Who owns your favorite park?

That might seem like a strange question. Many people assume that “we”—the public, the people—do. But from New York’s High Line to Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, parks in U.S. cities are increasingly managed, financed, and policed by private groups that have little accountability to the public. Just as many other services once seen as public goods—such as healthcare, schools, and water utilities—have increasingly become the property of corporations and wealthy financiers, public space, too, has been privatized.

Historians locate the origins of urban park privatization in 1970s New York City, when the city’s dire economic crisis spurred budget cutbacks of all kinds. These led to the establishment of the Central Park Conservancy and the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, both founded in 1980 with the goal of using private wealth to offset cuts to public funding for parks. The benefactors behind these organizations weren’t looking to aid all parks suffering from declining budgets—just those frequented by wealthy white people and tourists.

Two decades later, when the Friends of the High Line was founded in 1999 to rehabilitate a former railroad right-of-way on Manhattan’s West Side, having a private organization play a key role in the development of a park was neither novel nor controversial. It had become normalized, expected, and celebrated that new parks would involve the private sector.

When the High Line’s first section opened in 2009, it was toasted by critics and the public as a transformative urban park: it featured a unique mix of built and natural materials, and was situated three stories above city sidewalks. But the political and economic bases that made the High Line possible were equally transformative. The park marked the culmination of three decades of neoliberal changes to urban park governance, cementing the outsized role of private groups in park development, financing, and organization. Just as the High Line’s strange aesthetic mix of wild-looking plants and industrial relics set among a linear walking path has been widely copied, urban boosters across the U.S. mimicked Friends of the High Line’s strategy of mobilizing public-private partnerships to produce architecturally acclaimed green spaces.

In Chicago, park developers leaned on the Trust for Public Land, a national group that provides private funds and organizational support for privatized park projects, to build the city’s answer to the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail (also known as The 606). In Houston, where private influence has long held sway in urban development projects, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership relied on private funds for 91% of the initial funding for a linear postindustrial space along the city’s central waterway, including $30 million from ex-Enron billionaires Rich and Nancy Kinder.

There are more to come. Emboldened by the success of Buffalo Bayou Park, the Kinders have since granted $70 million to the Memorial Park Conservancy. In New York, billionaire High Line donor Barry Diller has taken a similar tack, battling various opponents to develop a $250 million privately managed park, Little Island, in the Hudson River.

Visitors to these shiny new parks might ask: So what? What’s so bad about a few architecturally brilliant parks being paid for with private dollars?

The problem with the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/The 606, Buffalo Bayou Park, and other parks like them is that they aggressively accelerate an unequal parks landscape. The same cost-cutting of public parks funding that started in the 1970s advances today, and its effects most harm poorer communities and communities of color, where local private resources to offset defunding don’t exist to nearly the same degree. These inequalities deepen even further when we consider that private parks organizations wield their clout to direct public funds to underwrite upscale, privatized parks like the High Line, which received $144 million in public money for its construction. The racial and economic geography of private park investment keeps the spaces from being accessible to a broad public.

The parks’ privatized security deepens this inequality. Private managers like the Friends of the High Line and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership also get to decide park rules—rules that can and do differ from those of city-run parks. Focusing on the “quality of life” violations that viciously cleansed urban public spaces of homeless people in earlier decades, the gaze of private security frequently trains itself on the people of color and poor people who visit these spaces. Few of the tourists that the parks are designed to attract—able-bodied, middle-class, white—care or even know about this aspect.

Recently, private park boosters have moved forward with proposed improvements to parks in communities of color. In Chicago, this has taken the form of developing similar parks in Pilsen (El Paseo) and the Far South Side (Big Marsh) in an effort to make park-building appear equitable. In New York, organizers have initiated plans for Queens’s answer to the High Line, QueensWay, a project billed as “a gateway and introduction to New York City’s most diverse communities.” In Houston, the Kinder Foundation gave $3 million to the Emancipation Park Conservancy, private keepers of a local symbol of Black freedom and have recently announced a $100 million offering to expand Buffalo Bayou Park into the historically Black neighborhoods east of downtown. These developments appear to offer some measure of racial equity into urban park landscapes, but given that few new park plans are tied to affordable housing, there is little question that these new parks will drive up local housing values, potentially leading to the displacement of long-term residents of communities long starved for park access.

The trend of investment in parks recalls the political strategies honed by 20th-century master planner Robert Moses, who was the force behind decades’ worth of bridges, highways, and public housing in New York City and its surrounding areas. Moses recognized that rallying the public to support park projects was easy, because of the social goods that they represented (never mind that his parks were usually concessions connected to disruptive infrastructural projects like highways). Biographer Robert Caro writes that, for Moses, “parks symbolized something good, and therefore anyone who fought for parks fought under the shield of the presumption that he was fighting for the right—and anyone who opposed him, for the wrong.”

The symbolism of parks remains powerful today. Wealthy benefactors use parks’ collective image as public, universal goods to push through plans that do not benefit the public, but that serve the private coffers of real estate developers and corporations, and those—like the philanthropists themselves—who are invested in building the symbolic and cultural power of their respective city. As elites build new park spaces in their own image, they deepen inequality and shape cities’ public realms as consumerist and securitized, to be squeezed for every last drop of private profit.

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Circa 1978. It was just another rehearsal at our junior high school chorus until Mr. Faber* passed out the sheet music for the new song.

Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton
Old times there are not forgotten
Look away!
Look away!
Look away,
Dixie Land.

My face got hot. My reaction immediate and visceral. More than a child could process.

Mr. Faber sat down at the piano and started to play—a run-through to let us know what was expected.

There’s buckwheat cakes and Injun batter
Make you fat or a little bit fatter
Look away!
Look away!
Look away,
Dixie Land.

I tried to go along, to laugh it off as a weird prank or a test.

But after singing the full song once, I couldn’t ignore my brain confirming that this was really happening. I had to say something.

I tried to be light about it.

“Ohhh, I wish I was a slave again!” I sang, more or less to the tune. The room went from a hive to a tomb.

“Are you serious?” I continued, attempting a laugh. “You can’t be serious, Mr. Faber. Dixie??”

The other children, most of whom were not black, sat frozen. Mr. Faber (who also was decidedly not black) stared at me from his baby grand. Even back then it struck me as strange that a concert-level pianist worked in a junior high school. I expected him to be angry, but he wasn’t angry at all. He was absolutely serene.

“If you don’t like it, quit.”

He went there immediately. It winded me. This was a junior high school chorus, but it wasn’t just any chorus. It was not the huge everyone-gets-a-trophy affair that I also sang in as a ringer. This was the elite mobile Madrigal Chorus, membership in which allowed you to leave school in the middle of the day and perform at senior centers and grand openings all over New York City. It was the center of my social life.

I wasn’t going to quit. Not over a song. I had no response for Mr. Faber, which I suppose became my response. He started “Dixie” from the top again.

I probably didn’t even say anything some weeks later when he brought us “Swanee.”

Swanee, how I love you, how I love you
My dear old Swanee.
I’d give the world to be
among the folks in D-I-X-I-Even though my mammy’s
waiting for me, praying for me
down by the Swanee.
The folks up north will see me no more
when I get to that Swanee shore.

Other songs we sang were also “problematic,” as they say these days. I now understand that the “boy” addressed twice in the first verse of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” was a full-grown man. And the line “You make the cotton easy to pick, Mame” gratuitously tainted an otherwise unremarkable tune. For what it’s worth, there were only two full-on Confederate anthems in our large Americana repertoire. Both were, however, in heavy rotation—“Dixie” was often our big finish, and “Swanee” was part of a medley Mr. Faber called “Sentimental Journey.” Both were major crowd-pleasers. I remember every word of each, just as I remember the night my parents first heard me do those songs, at the big annual school pageant.

The house was packed. I think we’d ended with “Dixie.” I can still see all the parents pouring out of the auditorium after the show, and my mother moving upstream like a salmon toward Mr. Faber’s piano.

I knew why, and I was mortified. I certainly understood her reaction—it was my reaction too. But I was a young boy, still embarrassed by the fact of a mother, let alone a mother complaining to my choral director. I stood in the wings and watched. They talked for what seemed like a long time. Eventually my mom turned and walked away.

My parents left it up to me whether to stay in the chorus. I stayed. And on balance it was worth it. I felt that way then, and I feel that way now. During that same time, I played the lead role in Oliver, and the experience shaped me. As an adult, I’ve played bass on a few proper stages, in front of enthusiastic and good-sized crowds; honestly, none have matched the scope and majesty (in my mind) of the parents in that little school auditorium erupting into applause during my “Where is Love?” It was perhaps my first win, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Thirty-five years went by. The internet was invented. Then Facebook appeared, and around 2013 I discovered a group for alumni of my junior high school choruses. I joined immediately.

At first, I enjoyed the group very much. I had so much fun in chorus and Madrigal, and I wanted to catch up and reminisce. The racist songs are not my biggest memory of that period—the applause is, followed by the cast parties. The “Dixie” memories aren’t especially powerful or unpleasant. Merely discordant. The memories were there, however—and something I have found interesting about this reunion generation (old enough to remember when a kid moving away meant you never saw or heard from them again, but young enough to make full use of social media now) is the opportunity to revisit childhood events, seen now through adult eyes. I saw such discussions as part of what the group was for.

My initial efforts to broach the subject were cleanly overlooked by the group. Crickets. I considered letting it go, but instead messaged Mr. Faber directly. I didn’t need anyone to fall on their sword; I just thought a quick casual reality check would be nice, and appropriate. An acknowledgement that those song selections were misguided. Also, I was curious when they fell off the roster; maybe ours was the last year anyone performed them. These were the things I asked Mr. Faber, but I never received a response (which, I suppose, was his response).

It all started feeling a little gaslighty, so about six months later I posted about the songs again. This time I was not stonewalled, but the responses that came were disappointing. Most of the people who responded had not been there, and seemed to have more of a problem with me saying something critical of Mr. Faber than they did with Mr. Faber making kids learn and sing “Dixie.” But the replies from the few who had been in Madrigal with me were unexpected.

The 1970s was a different time. I don’t remember being offended.
The 1970s was too long ago to be bringing this up now.
Mr. Faber did many good things and is a good person and is not a racist.
Mr. Faber did not know that “Dixie” was a racist song.
“Dixie” is not a racist song.
You should have spoken up at the time.

I don’t fault my chorus mates for trusting Mr. Faber back then, and not realizing that he had us singing weird racist songs. We were children. They didn’t know because it did not affect them directly, and no one told them.

That’s the part that I am only just now seeing, decades later. We sang Confederate anthems in front of our parents, all of us, in an auditorium that had to hold a couple hundred people and, after it was over, only my mother complained. The other parents all filed out like nothing had happened.

No one who responded to my Facebook post mentioned their parents saying anything to them about Dixie or the other songs. Not immediately after the concert or ever. And then those kids grew up.

Maybe 10 years ago I was in a judge’s chambers discussing a motion that had been brought by the producers of an awards show. The producers, whose show focused primarily on black artists, were requesting an immediate injunction against a competitor. Time was of the essence because the show was to be taped the next day.

I sat with a colleague on either side of me: a white guy and a Latina. The judge was white and old and had never heard of this awards show. We explained it to him. And the judge laughed and said, “Well. I think that I will give them whatever they want. As long as they bring me a mammy to put in the corner of my office!” He chuckled heartily.

I tell this story knowing not only that no one else who was there remembers saying or hearing that; I tell it certain that no one else who was there even perceived it at the time. It was clear from the glazed eyes on either side of me, they were letting the words pass right through them. Some of you reading this will know what I am talking about. I was the only black person in the room, and as such I was the only one experiencing what was actually happening. The non-black people were in that altered state that screens out anti-blackness in real time, like how our brain screens out the sensation of the ambient air on our arms. It wasn’t happening even while it was happening. I was sitting between two colleagues—two friends—but I was alone.

I sang “Dixie” alone, too. I was on a crowded riser surrounded by the other tenors and towered over by the altos, but I was alone. Look away, indeed.

The January 6 attack on the Capitol looked like a negative print of The Birth of a Nation—America’s first, worst nightmare. The government’s response so far seems methodical and careful; tentative, even. Law enforcement suddenly appears uncertain what to do with folks who have broken the law. Due process looks nice. I’m sure that, eventually, a handful of people will do a little time for attempting to hang the Vice President of the United States. But, compared to the swift and deadly state violence that is traditionally triggered by, say, a black person reaching for their wallet, or the suggestion that my life matters, official reaction has been strikingly respectful.

We all knew the attack was coming that day. Still, so many people, across all levels of American society, looked directly at the threat and did not see a threat. On January 6, everyone watched the same thing but, once again, black people saw it alone.

And when the next attack comes, most white people will be as surprised as they were the last time. They do not see; it is who they are. When a police captain at a press conference is comfortable saying of a mass murderer, “Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did,” it is evident that, even now, the filter remains firmly in place.

The Nazis are bad, but it’s the not-sees who are going to get us all killed.

* (not his real name)

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There’s one beloved tradition New Yorkers craving that familiar yuletide feeling will be especially loath to give up: Christmas trees, which are selling big this season, and the accompanying seasonal migration of Christmas tree vendors into town. Every year, an army of friendly, woodsy-looking salespeople, many from Quebec, set up shop on city sidewalks and sell live Christmas trees that make their way into apartments all over the city, tied to taxi cab roofs and lugged up narrow flights of stairs to upper floors.

Street vendors are a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape of New York City at all times of the year, of course. In every borough, in every corner of the city, they hawk everything from fruit and empanadas to clothing and second-hand goods. But New Yorkers have a particular fondness for the Christmas tree sellers who camp on busy corners each winter, with their fresh-smalling balsams and firs, propped up against sheds they’ve decorated with alluring displays of lights, wreaths, reindeer, found objects, and furniture: homey backdrops meant to seem like a miniature French Canadian Christmas village.

For one month every winter, these Christmas tree sellers become the glue that cements neighborhoods together. On the streets at most hours of the day and night, they’re the first to say hello and the last to say good night; their presence creates a small-town ambiance in a city of 8.4 million people. They become integrated into the community, and the community welcomes them. In a time when disease is trapping New Yorkers in their apartments and upending life-affirming routines, sidewalk Christmas tree stands and their vendors remain a crucial force for resilience in the city, keeping spirits high and connections intact.

Nationwide, the Christmas tree business is a very lucrative industry. Americans spent $2.56 billion on Christmas trees in 2018, and 25 to 30 million families buy live trees every year. A tree purchased on the street in New York may cost anywhere from $35 to $200, depending on its size, its type, and the neighborhood where it is sold. The most expensive trees are Fraser firs, prized for their two-toned needles (dark green on top and silver underneath) and their ability to hold up to indoor heat. Balsams, Douglas firs, and spruce trees are cheaper.

A Christmas tree market on West Street, near Pier 21 in Manhattan, around 1910. Courtesy of the Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

Tree vendors descended on New York as early as 1851, when a tree sold for $1. Today, these salespeople enjoy special status; a 1938 law, passed by the New York City Council, decreed that “storekeepers and peddlers may sell and display coniferous trees during the month of December.” The so-called “Coniferous Tree Exception” was enacted following citizen protests against then-Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s “war on Christmas trees,” during which the reform-minded mayor banned selling trees on city streets without a permit in an effort to clear the way for automotive traffic.

Since then, Christmas trees vendors have expanded throughout the five boroughs of New York, from Brooklyn and Queens to the Bronx, with the densest concentration of stands in Manhattan. Trucks from Quebec, Nova Scotia, Vermont, and North Carolina, working for large companies, deliver tens of thousands of trees to vendors around the city every night from Thanksgiving until December 25; the vendors then remain onsite around the clock to sell the trees and protect them from theft.

Since permits are not required, it is a largely unregulated business. Sales and salaries are delivered in cash, under cover of darkness, and business secrets are closely guarded. Some sellers rent sidewalk space in front of any store that will offer it to them. Others participate in auctions operated by New York City Parks and Recreation, which offers five-year contracts for spaces in city parks that can cost $1,000 a year in less desirable locations to $50,000 or more in SoHo Square on Sixth Avenue. A good spot for selling trees on the street is highly coveted and expensive, and competition is intense. Larger Christmas tree companies, including Florida-based Forever Evergreen, which operates the majority of the tree stands in New York, have been known to get into bidding wars, fueling an increase in tree prices. The competition for spaces and customers creates conflicts between vendors. Stories about spying, fights, and burning down tree stands are rampant.

Individual vendors are the heart of the Christmas tree business in New York City. Many come from Quebec, whether their trees do or not, recruited by the tree companies because they are winter-hardy folks who are acclimated to frigid temperatures and are willing to camp out for a month, sleeping in their vans or their sales huts. The vendors form a small community, spread across Manhattan and into Brooklyn.

Selling trees is a profitable job that nets between $7,000 and $30,000 in a single month. It offers adventure and the enticements of a month in the Big Apple. But the working conditions are harsh, by any standard. Many stands are open 24 hours a day—and even if they aren’t, the trees must be protected from theft, more or less anchoring sellers to the stand day and night. If a seller has somewhere else to spend the night, they might load their unsold inventory onto a truck for the night, but they still must wait at the stand for the nightly shipment of trees, and take care of after-hours deliveries to nearby apartment dwellers. Mental stress compounds the hard physical work. Vendors carry large amounts of cash over the border when they return home, and fear detection when they pass through Canadian customs on their way back to Quebec. (For this reason, they shun media attention in New York.)

Selling Christmas trees requires marketing moxie. Vendors ensure that their stock of trees, carefully trimmed for symmetry, suits the surrounding neighborhood—smaller, less expensive trees are better suited to a block of modest walk-up apartment buildings, while towering evergreens might sell well in an area with large luxury apartment buildings or businesses. They become ace salespeople, sometimes even playing on stereotypes, with the vendors themselves becoming part of the display. One West Village vendor dresses her American boyfriend in a faux-Quebecois lumberjack getup; in another part of the Village, a French Canadian vendor with perfect English purposely thickens his accent to add to his paysan image.

Tree sellers have perfected marketing their wares, setting up homey little French Canadian outposts throughout the city. These reindeer decorate a stand in Manhattan. Photo by Kevin Cabrera, November 28, 2020.

One stereotype of Quebecers turns out to be true: They are extraordinarily good natured and friendly, which goes a long way toward generating sales and drawing the same customers back year after year. It also cements the vendors as a critical element of urban street life, heightening the actual and perceived safety of the streets and residents’ sense of community. As journalist and activist Jane Jacobs observed, “A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted street is apt to be unsafe. There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” 

Tree sellers are rewarded for their friendliness by local residents who look out for them, bringing them coffee, sandwiches, soup, and companionship, especially in inclement weather. Stores allow them to vendors to use the restroom. A resident may watch over a stand while the seller steps away. Sellers and homeless people—both essentially living on the street—establish mutually beneficial relationships involving exchanges of food and protection. These relationships are deeper than the ones forged between vendors and residents in other seasons. Warm conversations, perhaps briefer now during the pandemic, take place whether a passerby buys a tree or not, making tree sellers’ long shifts in the cold pass more quickly and relieving residents’ long months of isolation for a few moments.

This holiday season—the COVID Christmas—has been a strange one for New York and its Christmas tree vendors. Many vendors faced troubles getting to New York at all, with the U.S.-Canadian border closed to nonessential travel because of the pandemic. The ban does not include Christmas trees, but it does impact the people who sell them, and vendors from Quebec cannot cross the border legally. This year, fear of being detected by customs authorities is even more intense than usual.

New York City has borne more than its fair share of trauma in the last 20 years. But traumas like the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have revealed both the city’s toughness and its sociable, almost small-town side—exemplified in the Christmas tree subculture that is as much a part of holidays in New York as adorned shop windows on Fifth Avenue. Like Christmas, the vendors come every year. And in this pandemic year, particularly, they remain essential hubs of safe community contact, counteracting forced isolation. Since the end of the first COVID-19 wave, New York has been reinventing itself in creative ways—for instance, in the way it has created beautiful outdoor dining settings. The annual ritual of welcoming tree vendors, buying a tree, and carting it home in the cold should buck up New Yorkers as they celebrate the symbols—and substance—of their survivorship and goodwill.

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Details of the story are familiar. We know them from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 gothic horror, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which a murderer is tormented by the ceaseless pounding of the victim’s heart he’s buried under his floor. Poe knew the story because he read newspapers. If you were alive, literate, or just vaguely sentient in New York or Philadelphia (where Poe lived) in 1840 and 1841, you probably knew the story, too. You knew it because cheap newspapers covered it in all its gory details for months—covered it with the relentless persistence of the beating heart beneath the floor in Poe’s tale. Daily papers needed readers to survive, after all, and murders—the more shocking, the more grisly, the better—brought readers.

But there was one American editor who turned his gaze the other way, hoping to elevate rather than titillate. Horace Greeley thought he could fix American newspapers—a medium that had been transformed by the emergence of an urban popular journalism that was bold in its claims, sensational in its content, and, in Greeley’s estimation, utterly derelict in its responsibilities.

As the trial for the bank manager’s murder wound to a close in April of 1841, with the killer sent up the gallows, Greeley was just launching the daily newspaper that would make him famous, the New-York Tribune. He should have flogged the New Brunswick case for all it was worth. But the Tribune referenced it just twice. First, Greeley printed a short editorial comment on the killer’s execution, but nothing more: no reporter on the scene, no bold-faced headlines referencing “Peter Robinson’s Last Moments,” “Breaking the Rope,” or “Terrible Excitement.” 

Then, two days later, Greeley let loose—not to revisit the killing or to meditate on the lessons of the hanging, but to excoriate the newspapers that had so avidly covered both. The coverage, he wrote, amounted to a “pestiferous, death-breathing history,” and the editors who produced it were as odious as the killer himself. “The guilt of murder may not stain their hands,” Greeley thundered, “but the fouler and more damning guilt of making murderers … rests upon their souls, and will rest there forever.” Greeley offered his Tribune, and crafted the editorial persona behind it, in response to the cheap dailies and the new urban scene that animated them. Newspapers, he argued, existed for the great work of “Intelligence”; they existed to inform, but also to instruct and uplift, and never to entertain. 

Greeley tumbled into New York City in 1831 as a 20-year-old printer. He came from a New England family that had lost its farm. Like thousands of other hayseeds arriving in New York, he was unprepared for what he found. With a population over 200,000, Gotham was a grotesquely magical boomtown. Riven by social and political strife, regular calamities and epidemics, and the breakneck pace of its own growth, it was a wild novelty in America.

Farm boy Horace Greeley arrived in New York City in 1831. Illustration from 1872, The life of Horace Greeley, editor of “The New-York tribune”: from his birth to the present time. Courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images/Flickr.

At least there was plenty of printing work to go around. The year after Greeley’s arrival, New York had 64 newspapers, 13 of them dailies. In many ways, though, the press was still catching up to the city’s fantastic new reality. The daily press was dominated by a small core of expensive six-cent “blanket sheets,” mercantile papers that were pitched to merchants’ interests, priced for merchants’ wallets, and sized—as much as five feet wide when spread out—for merchants’ desks. The rest of New York’s papers were weeklies and semiweeklies for particular political parties, reform movements, or literary interests. They tended to rise and fall like the tides at the city’s wharves. 

Newspapering was a tough business, but in 1833 a printer named Benjamin Day began to figure it out. Day’s New York Sun didn’t look or feel or read or sell like any daily paper in New York at the time. Hawked in the street by newsboys for just a penny, it was a tiny thing—just 7 5/8” x 10 1/4”—packed with stories that illuminated the city’s dark corners. Where newspapers had mostly shunned local reportage, Day and his reporters made the city’s jangling daily carnival ring out from tiny type and narrow columns. 

The formula was simple: “We newspaper people thrive on the calamities of others,” as Day said. And there was plenty of fodder, be it “fires, theatrical performances, elephants escaping from the circus, [or] women trampled by hogs.” And if accidents, or crime scenes, or police courts, or smoldering ruins offered up no compelling copy, the Sun manufactured it by other means. Take the summer of 1835, when the paper perpetrated the famous “moon hoax” with a series of faked articles about lunar life forms seen through a new telescope. 

That same year an itinerant editor named James Gordon Bennett launched his penny daily, the New York Herald. There, he perfected the model that Day had pioneered, largely by positioning himself as an all-knowing, all-seeing editorial persona. In 1836, as the Sun and the Herald dueled over coverage of a prostitute’s murder, Bennett fully made his name. His dispatches offered lurid descriptions gleaned from the crime scene, where he claimed access as “an editor on public duty”; his editorials took the bold—and likely false—stance that the prime suspect, a young clerk from an established Connecticut family, was innocent. The Herald soon surpassed the Sun in circulation, drawing in even respectable middle-class readers.  

The age of the newspaper had dawned, and Bennett crowned himself its champion. “Shakespeare is the great genius of drama, Scott of the novel, Milton and Byron of the poem,” he crowed, “and I mean to be the genius of the newspaper press.” Books, theater, even religion had all “had [their] day”; now, “a newspaper can send more souls to Heaven, and save more from Hell, than all the churches and chapels in New York—besides making money at the same time.”

Greeley, a prudish latter-day New England Puritan, looked on in horror. Bennett and Day were making money, but they did so by destroying souls, not saving them. The penny press betrayed the great power of the newspaper to inform, and shirked the great burdens of the editor to instruct. The power of the press was being squandered in an unseemly contest for the lowest common denominator. These “tendencies,” Greeley recalled in 1841, “imperatively called for resistance and correction.”      

Resistance and correction found several expressions, beginning in 1834 with Greeley’s first paper, a “weekly journal of politics and intelligence” called the New-Yorker. There, Greeley promised to “interweave intelligence of a moral, practical, and instructive cast”; he promised to shun the “captivating claptraps” and “experiments on the gullibility of the public”; and he promised to do it all “without humbug.”

There were problems with this approach, beginning with the fact that it didn’t pay. Greeley’s limited correspondence during the New-Yorker’s run between 1834 and 1841 reveals the editor continually at or near the financial drowning point. There wasn’t much of a market for instruction and elevation in print, even at $3 a year. “I essay too much to be useful and practical,” he told a friend. “There is nothing that loses people like instruction.” Instruction, if served at all, was best delivered in small doses, and with “sweetmeats and pepper sauce” to make it go down.      

The editorial staff of Horace Greeley’s Tribune, photographed sometime around the 1850s. Greeley is seated third from left. Courtesy of Mathew Brady, Library of Congress.

And there was another problem: How much could a newspaper actually accomplish in correcting the sins of other newspapers? Printed content was like the paper money that was at the root of the era’s regular financial crises: there was too much of it, and no one quite knew what it was worth. The same week that Greeley debuted his New-Yorker, another city paper placed a mock want-ad seeking “a machine for reading newspapers,” one that could “sift the chaff from the wheat,” “the useful facts from idle fictions—the counterfeit coin from the unadulterated metal.” 

Still, Greeley persisted—certain that the world just needed the right editor and the right newspaper. He put forward the Tribune in 1841 with the assurance that he had found both. Here would be a “newspaper, in the higher sense of the term,” more suited to the “family fireside” than a Bowery barroom. Its columns would be expurgated—no “scoffing infidelity and moral putrefaction,” no “horrid medley of profanity, ribaldry, blasphemy, and indecency.” In their place would go “Intelligence,” Greeley’s notion of journalism as a vehicle not just for news, but for ideas, literature, criticism, and reform.   

The notion, like the uncouth, wispy-haired towhead himself, was an easy mark for Bennett, who took aim following Greeley’s sermon on the coverage of the New Jersey murder. “Horace Greeley is endeavoring, with tears in his eyes, to show that it is very naughty to publish reports of the trial, confessions, and execution,” Bennett wrote. “No doubt he thinks it’s equally naughty in us to publish a paper at all.” By Bennett’s lights, Greeley’s priggish objections came from his rural roots: “Galvanize a New England squash, and it would make as capable an editor as Horace.” Greeley was simply not up to the work of urban journalism.  

But Greeley was shrewder than Bennett thought. True, he’d never quite shaken off the dust of the countryside, but that was by choice. Greeley used Bennett’s editorial showmanship as a foil to create his own journalistic persona—setting himself up as a newsprint version of a stock folk figure of the day: the wise country Yankee sizing up a world in flux. Bennett, the savvy urbanite, was the herald telling the city’s dark secrets; Greeley, the rustic intellectual oddball, was the tribune railing against them. There was room for both. 

Greeley’s Tribune and Greeley the tribune would rise together over the next 30 years, paper and person often indistinguishable. The Tribune would never be the newsgathering operation that Bennett’s Herald was, nor would it match the Herald’s circulation in New York City itself. Instead, Greeley would use the city as a platform from which to project an editorial voice outward, to the country beyond. By the eve of the Civil War, the Tribune was reaching a quarter of a million subscribers and many more readers across the northern United States, and Greeley was the most visible and influential newspaper editor in the country. He was, by his own description, a “Public Teacher,” an “oracle” on the Hudson, “exert[ing] a resistless influence over public opinion … creating a community of thought of feeling … giving the right direction to it.” This was the work of journalism. 

The idea landed with many of the readers who received the Tribune’s weekly edition. They regarded it as they would their own local weeklies: written, composed, and printed by one person. Greeley, in their belief, produced every word. He did little to discourage such impressions, even as the paper became a strikingly modern operation with a corps of editors, armies of compositors and printers, and massive steam-powered presses. “For whatever is distinctive in the views or doctrines of The Tribune,” he wrote in 1847, “there is but one person responsible.”  

Horace Greeley never quite fixed popular newspapers, or the society that spawned them. The Herald continued to thrive, Bennett continued to bluster, crimes and calamities continued to happen. But Greeley did change newspapers. In making the Tribune into a clearinghouse of information as well as ideas, he made reform-minded, opinion-driven journalism commercially viable, and invented the persona of the crusading journalist. For the next three decades, until his death in 1872, Greeley would demonstrate the power—and limits—of that model. 

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The Guggenheim is also the defining symbol of the legacy of its designer, the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Through his work and the force of his personality, Wright transformed the architect into artist—a feat he never could have accomplished without a long, complex and rich relationship with New York City.

Today, Wright is best known as a pop icon, a flamboyant individualist with a chaotic love life who routinely bullied clients and collaborators—all in the service of his powerful personality and homegrown American aesthetic. But there was more to him than that. Wright was the first true star of his field, and his vision and success liberated generations of architects in his wake, from Frank Gehry to Zaha Hadid to Santiago Calatrava, inviting them to move beyond utilitarian function packed in square boxes to explore sculptural forms with autonomy.

Less known is the role New York City played in his vast influence as an artist. Wright complained shrilly about the city, calling it a prison, a crime of crimes, a pig pile, an incongruous mantrap and more, but this was the bluster of someone who protested too much. New York forged Wright’s celebrity as an American genius, resurrected his career in the late 1920s, and ultimately set him up for the glory of his final decades and beyond.

Wright got his start far from New York. Born into a dysfunctional Wisconsin family in 1867, he weathered his parents’ divorce but dropped out of college. He became the righthand assistant of the architect Louis Sullivan, a pioneer in Chicago’s efforts to create a distinctive American architecture, and in the 1890s started his own practice in Chicago, and Oak Park, Illinois.

By 1909 Wright had revolutionized domestic architecture, opening up the interior spaces of houses and harmonizing them with the landscape. He spent much of the 1910s in Japan designing the Imperial Hotel. Upon his return to America in the early 1920s, he found his career in shambles and his personal life in disarray, and spent much of the decade trying to reestablish his practice and his personal equilibrium. His brilliant projects went mostly unbuilt, and the yellow press covered his messy divorce and daily exploits. In the early 1930s Wright began to reemerge to acclaim in the public eye. In the last two decades of his life, his built work proliferated, and he rocketed to international fame.

Wright lived almost 92 years, so he had a long time to establish this fame—and he is experiencing one of his periodic resurgences of popularity today. Wright’s houses are once again in vogue (after decades of going in and out of fashion) and two chairs from the early Prairie period recently sold at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s more, the architect is enjoying renewed status as a cult figure, revered by his followers for his independence and individualism—the inspiration, at least indirectly, for Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Wright’s latest generation of fans are rushing out to buy a recent biography that revisits the tragic and notorious fires at the architect’s compound at Taliesin, his home and studio near Spring Green, Wisconsin. They gather enthusiastically on the Internet, posting snippets of Wright’s writings on Twitter. Some still refer to him reverently as “Mr. Wright.” He’s a cash cow for the eponymous foundation which, having just announced closing his unprofitable school, licenses his name on everything from tea cups to ties.

Wright’s detractors have a lot to talk about these days, too. Wright was the sort of old white male who makes easy target practice, a famously arrogant figure who often alienated the very clients he relied upon to bring his architecture to life. A recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art reminded visitors of strands of racism and misogyny in his work. Wright and his last wife, Olgivanna, exerted domineering control over apprentices, even dictating who married whom.

But all the focus on Wright’s sensational biography—whether it elevates him to pop icon status or hoists him overboard as a monstrous egomaniac—avoids the serious question: beyond the hype, what is Wright’s legacy? That brings us back to New York.

Although Wright wanted to portray himself as unique and self-created, he was part of a long tradition of seekers that continues today, artists of every stripe, in all media, who recoil at the terrors of New York while seeking to know it, to celebrate it, and to use it to find out who they are. A series of prominent American writers saw New York as a “terrible town” (Washington Irving) with skyscrapers that erupted in a “frenzied dance” (Henry James). For Henry Adams, New York had an “air and movement of hysteria.” Hart Crane, the poet, wrote Alfred Stieglitz in 1923 that “the city is a place of ‘brokenness,’ of drama.”

Interwoven into these complaints was an acknowledgment that New York spurred creativity and transformed artists. Herman Melville badmouthed New York at length. But during his first stay there, from 1847 to 1851, the city’s vibrancy and burgeoning publishing industry turned him from an unknown into a great popular success. Not only was Melville’s career transformed but, according to his biographer, the “pulse” of his energy increased. Melville remained tethered to the city and its publishers for the rest of his life, and he died there.

Wright had a similar response to New York: repulsion and irresistible attraction. He first visited the city in 1909 anonymously but his most transformative experience there began in the mid 1920s when, fleeing his estranged wife, Miriam, he took refuge with his lover, Olgivanna Hinzenberg, and their infant in Hollis, Queens, in 1925. A year later he returned. This time he went to Greenwich Village, home of his sister Maginel, a successful illustrator.

Wright’s stay of several months occurred as he was struggling to rebuild his practice and his reputation. All his projects—from an innovative office building in Chicago to a spiral shaped “automobile objective” for motoring tourists in Maryland—had fallen away. He had high hopes for “San Marcos in the Desert,” a lavish resort in Arizona, but it had no secure funding. Building new projects in New York could be a way out of debt.

New York offered energy, culture, and connections. His visit to the city enabled him to reconnect with his client and close friend William Norman Guthrie, the iconoclastic rector of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie at East 10th Street and Second Avenue. Guthrie wanted to reform religion by making it inclusive and global. He invited New York literati to the church, and introduced his followers to rituals and practices such as services from Hindu swamis and Native American leaders, and, to raise cosmic consciousness, Eurythmic dancing by scantily clad young women. Guthrie’s work set the stage for the 1960s counterculture in the East Village.

Wright designed two visionary projects for Guthrie during the 1920s, an immense fantastical modern cathedral, attached to no particular site, and a pinwheeling skyscraper to be located on the church’s grounds. The feasibility of the cathedral and the skyscraper’s scale in the neighborhood mattered little to Wright. Their role was to confirm the architect’s creative imagination. The skyscraper in particular became a vehicle in Wright’s publicity campaign against European modernism from 1930 onward (he pushed the argument that he had originated what Europeans followed). The skyscraper’s model became a set piece in all his exhibitions, and visitors today can see it at the Museum of Modern Art.

At the same time Wright was designing the St. Mark’s projects, he began forging a network of connections that would propel him forward. A circle of young modernists—including the critic Lewis Mumford and the designer Paul Frankl, known for his “skyscraper furniture”—championed and honored Wright. Mumford defended Wright in his writings and would insist Wright be included in MoMA’s epochal International Style exhibition of 1932. Frankl extolled Wright in books and saw to it that the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen recognized the architect with an honorary membership.

The city’s more conservative, established practitioners welcomed him too, if somewhat belatedly. The buzz surrounding Wright led publishers to seek essays and books from him. Wright wrote a series of essays for Architectural Record that articulated the nature of modern materials and building practices. Princeton University published lectures he gave there, in which he expanded his theory of modern architecture. He also wrote for mass market publications like Liberty magazine. Intertwined with the publications were a series of exhibitions of Wright’s work that raised awareness of his architecture domestically and internationally.

By 1932, when Wright’s Autobiography debuted to critical acclaim, the Depression had devastated the careers of most architects, but Wright’s would only advance. He conceived of his masterwork, Fallingwater, in 1936, while he was developing a new type of middle-class American home that he called Usonian. He was one step away from the pinnacle of his career.

Wright wasn’t living in New York when he designed Fallingwater—he worked from Taliesin—but throughout this period he remained connected to the city and its institutions, including MoMA. By 1943, when he received the commission to design the Guggenheim Museum, Wright knew the city and its challenges intimately. The project would encounter problems with the city building department, protests from artists who thought the building might compete with their art, and pushback from obdurate museum directors whose agendas differed from Wright’s and that of the late founder, Solomon Guggenheim.

By the early 1950s Wright and Olgivanna spent so much time in New York that they remodeled and moved into a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Unlike his first visit to Manhattan, this time around Wright basked in glamor. He entertained Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller as clients, gadded about with Hollywood star Ann Baxter (who happened to be his granddaughter), and appeared on television for interviews with Mike Wallace and Hugh Downs. He even showed up on “What’s My Line,” a quiz show where blindfolded celebrities tried to guess the guest’s identity.

Could New York be the Gotham we prize without the Guggenheim? Could Wright have become the figure we know today without New York? No, to both questions. Wright might have always remained identified with the Prairies, but he needed New York to confirm his superstar identity. New York, in turn, needed Wright to announce the future of architecture—for better or worse—from the world capital of culture, and to set the stage for the visionary projects of the 21st century.

Without each other, these two institutions, the city and the man, would be altogether different.

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Walt Whitman once compared Broadway to a river, and that’s what it seemed to me when I finally walked along its path a year later. Broadway really was a noisy, urban Mississippi overflowing with people, cars, and trucks, its shoreline lined with skyscrapers and bathed in electric light. Right next door to Times Square and its peep shows were churches (St. Mary the Virgin, on 46th Street, and Holy Cross, on 42nd Street) and in the middle of everything a statue of a Roman Catholic priest (Francis Patrick Duffy, decorated World War I chaplain and Holy Cross’s pastor). Coming from Gainesville, I thought the contrasts were rather extreme, and that Broadway was the most perplexing, distorted place I’d ever seen.

For many years, visitors have been thinking exactly the same thing: Illustrator Valerian Gribayedoff, a Russian immigrant, thought that Broadway was “a kind of animated mirror, looking back at you with its myriad faces in the same mood in which you regard it.” That was way back in 1893.

Even George M. Cohan, the prolific song-and-dance man who sold Broadway to the masses in the form of sheet music and traveling musicals, and more than anyone cemented the street as the epicenter of American popular culture, couldn’t quite get his head around it. “Nobody understands Broadway,” one character in Cohan’s 1912 production Broadway Jones proclaims. “People hate it and don’t know why. People love it and don’t know why. It’s just because it’s Broadway.”

Through the 19th century, Broadway was a continuous source of American civic pride, a “Path of Progress” where everything promising about the country’s future came together in one long allegorical strand. “Broadway represents the national life,” journalist Junius Henri Browne wrote soon after the Civil War. In order to see America, he suggested, all that was required was a station point along Broadway. “Take your stand there,” he advised, “and Maine, and Louisiana, the Carolinas, and California, Boston, and Chicago, pass before you.”

Herald Square, 34th Street and Broadway, undated. Photo courtesy of New York Public Library.

To understand its history, follow the street from south to north.

Broadway begins at Manhattan’s southern tip, where it forms the spine of the financial district and provides a stage set for ticker tape parades. Skyscrapers, including the majestic Woolworth Building, cloak the street in shadow. At the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street, administrative assistants and stockbrokers lunch amid the graves of Trinity Churchyard, where Alexander Hamilton rests beneath a monument close by a wrought-iron fence along Rector Street.

Continuing to the north, Broadway pierces SoHo, where cast-iron buildings from the mid-19th century look down on a district that 50 years ago was so desolate the city’s fire chief nicknamed it “Hell’s Half Acre.” Now it’s a mall of expensive shops for tourists.

At 10th Street, Broadway suddenly bends to the north on its way to Union Square, which began in the early 19th century as the “Forks,” the rural intersection of the Bowery and Broadway, and was enclosed as a public park in 1833. Union Square became the most fashionable district in the city—in 1865, the six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt watched Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession pass below the window of his grandfather’s mansion at the corner of Broadway and 14th Street—and by the 1890s, the old mansions, having been torn down or converted to sweatshops, had become the main gathering place for labor unions, socialists, and anarchists.

Six blocks to the north, Madison Square was the site of riots in 1901 when the city arranged nice new chairs in the park and tried renting them for a nickel. Now you can sit for hours, for free, in folding chairs arranged in the wedge of space between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Once that narrow space was a perpetual tangle of trolleys, trucks, and cars and on election nights, crowds pressed into the hectic intersection to watch as vote tallies were projected onto a giant screen attached to the Flatiron Building. Now that same storied section of Broadway is nothing if not peaceful, a place of beautiful, trendy people and Shake Shack burgers.

Madison Square was the original starting point of a lurid playground bathed in the glow of electric streetlights and billboards that by the early 1900s had been nicknamed the “Great White Way.” That section of Broadway became so famous, and its stores, theaters, hotels, and restaurants so profitable, that every small-town chamber of commerce had to have its own version. “[Let us] get together and have a Great White Way as soon as possible,” urged the editors of the Richmond, Kentucky, Daily Register in 1919. “It is an indication of a prosperous condition, and a progressive spirit.”

City councils in El Paso, Pensacola, Topeka, and Albuquerque were soon busy carefully planning new downtown business districts in emulation of Broadway, but the original Great White Way was an accident; even those weird, interstitial trapezoids (not squares) that became Herald Square and Times Square, two of the most vibrant public spaces in the world, were nothing more than the byproducts of the misalignment of Broadway’s angled path with the later straight avenues of the city grid. Broadway’s transformation from colonial cowpath to cosmopolitan thoroughfare was nothing if not organic.

At Columbus Circle, Broadway brushes past Central Park’s southwest corner, widens, and becomes something else entirely, a remnant from the Gilded Age that was originally called the Boulevard and was meant to put New York City on par with Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s grand boulevards of Paris. That ambitious section of Broadway was carefully designed, with a planted “mall” running up the center and whimsical apartment houses in the Parisian Belle Époque mode on either side.

The old Boulevard continues up the West Side, past restaurants, delis, and dry cleaners, all the way up to 168th Street, where in the midst of a predominantly Dominican neighborhood it takes over the narrower path of the former Kingsbridge Road, which dates to the early 18th century. At the island’s northern tip, Broadway crosses over the Harlem Ship Canal by way of the Broadway Bridge, continues through the Bronx, and, as Route 9—not so much Great White Way as Adequate Grey Highway—winds its way to the Canadian border.

“Broadway,” Whitman also wrote, “will never fail in riches, arts, men, women, histories, stately shows, morals, warnings, wrecks, triumphs—the profoundest indices of mortality and immortality.” That’s another way of saying that Broadway is much too long and varied to understand in one lifetime. Stephen Jenkins, writing in 1911 in The Greatest Street in the World, thought that Broadway was the place where New Yorkers felt most at home.

I’m not sure I’ll ever feel at home on Broadway, but at least I understand it a bit better than I did when I saw it for the first time almost 30 years ago. Perhaps Broadway resonates because it’s a place where anyone, native or immigrant, can freely wander, like the cable cars Stephen Crane described in 1896 as plying the street “up and down, up and down, in a mystic search.” For some, Broadway might even reveal the key to happiness.

“I guess Broadway, for me, was everything in life I’ve never had,” George M. Cohan once said. “My education, and the friendships, games, adventures, and just plain fun of boyhood and growing up.”

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On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge—after 14 years of construction—was opened at last. The mayor of Brooklyn, Seth Low, had declared the day a public holiday in his city; on the New York side, there was a “strong expression of sentiment” in favor of closing the Stock Exchange early. The president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, along with future president Grover Cleveland, governor of New York, made a ceremonial crossing from New York to Brooklyn, which at the time were two separate cities that soon would become one. That night there would be a fireworks display of terrifying grandeur, 14 tons of explosives let off from the bridge itself, serpents of fire, flowers of fire, showers of fire.

Then there were speeches, including two giving thanks to the Roeblings, the German family who had built it.

First to be praised was John Roebling, a German immigrant who had conceived the bridge—but had died suddenly in 1869, before work had even begun. Then came a nod to his son, Washington, born in the United States, but who had grown up in a German-speaking community, not learning English until he was 11.

Washington Roebling had taken over the immense project at the age of 32 and had, in the words of the politician-industrialist Abram Hewitt, “braved death and sacrificed his health to the duties which had devolved upon him, as the inheritor of his father’s fame, and the executor of his father’s plans.”

The prominent clergyman Richard Storr rose and said: “It was not to a native American mind that the scheme of construction carried out in this bridge is to be ascribed,” he said, “but to one representing the German people . . . the skill which devised, and much, no doubt, of the labor which wrought them, came from afar.”

Washington Roebling—in his foreign heritage, his ingenuity, and his longevity—defined as much as anyone what it meant to be American, at least in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in 1837, in western Pennsylvania when it still was the frontier, he died in 1926, in the Jazz Age. He was not only an engineer but also a scientist, a musician, a linguist, a husband and father. He served four long years in the Union Army during the Civil War, promoted from lowly private to colonel by the war’s end, and was known as Colonel Roebling to the end of his days.

His name is mostly forgotten, but he made an American icon: a bridge that has served New York’s commuters and tourists and lovers for nearly 150 years while inspiring poets and painters and photographers from Hart Crane to Georgia O’Keefe to Walker Evans.

Washington’s father John had been born in 1806 in Saxony; Johann August Roebling was his name until he emigrated to America in 1831. He trained in Berlin as a surveyor and an engineer, but Prussian bureaucracy stymied the ambition of this visionary and energetic man, and he resolved to make a new life for himself across the ocean.

He would do all that and more. In 1842 he patented a design for making rope from wire, a development that made his, and his family’s, fortune. Wire rope would be the foundation of his great engineering works, not least his suspension bridge across Niagara Falls—strong enough to carry a locomotive—and the John A. Roebling Bridge across the Ohio River, which still connects Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky today.

John and his brother Carl were two of the 150,000 people who left what we now know as Germany between 1831 and 1840. They acquired land in western Pennsylvania; they and their fellow immigrants swiftly built a lovely little town, still intact today, which they called Saxonburg. It was here that Washington was born, and where he lived, in a wholly German-speaking community, until he went to school in the late 1840s and learned to speak English.

It was around this time too that John Roebling’s wire rope business outgrew rural Saxonburg; he bought land in Trenton, New Jersey, just then becoming an industrial center, well-situated between Philadelphia and New York. Washington would later note that the land his father bought in Trenton for $100 per acre was worth $22,000 per acre in 1894. Eventually, wire made by John A. Roebling’s Sons company would be incorporated not only in suspension bridges such as the George Washington and the Golden Gate, but also into the Wright Brothers’ and Charles Lindbergh’s airplanes. The wire also made it into nearly all of Mr. Otis’ elevators. This is the stuff of the American dream—a dream, like those of so many, with immigrant roots.

Washington was born an American, but raised in an immigrant culture. His father had chosen America, though John understood too that it was not a perfect place. He saw that, in his own words, “the all-disturbing European” had displaced a native population; he despised the evil of slavery, and Washington would join the Union Army in the earliest days of the war to fight against that evil. (Washington’s name was not as patriotic as it sounds. He was not named for George Washington but for a fellow surveyor, Washington Gill, whom his father met in his first years in the United States. Washington always disliked his mouthful of a name.)

For all his life, Washington worked with men who had come from afar to be Americans; these were the men who built the Brooklyn Bridge. William Kingsley, a wealthy Brooklyn contractor who promoted the project, had been born in Ireland; as had Thomas Kinsella, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the newspaper which ardently supported the bridge and Washington Roebling’s work. Wilhelm Hildenbrand, one of Washington’s most loyal and talented assistant engineers, had emigrated from Germany in the years after the Civil War; before his work on the Brooklyn Bridge he had designed the great train shed for New York’s Grand Central Depot (demolished in 1903 to make way for the structure that stands now).

And, as Richard Storr had so correctly remarked at the bridge’s opening, the men who worked in the deep foundations of the bridge, who cut the stone and set the great cables in place, who did the most dangerous work on site, came from all over the world. How many men died during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge? It is hard to settle on an exact figure, since records were not kept in the same way they are now.

In the rolls of the dead we can find James McGarrity, born in Ireland, who died in 1871 when a derrick collapsed. William Hines died in the same accident; he was Scottish by birth. Peter Koop, born in Germany, was 20 when he died in 1873; his foot got caught in some machinery. Harry Supple, a rigger renowned for his high-wire feats on the cables, was born in Newfoundland and had been a sailor; he died when a strand of cable snapped in 1878 (as Brooklyn historian Maggie Blanck has written about in detail).

Washington Roebling himself was very nearly a casualty. The towers of the bridge were built using “caissons,” chambers of compressed air sunk down into the river’s bed. Men, including the chief engineer, who worked in these chambers were stricken with “caisson disease,” now called decompression sickness, its cause not yet understood. During the worst years of Washington’s illness, his wife, Emily Warren Roebling—whose own family had come to America on the Mayflower—would become the de facto project manager for the bridge, and she is rightly honored with a plaque on one of the great towers.

The great East River bridge remains a monument both to the men who lost their lives, and to the engineers who envisioned and built it. It demonstrated that an audacious and beautiful bridge could be constructed in the aftermath of a dreadful civil war, an embodiment of unity and progress in steel and stone.

John Roebling often told his oldest son that his success would never have been possible in Germany. John’s newfangled rope enabled the construction of a suspension aqueduct in Pittsburgh in 1844-45, his first big engineering success.

In recalling his father’s breakthrough, Washington later wrote: “The dignity and pride of the supervising engineer would have ground down the ambitious attempt of the young engineer in even proposing such a structure which had no precedent America was the goal which all young men aimed to reach then as well as now.”

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Although Teddy Roosevelt won in 1904 (having acceded to the presidency after President William McKinley was assassinated), most successful politicians from New York City failed when they ran for president. This list includes Al Smith, Tom Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, and Rudy Giuliani.

By contrast, Donald Trump never made it in New York City’s business, cultural, or civic world. He’s neither rich enough to compete with multi-billionaires like Bloomberg, nor generous enough to qualify for the boards of cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the city’s leading medical centers. In New York, you’re known for how much you give to museums or hospitals, not how much you have; New York tolerates any behavior but not intolerance and racism; and in a city of loudmouth mayors like Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s mouth was a minor leaguer. In a city with 400 million square feet of commercial office space, having your name on a bunch of hotels and golf clubs does not mean much. That’s why he had to run for president: Almost no one admired or deferred to him in New York City.

And he never went out of his way to pay attention to the city and its tragedies either. In fact, he had never even gone to the September 11 Memorial until the 2016 campaign when he invoked the 2001 attack to criticize his Republican nominee rival Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

To understand how Trump emerged from New York City, and why he succeeded so well outside it, we must start in the borough of Queens. From the moment of his birth, Trump was an outsider, the son of an outer borough real estate developer. He was born in the Jamaica Medical Center, not a high-prestige Manhattan hospital, and he was a resident of Queens, not a wealthy Manhattanite.

One of the five boroughs that make up New York City, Queens is a collection of self-contained communities, not a coherent jurisdiction. Queens’ reputation for detachment was famously established 50 years ago when Kitty Genovese was killed while her neighbors ignored her cries for help. It’s notable that the 1960s primetime television program that established Queens’ identity was “All in the Family,” a hit sitcom featuring the working-class anti-hero, Archie Bunker.

Queens lacks the swagger of Brooklyn, which was once a separate city, or the spirit of Staten Island, which is part of New York City politically but culturally closer to New Jersey. And it’s a world away from the grittiness of The Bronx, which, despite hosting the Yankees, is also home to the poorest congressional district in the nation (and the nation’s largest wholesale produce market).

Today, Queens is best known as the home of the U.S. Open, Kennedy and LaGuardia Airports, and the New York Mets, who never fail to find a way to fail. But it has a history of producing memorable personalities, among them Nancy Reagan, Martin Scorsese, Paul Simon, Cindy Lauper, Russell Simmons, and Harvey Weinstein. The most prominent residents of Queens, when Trump was growing up, were African Americans: Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and Ralph Bunche.

Trump was not even elite in Queens. He went to the undistinguished Kew-Forest School and then attended the New York Military Academy, rather than the nationally ranked Jamaica High School located near his home. Trump, whose father was of German descent and mother was a Scottish immigrant, lacked the pedigree, money, or education to gain entry into fancier circles.

Trump’s father, Fred Trump, a real estate developer, lived in what was designed to be a gated, very white, insular enclave: Jamaica Estates, Queens. The Trumps didn’t live in either of the two higher-status neighborhoods of Queens: Forest Hills Gardens, well-known for its restrictions barring Jewish or African American homeowners, or Douglaston, adjacent to the Long Island Sound waterfront, where John McEnroe was raised.

Trump had a bigger handicap in the form of his heritage. Fred Trump, who built middle-income housing in Brooklyn and Queens, had been arrested in 1927 at a KKK protest rally in Queens, according to The New York Times. (The German Bund met regularly in Ridgewood, Queens, where pro-Nazis subsequently opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt for supporting Britain in its war against Hitler.)

Since World War II, a German heritage has been a liability for prospective politicians in New York. In fact, the current mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr., and was called Bill Wilhelm before he legally changed his name to Bill de Blasio, adopting his mother’s maiden name as his own just in time to run for city council.

Trump then missed out on two opportunities that would have expanded his exposure to other cultural groups. Although of age for military service during the Vietnam War, he successfully avoided the draft with four deferments—and one medical deferment after college.

He also entered adulthood just as white Protestants were declining in status and power in New York City. With the end of fixed commissions on Wall Street, and the advent of new information technologies, financial services became a competitive industry where brains replaced bloodlines. Instead of a Wall Street job, Trump graduated from college and returned to work in the family real estate business.

As an ambitious young man, Trump found himself in the outer boroughs, which were, until recently, the minor leagues for real estate developers. Trump made the leap into Manhattan by using his father’s political connections and his own impressive negotiating skills to get control of the aging Commodore Hotel located next to Grand Central Terminal. With financing from the Hyatt Corporation, and a generous tax abatement from the city and state, Trump Tower was built in the 1980s, at 56th Street and Fifth Avenue, a prime Manhattan location. Today, it is best known as the Trump family version of Buckingham Palace.

But these real estate successes were not followed by integration into the city. Trump couldn’t fit in, and he never actually owned many properties—he was focused far more on licensing his name, and attaching them to buildings, like a barbarian marking what he had seized.

Trump never became a member of the Real Estate Board of New York, the leading organization of property owners in New York City. And the city’s major law firms and real estate consulting firms were reluctant to work for Trump, since he is known for not paying his bills. Most of the major commercial banks in New York refused to finance his real estate projects, especially once they became aware of his propensity to use bankruptcy laws to protect whatever money he had earned from projects, while hurting investors.

In New York City, Trump, like any interloper, did take advantage of the tools available to him. Specifically, he manipulated the Manhattan-based mass media to create a national identity as a celebrity. Trump’s success was thus built more by maintaining a high profile in New York media, and then through national TV, as host of NBC’s The Apprentice, for 25 years, than by business acumen.

The New York City tabloid newspapers loved to feature Trump, in stories about his three marriages and his calls for proof of President Obama’s birth. The front page of the New York Post is the equivalent of a daily billboard, which the local radio and television news programs treat as raw material for their evening programs. Trump was a master at getting the New York Post to cover his words, his wives, and his fights with Ed Koch and Barack Obama. He became famous as someone New Yorkers loved to ridicule.

Trump didn’t care about being right or smart or ethical, only about being known. In 1989, he took out $85,000 in full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty after five young African American men were arrested for attacking the Central Park jogger. The charges against them were ultimately dismissed.

But the image and attitudes that made him unacceptable to most of New York City were precisely what Republican Party voters valued in 2016. (It’s worth noting that Trump even lost Manhattan, his home county, to Ohio Governor John Kasich, in the 2016 presidential primary.)

Trump’s is hardly an accidental presidency. In fact, his failure to make it into the upper echelon of New York’s business community is what drove him to run for president. The kid from Queens made it across the East River into Manhattan but he never absorbed the values of New Yorkers and the importance of immigration, global trade, higher education, and the free press. Trump’s presidency is actually based on a rejection of “New York values.”

But his career assaulting the political and cultural elites of New York taught him one lesson: Even a bad bully can have a fan club; you can succeed in life without being housebroken.

News reports now have him marveling that New Yorkers who once wouldn’t give him the time of day—like the former Goldman Sachs chieftain Gary Cohn—now work for him.

In light of his history, the Trump campaign promise to “take back America” was more than an empty slogan. It’s a genuine reflection of his inability to fit into the cultural and economic arena of New York City where he was never recognized as a person of consequence.

The post We Can Thank New York City for Trump appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The object in question was a Bally Bumper pinball machine from 1936. For many, this machine is the quintessential pinball experience. You launch a ball up a slanted table and try to get it to bounce off as many targets as it can before it drains back off. Bumper was the first machine to have electric targets that added points to your score when hit, and a totalizer that kept track of your score.

The officer took me to the Alameda garage of his recently deceased twin brother, who had also been a cop. The Bumper game was dusty, but looked like it still worked. The officer said that the machine had been set up here since they first got them, and that he had an identical one in his crawlspace. I asked when they received the machines and he replied, “My brother and I were Alameda police in 1936, when the Oakland cops confiscated these and gave them to us Alameda cops as gifts.”

Many people are stunned that pinball could ever have been considered gambling. However, if you play a couple of games on Bumper, which I quickly purchased from the police officer, you will see that even at a nickel a game, it’s horribly addictive and could quickly drain your pocket change.

What really made pinball gambling was awarding a prize for reaching a high score. In 1931, America was introduced to coin operated pinball. Almost overnight, pinball machines began replacing trade stimulators, which were mechanical games of chance that awarded gum or a cigarette that were designed to lure people into businesses, so they might buy something.

Pinball machines showed up everywhere—candy stores, bars, smoke shops—and many forms of award were given as prizes: cigars, free drinks, game credits, and of course, money. The payout didn’t happen like a slot machine. Instead, the proprietor of the establishment would handle the awards. Even if the card on the machine said “FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY!” everyone knew the storekeeper would pay up.

With Prohibition winding down, organized crime was eager to take on pinball as a more acceptable alternative to the highly illegal slot machines of the day. It was a cash business, and it was a good one. For almost 30 straight years, pinball made more money than the entire motion picture industry. To the public of the 1930s, it was a welcome escape from the dismal economic climate and offered a chance of instant redemption.

Nationwide demand was so high for pinball machines that companies could not keep up. During that time, over 150 manufacturers got into making the “marble games.” And it would be David Gottlieb’s 1931 Baffle Ball machine that cornered that market, as he developed an assembly line process for making the game.

Despite manufacturing advances, demand was so high that Gottlieb soon was unable to meet his distributors’ requests. One of the frustrated distributors, Ray Maloney, decided to make his own machine, “Ballyhoo,” named after a popular gentleman’s humor magazine. The game was so successful, his company name—formerly known as Lion Mfg. Co.—was changed to Bally. Although all the manufacturers were cognizant of the gambling aspect of pinball, nobody pursued it as enthusiastically as Maloney, who allegedly developed ties to the Mafia.

The most famous opponent of organized crime’s pinball racket was New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. He had run on a ticket that opposed the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine and would serve for three terms, from 1934 to 1945. Living up to his promise to “Clean up New York City” he quickly declared war on slot machines. And after dumping thousands of confiscated devices into the Hudson from barges, he turned his attention to pinball.

LaGuardia campaigned so relentlessly against pinball’s evils that it seemed like he had a personal vendetta against the game. He loved publicity, and posed for photos in which he wielded a sledgehammer, smashing the now illegal games amidst crowds of law officers. LaGuardia boasted that the hardwood legs from the machines were being fashioned into police billy clubs, perfect for beating the heads of the nefarious operators.

Of the many pictures of the mayor posing with his “Sledgehammer of Decency” the one that really caught my eye was not obviously posed. Here, LaGuardia is seen pushing over a pinball machine that seemed strangely familiar. Upon closer inspection, and after comparing various photos, I concluded beyond a doubt that the machine in question was none other than my favorite game, Bally’s Bumper.

In 1942, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the New York mayor had his final victory over pinball. He argued that pinball was a misuse of precious resources needed for the war effort, and successfully lobbied the Federal Government to ban the making of pinball machines in America. After the war, pinball manufacturing was allowed to resume, but the game had lost much of its appeal because of its bad rap.

LaGuardia pushing over the Bally’s Bumper pinball machine.

Then, in 1947, pinball got a boost, thanks to the invention of the flipper, which was introduced by Gottlieb’s engineer Harry Mabs. Before the flipper was invented, the game was more akin to bagatelle, a French invention of the late 1700s, which was played with a cue stick; the concept was to shoot the ball up an incline and arch it over a barrier to attempt landing it in scoring pockets. Bagatelle and successor versions depended on the initial shooting of the ball. Before flippers, the player had no way to interact with the descending ball and thus it was much more a game of chance than skill.

Ironically, LaGuardia died one month before the introduction of the flipper, which brought on another pinball craze. But LaGuardia’s legacy was so powerful that pinball remained banned in New York for nearly 30 more years. In 1976, responding to pressure from the industry, the New York City Council heard arguments about how the flipper had transformed pinball into a game of skill. The council chamber had two machines brought in and had a ringer come in and display how he could beat the game using his flipper skills. The ban was lifted and Gottlieb made a limited run of games re-titled “New York” to celebrate the decision.

But the flipper’s invention did not stop Bally’s Ray Maloney from pushing a new design that would bring back the gambling aspect to pinball. Enter the Bingo pinball machine in the late 1940s. Early models were founded on the goal of getting the balls into certain holes for game credits, but that quickly evolved into a Bingo card format where the flipperless playfield was strewn with rubber ringed posts and 25 holes to catch the balls. The idea was to light three or more numbers in a row to get awarded credits. Whenever you see a pinball game that has a three-digit credit counter, you can safely assume it was designed for gambling.

The way it worked was, if you racked up a significant amount of credits, you would tell the bartender or shopkeeper and he would cash you out by paying you for all the unused credits. The bartender or shopkeeper would then push a “knock off” button that would count down all the credits and zero the game for use by the next player.

These machines were soon declared to be gambling. And in 1950 came the biggest single blow to pinball: the passage by Congress of the Johnson Act. That law banned interstate shipment of “gambling devices” (including repair parts, manuals, etc.) except to states in which the device was legal. So, it now was a federal offense to ship slot machines, “one-balls,” and pinball devices into any state which did not allow them. This should have been quite a deterrent to the manufacturers and distributors.

But the game was too popular, and it thrived in the many states where machines were legal, and even those where they weren’t. Enforcement was uneven at best. In San Francisco, where pinball was never illegal, the Bingo games were singled out as unabashed games of chance that were draining men of their paychecks. But the police could not keep up with all the secret rooms and payola protecting the operators.

Complaints from angry spouses eventually convinced the powers that be to declare that Bingo pinball machines had to be adapted to play only one game per coin. Players hated the decision but mostly surrendered; a few removing the modifications to make them play as originally intended.

Every time I get a chance to play a game on my Bumper, I look up at the museum’s poster of Mayor LaGuardia toppling the game. And I take a deep breath, pull back the plunger, and thank my lucky stars that his sledgehammer did not come down on my precious machine.

The post The Mob, the Mayor, and Pinball appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.