Collected Essays

by Joan Didion

  In August 1990, Peter Franconeri pled guilty to a misdemeanor, the unlawful removal of a body, and was sentenced by Criminal Court judge Peter Benitez to seventy-five hours of community service. This was neither surprising nor much of a story (only twenty-three lines even in Newsday, on page twenty-nine of the city edition), and the case’s lenient resolution was for many people a kind of relief. The district attor­ney’s office had asked for “some incarceration”, the amount usually described as a “touch”, but no one wanted, it was said, to crucify the guy: Peter Franconeri was somebody who knew a lot of people, under­stood how to live in the city, who had for example not only the apartment on East 68th Street between Mad­ison and Park but a house in Southampton and who also understood that putting a body outside with the trash was nothing to get upside down about, if it was handled right. Such understandings may in fact have been the city’s true “ultimate shriek of alarm”, but it was not a shriek the city wanted to recognize.

  2

  Perhaps the most arresting collateral news to surface, during the first few days after the attack on the Central Park jogger, was that a significant number of New Yorkers apparently believed the city suffi­ciently well-ordered to incorporate Central Park into their evening fitness schedules. “Prudence” was de­fined, even after the attack, as “staying south of 90th Street”, or having “an awareness that you need to think about planning your routes”, or, in the case of one woman interviewed by the Times, deciding to quit her daytime job (she was a lawyer) because she was “tired of being stuck out there, running later and later at night”. “I don’t think there’s a runner who couldn’t describe the silky, gliding feeling you get running at night,” an editor of Runner’s World told the Times. “You see less of what’s around you and you become centered on your running.”

  The notion that Central Park at night might be a good place to “see less of what’s around you” was recent. There were two reasons why Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, when they devised their winning entry in the 1858 competition for a Central Park design, decided to sink the transverse roads below grade level. One reason, the most often cited, was aesthetic, a recognition on the part of the design­ers that the four crossings specified by the terms of the competition, at 65th, 79th, 85th, and 97th streets, would intersect the sweep of the landscape, be “at variance with those agreeable sentiments which we should wish the park to inspire”. The other reason, which appears to have been equally compelling, had to do with security. The problem with grade-level crossings, Olmsted and Vaux wrote in their “Green­sward” plan, would be this:

  The transverse roads will . . . have to be kept open, while the park proper will be use­less for any good purpose after dusk; for ex­perience has shown that even in London, with its admirable police arrangements, the public cannot be assured safe transit through large open spaces of ground after nightfall.

  These public thoroughfares will then require to be well-lighted at the sides, and, to restrain marauders pursued by the police from escaping into the obscurity of the park, strong fences or walls, six or eight feet high, will be necessary.

  The park, in other words, was seen from its concep­tion as intrinsically dangerous after dark, a place of “obscurity”, “useless for any good purpose”, a refuge only for “marauders”, The parks of Europe closed at nightfall, Olmsted noted in his 1882 pamphlet The Spoils of the Park: With a Few Leaves from the Deep-laden Note-books of “A Wholly Unpractical Man”, “but one sur­face road is kept open across Hyde Park, and the su­perintendent of the Metropolitan Police told me that a man’s chances of being garrotted or robbed were, be­cause of the facilities for concealment to be found in the Park, greater in passing at night along this road than anywhere else in London.”

  In the high pitch of the initial “jogger” coverage, suggesting as it did a city overtaken by animals, this pragmatic approach to urban living gave way to a more ideal construct, one in which New York either had once been or should be “safe”, and now, as in Governor Cuomo’s “none of us is safe”, was not. It was time, accordingly, to “take it back”, time to “say no”; time, as David Dinkins would put it during his campaign for the mayoralty in the summer of 1989, to “draw the line”. What the line was to be drawn against was “crime”, an abstract, a free-floating specter that could be dispelled by certain acts of personal affirma­tion, by the kind of moral rearmament that later fig­ured in Mayor Dinkins’s plan to revitalize the city by initiating weekly “Tuesday Night Out Against Crime” rallies.

  By going into the park at night, Tom Wicker wrote in the Times, the victim in this case had “affirmed the primacy of freedom over fear”. A week after the as­sault, Susan Chace suggested on the op-ed page of the Times that readers walk into the park at night and join hands. “A woman can’t run in the park at an offbeat time,” she wrote. “Accept it, you say. I can’t. It shouldn’t be like this in New York City, in 1989, in spring.” Ronnie Eldridge also suggested that readers walk into the park at night, but to light candles. “Who are we that we allow ourselves to be chased out of the most magnificent part of our city?” she asked, and also: “If we give up the park, what are we supposed to do: fall back to Columbus Avenue and plant grass?” This was interesting, suggesting as it did that the city’s not inconsiderable problems could be solved by the willingness of its citizens to hold or draw some line, to “say no”; in other words that a reliance on certain magical gestures could affect the city’s fate.

  The insistent sentimentalization of experience, which is to say the encouragement of such reliance, is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character and the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape pa­rades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, 8 million stories in the naked city; 8 million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcil­able.

  Central Park itself was such a “story”, an artificial pastoral in the nineteenth-century English romantic tradition, conceived, during a decade when the popu­lation of Manhattan would increase by S 8 percent, as a civic project that would allow the letting of contracts and the employment of voters on a scale rarely before undertaken in New York. Ten million cartloads of dirt would need to be shifted during the twenty years of its construction. Four to five million trees and shrubs would need to be planted, half a million cubic yards of topsoil imported, 114 miles of ceramic pipe laid.

  Nor need the completion of the park mean the end of the possibilities: in 1870, once William Marcy Tweed had revised the city charter and invented his Department of Public Parks, new roads could be built whenever jobs were needed. Trees could be dug up, and replanted. Crews could be set loose to prune, to clear, to hack at will. Frederick Law Olmsted, when he objected, could be overridden, and finally eased out. “A ‘delegation’ from a great political organization called on me by appointment,” Olmsted wrote in The Spoils of the Park, recalling the conditions under which he had worked:

  After introductions and handshakings, a cir­cle was formed, and a gentleman stepped be­fore me, and said, “We know how much pressed you must be . . . but at your con­venience our association would like to have you determine what share of your patronage we can expect, and make suitable arrange­ments for our using it. We will take the lib­erty to suggest, sir, that there could be no more convenient way than that you should send us our due quota of tickets, if you will please, sir, in this form, leaving us to fill in the name.” Here a packet of printed tickets was produced, from which I took one at random. It was a blank appointment and bore the sig­nature of Mr. Tweed.

  As superintendent of the Park, I once re­ceived in six days more than seven thousand letters of advice as to appointments, nearly
all from men in office. ... I have heard a candidate for a magisterial office in the city addressing from my doorsteps a crowd of such advice-bearers, telling them that I was bound to give them employment, and sug­gesting plainly, that, if I was slow about it, a rope round my neck might serve to lessen my reluctance to take good counsel. I have had a dozen men force their way into my house before I had risen from bed on a Sunday morning, and some break into my draw­ing room in their eagerness to deliver letters of advice.

  Central Park, then, for its underwriters if not for Olmsted, was about contracts and concrete and kick­backs, about pork, but the sentimentalization that worked to obscure the pork, the “story”, had to do with certain dramatic contrasts, or extremes, that were believed to characterize life in this as in no other city. These “contrasts”, which have since become the very spine of the New York narrative, appeared early on: Philip Hone, the mayor of New York in 1826 and 1827, spoke in 1843 of a city “overwhelmed with population, and where the two extremes of costly luxury in living, expensive establishments and improvident wastes are presented in daily and hourly contrast with squalid mixing and hapless destruction.” Given this narrative, Central Park could be and ultimately would be seen the way Olmsted himself saw it, as an essay in democracy, a social experiment meant to socialize a new immigrant population and to ameliorate the per­ilous separation of rich and poor. It was the duty and the interest of the city’s privileged class, Olmsted had suggested some years before he designed Central Park, to “get up parks, gardens, music, dancing schools, reunions which will be so attractive as to force into contact the good and the bad, the gentleman and the rowdy”.

  The notion that the interests of the “gentleman” and the “rowdy” might be at odds did not intrude: then as now, the preferred narrative worked to veil actual con­flict, to cloud the extent to which the condition of being rich was predicated upon the continued neediness of a working class; to confirm the responsible stewardship of “the gentleman” and to forestall the possibility of a self-conscious, or politicized, proletar­iat. Social and economic phenomena, in this narrative, were personalized. Politics were exclusively electoral. Problems were best addressed by the emergence and election of “leaders”, who could in turn inspire the individual citizen to “participate”, or “make a differ­ence”. “Will you help?” Mayor Dinkins asked New Yorkers, in a September 1990 address from St. Pat­rick’s Cathedral intended as a response to the “New York crime wave” stories then leading the news. “Do you care? Are you ready to become part of the solu­tion?”

  “Stay,” Governor Cuomo urged the same New Yorkers. “Believe. Participate. Don’t give up.” Man­hattan borough president Ruth Messinger, at the ded­ication of a school flagpole, mentioned the importance of “getting involved” and “participating”, or “pitching in to put the shine back on the Big Apple”. In a dis­cussion of the popular “New York” stories written between 1902 and 1910 by William Sidney Porter, or “O. Henry”, William R. Taylor of the State Univer­sity of New York at Stony Brook spoke of the way in which these stories, with their “focus on individuals’ plights”, their “absence of social or political implica­tions” and “ideological neutrality”, provided “a mirac­ulous form of social glue”:

  These sentimental accounts of relations be­tween classes in the city have a specific his­torical meaning: empathy without political compassion. They reduce the scale of human suffering to what atomized individuals en­dure as their plucky, sad lives were re­counted week after week for almost a decade . . . their sentimental reading of oppression, class differences, human suffering, and af­fection helped create a new language for in­terpreting the city’s complex society, a language that began to replace the thread­bare moralism that New Yorkers inherited from 19th-century readings of the city. This language localized suffering in particular moments and confined it to particular occa­sions; it smoothed over differences because it could be read almost the same way from either end of the social scale.

  Stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on in­nocent victims, offering as they do a similarly senti­mental reading of class differences and human suffering, a reading that promises both resolution and retribution, have long performed as the city’s endor­phins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems. What is singular about New York, and re­mains virtually incomprehensible to people who live in less rigidly organized parts of the country, is the minimal level of comfort and opportunity its citizens have come to accept. The romantic capitalist pursuit of privacy and security and individual freedom, so taken for granted nationally, plays, locally, not much role. A city where virtually every impulse has been to stifle rather than to encourage normal competition, New York works, when it does work, not on a market economy but on little deals, payoffs, accommoda­tions, baksheesh, arrangements that circumvent the di­rect exchange of goods and services and prevent what would be, in a competitive economy, the normal as­cendance of the superior product.

  There were in the five boroughs in 1990 only 581 supermarkets (a supermarket, as defined by the trade magazine Progressive Grocer, is a market that does an annual volume of $2 million), or, assuming a popula­tion of 8 million, one supermarket for every 13,769 citizens. Groceries, costing more than they should be­cause of this absence of competition and also because of the proliferation of payoffs required to ensure this absence of competition (produce, we have come to understand, belongs to the Gambinos, and fish to the Lucheses and the Genoveses, and a piece of the con­struction of the market to each of the above, but keep­ing the door open belongs finally to the inspector here, the inspector there), are carried home or delivered, as if in Jakarta, by pushcart.

  It has historically taken, in New York as if in Mex­ico City, ten years to process and specify and bid and contract and construct a new school; twenty or thirty years to build or, in the cases of Bruckner Boulevard and the West Side Highway, to not quite build a highway. A recent public scandal revealed that a batch of city-ordered Pap smears had gone unread for more than a year (in the developed world the Pap smear, a test for cervical cancer, is commonly read within a few days); what did not become a public scandal, what is still accepted as the way things are, is that even Pap smears ordered by Park Avenue gynecologists can go unread for several weeks.

  Such resemblances to cities of the third world are in no way casual, or based on the “color” of a polyglot population: these are all cities arranged primarily not to improve the lives of their citizens but to be labor-intensive, to accommodate, ideally at the subsistence level, since it is at the subsistence level that the work force is most apt to be captive and loyalty assured, a third-world population. In some ways New York’s very attractiveness, its promises of opportunity and improved wages, its commitments as a city in the developed world, were what seemed destined to render it ultimately unworkable. Where the vitality of such cities in the less developed world had depended on their ability to guarantee low-cost labor and an ab­sence of regulation, New York had historically de­pended instead on the constant welling up of new businesses, of new employers to replace those phased out, like the New York garment manufacturers who found it cheaper to make their clothes in Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur or Taipei, by rising local costs.

  It had been the old pattern of New York, supported by an expanding national economy, to lose one kind of business and gain another. It was the more recent error of New York to misconstrue this history of turn­over as an indestructible resource, there to be taxed at will, there to be regulated whenever a dollar could be seen in doing so, there for the taking. By 1977, New York had lost some 600,000 jobs, most of them in manufacturing and in the kinds of small businesses that could no longer maintain their narrow profit mar­gins inside the city. During the “recovery” years, from 1977 until 1988, most of these jobs were indeed replaced, but in a potentially perilous way: of the 500,000 new jobs created, most were in the area most vulnerab
le to a downturn, that of financial and busi­ness services, and many of the rest in an area not only equally vulnerable to bad times but dispiriting to the city even in good, that of tourist and restaurant ser­vices.

  The demonstration that many kinds of businesses were finding New York expendable had failed to prompt real efforts to make the city more competitive. Taxes grew still more punitive, regulation more By­zantine. Forty-nine thousand new jobs were created in New York’s city agencies between 1983 and 1990, even as the services provided by those agencies were widely perceived to decline. Attempts at “reform” typically tended to create more jobs: in 1988, in re­sponse to the length of time it was taking to build or repair a school, a new agency, the School Construc­tion Authority, was formed. A New York City school, it was said, would now take only five years to build. The head of the School Construction Authority was to receive $145,000 a year and each of the three vice presidents $110,000 a year. An executive gym, with Nautilus equipment, was contemplated for the top floor of the agency’s new headquarters at the In­ternational Design Center in Long Island City. Two years into this reform, the backlog on repairs to exist­ing schools stood at 33,000 outstanding requests. “To relieve the charity of friends of the support of a half-blind and half-witted man by employing him at the public expense as an inspector of cement may not be practical with reference to the permanent firmness of a wall,” Olmsted noted after his Central Park experi­ence, “while it is perfectly so with reference to the triumph of sound doctrine at an election.”

  In fact the highest per capita taxes of any city in the United States (and, as anyone running a small busi­ness knows, the widest variety of taxes) provide, in New York, unless the citizen is prepared to cut a side deal here and there, only the continuing multiplica­tion of regulations designed to benefit the contractors and agencies and unions with whom the regulators have cut their own deals. A kitchen appliance ac­cepted throughout the rest of the United States as a basic postwar amenity, the in-sink garbage disposal unit, is for example illegal in New York. Disposals, a city employee advised me, not only encourage rats, and “bacteria”, presumably in a way that bags of gar­bage sitting on the sidewalk do not (“Because it is,” I was told when I asked how this could be), but also encourage people “to put their babies down them”.