Metropolis : the American City in Popular Culture / Robert Zecker

METROPOLIS METROPOLIS The American City in Popular Culture Robert Zecker Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zecker, Robert, 1962– Metropolis : the American city in popular culture / Robert Zecker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-275-99712-0 (alk. paper) 1. Cities and towns—United States—History. 2. Urbanization—United States—History. 3. Human geography—United States—History. 4. City and town life—United States— History. I. Title. HT123.Z423 2008 307.760973—dc22 2007036455 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Robert Zecker All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007036455 ISBN: 978-0-275-99712-0 First published in 2008 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Next Stop, the Ghetto: Tours of Ethnic Exotica in the Popular Press 15 3. “A Problem That We, the Public, Must Solve”: The Gangster Film 71 4. “Certain Sociological Realities There”: A City for the 1960s and Beyond 117 5. “All of Life Was There Before”: The Urban Nostalgic Memoir 165 6. “We Never Locked Our Doors at Night”: Newark on the Net, minus the Mob 201 Conclusion 221 Notes 225 Index 267 1 Introduction When a man is tired of London he is tired of life. Samuel Johnson This city here is like an open sewer, you know, it’s full of fi lth and scum. ‘Cause sometimes I can hardly take it. Sometimes I go out and I smell it, I get headaches it’s so bad, you know? Sometimes they just, they never go away, you know? I think the president should just clean up this whole mess here, he should just fl ush it right down the f’ing toilet. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver , on Times Square, circa 1976 1 Ever since the rise of mass culture, the idea of The City has played a central role in the imagined landscape of many Americans. Whether in print, fi lm, or television, the sidewalks of New York (and often Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and even Newark) have thrilled and repulsed consumers in just about equal measure, maybe attracting readers and viewers precisely because the city streets and the disreputable types who skulked in their shadows were so repulsive. Certainly some writers and fi lmmakers have depicted the city as a site of fun, with Woody Allen, for example, presenting a love letter to photogenic parts of his city like the Upper West Side, home to affl uent, well-read (albeit neurotic) intel- lectuals with a ready blend of witty patter equal parts Noel Coward and Borscht Belt. In the early twentieth century, too, Tin Pan Alley in particular reassured mainstream America that “the city’s a wondrous toy, just made for a girl and boy.” “East Side, West Side, all around the town,” colorful New Yorkers were offered as amusing, even if a little exotic, objects of spectacle. When city dwellers were presented as colorful Rosie O’Grady, it was easy for listeners to convince themselves that it was still possible to “turn Manhattan into an island of joy.” 2 2 METROPOLIS Still, after non–New Yorkers fi nished whistling about Mott Street’s gently glid- ing pushcarts, they often turned to fi ctional portrayals of the city that were a little more somber or enjoyed a fi ctional city in which the thrills were often illicit. Popular song versions of Manhattan had to vie with more threatening portrayals of immigrant thugs or lawless gangsters. And from the 1970s to the present, for every lovable, neurotic New Yorker Woody Allen offers up, there’s one of Scors- ese’s Brooklyn Goodfellas or, more ominously to middle-class white viewers, some Boyz ’n the Hood . Indeed, by and large, in whatever era one chooses, the view from the city street has been more Bickle and less Johnson. Even as early as the mid-nineteenth century, dime novels and journalistic ac- counts viewed the city and its denizens as a threat to the republic, with the voices of alarm crying fortissimo once mass immigration turned cities decidedly non- Nordic. What devotee of The Wire wouldn’t nod his head in recognition, if not outright agreement, at this nightmarish account of dystopic future Philadelphia as a city ready to implode from a surfeit of greed, vice, hedonism, poverty, and ethnic and racial tension: ‘The lordlings of the Quaker City have sold their father’s bones for gold, they have robbed the widow and plundered the orphan, blasphemed the name of God by their pollution of his faith and church, they have turned the sweat and blood of the poor into bricks and mortar, and now as the last act of their crime, they tear down Independence Hall and raise a royal palace on its ruins!’ . He passed along among the crowd of gay wayfarers, he passed many a gay equipage, many a gorgeous chariot, and here and there at the corners of the streets or among the gayest of the laughing throng, he beheld a squalid beggar crouching to the earth as he asked for bread, or a pale-faced mechanic in worn and tattered clothes, who shook his hands in impotent rage as he beheld the stares of wealth which fl ashed from the lofty windows as if to tantalize him with their splendor. ‘Cursed be the city,’ cried that solitary voice, leading the supernatural choir. ‘Its foundations are dyed in blood. The curse of the poor man is upon it, and the curse of the orphan. The widow, with her babes starving at her breast, raises her hands and curses it in the sight of God. Wo unto Sodom!’ 3 Yet this depiction of a city decidedly short of brotherly love did not spill from the laptop of a screenwriter pitching a new series for Fox or HBO. Rather, George Lippard caused a sensation in 1844 with his novel Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall. Lippard’s work spawned an entire genre, the “city mystery,” with a slew of authors exposing the “darkness and daylight” of New York, Philadelphia, and other cities in novels disguised as moral tract or guidebook to urban vice districts (it was often hard to tell the difference between condemners and the promoters of the nineteenth-century sin cities). After the Civil War, publishing houses such as Beadle made their fortune churning out dime novels that were snapped up by readers eager to be titillated with the sins of the cities. Lippard and his imitators often condemned the poor and the decadent upper-class urbanites alike, for foppish plutocrats’ effete love of luxury and sins of the fl esh were also seen as endangering the egalitarian republic of producers. 4 Introduction 3 Whether the United States, even in its fi rst decades, ever truly was a nation of rough economic equality—even for native-born white Protestant males—is beside the point. This belief in what Glenn Altschuler calls the “rude republic” prevailed as a powerful myth, and if we discount the archaic language and lack of urban realism in the absence of “street cred” profanity, nineteenth-century fi ctional city hoods conveyed the same message as our contemporary television and fi lm narratives of urban pathology: The city is corrupting the nation. Rich city leeches bleed the body politic from the top, while desperate, alien vultures prey from below. 5 From the nation’s beginning the deck was stacked against urban America. Po- litical leaders of the early republic such as Thomas Jefferson regarded cities as the seats of chimerical mobs of landless laborers beholden to the nearest demagogue promising them a job in return for their vote. And just like Lippard, Jefferson wor- ried about would-be aristocrats in big, bad New York and Philadelphia. It was only in the countryside, among a self-suffi cient yeomanry, that political virtue could triumph. To the degree that America urbanized, Jefferson and his many protégés such as James Madison believed, the nation would descend down a rocky path to European-style corruption, in which men of means eyed the penniless rabble warily and relied on hireling armies to keep restless city folk at bay. Southern agrarians saw to it the new nation’s capital was moved to a planned, semirural town to avoid the evils of cities and their sullen rabble and would-be aristocrats. 6 Whether Jefferson’s self-conception of the white rural yeoman as completely virtuous and self-reliant was accurate (for one thing, it leaves aside any consider- ation of the degree to which Jefferson and his peers were indebted to hundreds of slave “servants”), it became an enduring antiurban foundational myth. Only by developing western farm lands, what Jefferson called “an empire for liberty,” could America counter the corrupting effects of large, vice-ridden cities. In subsequent decades this Jeffersonian ideal remained powerful in shaping many Americans’ conceptions of cities, even as western metropolises such as Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco were added to the roster of decadent, suspect, un-American places. And when such places became less Protestant and western European in composi- tion, the alarms over the dangers of the city took on a strident tone.

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