credit card bill from the weekend can attest, New York is a city of extremes, and nowhere in America is insane wealth more ubiquitous. On a first day stroll up to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and into Dumbo, I ask about the helicopters shooting up and down the East River. Upon learning that they are mostly rich people shuttling back and forth between the city and their places in the Hamptons, I suddenly understand why people here vote for Bernie Sanders. Prior to the Yankee game, we take a Labor Day walk up a quiet Wall Street. Twenty years after terrorists targeted it, downtown Manhattan remains the financial capital of the world. The only real damage to American supremacy has been self-inflicted.

This School of Foreign Service graduate has stopped and started three blog posts on the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the twenty years of war that have now come to an ignominious close. Everything about it strikes me as a tale of hubris and decline, and the 2000s now look like a disastrous diversion that may shift the center of the world away from this great city and toward some rather less friendly place. But yet here is New York, still marching along, its power for good or ill only consolidated since terrorists tried to stab at its heart in 2001. The same can be said for its pandemic resilience: yes, there have been losses, some of them great, but the data already belie any tale of collapse. I also find New York’s Covid era policies, with regular vaccine card requirements for entry but mask mandates only in crowded indoor spaces, the best-adjusted to reality of any I’ve encountered in my travels. New Yorkers are in the game to crush the virus and get back to living as they prefer, not to lurch along in fear or accommodation of it.

For those of us for whom private helicopters are not an option, a series of ferries offer one of the more fun ways to drink in that New York life. They cruise up and down the East and Hudson Rivers at a surprising speed, with added routes around to the south side of Brooklyn and one even striking out boldly toward the promised land of Staten Island. Ferry passengers get new perspectives up at iconic bridges and across at skylines, an ongoing immersion that is hard to find when reliant on the subway. When my dad and I visited here on a college tour, he likened that experience to that of a gopher popping in and out of holes. A few rickety rides between these old tiled platforms quickly form strong opinions: the F is painfully slow, the 6 regularly ghosts, and the 4 is speedy but an eternal mystery over where it will actually stop. New York both exacerbates the wealth gap and then flattens it, subjects all but a select few to the same crowded platforms and scheduled maintenance delays.

The pandemic and the floods shed new light on a city fraying some at the edges, duct taped together in an effort to keep century-old infrastructure running, threatening to lurch toward a new status quo where nothing is fixable or ever on time. Except on rare occasions, the difference between third- and first-world cities is not so much in any immediately visible levels of chaos, but instead in the belief in the systems behind it all. If resignation reigns, if people expect that everything will run poorly and nothing will get better, well, they are probably right. New York teeters on the edge at times, but most people still nurse higher expectations against all odds. Things may yet get better, the eternal promise of the liberal, progress-oriented mind. And when they do go awry, New Yorkers have a talent for handling these situations in a way that we Minnesotans will not: just yell loudly.

This attitude is on display at Yankee Stadium on Labor Day. The Bronx Bombers, fighting to maintain a playoff spot, blunder their way through an anemic and error-filled performance, while the pitching serves up four home runs in an 8-0 loss to Toronto. Even in a game with nothing to cheer, spontaneous chants erupt all around our section at least once an inning. This is no Target Field picnic in Minneapolis: everyone is engaged, knows the players and their flaws. They offer up goofy random remarks and the continued graphic serenades of Houston Astro José Altúve that have been a staple of every game since his one and only visit this season back in May, that scumbag cheater. (Forgive me if my biases are showing.) After a scrub pitcher gives up a grand slam in the ninth and makes the game a laugher, the crowd fully turns, the boobirds out in full force. Ah well; at least it was a beautiful day for a ballgame.

The Yankees may look moribund, but they will be back thanks to New York’s saving grace: an eternal hope for reinvention. I find one such sign in Moynihan Train Hall, a sparkling new Beaux-Arts facility that combines a grand new atrium with an old post office to hearken back to the late, great original Penn Station, an inspiring reminder that iconic public infrastructure really is still possible. A second comes on Little Island, New York’s newest burst of civic fascination, an art installation as a public park that invites senseless serendipitous wandering, both casual and immersive, depending on one’s mood. Its nearby forerunner is the High Line, a repurposed promenade along an elevated train line that is now thick with plant life growing up out of the concrete. These living parks blend New York’s brutal monumentality with a resurgence of nature, a sense of what a rebirth from ruin can be. Progress, however, comes in fits and starts: at the end of the High Line is Hudson Yards, a new, gleaming, soulless and inconvenient behemoth for rich corporations and luxury shopping. I would call it a billionaires’ playground, but if this is how billionaires have fun, the status may not be worth the hype.

I recover from any lingering annoyance at ugly developments with a stroll up Central Park East to the Met. The art museum first captured my imagination as a kid when I read The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but this is the first time I’ve set foot in America’s largest art museum. Alas, I fear hiding away in the Met is now much harder than it was when the book was published in the 60s, which is a shame, because I would gladly do so and spend a few nights here. Two and a half hours with no agenda lead me to wander from Greek and Roman art to Middle Eastern carpets, from French impressionists to halls of sculptures, through European period rooms past arms and armor to the Temple of Dendur (closed for construction) and some of the Egyptian rooms. I’ve only scratched the surface of this collection, that New York centralizing force at its absolute finest.

New York’s greatest works of art, however, may come in its human tapestry, and I am here to wrap myself in that urban fabric I have missed so dearly. Dozens of Instagrammers on the same street in Dumbo, rows of families grilling along the Brooklyn Heights waterfront, an urban motorcycle gang by Prospect Park, and the J’Ouvert festival of Caribbean pride livening up the streets of Crown Heights. A reality show casting event in Hudson Yards (a fitting locale); old Upper East Side dames with their marvelous accents and gaudy glasses and batty clothes. Kids attack the streets narrow of Brooklyn on bikes and skateboards with more confidence than I could muster on an empty six-lane highway. An earnestly cool young couple buried in some newspaper tarred in leftist slogans, a man straight out of hipster central casting reading a DIY book, the guy at the next table at the wine bar rattling on about his tasting journeys. A lone young artist on a bench in the Met, the outside world tuned out, deep in a sketch of a Roman statue. A towering Black man in drag getting handsy with his travel companion, a rowdy extended family of grumbling Yankee fans, the lady behind the bar whose small talk gives a single boy a little flutter. “She’s holding an ice cream cone!” a four-year-old proclaims upon his first viewing of the Statue of Liberty from the airplane window. Here, perhaps, is a true symbol of freedom.

After a rush of New York experiences on the first two nights, my final one is all about people: college-era friends who have settled into very different lives in the American capital to drink it up. First, Andrew and I do a vegan dinner with Eileen in Crown Heights, and later we get drinks with my old roommate Phil in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he and Jess, another fellow Hoya, have just bought a brownstone and begun to nest. We catch up and get takes on pandemic life in New York, on Brooklyn neighborhoods, on how to get around the city, on the life stages we’ve entered now that we’re nearly ten years out of college. All the pieces are back in place, and maybe nothing has changed since we went out in Georgetown and wandered the cobblestones and stumbled back to the house on R Street, fully in the thralls of our fortunate lives.

Time, however, does not let us stay in these nostalgia trips, and in all of us I detect a new level of self-assurance, a deeper knowledge of who we are. My friends all live out some version of that New York pursuit. Eileen navigates life changes with an aplomb I could not muster, while Phil and Jess start to put down roots; Andrew, for his part, is very ready to say Goodbye to All That. I am sympathetic to his exhaustion with the uglier side of New York, and eager to visit him as he moves back to our old haunts in DC. There are a thousand eminently rational reasons for why New York is not my path, and I do not regret that life has not led me to pursue a Manhattan apartment or a Brooklyn brownstone or weekend choices between Nantucket or the Hamptons.

And yet the pull is just as strong as it was since I came here as a 16-year-old, just as fresh and intoxicating as it looked to teenage eyes, spared Joan Didion’s cynical and discerning eye because that distant ideal is probably all it will ever be. It is still the imperial capital, the height of the civilization I live in, and emblematic of all its glories and its horrors, humanity’s promise and belief in new beginnings tied up in its troubles and threats and the unavoidable insularity that comes when like-minded people cluster together in one place. I do not live in it, but I need it to set the standard I use to measure everything else. Ever upward.