“Hey, I’m Walking Here!”

Observing the diminishing multiplicity of the New York City crowd

He strode out in front of me at the cross street of 8th and Broadway. Moving to an unheard rhythm in his headphones, his walk was a performance dictated by the beat. He dissected the oncoming crowd with a supple, muscular ease. His loose tank top and cut off jeans partially revealed the taut physique of a dancer. I watched the faces of those approaching him, their gaze drawn by his presence and cool rolling gait. Some regarded him with admiration, others with apprehension. All gave him a wide birth, not that he cared to notice. At 10th Street he passed by a series of vertical scaffolding poles, each of which he felt the compulsion to slap twice, first on the facing and then on the reverse side. He did so directly on the beat, endeavouring not to break stride. If he failed to make contact, he would pause and repeat the action, bound by a law that prevented him from moving forwards until skin and metal had touched twice. Continuing northwards, this law applied to each and every scaffolding pole that he encountered. At 13th and Broadway, a momentary performance space opened as all traffic halted at the lights. Seizing this fleeting opportunity, he stepped out into the street and began to dance at the centre of the intersection, his arms rippling in fluid wing like motions. As the lights changed, he disappeared westwards behind a blaze of yellow cabs.
+++++I had just begun to draft a thesis on the New York literary flâneur and was a newcomer to the city. I’d been tailing this man for a number of blocks, and I quickly recognised that he was an embodiment of all that I first expected from New York street life: threat, exhibitionism, exoticism and perhaps just a little madness. The city had not let me down. I was born and raised in England, but this had not denied me an albeit ersatz Manhattan street education. 1970s and 80s television bent back the skyscrapers to reveal a Manhattan crowd capable of harbouring all manner of deviant personalities. I was both terrified and mesmerised by the unfamiliar on screen street life that I witnessed; here was a city that wailed, hissed, honked and belched steam like no other. So began my obsession with New York City. During my teenage years, I dressed like Serpico and walked the streets of Newcastle upon Tyne with the Velvet Underground as my soundtrack. Still, little could prepare me for my first real immersion in the New York crowd.
+++++Europeans observing the New York crowd were always startled by its difference. In American Notes, Charles Dickens, compared the new world metropolis to London, stating: “there is one quarter, commonly called the Five Points, which, in respect of filth and wretchedness, may be safely backed against Seven Dials, or any other part of famed St. Giles’s”. Dickens understood London; he was yet to understand Manhattan’s “many-coloured crowd,” referring to both the array of “rainbow silks and satins” worn by female strollers and the multitude of ethnicities which mingled on the streets. New York appeared to offer everything in greater abundance, including squalor. Still, Dickens struggled to read a crowd which was alien to him. Agatha Christie commented, “it is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story,” drawing attention to the city’s then infamous crime rate, but also suggesting that visitors must too indulge in a little detective work if they are to unlock the city’s mystery. Whereas, French theorist Jean Baudrillard stated: “such is the whirl of the city, so great its centrifugal force, that it would take superhuman strength to envisage living as a couple and sharing someone else’s life in New York. Only tribes, gangs, Mafia families, secret societies, and perverse communities can survive, not couples.”
+++++New York City street life is met rarely with indifference; such is its ‘otherness’ to the European eye. Dutch architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas is correct; Manhattan is and always has been a “counter-Paris, an anti-London”. To the newcomer from Europe, the crowd is at first unreadable, dizzying and disorienting – and why should it prove otherwise? In Midtown, pedestrians scurry for space at the depths of canyon like streets, their faces discoloured by the aggressive illuminations. This cinched-in street life is unfamiliar to those at home in an Old World city. Manhattan’s radical topography dictates a pace and atmosphere which is both exotic and claustrophobic. The closer proximity of bodies triggers a dual sense of arousal and paranoia.
+++++The frisson of fear and outsidership whilst walking in New York City is well documented by European writers. Initially, many could not see beyond the perceived threat within the crowd or even actively sought out the city’s minatory spaces. Dickens, for example, took up a position in the urban field reminiscent to that of the classic nineteenth century Parisian flâneur, as he observed the New World equivalent of the ragpicker in the Five Points. Baudrillard too drew upon his sense of estrangement borne out of being a French citizen in the twentieth century American metropolis to critique what he saw as an intensely paced combative society held together by brute force and criminality. The words of these writers accompanied me on my first research trip to New York. Flânerie is essentially a solitary practice, yet whilst I walked the streets alone, it was as though their disembodied presence had joined the enterprise. Dickens asked his reader: “Shall we sit down in an upper floor of the Carlton House Hotel, and when we are tired of looking down upon the life below, sally forth arm-in-arm, and mingle with the stream?” Although the city had aged over one hundred and fifty years since Dickens laid eyes upon it, from my tower block hotel room I felt the same lure of the crowd.
+++++Manhattan is a theatre-in-the-round. The audience stare downwards to a centre point of activity. By descending and stepping onto the street, each pedestrian moves from the auditorium to the stage and becomes part of an elaborate and inexhaustible cast. Few visitors to the city will linger in the audience for long. For myself, this became a major bind. It was my intention to visit the city in order to access The Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and archives at Fales Library. No sooner had I sat down to study than my mind wandered to the parade of pedestrians strolling by. I was missing part of the performance. Needless to say, little written work was completed on that particular trip. I wandered at every given opportunity – even at 4am, with coffee in hand, trying to out walk my jetlag. One day, I decided to walk the entire length of Manhattan Island, beginning at Battery Park and following the diagonal sash of Broadway northwards to Inwood, until I reached the Harlem River Ship Canal. It was my vague aim to watch the stage picture change as I moved between neighbourhoods.
+++++Manhanttan’s neighbourhoods are determined not only by their distinct characters, but by the manner in which they define the identity of those who inhabit their streets. A walker can shift from insider to outsider within the distance of a block. Acceptance or rejection depends upon to what degree the individual traversing the neighbourhood complies with the surrounding crowd. In the five or so hours I spent on Broadway, I pushed past Armani suited hoards in the Financial District, lumberjack shirt and jeans hipsters in the Village and camera toting tourists in Midtown. Gangs of co-eds at Columbia University gave way to gangs of corner boys in West Harlem, who in turn gave way to Ecuadorian, Mexican and Dominican families in Washington Heights and Inwood. It was as though each group of cast members were held in place by a network of invisible partitions.
+++++The writers all followed me, of course. Dickens was escorted by two police officers when visiting the Five Points, and he scolded me for not doing the same before entering Washington Heights, the city’s infamous crime capital. Baudrillard, who once commented on the “sexual stimulation produced by the crowding together of so many races” in Manhattan, caught my distasteful glances as he eyed each passerby lasciviously. Resident New York flâneurs joined the parade of Broadway strollers. Walt Whitman appealed to Baudrillard’s urges, selecting one body from the crowd and declaring: “you give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass.” Allen Ginsberg spoke to Dickens’s wariness of the crowd, “…these strangers mean strange business…Have they knives? Om Ah Hum – have they sharp metal wood to shove in eye ear ass?” At Times Square, Frank O’Hara reminded me how “neon in daylight is a / great pleasure” as I edged my way through the lunch hour crowd. Everywhere I looked I saw fragments of literature. As I neared Harlem, I thought of James Baldwin’s Another Country, and wondered if the uptown 1, 2 and 3 trains running beneath Broadway still protested the “proximity of white buttock to black knee” as they “rushed into the blackness with a phallic abandon”. I also thought of early twentieth century affluent white ‘slummers’ who made the uptown journey to indulge in the ‘exoticism’ of the ghetto, and the black Harlemites themselves, for whom the northward crossing of the racial divide was simply returning home.
+++++The walk began to connect disparate identities across time; not only New York’s wandering writers, but all of those who had inscribed the island with its history. I followed the path of Broadway, originally the Wickquasgeck Trail, dictated by the repeated footfall of the displaced Lenape tribe. The trail was worn deeper and wider when adopted as a trade path for Dutch settlers and was first paved under British rule in 1709. Its paving stones would be trodden by waves of hopeful immigrants, and later in its history, auditioning actors and expectant theatre audiences. As I passed through the section of Lower Broadway dubbed the ‘Canyon of Heroes’, I saw records of the city’s tickertape parades embedded into the sidewalk. Underfoot, granite strips commemorated America’s great achievers, from astronauts to World Series winners. For much of its existence Broadway was New York, and to walk its length was to read the city’s history from birth to the present day. Its path contradicted the rectilinear rationality of the grid, creating triangular shards such as the Flatiron Building, one of the oldest surviving skyscrapers in the city. Lower Broadway remains representative of a city in a constant state of becoming, with many of its oldest buildings having been demolished in the name of progress.
+++++The manner in which the city moves to excise that which is decaying or obsolete applies not only to its buildings. At 215th street I rode the subway downtown, re-merging at Times Square. At the entrance to the Warner Brothers store stood a large statue of Daffy Duck, parading as a 42nd Street hustler and hawking an array of watches from the lining of his jacket. It was hard not to think about New York’s unspoken history; a history which Mayor Giuliani’s ‘Quality of Life’ campaign sought to scrape from the sidewalks like discarded gum. Daffy was a monument to Times Square past and a specific form of street life banished from Midtown. Gone were the seedy cinemas and equally seedy cafeterias such as Bickfords, from which Beat icon Herbert Huncke would play the low life flâneur, watching the sidewalk parade of pimps, prostitutes, johns, fellow hustlers, dealers, rent boys and pederasts. By the time of my arrival, these unwanted characters had also been excised from the crowd. As a newcomer, I was partly relieved that Times Square did not bear the same threat for which it had become notorious in the 1970s and 80s. However, I was equally concerned as to whether the same strict system of inclusion and exclusion present in Midtown would ultimately spread throughout Manhattan affecting the multiplicity of the crowd.
+++++I returned to New York on a yearly basis, and spent each trip researching and strolling. I always made it my duty to escape the library and walk the length of the island. My route remained the same, but with each walk the city changed around me. Of course, I noticed that the odd derelict building had been prised from the landscape like a rotten tooth, and that many of the mom and pop convenience stores and cafes had given way to major chains. My main interest, however, was the crowd itself. The crowd populating the streets of each neighbourhood was changing. At first the change was almost imperceptible. Only a few cast members had strayed out of position – no cause for alarm. Perhaps I spotted an Armani suit in the Village, or a Villager in Washington Heights? Yet, as the years passed, those invisible divisions between neighbourhoods seemed to gradually dissolve. It became more and more difficult to define a neighbourhood by its street life.
+++++This was to be expected. The ongoing gentrification process was impacting all of Manhattan, particularly its marginal communities. In my initial naivety, I never questioned the authenticity of life in the Village, but in truth, the majority of the neighbourhood’s bohemian set had been evicted long before I ever arrived. Their replacements were high earners who could afford the ever increasing Greenwich Village rental costs and who courted the idea of playing at bohemians. Walking thorough Washington Heights was a different matter – here was a neighbourhood in conflict. The Dominican families that I witnessed during my earlier Broadway walks were now mingling with an invading upscale art set, which was buying up multiple apartments in brownstones and townhouses to create floor-throughs. There was a sense of inevitability that the Dominicans would be forced to the outer boroughs by the rising cost of real estate.
+++++Alongside gentrification, a heightened level of street surveillance following 9/11 also had a major impact on the nature of the New York crowd. Walking the streets months after the terrorist attack revealed a new sense of mutual care and respect which had before been lacking. Enforcing that respect was the presence of a police officer on almost every Midtown street corner. Manhattanites became more vigilant with regards to unusual behavior on the street, a level of vigilance extant today. Over the period of a few years, the dual processes of gentrification and surveillance plucked various forms of ‘otherness’ from the crowd. For the tourist, the taming of Manhattan’s mean streets was a positive move – almost all neighbourhoods could be safely explored as so called skid rows receded or disappeared. Yet, twenty first century Manhattan has still not solved its problem of destitution; it has merely strived to exclude the homeless from its crowds. In 1999, Mayor Giuliani told a local radio station, “Streets do not exist in civilized societies for the purpose of people sleeping there […] Bedrooms are for sleeping.” The paraphernalia of Giuliani’s ‘street sweep’ remains visible in Times Square, where flat surfaces once suitable for bedding down on are now covered with metal studs or spikes in order to make them as uncomfortable as possible. The city has been made unaffordable and uninhabitable to its poor and homeless populations.
+++++Manhattan risks becoming the equivalent of a west coast gated community accessible only to the wealthy, the implications of which are dire for its still vibrant street life. From Dickens to O’Hara, writers have celebrated the diversity of the New York crowd. The city has always compelled its residents and visitors alike to step onto the street and, to borrow from Baudelaire, “take a bath of multitude”. Processes of exclusion currently at play in the city coax the crowd ever closer to becoming one homogenous mass. The man who I witnessed dancing at the centre of the intersection held the power to reinvent the crossroads as a performance space, sending waves of fear and delight through nearby pedestrians. Those individuals able to create such a spectacle, or change the atmosphere of the street are becoming a rare sight – such is the city’s paranoia regarding all forms of ‘otherness’.
+++++I do not profess to know the city in the same manner as a resident New Yorker; yet, my critical position as an outsider helps me to recognise that with each yearly visit, the city has shed a skin. The great diversity that captivated artists and writers alike, and defined the character of street level Manhattan from its very beginnings is being sloughed. I’m not suggesting a return to the island’s darkest days, when it was unsafe to walk the streets. However, a distinction must be made between ‘otherness’ and threat. For the sake of security, those who fail to comply with the rigid expectations of an increasingly obedient society are swept away, regardless of whether they pose any true danger to the city. Throughout its history Manhattan has been home to those considered outsiders elsewhere in America, from communities of ethnic minorities, to all manner of eccentrics, artists, writers and musicians. In the decision to cast out all but the most wealthy or complicit, Manhattan risks losing not only the multiplicity of its street life, but its status as an epicentre for radical artistic, cultural, intellectual and societal renewal.
+++++I dread the day when I walk Broadway’s length and am unable to sense that unique change which comes from crossing a neighbourhood divide – or when the original name of each neighbourhood is condensed into a convenient acronym, to be forgotten along with the very residents that forged its identity – or when all ludic interaction with the street is forbidden – or perhaps when I myself cannot afford to pay my way through the city’s gilded gates. Until then, Dickens, O’Hara and the rest of you: meet me on Broadway and bring your walking shoes – we’re heading uptown.
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Darren Richard Carlaw is a British writer, editor and researcher. He studied at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he completed a PhD thesis examining the New York flâneur. His work has been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Journal of American Studies, Conserveries mémorielles and Fractured West. He is currently writing a monograph about walking in New York City.He is also the founder of StepAway Magazine, a new online literary magazine which will publish urban flash fiction and poetry with an emphasis on the walking narrative. Issue one of StepAway Magazine will be available on March 21st 2011.