Classic Mr NYC

"He made this city!"

In the movie Chinatown, the evil Noah Cross says this twice about his former business partner Hollis Mulwray. Cross both loved and hated him. Mulwray built a dam that brought water to LA and made them rich. But when Mulwray refused to build another dam -- as part of a dark plot to steal water and land in the Valley, and to make LA even bigger -- Cross murdered him. Still, even after that, Cross pays tribute to his victim's great legacy.

Cross and Mulwray are entirely fictional, obviously, but Mulwray is based on the very real William Mulholland who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, bringing massive amounts of fresh water to the young desert city. Within a decade its population has tripled -- oh yes, Mulholland made that city.

New York City is, of course, much older and not on a desert. And if you asked most people today who "made" NYC, they might point to Robert Moses or argue that no one person is responsible for "making" NYC in its 400-something year history.

But they would be wrong. One man did make NYC, at least the city of five boroughs we live in today: Andrew Haswell Green.

I blogged about him briefly a few years ago, specifically citing a Bowery Boys episode about the man. Yet I realize that I have not really given him his due: Green truly is the "Father of Greater New York." His vision, his efforts, his ideas, were resposible for: Central Park, The New York Public Library,The Metropolitan Museum, The Bronx Zoo, The American Museum of Natural History, Riverside Drive, Morningside Park, Fort Washington Park. And Green chaired the committee, and had the vision, to consolidate the five counties of Bronx, New York, Queens, Kings, and Richmond into one city -- Greater New York.

So yes -- he made this city! The NYC we live in today was Green's vision. 

And the reason, I think, I never properly gave him his due it because our city, his city, hasn't done it either.  

Remember in Godfather II when Hyman Roth says about his (also) dead former partner Moe Green that he was responsible for creating Las Vegas? And remember when Roth yells that there isn't even a signpost or plaque commorating this "great man"? 

Well, in Mr NYC's opinion, the memorials to Green NYC are extremely insufficiant. There's a small park on the Upper East Side and a bench in Central Park. There's also an island up in the Niagara River named after him. But these minor memorials don't seem to, in any way, really give the man his due. He doesn't even have a street or a building named after him! Ed Koch has a friggin' major bridge named after him -- but not this guy? Green needs to have a massive memorial named after  him, a huge tribute.

Why not City Hall? 

Because he made this city! 

Who Makes a City?

Recently I watched again the great 1974 movie Chinatown, the noir thriller about the battle for land and water in 1930s Los Angeles. While the movie itself is fiction, the story is based on the very real history of how William Mulholland brought water to -- and stole it from -- Los Angeles. He was a man of humble origins, a hardworker, an immigrant (!) from Ireland who worked his way up the economic ladder, and helped shaped the nation's second largest city -- while making himself rich and causing the death of 500 people in the meantime. A legend and a monster all at once.

History is made of such people, and the people who powered the growth of cities are no exception.

In NYC, the masterbuilder Robert Moses is the most obvious example -- a great builder of roads, bridges, parks, and everything else who brought this city into the 20th century -- and also destroyed neighborhoods and lives forever. But Moses was not the only transformative New Yorker -- think of the great artists and businesspeople who have shaped it -- Broadway producers like the Shuberts and the Nederlanders, filmmakers like Scoresese and Woody Allen, businessmen like the Rockefellers and Lew Rudin, the list of New Yorkers who built this city and made it rich (literally and figuratively is great). Some were great, some were awful, and many were both -- but they gave us our city, for better or worse. 

That's why I loved reading this excerpt from a book about the growth of New Orleans. It's about the various characters -- some inspiring, some frightening, many just down right weird -- who shaped the Crescent City in the 20th century. I love New Orleans and have blogged about my 2009 trip there as well as other things I love about. As a city, it couldn't be any more different from NYC but, like NYC, it has great characters over the years who made it the great place that it is.

And, if you're the mood for some good New Orleans grub, consult this list of the best canjun-creole joints in NYC.  

Heavenly Riverside Drive

One of the defining features of great cities is that even its streets and avenues are famous: think Saville Row in London, the Champs D'Elysee in Paris, the Via Del Corso in Rome, Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Mulholland Drive in LA, and many others. 

In NYC, especially Manhattan, Wall Street, Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Central Park West, and Sutton Place are famous the world over because they posses some of the most expensive real estate on earth. These avenues are synonymous with wealth, power, fame, glamour -- you name it. The richest and most famous people in the world live there, its architecture and streets exude the 1%. Tom Wolfe wrote a whole book about it back in 1987. 

'nough said.

So what about Riverside Drive?

Unlike those avenues, it doesn't have anywhere near the fame and pedigree. But what's crazy is that Riverside Drive is probably more beautiful than any of them. Nestled next to the Hudson River, running quietly from 72nd street up to the top of Manhattan island, it's an amazingly peaceful avenue right next to one the most frenzied places in the entire world. You just walk a block west from the loud craziness of Broadway onto the leafy, zen-like Riverside Drive and it's like you've stepped out of one world into another. 

I know a lot about Riverside Drive because, well, I grew up there. And I've always felt like it never got the respect of Manhattan's other great avenue. But that's changed a little recently: there's now a book about it called Heaven on the Hudson that chronicles its amazing history. Riverside Drive is full not only of beautiful buildings, it's not only across the street from its own park with sweeting views of the Hudson River, but it's also full of monuments and also contains some of the last remaining free-standing mansions in NYC. You should read the interview with the author. I can't wait to read the book.

If you want to know more about what makes Riverside Drive so magical, you should read this 1998 essay "My Manhattan: 44 Blocks of Enchantment." I remember reading it when it was published -- I was in college, far from NYC, and it brought me right home in my mind. 

You can read all of Mr NYC's Riverside Drive coverage here.

I never say things like this but I'll say it here: Riverside Drive is the best avenue in NYC!

Review: "Motherless Brooklyn" (2019)

Private corruption leads to public corruption -- the personal venality of those in power is inflicted upon the masses in terrible ways. We are seeing this in extremis with the morally rotten and massively corrupt presidency of Donald Trump. Although this reality horror show will end a week from today, its stench will linger over us for a long time afterwards.

And that's the overarching problem -- even when bad powerful men go away, we the people remain stuck with their corrupt works for years and decades to come.

If you've ever read The Power Broker, Robert Caro's biography of NYC "master builder" Robert Moses, or seen the movie Chinatown, a fictional retelling of engineer William Mulholland bringing water to Los Angeles, the central concept within both is that the personal corruption of these powerful men fueled and warped the development of our nation's two biggest cities -- and, even now, decades after their deaths, we are literally living in the crime scenes i.e. the cities they made. 

And that's the basic idea behind Edward Norton's 2019 movie Motherless Brooklyn: the city is a crime.

A very liberal adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn is Norton's attempt to take the basic framework of Chinatown (a private detective investigating a weird crime) and marry it with the facts in The Power Broker (an unelected master planner who builds in NYC with dictatorial power) to make a 21st-century fable about the corrupt shaping of our city. 

A thumbnail of the plot: a private detective with Tourette's syndrome named Lionel Essrog investigates the murder of one his partners. His investigation leads him to Harlem where he meets a woman named Laura Rose who works with someone named Gabby Horowitz (based on Jane Jacobs) who is fighting the redevelopment plans of city commisioner Moses Randolph (based on you-know-who). Essrog eventually meets up with a man named Paul, another brilliant but failed city planner, who turns out to be Randolph's brother and who knows a dark secret that could bring him down. Essrog discovers that Randolph's redevelopment plan is just a scam to kick poor black people out of their homes and sell their property to private developers. Paul explains to Essrog how Randolph's power is beyond anyone else's in government and how, as the head of an unelected public authority, he is totally unaccountable to anyone. Events ensue and Essrog comes to realize that Laura's life is in danger -- unless he can somehow get to Randolph and blackmail him with his secret. There's lots of double-crossing and complexity that makes this a very noirish yarn. 

It's a story about the power behind the power, the secret history of NYC, and the darkness behind it all. Also, it's a tale about the basic evils of gentrification and how the "public good" is often a cover for private greed.

The cast is excellent: Norton is compelling as Essrog, Alec Baldwin is ominous as Randolph, and Willem Dafoe is the standout as the tortured Paul. The cast includes Michael K. Wiliams, Bobby Cannavale, a cameo by Bruce Willis, Cherry Jones as Gabby, and a very good actress named Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Laura. 

Norton is a fine director and the movie holds your attention to a point but, ultimately, the story feels slight in relation to the heights of its ambition. You can tell, in a way, that Norton is suffering from the classic "anxiety of influence" -- he is cleary in awe of, and has great reverence for, Chinatown and The Power Broker and the original novel, that his efforts with this film feel stunted, as much as influenced, by them. Also, I think there's an inherit problem when you're trying to make a movie that's partly inspired by a novel but also trying to incorporate plot lines and factoids from another movie and another book. It's just too much -- and while a noble attempt it makes the story and its themes feel more jumbled than inspired.

Still, it's an interesting concept for a movie -- and it's more of a concept than a movie in my opinion -- but that's why I recommend people see Motherless Brooklyn along with enjoying it's wonderful cast.