New York Bounces Back

A remarkable renewal of energy and morale

In the worst years, a certain begrimed anxiety hung in the air. New York City was an interminably terminal case, its official death notice reprinted weekly. Bonds came due; corporations bailed out for Connecticut, the Sunbelt, anywhere. Citizens could paraphrase the municipal hymn New York, New York: "The Bronx is up/ And the battery's dead." They envisioned weeds pushing up through the stones of Rockefeller Center, Roseland reverting to jungle. Watching the parade of garbage strikes and pedestrians high-stepping in a rage among the dogmerde, New Yorkers could imagine themselves being a little like the sailors on Joseph Conrad's Narcissus, helpless in a gale: "[They] had the aspect of invalids and the gestures of maniacs."

A native returning last week after an absence of two or three years might have thought for a moment that New York was catastrophe as usual. Striking pressmen, supported by other unions, shut down the city's three major daily newspapers, the New York Times, the Daily News and the Post. But the native would have been wrong. Before they closed up, the papers had reported a happier story. Sitting in City Hall at a desk that George Washington used when New York City was the capital of the U.S., Jimmy Carter signed a bill that authorizes $1.65 billion in federal loan guarantees for the city. The event possessed immense practical meaning for the Big Apple, which for two years has been creeping back from the edge of bankruptcy; the guarantees will enable New York to borrow enough money at least to start straightening out its preposterously bungled financial affairs and to repair the streets, bridges, subways and other facilities that have become dangerously decayed.

But the bill signing last week had an even greater psychological and symbolic importance for New Yorkers. It culminated and confirmed a renewal of morale and energy that has been proceeding in the city for many months. A plausible case can be made that New York City--which the outside world generally takes to mean Manhattan, not air of the city's five heterogeneous boroughs--is a livelier, pleasanter, more exciting and simply nicer place to be now than it has been in years. The fact is especially remarkable considering that with radical cutbacks in municipal services (a total of 60,000 workers), things like park benches, potholes and children's education receive less attention than they did in the past.

New York has always been theatrically narcissistic--one of the qualities for which it has been loathed in other parts of the U.S. All over the city, people are wearing I LOVE NY T shirts (a red heart where love should be), in a sort of truculent self-consciousness, an enthusiasm that should not have to be announced. It is defensive municipal flag waving, the equivalent of the old LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT sticker. But a change both real and psychological has occurred.

Last week New York was in its mellow and hazy high summer. Jugglers performed in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From its steps, an impromptu amphitheater, crowds consuming hot dogs and lemonade could watch the street circus, then wander into the museum's cool caverns to savor a Rembrandt and hieroglyphics. All up and down Manhattan, street musicians played--saxophones, cellos, violins, steel drums. On Park Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets, across from the Manufacturers Hanover Trust building, a brass quintet called the Waldo Park Players blew tunes ranging from the Beatles to Mendelssohn. One night more than 150,000 New Yorkers and visitors came to Central Park's Sheep Meadow. They laid out blankets and picnic suppers, bottles of wine and sleeping babies, and settled down to listen to the New York Philharmonic play a program culminating in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. At the finale, brilliant salvos of fireworks lit up the sky.

On their summer lunch hours in midtown Manhattan, office workers now can pass up the hot-dog man in favor of felafel wrapped in Syrian bread, or quiche Lorraine, a gyro sandwich, shish kebab or exotically spiced vegetarian dishes. At stands on corners all over the city, teenagers sell juice freshly squeezed from oranges and watermelons.

"New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience," E.B. White wrote 30 years ago. "If they did, they would live elsewhere." They know that the city is too damned dirty, and no doubt getting dirtier, with about 50% of the sanitation trucks broken down at any given moment. (Miraculously, however, a new law requiring dog walkers to clean up after their pets is being widely obeyed.) They know that many once grassy parks have long since been scuffed to baldness. But most great cities have been dirty and dangerous--for example, ancient Rome, 18th and 19th century London. New Yorkers are now more in a mood to think that their city offers incomparable compensations.

"New York has a very definite personality," says J.R. Home, 34, an actor who grew up in a small town in Texas and has lived on Manhattan's West Side for six years. "The rest of the country is beginning to look all the same--giant freeways, parking lots, shopping centers. But you get a real sense of the past here, and a feeling that anything can happen. You see shopping-bag ladies walking up to Jackie O."

It is possible to romance too much about New York: anyone rhapsodizing that "anything is possible" in the city must acknowledge that the anything has a dark and even unspeakable side--slum miseries, ghettos like the South Bronx burning themselves out, and horripilating parlors of decadence, catering to the most specialized of the perverse. Much of the rest of the nation regards New York as a cautionary tale, the urban exemplar of everything that can go wrong: poverty, pollution, crime, racial conflict, corrupt and stupid government, dirt, traffic, immorality and, no doubt, sinful pride.

Still, the basically antiurban sentiment of the late '60s and early '70s has undergone some revision. The romance with the countryside did not always work out. Nor did the attraction to California, about which true New Yorkers maintain an unappeasable snobbery. That attitude may reflect a supercilious insularity, part of the reason so many Americans contemptuously regard New York as a kind of foreign country.

If New York's morale really is better these days, it may be because so many of those who hated the place left. Those remaining may better fit the city temperamentally. Says Sandra Schneiderman, a medical secretary and divorced mother of two teen-age children, who has lived in Manhattan for six years: "I complain like everyone else when the elevator breaks down and I am forced to climb nine nights of stairs. But I'm not about to move. I feel an enormous sense of freedom living here. There is no mold to fit into."

The edginess and jump of New York, its variety, its compactness and capacity to surprise1 are exerting great charm, not only upon residents but upon tourists as well. Nearly 17 million people visited New York last year and spent $1.6 billion--up $100 million from the total in 1976. New York has more hotel rooms than most cities in the world--100,000 of them--and it is sometimes hard to find one that has not been booked.

Psychologically, the New York revival probably began two years ago, when 16 tall ships from all over the world paraded up the Hudson River to celebrate the American Bicentennial. Although police and newspapers had predicted chaos, the celebration was peacefully magnificent, brought off with a style that startled New Yorkers, so long hangdog, into the thought: "Well, maybe this is the greatest city in the world." Later that month, the city accommodated the Democratic National Convention; the delegates went away pleasantly surprised by the city that some of them had envisioned as a broken-down Sodom.

The rest of the country has continued to see benign and even rather lovely views of New York. After years in which movies like Klute and Taxi Driver showed filth and mean streets, film makers present the city now in softly appealing tones. In Saturday Night Fever, Manhattan is the unreachable magic destination. In Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman, the city seems so charming that many ex-New Yorkers seeing the movie think wistfully of returning.

The Public Broadcasting Service's Live from Lincoln Center has shown the rest of the country the kind of breathtaking cultural possibilities that are available in the city. Whatever outlanders think of New York, there is something impressive about having Mikhail Baryshnikov and Beverly Sills only three or four subway stops away. At the same time, the famous invalid of Broadway is doing a booming business. Theater revenues have more than doubled, and the number of patrons has risen by 70% in the past five years. Shows like The Wiz, Grease, Dracula, "Da," Deathtrap and Ain't Misbehavin' are selling out.

New York could be judged by a reading of its Anger Quotient. In the late '60s and early '70s the city fairly smelled of rage; the 1974 film Death Wish--about a white liberal turned vigilante-revenger --received a certain amount of sneaking sympathy at the dinner parties of the white middle class. Since 1976 the Anger Quotient has gone steadily downward. A decrease in violent crimes has been partly responsible. A walker in Central Park is as likely to be overrun by joggers as assaulted by muggers. New York has the fifth highest major crime rate among the ten largest cities in the nation, behind Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles and Detroit. Major crimes in New York decreased last year by 6.4%, perhaps because the potential victims have become a good deal smarter and more cautious. Apartment houses have installed closed-circuit TV and buzzer systems. In large office buildings, guards check identification passes.

New York's spirits have risen with the improvement in its economy. After a seven-year loss of 600,000 jobs, from 1969 through 1976, the city gained 9,000 in the period from February 1977 to February 1978. The exodus by large corporations has slowed. Four years ago, whole buildings in prime Manhattan areas were empty. Now 1 million sq. ft. of floor space has been newly rented since January. Says Lewis Rudin of Manhattan's Rudin Management: "I counted up $1 billion--that's billion--of privately financed new construction the other day." He listed, among other projects, the $110 million AT&T headquarters at 55th and Madison and the $80 million IBM building at 57th and Madison. There is an apartment shortage in Manhattan, with co-ops selling for prices that would have been impossible only a year ago. Luxury buildings like the Olympic Tower, opposite St. Patrick's Cathedral, and the Galleria, on 57th Street --both of which have penthouses priced at more than $1 million--have sold out.

Many of the buyers are foreigners. Unlike most Americans, a lot of foreigners regard New York as a haven, to which they are fleeing from the high inflation and political instability of their own countries. They come from France and Italy, the Middle East and the Far East, as well as South America, bringing vast amounts of new wealth into the city.

With co-op prices so high and rents climbing, the renovation of old houses and buildings is an inviting alternative. Whole neighborhoods, such as SoHo (south of Houston) and SoSo (south of SoHo), are undergoing strikingly imaginative renovation. Neighborhood and block associations have proliferated, increasing New Yorkers' sense of community and their feeling that they are not at the mercy of an anonymous city bureaucracy. If a neighborhood association makes a fuss about infrequent trash collections, a sanitation truck shows up fairly promptly. A certain new self-reliance is evident among New Yorkers, who on their own are reclaiming parks, planting community gardens, developing day care activities; if city hall is busy just keeping the entire government out of debtors' prison, residents conclude they must act for themselves.

If New York has regained a kind of vivacious equilibrium, how long can it last? The city is painfully dependent on the good fortunes of the national economy. New York City, the strictly physical plant, is in a state of appalling neglect. The West Side Highway has literally fallen apart. Despite some renovations, the city's housing stock is in disastrous condition, especially in slums.

But New York seems to be coping --chastened but in reasonably good mental health, even though just now in August the island of Manhattan is many tons lighter because most of its psychiatrists have gone to Martha's Vineyard and the Hamptons on Long Island. There seems a bit less of the manic energy that existed in the 1930s when, for example, Fiorello La Guardia raced to the Bronx Terminal Market at 6:30 in the morning with a pair of buglers to announce that he was banning the public sale of artichokes because the wholesale supplier was controlled by gangsters. But New York, as always, is a state of mind; it is what you think it is. Not long ago a painter set up an easel on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk and began to work on a picture, sighting along his brush from time to time, looking at the fuming steel flow of jammed traffic that inched downtown. When spectators walked up for a look at his canvas, they found that he was placidly painting a quiet meadow with a stream running through it. The man admirably embodied certain crucial New York survival traits: exhibitionism, humor, and possible derangement.

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