LITTLE OLD NEW YORK
New York Panorama : A Comprehensive View of the Metro- polis. Prepared by the Federal Writer's Project and presented in a Series of Articles by Various Hands. With an introductory chapter by Susan Ertz. (Constable. 128. 6d.)
The Rise of New York Port. 181.5-1860. By Robert Green- haigh Albion. (Scribner's. ifs.)
THE Federal Writer's Project was one of the boldest experi- ments in social salvage undertaken by the New Deal ; it was patronage on a colossal scale, and one admirable result has been The series of Federal Guides which have, at last, given the United States something to rival Baedeker—and as American as Karl is German. But faced with the task of compressing New York into one volume, the anonymous federal writers have lost courage. So this "Panorama " is not a guide-book, but a lively and, in many ways, learned survey of the life of New York from subways to swing. Geology, economics, ethnology, art are all called on to explain and to illustrate the life of the city which, thanks to the movies, is better known to the world, visually at least, than any of its rivals from Babylon to London have ever been.
The attempt at a conspectus was a bold one, but it deserved and has achieved success. There is only one serious omission in the editing, though that is serious enough ; there is no map. End-papers of a very general diagrammatic type are not enough, for if it is easy to keep the topography of Manhattan Island in one's head, it is harder to remember from what part of the hinterland of Brooklyn came the latest Norwegian film star. And outside the city limits are the suburbs which provide the female audiences for the matinees and the evening audiences at home for lectures. A general map covering the territory between Princeton and Westport, as well as a more detailed map of the five boroughs, would have been extremely useful. There are, as is inevitable in a long book by different hands, some minor slips. It is not very important that Bakunin, who died in 1874, is declared to have been impressed by the strikes of 1877. An ambiguity in language may mislead readers into thinking that burning negroes alive was a regular, perhaps an annual event.
With various hands at work, there are natural differences of interpretation and of language. The million Russians with whim Miss Ertz credits the city elsewhere appear more correctly as Jews, and the criticisms of the street plan that run from Frederick Law Olmsted to Mr. Lewis Mumford are scattered through various sections. One criticism made by G. K. Chesterton is, however, ignored, the difficulty of remembering a numerical address, such as 129 E 30th Street, compared with an address in the older part of the city, say, 12 Gansevoort Street. But all in all, this is a good job. It makes a beginning in explaining New York to visitors, and, even more necessary, to New Yorkers.
The great city is many things, but it is, above all, a harbour and a port. How it came to be the greatest port in the world is made plain in Professor Albion's most learned, acute and readable book which can be commended to all serious students. It is because of its greatness as a port that New York can house the Planetarium and Madison Square Garden ; provide funds and students for Columbia University, to teach all subjects from " advanced calculus to plain cook- ing " ; make the milieu for the large audiences at Roseland, and the small audiences at the Onyx ; be the dream city of millions for whom New York is the " roaring forties " of night clubs, gangsters, chorus-girls and jazz, surrounded by vast apartment houses to which virtuous young women of various professions are lured, and from which they always escape suffering from nothing worse than a bad fright. New York is not America, and New York is not just an amusement centre, but it is that, and much of its glamour and its un- popularity in America is due to its reputation as a centre of sin. Dallas may outstrip Forty-second Street ; Philadelphia sin in its own decorous way ; but New York is still alone on its bad or suspect eminence. As is well stressed here, even Hollywood is only a suburb of New York ; apart from films about the films, it does not provide its own background, it is parasitic on Park Avenue, and the lower East Side, on the writers and actors, of the New York theatrical district to provide it with most of its raw material, and, in the great " first-run " houses of New York, the new films find their most profitable publicity. What is true of the films is true of most other arts, although New York is a great importer as well as exporter, importing Toscanini and exporting The Women, for instance. Into this Tilnr pours more than one Orontes, but unlike Rome, New York hits back.
In all this welter of tourists and sailors, adventurers and victims from the outside world, the native New Yorker is rather neglected. Yet he exists. Indeed, with the practical cessation of immigration he is becoming more numerous pro- portionately than at any time for three generations past. It is a pity, then, that the article on the vernacular is almost exclusively devoted to vocabulary, and to rather exotic aspects of that. Where did the New Yorker get the accent that produces such phrases as " I saw a bold called Berd on Toity- toid Street "? Is it really worth taking space up with " wanna buy a duck? " which is now surely only a signature phrase for Joe Penner? A more interesting part of the linguistic information in this volume is the learned discussion of swing terms ; study of this may be commended to the statesmen who think that " jitterbug " means what Sir Samuel Hoare and other eminent authorities thought it did two months ago. The elaborate refinements of swing language are not to be mastered by a tired statesman or leader-writer! But the hysterical vigour of the city is well displayed in the conduct of the real jitterbugs whose vigour and abandon might startle savages ; in the passionate sporting crowds who follow the basketball teams or Joe Louis, or the bearded wrestlers, as well as fill the bleachers in support of two of the three leading baseball teams that this volume mentions. For if only to show that even New York has topics too sacred to be discussed in public, the writer refuses to name the Brooklyn Dodgers. We read of and see the great bridges ; we are told of, but not shown, such pioneer skyscrapers as the Shelton Hotel ; the horrors of the slums are not hidden from us, or the inadequacy of many social services. And we end with a brief account of this year's great exhibition, which has been built on a rubbish dump, and which will leave behind it a park where many blades of grass will grow where before there were only the wrecks of model 7s and other relics of progress.
D. W. BROGAN.
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