How Sweet the City Can Be

I HAD A REAL New York City sojourn on a recent weekend, one that reminded this longtime country dweller how sweet the city can be.

It began on Friday night at the IFC Center downtown, watching a premiere screening of the pilot of the new HBO series The Deuce, which is set on 42nd Street in 1971. Though I didn’t get to New York until the early ’80s, the street scenes in the show were familiar—the grit and violence and general decay lingered at least through the crack years of the mid-1980s; when I left New York, 42nd Street remained a canyon of porn theaters and massage parlors. (The Deuce, by the way, is brilliant—Maggie Gyllenhaal is unforgettable as the complicated lead.)

But the next morning, bright and early, my wife and I were on the ferry to Governors Island, the city’s newest amenity. Long a military base, its barracks and forts were turned into a park a few years ago, and now—for $2—you can head across a narrow stretch of the harbor on a boat and soon you’re in a completely different world: There are, of course, food trucks (but no cars), and a grove where the city has strung hammocks for you to rest, and a pop-up miniature golf course, and dozens of small art exhibits, concert stages, and grills. There’s even a Compost Learning Center, in case you want to, well, learn about compost.

What Governors Island reminds us is how much city life has improved in the last few decades. There are places like it in every city I know—soccer fields and carousels and farmers markets. What there isn’t, any more, is a way for poor people to enjoy that urban life. In The Deuce, one of the characters lives for a while in a Times Square residential hotel. In those days, cities were places where the marginal could make a life of sorts along the ... margins.

But in the decade that followed, those single-room-occupancy hotels started turning into condominiums (or actual hotels, the kind that now charge German tourists $300 a night for a little room). It was suddenly much harder to be a lost soul. That produced the first real tide of homelessness in the city—when I lived there in the ’80s, and helped start a homeless shelter in the basement of my church, homelessness was still novel, an emergency, something we imagined might go away.

It never did, because the city just kept getting richer and more expensive, and in the process more and more exclusive. You’d have to be a highly successful loser now to stand a chance there. In an odd and hopeless way, the gritty New York of the 1970s and 1980s offered more chances to the poor and marginal than the shiny happy place that’s built up in the years since. This is not a defense of that gritty place—it’s just an observation.

And a reminder that one of the real challenges of this millennium is to build urban areas in ways that make it possible for more people, of all types, to enjoy their pleasures. Alex Steffen, a well-grounded short-term futurist, has been using his blog to build out a series of ideas about “the heroic future,” one where, among other things, we change the zoning laws in our city to encourage more building, so that housing becomes less expensive instead of more, and urban cores even more dense and lively. There’s NIMBY opposition, always, from people who like the current balance of power. But a future that’s environmentally sound, and fundamentally just, demands that we keep on building great urban areas.