When I read accounts of the heaving masses of early New York, I’m sometimes surprised the island didn’t just give up and sink back down into the Atlantic Ocean. The steady stream of people who flock to the city for its opportunities brings a constant renewal of culture, intellect, and skill. The immigrant experience that is more of a history in rural and suburban parts of the country –“when your great-grandfather came over from Ireland with $10 in his pocket…” –is a daily reality in New York. The city’s ability to accept immigrants and incorporate their unique offerings revitalizes the city and fosters innovations that keep New York a city of global importance. Some even go so far as to say that these newcomers represent the true New York.
NYC could not function without its trade culture. On the way to class today, I drank a cup of coffee made with beans imported from Columbia. In a home in colonial New York, tea was made with leaves imported from India. Like any city, New York imports that which it cannot efficiently produce itself (which at this point, is nearly everything). The act of importing has for several centuries fostered a vibrant diffusion in the ports of the city. The city’s long history of immigration has facilitated a tradition of the importing of human capital.
Considering New York in the physical sense brings to mind famous buildings, the waterfront, Central Park. The subway system runs beneath the surface of lower Manhattan, shaking the foundations of less-than-perfectly constructed apartment buildings. As fits any destination landmark, it has a gift shop. The MTA Transit Museum gift shop sells any conceivable souvenir item (yes, even socks) with subway letters plastered all over it. Beyond the fact that the system stuffs New Yorkers and tourists alike into a tiny car like sardines in a can, the very construction of the system was quintessentially New York. Drawing upon the masses of immigrant labor, the team behind the construction of the subway system benefitted from the skills of Italian artisans. Much of New York’s success can be attributed to immigrant contributions.
This constant import of new skill sets has facilitated a long history of reinvention. Last night at dinner, President Sexton talked about another import-related success story—The Courant Institute. Globally renowned for its achievements in applied mathematics, the Institute became exceedingly strong at a time when NYU wasn’t the top-ranking university it is today. The namesake of the school, Richard Courant, was a German Jew who was forced to leave his homeland. Other German Jews who had to leave Germany in the years leading up to WWII were brought onboard, and before long the University was in possession of a world-class mathematics faculty. In a fittingly New York fashion, NYU can attribute this success to the input of newcomers.
One of the writers who argued that "newcomers represent the true New York" was E. B. White. In his classic 1949 essay Here is New York, White wrote:
ReplyDeleteThere are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter-the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last-the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.
I'm a born and bred New Yorker, but I don't think I really became fascinated with the city until I returned to it live in it 1997, having spent most of the previous 18 years living in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Berkeley, California; and New Haven, Connecticut.