Ted Conover
Page 30
The speaker after me told the kind of story that illustrated why crime was on people’s minds. He was the editor of FBRoad, a glossy car magazine, and he sported a white silk scarf around his neck. While on his way back from Tibet recently, he said, he had stopped for a meal in Chengdu and his jeep was stolen by two Tibetans. (There were knowing murmurs in the audience; Tibetans seemed to have a criminal reputation among Han Chinese.) He wondered whether to call his insurance company or the police. The police, he concluded. Then he called the leader of the Chengdu jeep club. He in turn summoned all of the club’s members via radio, describing the stolen car and the presumed perpetrators. “They sent a few groups of young strong men with proper ‘weapons’ to stand guard at different highway junctions.”
The car was located and stopped within a few minutes. The Tibetans abandoned it and fled. More than thirty jeeps soon converged on the spot where the stolen jeep had been intercepted. Then the leader and the editor went to the police to file a report. “You’re more efficient than we are!” said the police. Local papers gave the incident front-page headlines.
In another story, he told of breaking down near Xinjiang and needing a part he didn’t have. Parts were scarce on the frontier, but a phone call to an industry friend in Beijing led to an introduction to a parts distributor in Xinjiang, who soon supplied what the editor needed. The moral in both cases was that informal networks of car fans could produce quick results in times of need. If the government lent its support to drivers’ needs, imagine how similar benefits might accrue to those who weren’t similarly “plugged in.”
It was a different take on government intervention than I was used to. My translator explained that having a government imprimatur could help a business in many ways. But I knew that not everyone felt the same about close involvement with the government.
In Beijing, I had interviewed another big player in this world, Chen Ming, who helped run what was apparently the biggest self-driving organization in China, the auto club arm of traffic radio FM 103.9.-His forty or so employees occupied a floor and a half of a new office building near downtown. By contrast with Zhao, who—by Zhu’s reckoning and others’, might have lost money on the Hubei trip—Chen Ming had high volume and a rapidly growing business. Members paid $27 a year and received benefits that included group insurance rates, end-of-the-year gasoline rebates, “auto rescue” within Beijing’s 5th Ring Road, and free rental cars if a repair took more than three days.
Linking an auto club to a traffic radio station seemed inspired. Chen got his start in the business as Zhao’s protégé: he was assistant manager of Beijing Target Auto Club. Chen said he grew to believe that Zhao’s approach, his eagerness to stay involved with the government, was outdated, and perhaps he’s right.
I didn’t mention Chen Ming to Zhao. Both might succeed, for all I know. Certainly Zhao is ambitious enough; what he wanted to do the following summer, he told me as we drove home from the summit, was lead a trip of one hundred Americans from Beijing to Lhasa. This route, as many had confirmed to me, is one of the world’s most spectacular drives. What should he do, he asked, to realize this goal?
I ticked off the two obstacles that were obvious to me: (1) the impression among many Americans that China had invaded Tibet (most Chinese believe they had liberated it), and that they might therefore feel awkward going with a Chinese company, and (2) the question of who would drive the cars, if the Americans themselves weren’t allowed to. Zhao was undaunted. A simple education campaign could solve the first problem, he believed. Did I know the Tibetans used to practice slavery? As for the second problem, laws would eventually be reformed to allow foreigners to drive themselves, Zhao said, but until they were, he could easily provide every carful of Americans with a Chinese driver.
I didn’t think this plan had legs, but once again, Zhao was undaunted. In order to develop contacts and learn more about Americans as a potential market, he told me at the end of our drive back to Beijing, he had organized for adventuresome Chinese a self-driving trip around the American West! They’d see San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas before crossing the country to the East Coast. His group already had their visas, and he hoped I’d consider joining them to chronicle this maiden voyage of Chinese drivers to the United States.
I regretted having other commitments that would keep me away, I said. And I meant it. The rise of Chinese-as-tourists was a big story, but even more, it was an enjoyable story: Zhao’s cohorts were likely to be successful middle-aged men, as thrilled as kids by their new adventure. If they were like Zhu, they were going to have a great time.
An ebullient atmosphere surrounds the automobile in China. You can see the excitement continuing, even growing, as more people buy cars. It is reminiscent of a fading romance in American life, this crush on the automobile, the thrill of car ownership, and to witness it is to feel both nostalgia and the excitement of the new at the same time. Lord only knows where it all could be headed—in terms of congestion and pollution, in terms of competition for increasingly scarce and expensive fuel, it is not hard to predict a slow-motion, multi-car pileup in China’s future. But it felt unfair to raise those issues in the presence of Zhao and the rest. They were out to have fun, the kind we’ve already had. Who are we to say they can’t?
GROWING BROADWAY
THE WORLD HAS ONLY A HANDFUL of really famous streets. The most famous is probably the Champs-Élysées. From there you might think of London’s Downing and perhaps Oxford Streets, Barcelona’s Ramblas, Tokyo’s Ginza, Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma, possibly Berlin’s Ku-Damm (Kurfürstendamm), Jerusalem’s King David Street, Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, and several in the American West: The Strip in Las Vegas; Sunset, Wilshire, and Hollywood Boulevards and Mulholland and Rodeo Drives in Los Angeles; and San Francisco’s Embarcadero and Lombard Street. Possibly Boston’s Memorial Drive or Commonwealth Avenue.
Oh, and the one near me: Broadway.
Broadway is famously in Manhattan, but it continues north through the Bronx and traverses Yonkers in Westchester County before finally getting a new name north of Tarrytown: Albany Post Road. Under that alias and others, including U.S. Highway 9, it continues up the Hudson River to Albany and from there nearly to the Canadian border—about 330 miles. For many years, though, the street at the southern tip of Manhattan that became Broadway was quite short. The story of Broadway’s birth and growth links to my own New York story.
In 1625, settlers organized by the Dutch West India Company began building Fort Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan. They were not the first people on the island: Wickquasgeck Indians, one of the Lenape (Delaware) tribes, had seasonal camps and trails that they used for hunting and, soon, for selling beaver pelts to the Dutch. The main thoroughfare of New Amsterdam—the future Broadway—was called Heere Straat, or High Street, and may have followed the route of an Indian path. It began at a wide clearing at the Dutch fort, tapering to a street still wider than present-day Broadway that extended several blocks north. It ended at the town’s limit, which was a twelve-foot-high earth-and-wood fence fortified by palisades—sharpened pikes of wood—all the way across the lower island. This protective boundary was eventually the path of Wall Street. The Dutch were worried about aggression from the English, who had already settled Boston, Philadelphia, and Virginia, and from Native Americans. (In 1632, a different Lenape tribe wiped out a colony of thirty-two Dutch settlers in Delaware.) At Heere Straat there was a gate through the wall that allowed passage to the wilds farther north.
Among the founders of New Amsterdam were my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Wolphert Gerritsen Van Kouwenhoven; his wife, Aelte Jans; and their sons Gerret, Jacob, and Pieter. (Two other sons had died.) Wolphert worked as a farmer and Aelte as a fur trader. Heere Straat was tiny New Amsterdam’s principal street, and one imagines they spent a lot of time on it.
When the British took over New Amsterdam in 1664, Heere Straat was renamed Broadway. The British tore
down the stockade along Wall Street, leaving Broadway (and the former Dutch settlement) free to grow. By the mid-eighteenth century, hills on it just north of Maiden Lane had been flattened, shade trees planted along its sides, and Broadway reached the Commons (present-day City Hall Park). On July 9, 1776, following a public reading of the Declaration of Independence ordered by George Washington, who listened to it while seated upon his horse, “a mob spilled down Broadway to Bowling Green and pulled to earth the statue of George III.” Washington was elected president in 1789 and moved into “the finest private building in town, the four-story McComb House” at 39 Broadway. Lower Broadway and the area west of it was the tony place to live. (To the east was the notorious slum Five Points.)
As New York grew, so did Broadway. By 1800, straight, lined with poplars, and paved with cobblestones, it reached Astor Place (in the present-day East Village, a block from my office), where it ended at a fence marking the southern boundary of a farm. An 1811 commission charged with rationalizing the growing city’s streets into a grid recommended straightening Broadway so that it would conform with everything else—but it failed. By 1815, Broadway was two miles long and had veered northwest at 10th Street—so as not to destroy an influential farmer’s cherished tree, according to legend. More likely, wrote journalist and historian David W. Dunlap, the bend was engineered to make “for a smoother and more direct junction with the angle of the Bloomingdale Road at 16th Street.” The Bloomingdale Road, which didn’t conform to the grid either, dated from 1703 and led to a country area that is now the Upper West Side. It was a natural extension of Broadway; the two routes would eventually become one. But not quite yet. By 1840, when Manhattan’s population stood at 312,710, Broadway had reached 14th Street. “How this city marches northward!” exulted one citizen in his journal.
Better transportation helped to make that possible. Horses, carts, and horse-drawn carriages (like the cabriolet), both personal and for hire, predominated in the early 1800s. They were joined by stagecoaches that could carry four to six passengers—you could catch one heading downtown at Broadway and Houston. More “mass” were the omnibus coaches that began to appear around 1829: boatlike wagons with benches, drawn by two or four horses. The slaves who had helped build New York, starting with New Amsterdam, were still excluded—public transport was segregated. “When a black man hailed one of the new omnibuses going up Broadway, the driver warded him off with a whip, convulsing white bystanders with laughter.”
For a century starting in the early 1700s, Broadway had been popular for promenading; “young men and women arose at five o’clock in the morning to stroll the thoroughfare,” wrote historian Edward Robb Ellis. Charles Dickens, visiting in 1842, remarked on the “lively whirl of carriages” and well-dressed people shopping and window-shopping at Broadway’s high-end stores—the stretch from Canal Street to Houston Street was especially booming. Wrote Dickens, “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?” In the late-afternoon promenade hour, New York Tribune reporter George Foster observed in 1849, the street became “a perfect Mississippi, with a double current up and down of bourgeois ladies and gentlemen” who were checking out the goods in the windows of upscale shops—and each other. This kind of commentary, the impressions and speculations of gentlemen sauntering the streets, had grown into an art form in Europe in the 1820s, and Americans could benefit. The flâneur (or “stroller”) perspective, as elaborated by Baudelaire, promoted the idea of city-watching and made bewildering, stressful street life something to appreciate, even celebrate. Looking for material for his newspaper, The New York Aurora, in 1842, Walt Whitman donned top hat and frock coat and sauntered down Broadway every day. Observing from the sidewalk or from a mobbed omnibus, he extolled the “continued, ceaseless, devilish provoking, delicious, glorious jam!”
Of course one person’s glorious jam is another’s hell on earth. Dickens had noted (and made light of) the stray pigs that found the thoroughfare intriguing. The excrement of the various livestock that used Broadway, particularly horses (horse-drawn streetcars first appeared in 1832), was just one aspect of unpleasantness. A visiting Englishman (obviously no flâneur) complained about the “driving, jostling, and elbowing” on Broadway and Wall Street. “Add to this the crashing noises of rapid omnibuses, flying in all directions, and carts (for even they are driven as fast as coaches are with us), and we have a jumble of sights and sounds easy to understand but hard to describe. The most crowded parts of London can scarce be compared with it.”
Shops and department stores began to be lit with gas at night, adding to the glamour of Broadway. Electric bulbs arrived in the late 1880s. Electrical light was soon used in advertising; the huge illuminated signs (one at Madison Square was fifty by eighty feet and used 15,000 bulbs) gave rise to the moniker “The Great White Way” for the stretch of Broadway between 23rd and 34th Streets.
Theaters, many of them featuring burlesque, used the lights to advantage, and extended the entertainment zone of Broadway up to 42nd Street, which at the time was still considered uptown. Beyond was “the country,” though already it had many residents, some of them wealthy farmers with large estates. A stage line up woodsy Bloomingdale Road toward an area called Bloemendaal (after a town in Holland’s tulip-growing region) had been running since 1819. As the city and “plebeian” commercial establishments grew, wrote Putnam’s magazine in 1853, New York’s wealthiest “fled by dignified degrees up Broadway.” By then it was continuous with Bloomingdale Road, which was widened and straightened in the late 1860s, after which (following a period when it was called the Boulevard) it was renamed Broadway in 1899, and the two became one.
And still Broadway grew. In 1892, Columbia College began a move from the east side to the seventeen-acre estate of the former Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum (which relocated to White Plains) between West 114th and 116th Streets. Despite concerns among some that the area was “about as remote and inaccessible as Mt. Kisco,” Barnard College and Teachers College soon followed, and quickly the area felt more central. By 1901 the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company had begun tearing up Broadway along its entire length in order to build the country’s first large-scale subway. In late 1904 the IRT began service, running between City Hall and 145th Street in Harlem. By 1908 the “Broadway line” had extended all the way to its current terminus in the Bronx, at West 242nd Street/Van Cortlandt Park, near where I live.
My first visit to New York City was for Thanksgiving dinner with a college friend my freshman year. I took the bus from Massachusetts down to the Port Authority terminal on Eighth Avenue. I looked as though I had just arrived from Colorado, which I nearly had: I carried a frame backpack and wore a down parka and heavy hiking boots. My classmate, Rob Vogel, and I walked along 42nd Street to Times Square to catch the Broadway subway to his parents’ apartment uptown.
This was 1976, and Times Square was deep into its decline. I liked the aroma of roasted nuts from vendors’ carts, but was a bit overwhelmed by everything else: the flashing signs, the guys selling drugs, the touts beckoning us into peep shows, the honking, the crowds.
A four-foot length of galvanized pipe crashed to the sidewalk just beside me as we approached the subway entrance off Broadway at 41st Street; it bounced and rolled off into the gutter. Rob and I looked up: Had it fallen off a scaffold? Had it been thrown? I thought to myself: This is why my ancestors got the hell out of here.
Fifteen years later, for reasons involving a girlfriend named Margot, my work as a writer, and perhaps a strain of counterphobia in my personality, I became a resident of Brooklyn. One cold weekend in January, my friend Seth came to town and, to get some fresh air, we decided to walk the length of Manhattan. Broadway seemed the logical route. On a sunny Sunday morning, we rode the subway to the financial district downtown. Its off-grid, short streets would have been more congenial to pedestrians 150 or 200 years earlier;
on this frigid morning, the high-rise office buildings channeled the wind and blocked the sun. The most imposing of these, of course, were the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. They stood a block west of Broadway between Liberty and Vesey streets, just about ten minutes into our fourteen-mile walk.
Around City Hall Park, the open space and trees provided a respite from all the giant buildings, as well as a good view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Up next was Chinatown, less crowded than usual given the weekend, then across Canal Street into SoHo, less crowded yet, going through a transition to the upscale, and also fun to walk through, with its cobblestone streets and cast-iron building facades.
There was a hint of Greenwich Village across Houston, but the next real attraction was Union Square Park, the only thing in the city that Broadway really has to bend to get around. We crossed the bottom corner of Madison Square Park at 23rd Street (okay, it bends a little bit there, too) and caught sight of the Empire State Building on our right as we entered the low 30s.
Times Square had come up a lot since that first visit of mine in 1976 but still gave me a headache, even on a Sunday. We bought hot dogs from a vendor at Columbus Circle and ate them while sitting on the granite steps of the monument to Columbus there; we were honoring a previous rendezvous we’d had one spring break, when we met at noon in Barcelona under the statue of Columbus at the end of the Ramblas. Where Barcelona offers a view of the sea from Columbus, however, New York offered a view of the ugly Coliseum exhibition center, a Robert Moses project that no longer exists.