In the tireless tradition of "Best [blank blank] in New York", New York Magazine's current issue features a debate between credentialed City wave-getters, about who [in the Modern Era] has been the City's best mayor.
The feature begins--
The feature begins--
The Greatest Mayor: “How Would Dinkins Have Done, Had He Come After Giuliani?”
Being a larger-than-life character helps. But so does keeping the streets plowed.
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Fiorello La Guardia at City Hall, October 1945. (Photo: William C. Shrout/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images) |
And for this, I love the piece like I love all 'Best of...' schtick journalism in New York City. Here's why:
First, we all identify. Like in our pizza debates, these articles make us lean in to catch every strand and/or to chime in with a nuance that displays our estoric localism--as if puzzling out the Weightiest Question of Our Time.
I mean, for the whole world.
True, New York is a global capital--we are home to some of the wealthiest individuals and powerful decision-makers in the world, and we churn them out reliably, through the ages. So yes, even a casual reader of NY mag, sitting in a doctor's office in Paducah, KY (that charming south/midwest border city, perched on a gentle bend in the Mississippi, overlooking Illinois) ought to sit up and take notice of these 'best of...' verdicts. How else would they judge the merits of the new, "Brooklyn-style" [sic] pizza offering on Pizza Hut's menu in the local strip mall?
It is only our ingenuity and refined taste that they can now discern what a brick oven versus a CNG-burning oven can do with bread and cheese!
Second, I love this genre because we typically feature the opinions of prominent, well-educated or well-worn New Yorkers--those who have gone to school in the arts of staying New York, or even teach school in it, for that matter. Following the 'best of...' template, this week's 'Best Mayor' is gently moderated, and each contributor chimes in with evocative observations or anecdotal evidence from this or that mayor's career. And if we can at all locate their references, we eagerly join in, quickly find ourselves either nodding thoughtfully or vigorously shaking our heads, frowning outloud on a crowded subway. This genre is a quintessential New York one because we *all* get expert status--if only in our own minds and what we imagine of our collectivity--and isn't this one of the main reasons to stay in New York?
Third, depending on where they appear, these articles are usually very timely--a rather overt gesture from the media powers that be. Sure, Time Out New York has its own content calendar cycle calibrated to touristic ebbs and flows, the weather, the sample saleseasons, etc. But New York Magazine, a magazine of slightly different cultural record, often has in-depth stories that try and surface a deep social revelation about New York. In November 2008, New York ran a feature by talented political reporter Jennifer Senior, capturing the paradox of urban loneliness.
Her article advanced a popular interest story from a place the magazine's readership could easily locate themselves, beginning:
Until I was 37 years old, I lived alone. It never struck me as particularly odd. If you’ve been in New York for any length of time, you know from both intuition and daily observation that many people live on their own in this town. But I never fully appreciated how many—and by extension, how colossally banal my own solitary arrangement was—until I checked with the Department of City Planning a couple of months ago. How many apartments in Manhattan would you have guessed have just one occupant? One of every eight? Every four? Every three?
The number’s one of every two. Of all 3,141 counties in the United States, New York County is the unrivaled leader in single-individual households, at 50.6 percent. More than three-quarters of the people in them are below the age of 65. Fifty-seven percent are female. In Brooklyn, the overall number is considerably lower, at 29.5 percent, and Queens is 26.1. But on the whole, in New York City, one in three homes contains a single dweller, just one lone man or woman who flips on the coffeemaker in the morning and switches off the lights at night.
Now, I'm not just partial to this article because Senior's first source is a Harvard sociologist who immediately invokes one of my favorite essays about urban life. Still, in Louis Wirth's referenced essay "Urbanism as a Way of Life" (1938) Wirth set out to establish a sociological theory of urbanism. Recasting an earlier statement by his contemporary, German sociologist Georg Simmel, Wirth elucidates a peculiar paradox of the urban, which is also Senior's central problematique:
A dense concentration of individuals in a permanent settlement isnt what distinguishes the urban from a village or town. Rather, what is urban arises uniquely from densely-populated centers where social heterogeneity is the norm. In other words, urban centers are filled with unlike strangers, co-existing much closer than they might choose in more traditional settlements.
Among many other derivatives of this arrangement, Wirth discusses how living shoulder-to-shoulder with unlikeness produces co-reliance among strangers. Urbanism is dependency on the kindness of a fellow subway passenger who stands aside for you to enter or exit the crowded train, on s/he who phones every number in your lost mobile until you are located. Some of our stranger codependencies are ordered by the market--like such personal services as laundry, food, or document delivery--requiring reliance on strangers to provide for our private needs. Whether Wirth's counter-example (the village or town) still exists, his point was that many of these situations aren't even presented, and if they are, we petition our intimates. Daily negotiations with unlikeness is an inescapable feature of life in crowded urban centers.
He explains:
...the city is characterized by secondary rather than primary contacts. The contacts of the city may indeed be face-to-face, but they are nevertheless impersonal, superficial, transitory, segmental...(Wirth 1938)
For whatever freedoms open up at anonymity's face in our urban lives, there are also costs. The multiplication of these stranger interactions can produce a tough-to-permeate exterior. It shows up in various expressions of reserve; in New York, the most quotidian is the willfully blank New York sidewalk gaze:
The reserve, the indifference, and the blase (blah-zay) outlook which urbanites manifest in their relationships may thus be regarded as devices for immunizing themselves against the personal claims and expectations of others...
This digression into the myth of urban loneliness is just to suggest that the appearance of Senior's piece--at the dark season's onset two years ago--in my estimate did a particularly effective job at articulating right on time what winter does to jeopardize the fleeting comforts of all of us alone together. They are scarce during the cold, short, dark winter days we spend concealed in coats and behind doors, but because they are otherwise ubiquitous, we can let them--and ourselves slip into a seasonal narrowed gaze, fixated on fast as possible passage between subway and apartment door or office. But our loneliness from being tightly (efficiently!) tucked in with strangers is a phenomenon with strong individual and aggregate social effects--not the least of which is loss of the opportunity to share the iconic gifts of daily life here: views of our bridges, skyscrapers, blossoming trees, waterfronts. Senior's piece wasn't by an means a loud PSA about the risks of Seasonal Affect Disorder. But it was timely to suss out some of the structural features of aloneness together, including those that can set in at winter's onset.
The 'Best of...' mayor article was published just after Mayor Bloomberg recovered from the firestorm he withstood following last month's doozy of a blizzard. His approval ratings dipped lower than they've ever been--37% according to a NY1 Marist poll conducted in the first week of January. So of course it was a perfect time to give authoritative city students the microphone, to magnify the catastrophe-provoked verdict onto the Mayor's performance more generally. Especially in a Mayor's final term, we are eager to pin controversy on our Mayors; usually prideful for our resilience, at these moments we just can't wait to see ourselves as victims of their wrongdoing.
And this really is the crowning genius of the 'Best of...' genre: it speaks loudly of the simplicity we crave. We are a City of Superlatives, and our tireless 'Best of...' rankings relieve the tension of blur and confusion arising from the day-to-day here in the world's capital:
'Best of...' is so comfortingly dogmatic. Don't we all greet as an oasis the opportunity to weigh in on at least a few things with merciless, unwavering rejection or profligate adoration? We have to bite our tongues and tolerate the bat-shit crazy evangelist lady on the subway, the obligatory, stifling work 'social' events, and the kid learning guitar in the apartment above us--if we lose our cool, the whole compact of alone together can spin out to pandemonium. So when it comes to questions of pizza, ice cream, or mayors, we like our chops, put up our dukes.I love this about New Yorkers--I think it deepens our staying.
