Downtown: My Manhattan Read online

  For the central theme of the large space he chose to represent eight successive stages in the arrival of an ocean liner at New York: the ship passing Ambrose lightship; taking on a pilot; being met by a coast guard cutter; being boarded by officials; passing the Statue of Liberty; on deck, the press receiving a female celebrity (probably Greta Garbo); tugs warping the ship into dock; and finally, discharge of cargo at the pier. This was a modern saga, both real and epic; clear and logical in its unfolding, and completely appropriate for the building.

  Marsh froze the present in these 1937 paintings, which is why today they give off such a powerful aura of nostalgia. In New York, the present becomes the past more rapidly than in any other world city. Look up at the paintings in a certain mood and you can hear Rudy Vallee singing. You can see Fred Astaire delivering the gift of grace to those maimed by the Depression. You can see Mayor La Guardia kicking slot machines into a river. You can see people walking down gangplanks and reaching for that day’s New York Times or Daily News. Or you can hear romantic young F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his autobiographical essay “My Lost City,” remembering the first time he came through the Narrows on such a ship, after three years in Europe: “As the ship glided up the river, the city burst thunderously upon us in the early dark—the white glacier of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge to rise into uptown New York, a miracle of foamy light suspended by the stars.” And then arriving again after the Crash, almost a decade later, like the passengers in the Marsh paintings: “We passed through curiously polite customs agents, and then with bowed head and hat in hand I walked reverently through the echoing tomb. Among the ruins a few childish wraiths still played to keep up the pretense that they were alive, betraying by their feverish voices and hectic cheeks the thinness of the masquerade.”

  The well-heeled passengers in the Marsh paintings of 1937 might have been chastened, as Fitzgerald was, by reality. But Marsh grants them the right to a mask. They could pretend to care more for the ball scores and the stock market than the news of Hitler or the civil war in Spain or the permanent scars of the Depression. For most of the passengers, adjustments appear to have been made. They had come through the bad time after the crash in 1929, when stockbrokers were shooting themselves in the bathrooms of speakeasies. Some had trained themselves to resist pity. But in the paintings, even they have a kind of pleased innocence, as they return to a New York that had three major league baseball teams and nine newspapers.

  The world symbolized by the great liners seemed certain to last forever, with all its arrogant adherence to the privileges of class. When Marsh was painting them, he could have walked out the door of the Custom House and seen the flagship buildings of the major shipping lines, solid and impregnable. They were bunched together on those few blocks of lower Broadway that had been called since the middle of the nineteenth century “Steamboat Row.” The buildings are still there, although the ships have all gone.

  Marsh must have walked where a vendor now sells lemonade and coffee and snacks, and looked at number 1 Broadway. On this spot in the perilous early days of the American Revolution, George Washington briefly pitched his headquarters in the home of one Archibald Kennedy. The historian Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker described it this way: “Its classical front entrance, Palladian window, ornate cornice, spacious rooms, grand staircase, elaborately decorated walls and ceilings, its great banqueting hall bespoke both good taste and opulence.”

  Washington didn’t stay long in the comfort of that house. Within months, he retreated from New York with most of his amateur army in the face of overwhelming British seaborne power, to fight again another day in other places. After the war, the site evolved from private home to tavern to small hotel and then in 1848 into the larger Washington Hotel. For more than thirty years it remained a hotel, serving the growing international clientele that passed through the booming harbor, or Americans from other states coming to New York to embark for Europe or other parts of the world.

  Then, in 1881, Cyrus W. Field, famous for being in charge of the successful laying of the Atlantic cable, decided to convert the site into an office building. The planned building started at ten stories, then was increased to twelve stories, with a tower and a mansard roof. Rising 258 forbidding feet above Broadway, the building offered views from the offices that were said to be spectacular. But in photographs, the imposing building, with its dark redbrick facade, looks gloomy at best, spooky at worst. The real estate men eventually agreed. In 1921, it was given a face-lift, with much of the ornament removed and the facade covered with a white limestone veneer. Until 1969, it would serve as the proud headquarters of the United States Lines. That year, the American flag vanished from the passenger line business.

  Today the building still carries marks from the vanished world in which it existed. Carved into the Broadway facade are escutcheons of the outposts of a swaggering capitalist empire: Capetown, New York, Melbourne, Queenstown, London, Plymouth. They remind us that globalization is nothing new. Around the corner on the long Battery Place side there are carved seashells and dolphins, along with doors still marked Cabin Class and First Class. Those doors no longer offer passage to distant places. Now they enter upon a row of ATMs operated by Citibank. On hot summer days, when the city is wilting, everybody looks like cabin class.

  At 25 Broadway stands another building from the lost world. A sign informs us that it is now the Bowling Green Station of the United States Post Office, which it has been since 1977, but for decades 25 Broadway served as the New York headquarters of the mighty Cunard Line. This was once the largest, grandest, most important passenger ship line in the world, which had been sailing to New York since 1840. One hundred and five years later, when the Queen Mary arrived with all those returning troops, there must have been people here who wept. And before his death in 1916, my grandfather, a valued employee of Cunard, must have visited here too. To step inside the building, as Reginald Marsh surely must have done while working at the Custom House, is to be astonished.

  The bronze doors open into a high vaulted vestibule that in combination with the great hall beyond has been described by the New York writer Gerard R. Wolfe as “certainly one of the most beautiful interior spaces anywhere.” I agree. The vestibule, with ornament designed by Ezra Winter, is a kind of overture for the great hall. The visitor pauses and then enters the main room, the place where travelers once booked passage. This chamber is shaped like an octagon and is 185 feet long and 74 feet wide, with a dome that rises 65 feet above the floor. It forces you to look up. And there on the groined, vaulted ceiling is a riot of figures and designs, all swirling with energy into oceanlike arabesques. There are mermaids and dolphins, starfish and sea horses, waves and wind, ships bearing many flags. Frescoes, bas-reliefs, painted maps, unreadable signs, obscure symbols, with visiting Neptunes and sirens and even an albatross: All struggle for space in this man-made vision of the sea. There are the ships of Columbus. And Leif Eriksson. And Sebastian Cabot. All as remote now, even to schoolchildren, as the legend of the Flying Dutchman. In some odd way, this baroque storm of a ceiling has an almost angry feeling to it now, as if the sea gods resent their abandonment by the puny mortals who are lined up below them, buying stamps.

  By comparison, the murals of Reginald Marsh, just down the block, are sedate, even happy. In the turbulent art of the Cunard Building, you still feel the presence of drowned sailors and lost ships, betrayed by wind and stars and luck. Waves can be murderous, the images tell us. Tides can be remorseless. All voyages are filled with the peril of the unknown. The Cunard murals are about the adventure and romance of going away. The Marsh murals in the Custom House remind me always of those soldiers in 1945. They too are about coming home. And home, for Marsh, is always New York.

  Chapter Three

  Trinity Country

  IT IS A bright Saturday afternoon in late summer, with a cooling breeze blowing up Broadway from the harbor. On the western sidewalk, I gaze down the slope of Wall Street, its entran
ce barricaded against terrorists with ugly concrete blocks. In the distance I can see the dark band of the East River. Sharing the sidewalk with me is a Middle Eastern man peddling hot dogs and roasted nuts from a cart with an umbrella. Ten feet away, another man sells New York sweatshirts, and they chat away in Arabic as the tourists pass them, fresh from looking at the site of the destroyed World Trade Center. A few yards downtown, toward Rector Street, huddled against the entrance to the subway station, an African man sells handbags and watches.

  My mind teems with those who have passed this way, the posturing aristocrats, the illustrious people from John Adams to Edith Wharton, the vanished merchant princes of the early nineteenth century, Alexander Hamilton and his deadly rival, Aaron Burr, mechanics and their apprentices, slaves and freedmen. I try to imagine the vanished Dutch town. We retain several Dutch words, such as boss and stoop, along with a few other remnants. As noted, those early Dutch bosses established the long New York tradition of corruption. The most famous boss, Peter Stuyvesant, waged a bigoted war against human weakness and, of course, lost, thus establishing another New York tradition. But there was one enduring legacy from the Dutch, one that even Stuyvesant could not destroy: the spirit of tolerance.

  That legacy of tolerance was not created by starry-eyed Dutch idealists. The Netherlands in the seventeenth century was the most religiously tolerant country in Europe because the Dutch were pragmatists. Paradise could wait; what mattered was making money today, this week, or this year. That in turn meant that everybody must have a share in the nation’s enterprise. When Stuyvesant wanted to expel Jewish refugees from New Amsterdam, the true bosses back home, the directors of the Dutch West India Company, told him, in effect, Forget it; we have Jews on our board. Tolerance was more than an ideal. It was good business.

  Most of the Dutch physical presence was erased by the great fires of 1776 and 1835. Time changed other things too. Across the long years of British rule, the old Dutch families slowly merged with their British conquerors, creating the first human alloy in New York, which was given its name in 1809 by Washington Irving: the Knickerbockers. On the whole, the Anglo-Dutch were a haughty, pretentious group, with constricted, mannered social lives, given to careful public display of aristocratic values. Irving was making fun of them in his A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. But the name stuck, and even the subjects of his humor came to embrace it. I’m always cheered when I think that those who are today called Knickerbockers have included such men as Patrick Ewing, Latrell Sprewell, and Stephon Marbury.

  The old Knickerbockers had their nostalgias too: for moving in grand carriages driven by slaves, or ballrooms in Georgian houses blazing with candlelight, or flirtations in Sunday morning places of worship. But nothing could last forever. The Bowling Green got smaller and smaller, more a park than a place for actual bowling. The splendid Georgian-Federal houses that faced it became places of trade, almost all of it concerned with the business of the port. Down the slope of Wall Street, in the direction of the East River, fine private homes gave way to countinghouses and brokerages and insurance companies, and later to skyscrapers. Down there, at the end of Wall Street at the river’s edge, stood the slave market. It too was part of the business of the port, and most of the prominent Knickerbocker families took part in it without shame. Many convinced themselves that God approved. Most didn’t care. This was New York, where money ruled.

  On today’s stroll north on Broadway, I pause, as always, when I reach Trinity Church. It’s a day free of appointments or deadlines. I can surrender for a while to this marvelous piece of human evidence. I’m not a religious man, but I’m always moved by Trinity and the land upon which it stands in such Gothic majesty. It is hard to imagine New York without it. Even its location speaks to our origins as a city, for Trinity faces Wall Street, creating a symbolic crossroads of God and Mammon.

  I enter the wide gates in the fence to the grounds and walk around to the left into the churchyard. I go directly to the monument that marks the grave of Alexander Hamilton. For several years in the early 1960s, coming up from the subway after midnight and walking down Rector Street toward West Street to go to work, I passed this monument and thought about the man. Almost certainly I’d have voted against Hamilton and his notions about the absolute need for an American aristocracy. But still I cherished him. In 1801, he had founded, with some political allies, the newspaper called the New York Post. In 1960, I started to work there as a reporter, thus beginning my adult life. I was like most other young men, profoundly ignorant of the past, even that part of it that had some marginal relevance to my own life. But I knew enough to thank Hamilton for starting his newspaper. I still offer him my gratitude.

  The Hamilton monument rises to a pyramid, the base of the pyramid bearing four stone lamps. Words and dates are carved into the face, but they only suggest the complexity of Hamilton’s life, of course, starting with his birth in the West Indies in 1755. At the foot of this monument is the grave of his wife, Elizabeth, who as the daughter of Philip Schuyler was part of the Knickerbocker elite. By comparing the dates on both graves we learn that Elizabeth lived for almost fifty years after Hamilton was shot dead in his foolish 1804 duel with Aaron Burr across the North River in Weehawken, New Jersey. The former Elizabeth Schuyler surely had heard the tales of her handsome husband’s infidelities, real or merely rumored, but she ended up beside him in the graveyard at Trinity.

  Off to the right is the grave of Robert Fulton, who died in 1815 and thus did not see the enormous changes that came to New York in the wake of his steamboat, originally called the North River Steamboat, later the Clermont. This first successful steam-powered ship sailed from the foot of Cortlandt Street in 1807 and made it to Albany in a record thirty-two hours. At the time, most of the city’s seaborne commerce was clustered along South Street on the East River. That river (or estuary) was generally free of ice because of tides and salt from the harbor, and captains preferred to avoid the hard winds that often howled from north or west along the North River. Fulton’s passenger steamboat changed all that, gradually at first and then with a great triumphant surge in the later decades of the nineteenth century. That little steamboat opened the North River to commerce and development. Until his invention, Fulton, a child of Irish immigrants from Kilkenny, was better known as a gifted painter, a student in Paris of the American expatriate Benjamin West, one of the most important painters of the turn of the century. On Fulton’s monument, the bas-relief is based on a self-portrait. But Fulton’s remains are not beneath his monument; they are in the vault of the Livingston family. His wife, Harriet, was a Livingston, and the Clermont was named for the family’s Hudson Valley estate.

  Today the tombstones and monuments, like so much about Trinity, exist as testimony. The earliest graveyard is north of the church itself, granted to the parish in 1697. The second, where the monuments to Hamilton and Fulton stand, was added in 1705. The north yard is dominated today by a brownstone Gothic monument erected in 1852 in memory of those hundreds of Americans who died as British prisoners during the Revolution in the old Sugar House two streets north of Trinity on what is now called Liberty Street (formerly Crown Street). Together, north and south are said to hold 1,907 graves, with others in private family vaults inside the church. They tell us something about mortality and vanity, of course, as all graveyards do, but they also speak to us about history and change in the city of New York.

  The names and relevant dates of many of the dead have been ground away by time and weather, and in a few cases charred into blankness by the fires of 1776 that toppled the first Trinity itself. Some of the permanent residents were renowned in their time, and for the few years in which they existed in human memory. The north yard holds the remains of William Bradford, who was a printer in Hanover Square beginning in 1693 and in 1752 founded New York’s first newspaper, the New York Gazette. He lived to be ninety-two. Also here is Francis Lewis, the only signer of the Declaration of Ind
ependence to be buried in Manhattan; he lost almost everything in the Revolution but is better known now through the boulevard in Queens that bears his name. Albert Gallatin is here too, twice secretary of the treasury, the man who stabilized American finances during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson and helped forge the settlement that ended the War of 1812. He was a founder of New York University. In a way, they too are examples of the New York alloy. Bradford emigrated to New York from England. Lewis was born in Wales. Gallatin came to New York from his native Switzerland.

  But with the probable exceptions of Hamilton and Fulton, even those whose names remain legible are now as forgotten as those whose names have been erased. Many of them were children, dead of cholera, dead of smallpox, dead of yellow fever in a town that had an inadequate water supply and no sewage system at all, a town where wild dogs contended for garbage with free-running pigs. The aristocrats who rented pews at Trinity did what they could to immunize themselves and their children from the dangers around them. Some of those tombstones tell us that none was ever truly safe.

  Trinity has its own rich New York history, in its way as indomitable as the city itself. The first church was granted a charter as part of the Church of England in 1697 by King William III, appropriately an imported Dutchman. The British strongly believed in welding church to state in the interests of preserving power. The first small, squarish church opened the following year, its construction aided by block and tackle loaned by Captain William Kidd from Pearl Street, who in 1701 would be hanged in London for piracy. Kidd would not be the last New Yorker whose friends insisted he was framed.

  The future of Trinity was truly secured in 1705, when Queen Anne made a land grant for a “church farm” that extended from Broadway to the North River and from what became Fulton Street all the way to Christopher Street in the west of today’s Greenwich Village. Such an immense grant was not unusual for the day. The Dutch had granted enormous tracts to well-connected patrons, arrangements validated by the shrewd British conquerors. The British understood that New Amsterdam was an outpost of a company, not a country, and thus free of nationalist obligations. They brought the Dutch settlers into the life of the colony they had renamed New York.