Entries tagged with “Giuliani” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

BY JESSIE MORGAN-OWENS
BROOKLYN CORRESPONDENT

This is my third post in a row to start out by reading the Sunday paper, but today I've got a little story we shot for the New York Times Magazine: "Hipster Replacement" (ha!), a map of the newest old scene in Brooklyn. (You can find it on page 110 of the Men's Fashion special issue of today's magazine.)

Allow me to introduce "B.E.L.T." to the readers of AHNY. The acronym stands for "below the elevated train" (the J/M/Z) in South Williamsburg. The neighborhood was "nameless" until the New York Times, the writer Cator Sparks, and Andy from Yoko Devereaux came along.  We weren't told what they were going to call the story or the neighborhood when they assigned us the piece for fear we might accidentally leak it or have it beaten out of us with vintage Air Jordans.

Frenchie of Frenchie's Gym on 303 Broadway, a 67-year old Puerto Rican body builder, deserves a story in the Times all his own.  You can see the old school, no nonsense, no a/c gym from the B.Q.E. He's been in there coaching and cajoling giant young men from the neighborhood to "Do it with Love!" since 1976.

Maybe you need to spend an afternoon with the "community organizers" down at Frenchie's, Mr. Rudy Giuliani.

Follow this link to an online version of the Magazine piece, featuring an interactive map of B.E.L.T.

We don't ordinarily aim to be a political blog here at AHNY, unless the discussion turns somehow to NYC history, culture, or politics.

Given Rudy Giuliani's special relationship to the city, then, I feel more than justified in saying something about his rabid-attack-doggery last night. In case you couldn't bring yourself to watch it or read the full transcript, here's the bit I'm interested in, which came close to the end. It's from his defense of that extraordinarily experienced executive, Palin. Rudy claims she's

already had more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket combined. (Cheers, applause.) She's been a mayor. (Laughter, cheers, applause.) I love that. (Cheers, applause.) I'm sorry -- I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough. (Laughter.)

See, it's his use of "cosmopolitan" as a pejorative that jumped out at me, probably because one of the biggest arguments Cyrus and I make about NYC -- along with historians and commentators like Tom Bender and Marshall Berman -- is that NYC offers Americans a model for civil society that's unique and uniquely appealing precisely because of the possibilities it affords for cosmopolitanism.

For Bender, NYC's cosmopolitanism is an appealing alternative to national origin myths founded in Puritanism or Jeffersonian agrarianism, which both tend toward xenophobia. For the ever optimistic Berman, even in the face of Giuliani's Disneyfication of the city, all the corporations in the world won't be able to eliminate entirely the "complex practice of sharing space," which is what he believes "gives people ideas, new ideas about how to look and how to move, ideas about being free and being oneself and being with one another." This is, essentially, the force behind cosmopolitanism, and why such an idea and experience matter to the world we live in.

What it means for this anti-cosmopolitanism to come from a former mayor of New York, then, is that we (meaning Waterman and Patell, but you, too) need to remember to keep the city's countercosmopolitan moments in view as part of the histories we're creating. There are lessons to be learned from the history of petty tyrants like Giuliani, who often did seem like a small-town mayor, more concerned about banning ferrets than in taking care of the total citizenry of his cosmopolitan city.