I grew up in New York City in the 1960s and 70s—not in Manhattan, but in the outer reaches of Queens, where there were backyards and squirrels and lawns to be mowed. When I was about 14 I first rode the number 7 line train into Manhattan—Times Square is where the 7 went, and the city I surfaced into was not in its prime—porn theatres, pawn shops, crazed people in filthy clothes. One transfer away was Greenwich Village, then home to about 500 “head shops” selling glass pipes and black light posters. This was more like it, because my friends and I were aspiring hippies.
Though I was fascinated by the crowds and the intensity and the giant buildings of Manhattan, I was also hypervigilant and a bit terrified by it all. The idea was to keep moving and not make eye contact. Manhattan offered no repose. After college, I lived in Manhattan for several years. I got to know Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, the museums, the parks. I never learned to love New York, but it’s imprinted on me, somehow—its 22 square miles seemed as vast and varied as a continent. There were the fountains and plazas of the opulent districts, the avenues you could walk for miles, the mountains of garbage bags at 2:00 in the morning.
Anyway, here’s a book about how Manhattan got to be the Manhattan that I know. It answers the questions I never thought to ask: How and when did Park Avenue become the place where the richest people lived? Why are the most exclusive department stores all on Fifth Avenue? I accepted Manhattan as a given, an outgrowth of the bedrock, like Australia or Yellowstone, but it only really became the place I knew a few short decades earlier—in the 1920s.
Donald Miller, focusing on the 1920s, devotes chapters to the builders and the sellers, the broadcasters and the publishers, people whose names I had heard but whose stories I did not know. Miller’s book is about a small army of Horatio Algers, mostly Jewish, who helped turn Edith Warton’s Manhattan of wooden mansions and horse carriages into Metropolis.
David Sarnoff founded NBC and William Paley founded CBS, enterprises that grew from nothing into essential American institutions in just a few short years. Walter Chrysler built not only a major automobile company but also the tallest (briefly) and most lavish skyscraper in the world. The car company retains his name, but the skyscraper is his monument; it could almost have been his tomb:
The completed lobby is a masterwork of dramatic design. Indirectly lit, its walls are of red, richly veined Moroccan marble. The floor is Sienna Travertine carved into patterns that point the way to the elevators. There are thirty-two of them, in four groups, each car with a different design and color, and each operator dressed—originally—in a different uniform ‘for each of the four seasons.’ The interior of the cabs are finished in exotic inlaid woods: Japanese ash and Oriental walnut, among them.
And so on and so forth. Later we get to read about Chrysler’s “three-story Cloud Club, a male-only redoubt for the three hundred or so of the city’s power brokers.” This was during prohibition: “Members were allocated wooden lockers to store their bottles; each locker had carved hydrographic symbols on its doors to prevent federal agents from identifying its millionaire lawbreaker.”
Park and Fifth Avenues only became possible after the massive engineering project that created Grand Central Station also buried the rail infrastructure going north along the East Side underground. Where the rich now live was once a several hundred foot wide corridor of tracks, mud, and shanties.
Miller also includes star athletes like Babe Ruth, the gangsters from Hell’s Kitchen in the West 40s—George Raft and Mae West emerged from this demimonde—and even the competing founders of cosmetics empires—Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden—who had competing salons at either end of Fifth Avenue’s miracle mile.
Money was water and fertilizer to the stone gardens of Manhattan, and money still flows freely. But the stone gardens have become a bit rank and overgrown, and it seems unlikely that there can ever be a flowering like the one that took place 90 years ago. Which is an overly ostentatious way of saying that the real action might now be happening somewhere else.
