Golden boys and girls

I was going to comment on another article that ran in last Sunday’s New York Times, but Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal beat me to the punch, and did a pretty good of it, too. So I'll share some of his insights, along with a few of my own, in today's post.

The object of Henninger’s and my affections is here. The Times solicits answers to the question, if you could nominate one era of New York’s history as its golden age, what would it be? Responding are “14 prominent New Yorkers with a keen sense of the city's past and present, from novelists like Cynthia Ozick to architects like Robert A. M. Stern to public figures like Vartan Gregorian.”

Henninger goes after several respondents who nominated the 1970s, all artists of various stripes who called the city home back then. They romanticize the good old days when they were broke and lived the boho life in an economically stressed town of mean streets and lawlessness. Good art, feeding off of the dark vibe of that decade, was indeed created locally. The music was raw and loud. I remember seeing The Ramones at CBGB’s in 1978 with my then brother-in-law. A glitzy, grimy hedonism ruled the night, and I have to say it was intensely compelling and seductive to a teenager from the suburbs, although personally I was ultimately relieved, as were my ears, when Joey, Dee Dee and company finished their set, and my brother-in-law and I returned to our car for the drive back to boring, orderly Long Island.

Performer John Leguizamo probably best expressed the consensus of his peers who nominated the 1970s as New York’s golden age. “New York was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund,” he opined.

Henninger distills his counterargument in these on-the-money paragraphs:

“Over eight years in the 1970s, New York lost more than a half-million private-sector jobs, according to E.J. McMahon and Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose essential travel guide to these years and their aftermath may be found in the current Winter issue of the Public Interest. During the 1970s the real New York nightmare wasn't lived in the SoHo funkytown, but in the funkless outer boroughs.

“Many of the city's most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls. Hell has always seized over-developed imaginations. But what attractions hath hell for average Joes who can't cop a ‘life’ in SoHo or Williamsburg? Then as now, they just took hell's hits in the neck, or left. In economic terms, much of creative Manhattan simply ‘free-rides’ on the backs of the workers whose tax payments constrain the bankruptcy sheriff.”

Henninger also notes, “These comments raise the question of just what liberalism believes makes a city great or even golden, rather than just . . . interesting.”

There was another aspect of the Times article that particularly impressed me. I detected the betrayal of a pampered insularity from today’s metropolis in several responses, perhaps most notably in the statement by novelist and historian Caleb Carr, who replied, in part:

“It may seem odd, to those living in a city sterilized by the Giuliani years, that anyone would feel fascination with or nostalgia for a decade that was almost as filthy, violent and degenerate as its predecessors.

“But not only did the 1890's witness attempts at the kind of meaningful reform that eluded Mayor Giuliani - of the Police Department, labor laws, and living conditions for the poor - it also saw the blossoming of culture both high and vulgar: the dominance of the Metropolitan Opera and establishment of the city's great museums, along with the Bowery music halls, Broadway, and the proliferation of artists' communities throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. We should remember, too, that a New York scrubbed clean of prostitution, adult entertainment, drugs and other dark phenomena is a city that has lost its original dynamic, and therefore its meaning.”

I don’t know what planet Caleb Carr is living on, but in my neck of the woods I encounter made-up hookers, dressed in v-neck red and fur, talking on cell phones and getting ready to call it a night, almost every morning before dawn on my dog walks. “Escort services” advertise their wares late nights on public-access cable television; almost all of them have Web sites these days, too.

As for “drugs and other dark phenomena,” they’re still around—I recount my own near-mugging in my December 8 dispatch—but are nowhere near the high-rise, high-security domiciles of established liberal creatives pining for the nihilism of New York’s underbelly. Perhaps they’re just too busy and too ensconced in the trappings of their success to have noticed that the beast is alive and kicking, in the streets below and on TV and the Internet.