New York, New York by Richard Wall

New York, New York

Martin Scorsese and the Changing Skyline of a Metropolis

On October 12th and 13th, 2007, mid-town Manhattan will be the setting for the 25th anniversary celebrations of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

In 1979, the last time I was in New York City, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were still standing proud (but were already then unloved by a very broad spectrum of New Yorkers). Pope John Paul II was in town, waving to the crowds, and Frank Sinatra was recording his hugely successful version of the theme song from Martin Scorsese’s movie New York, New York (1977).

Twenty-eight years have passed. Today, the song has become something of an established anthem for the city and its baseball teams, in both the Sinatra and Liza Minelli versions. John Paul II has died, and the twin towers have gone – but so, in all likelihood, and with less drama, have many other buildings: even without traumatic events like September 11th, cities change or grow, old buildings get demolished and new ones get built. And those who live and work in them acquire a special feel for the human impact of those ongoing – not sudden - transformations.

Back in 1977 New York, New York, “a vast, rambling, nostalgic expedition back into the big band era,” in the words of critic Roger Ebert, was the Sicilian-American director’s personal tribute to the Hollywood musical: a relative box office failure at the time but, as with any part of an uneven, turbulent, and very personal body of work, retrospectively an important milestone.

While other film directors have lived and worked in New York, Scorsese’s life and career in directing and producing movies set there, some controversial and many painful and exhausting to watch, reflects a particularly intimate and uneasy relationship between the artist and the life of his city. Its core elements are Italian-American identity (especially the male identity), family or lack of it, and the religious themes of guilt and redemption (he initially studied to be a Roman Catholic priest, before obtaining a degree in film directing at the New York University Film School in 1966 – and the rest is film history).

And, of course, there is the violence. Not just the “gritty” physical violence for which he is best known, as in Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990), but also the violence and intensity of emotions and feelings, revealed in both those movies and in what I regard as his supreme achievement, the film version of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1993).

That story is set in the tightly restrictive society of late-nineteenth century New York, on the surface a calm and measured context. Yet the impact of the emotional and psychological inner conflicts in this movie is in my opinion even greater than that produced by the better-known physically violent movies. The latter culminated most recently in an orgy of gratuitous violent death and ultimate personal isolation, The Departed (2006). This film is set not in New York but in Boston, in a predominantly Irish community rather than Italian, but still Catholic, and still riddled with guilt as surely as all the stiff bodies in it are riddled with bullets. Despite its huge commercial success and much admired technical brilliance, I do believe it is also true to Scorsese form in not finding redemption, and in leaving the ghost of depression wandering in the spectator’s, and probably the creator’s, soul.

Twenty-five filmically eventful years separate New York, New York from Gangs of New York (2002). This movie is set in mid-nineteenth century, beginning in 1846, but concentrating mainly on the period 1862-64, including the violent NYC riots against the draft. In the brief but astonishing end-shots, Scorsese makes a clever visual commentary on the rise of the skyscraper and the whole dynamic-technological future which then lay ahead, and hints at the emotional and psychological sources of the frantic energy driving those changes. In rapidly compressed time, a violent New York of 1864 becomes the high-rise steel and glass metropolis of 2000, as the city’s skyline morphs from the way it was then to how it was at the end of the twentieth century – including the twin towers of the World Trade Center

Despite the trauma of September 11th, 2001, this directorial decision was surely correct: at the time the film was released, the very recently collapsed towers were still a living emblem of New York City, even though debate raged as to whether they should or should not be shown in movies - or in any kind of cultural production at all. Potentially controversial CD covers were changed, release dates for books and movies were postponed, and TV or cable showings of older movies in which the towers appeared, like Mike Nichols’ Working Girl (1988), may well have been viewed with a strange mix of nostalgia and delayed shock and, for all I know, also postponed or cancelled.

Now, in late 2007, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is able to write that “9/11 is over.” Although he does not mean it in quite this way, the history of cities such as Hiroshima and Dresden tell us that, short of total destruction as in Pompeii, people begin to absorb and accommodate themselves even to the most traumatic events of the past, and to rebuild. As the years go by and the events become more and more telescoped in time, so too it becomes easier to situate them in historical perspective.

So by the time Steven Spielberg used a different closing shot of the towers, in his 2005 film Munich, audiences as well as creators were perhaps beginning to get accustomed to the idea of seeing those towers as part of New York City’s rich architectural history.

Even a cursory reading of a fascinating site like this one, or the Columbia University series on The Architecture and Development of New York City helps us to understand that the cycle of urban construction, demolition and renewal is as regular and dynamic as life itself, and sometimes just as violent. Decisions to demolish are just as fundamental as decisions to build, and indeed, given the space constraints on a place like Manhattan Island, the one may well be contingent on the other.

So it is in the light of these thoughts, and with a certain spirit of wonder and curiosity at the way time does in fact telescope events into history, that I offer readers below a more leisurely example of one of the periods through which Scorsese’s morphed ending in ‘Gangs’ passed - New York City in the early twentieth century, as revealed in the postcards of Irving Underhill (1872-1960) and others.

October 8th, 2007

Richard Wall (send him mail) is currently reading for a PhD in American History at the University of Birmingham, England.

Franz Huld’s Panorama of New York River Front, 1900 (four-panel folding card)

Selected Detail (Panels 1 & 3) below:

Bird’s Eye View of Lower New York, 1911

This postcard of New York City already shows the Woolworth Building (below, right), opened in 1913 to be the “world’s tallest building,” remaining so until 1929, when it was surpassed by the Empire State Building, constructed on the site of the former Waldorf Astoria Hotel (below, left).

Grand Central Station

Pennsylvania Railroad Station, New York (built 1910),

demolished in 1963 to make way for the new Madison Square Garden

"Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed."

~ "Farewell to Penn Station," New York Times editorial, October 30, 1963

Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Tower

Sunday Morning in Fifth Avenue

Upper Broadway Wall Street, 1912

Broadway, Downtown Stock Exchange

Postcards scanned from the author’s family collection.