Aphra Behn described her brief sojourn in Suriname as if being in a terrestrial paradise. The first English woman to make her trade from writing, Behn pronounces the tropical colony in her 1688 novel Oroonoko as a “place of Eternal Spring” that was permeated with “noble aromatics,” a country that was “rare, delightful and wonderful.” Though she only spent a few months from 1663 into 1664 in the South American colony, the tug of Suriname was persistent. The colony was the setting of Behn’s most celebrated novel (with Oroonoko arguably the first of that type in the English language), while she gifted to her friend John Dryden a feathered Carib headdress for its use in a London production of his 1695 play The Indian Queen. For Dryden, who had never been there, the English holdings in Suriname were a “beauteous sight so charming bright” that “Outshines the lustre of glory.” A century before, when Walter Raleigh reached the mouth of the Orinoco (from whence Behn drew her title), he wrote in his 1596 The Discovery of Guiana that the air was “fresh with a gentle easterly wind,” a rusticated pastoral of “deer crossing in every path,” with “cranes and herons of white, crimson, and carnation, perching in the river’s side.” These lands, especially Suriname, were an Edenic kingdom, a domain of exotic purple orchids and flaming red ixoras, of sylvan, sweet green pomelos and lurid, tart pitangas. Behn had been saddened to leave Suriname. So were the vast bulk of English colonists who followed her only three years later, as at the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Dutch War the Treaty of Breda had stipulated that Suriname would fall into Dutch hands in exchange for what many of the new exiles no doubt thought was a relatively worthless hunk of rock in the north Atlantic called Manhattan.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of New York City, though from the strange dearth of coverage about that auspicious marker you’d scarcely know it. There are a smattering of events through the Big Apple, an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, an outdoor Times Square concert in early September, a handful of street festivals. Yet other than a few notices in the expected publications there has been little reckoning about what four centuries of this indispensable city might mean at this particular point in history. A typically unsigned essay at The Economist is titled “New York is turning 400 and no one cares,” with the author noting that “almost no one gives a damn.” For all of the (lack of) enthusiasm surrounding the anniversary the city might as well be filled with disgruntled seventeenth-century colonists pining for Suriname. Maybe it’s the looming (or ominous) 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence that is already overshadowing this auspicious date in New York.
Perhaps there is an arbitrary feeling about quadricentennial, the four decades of Dutch rule over New Amsterdam making this year’s celebrations feel embarrassingly premature, since “New York City” didn’t really begin until four English warships sailed into the world’s largest natural harbor in 1664 and threatened to bomb the Dutch settlement into oblivion unless Director-General of New Netherland turned all of the city over to them, from Lange Eylandt to Konijneneiland, Breukelen to Haarlem, and all down that thoroughfare of the future great, white way called Breede Weg. Stuyvesant might not have cared – he always regretted when the Dutch colonial authorities moved him north from sunny Curacao.
Most likely, beyond the general ennui in which all Americans are currently stuck, the lack of enthusiasm over this latest birthday is because New York – a city that has endlessly mythologized the ever-regenerative power of newness – doesn’t think of itself as old. Like an aging ingenue ever-ready for her closeup, New York hasn’t yet grappled with its age. Consider as a historical fun fact that Boston is five years younger than New York City, and ask yourself if you already consciously knew that? For Boston is a city permeated with – in fact haunted by – its history, with a citizenry more than happy to remind you of that. Puritan ghosts hang like early-morning fog amidst the cobble-stones of North Boston and the red brick of Beacon Hill or Back Bay so that the thought of New York being older than Massachusett’s capital – even if only by five years – sounds incongruous.
Both Boston and Philadelphia (founded in 1682) feel older than New York; even the positively youthful Baltimore (established in 1729) harkens back to its beginnings in a manner that Gotham simply doesn’t. On the Acela Corridor it’s only the relatively antiseptic planned city of Washington DC that feels legitimately younger than New York. So allergic has New York, and Manhattan in particular, been to this colonial past that the ever-churning tumult of asphalt and concrete, iron and steel, glass and marble, erase and reinscribe New York over and over – a past that is always disturbed, always unstable. Sure, there are Victorian brownstones in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the occasional homestead in the Bronx or fortification ruin in the Financial District, but on the whole there is no equivalent to Rittenhouse Square or a Boston Common in New York. Today only a few farmhouses and a bevy of names are all that really survive of that century when New York was established. So out of place is the colonial in New York that when one happens upon it, such as the 1765 white-clapboard, Palladian Morris-Jumel House in Washington Heights, it feels as if you’ve left New York to wander into Cambridge or Germantown.
Whether or not Heraclitus was right that you can’t step into the same river twice, you certainly can’t return to the same New York. This is the image – and in many ways the reality – of the city on its 400th anniversary; that it never slows down enough so that it can be pinned down, even on its birthday. This is the metropolis of jack-hammers and sidewalks closed for construction, of rerouted traffic and high-rise cranes. Leon Trotsky, who lived in a Bronx exile for ten weeks before the February Revolution and who annoyed all of the wait-staff at Triangle Dairy by refusing to tip since it was a bourgeois affectation, wrote in 1917 that “New York… more than any other city… is the fullest expression of our modern age,” that is of “of capitalist automatism… of cubism…. of the dollar.” More romantically, Thomas Wolfe (after he got off the train from Asheville, North Carolina in 1924) said that “New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting sea, and earth, and stars.” When visiting in 1946, the French philosopher Albert Camus dragged on his Galouis and pronounced that the city which never sleeps is a “desert of iron and cement… an island of un-reality.” Truman Capote of Monroeville, Alabama succinctly claimed that “New York City is the only real city-city.” What’s notable is that for all of their variation, the Russian revolutionary’s respectful acknowledgement, the Gallic philosopher’s nihilistic horror, and the dual opinions of the Southern novelists – respectfully wondrous and bitchy – is that they weren’t made by the native born but by those who, even if briefly, made New York their own, as it ever is.
Because despite the (inaccurate) stereotype of urban unkindness, the price of entry to New York is arguably the lowest of any American cities. If you’re from Iowa a lifetime in Boston won’t make you either a Brahmin or a townie, but New York merely asks that you supplicate to the greatness of New York. It’s an issue of toughing it out and making the city one’s own, so that iconic New Yorkers from Andy Warhol to Tom Wolfe (different Southerner from the previous) are de facto native sons. A reason for this capriciousness is a matter of necessity – New York is simply so massive that like a black hole it must forever consume to maintain its equilibrium. There is a mutual reciprocity between the Big Apple and its transplants so that slightly more than a third of residents were born elsewhere, whether in Creighton, Nebraska or Katmandu, Nepal.
A city that was once a handful of Netherlandish settlers on the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers that now maintains a population of nine million people – 24 million once you encompass a metropolitan area that spreads like a Meadowlands’ oil slick into New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. By contrast, the United States’ second largest city of Los Angeles holds “only” four million souls, half of its eastern sibling. There are large and small American cities, of course, but to stand on a streetcorner in Manhattan is not to be in any one of those except bigger, but is rather a categorically different kind of experience, that fullest expression of the modern age in all its velocity and tumult that Trotsky detected. “New York is at once the climactic synthesis of America,” wrote journalist John Gunther in his 1947 travelogue Inside U.S.A., “and yet the negation of America.” A place both in and of its home nation and not, a city that is simultaneously obsessed with the present and yet somehow out of time.
Which is to say that New York – despite being a municipality that does whatever else any municipality has to do, i.e. a polity responsible for trash collection (sometimes) and public schools, a court system and public transportation – is also a potent idea. New York has for most of its history been a fantasy as much as a city; a symbol more than a place. Joan Didion (of Sacremento) writes that “New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself.” The New York of Henry James and Edith Wharton, J.D. Salinger and Truman Capote, of Woody Allen, Martin Scorcesse, and Spike Lee. People in Boise know more about Manhattan than people in Manhattan know about Boise because America has been entertained by I Love Lucy and All in the Family, Friends and Seinfeld. Our celebrations and holidays are measured in distances from Harold or Times Square, our news is delivered from a desk with the New York skyline behind it, our nighttime routines have been marked by David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers, and Saturday Night Live.
The fantasy of New York remains that of the stranger at a dusty, rural roadside bus station with a ticket to Port Authority and a dream of mythic self-reinvention, of what proud native son Walt Whitman intoned of the “Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies… my city!” The personal pronoun in that declaration is always shifting, a fluid quality. The antebellum New York of Whitman in Pfaff’s Rathskeller talking with the city’s bohemians is not F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920’s jazz age Babylon or the Greenwich Village Beats’ 50s Left Bank, of the 1970s post-apocalyptic birthplace of punk and hip-hop or the grotesque, glitzy simulacra of the 80s.
Yet for all of its regeneration, New York is prone to nostalgic mythologizing, a gauzy nostalgia as unsatisfying as a meal at the Times Square Red Lobster. Why mark the 400th anniversary when in someways New York has recently dwelled more and more in the past anyhow, whether the 20s of the Cotton Club, the 50s of the Gaslight, the 70s of CBGB, the 00s of the KGB Bar? The “Whatever” of Dimes Square? Manhattan survived bankruptcy and the AIDS pandemic, 9/11 and covid. Now, will it survive the indignity of neoliberalism, the island of a thousand Chase Manhattan Banks and Sweet Greens, where $5,000 a month will pay your rent on an efficiency? The indispensable American city is being replaced by a simulation of itself. For better and for worse, for both the city and the rest of us, New York is everywhere. In the next four hundred years will we be able to live off dreams, symbols, and fantasies alone as that triumphant skyline slowly sinks into the Atlantic?
