Entries tagged with “tour guides” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York
The Guardian's Travel section published a piece last week admonishing readers to throw out their NYC guidebooks and turn to the city's literary heritage instead. Advice we can stand behind -- though we still have favorite guidebooks we'd recommend!
The list included one item per decade from the 1930s forward. If you're too lazy to click through the link above, I'll give the spoiler version here:
1930s: Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
1940s: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1950s: New York 19 by Tony Schwartz [audio recording]
1960s: Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
1970s: The Power Broker by Robert Caro
1980s: Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney
1990s: My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum
2000s: Lush Life by Richard Price
A couple things I find interesting about this list: One, we don't teach any of these in Writing New York. Granted, the reason we can't teach half of them is strictly due to length: in a 14-week course attempting to cover more than two centuries of writing, we simply can't devote the time required to teach Ellison's masterpiece, as much as we would want to. We used to teach selections from O'Hara but he somehow fell off the syllabus a few years back. Caro sneaks into our course via the Ric Burns documentary, where he and Marshall Berman are our favorite Robert Moses bashers. And I have to admit: I'd never heard of New York 19! Amazon only has it available for mp3 download, but I'll keep my eye out for the real thing. The Guardian's description makes it sound quite appealing:
What would your decade-by-decade list look like?
The list included one item per decade from the 1930s forward. If you're too lazy to click through the link above, I'll give the spoiler version here:
1930s: Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
1940s: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1950s: New York 19 by Tony Schwartz [audio recording]
1960s: Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
1970s: The Power Broker by Robert Caro
1980s: Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney
1990s: My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum
2000s: Lush Life by Richard Price
A couple things I find interesting about this list: One, we don't teach any of these in Writing New York. Granted, the reason we can't teach half of them is strictly due to length: in a 14-week course attempting to cover more than two centuries of writing, we simply can't devote the time required to teach Ellison's masterpiece, as much as we would want to. We used to teach selections from O'Hara but he somehow fell off the syllabus a few years back. Caro sneaks into our course via the Ric Burns documentary, where he and Marshall Berman are our favorite Robert Moses bashers. And I have to admit: I'd never heard of New York 19! Amazon only has it available for mp3 download, but I'll keep my eye out for the real thing. The Guardian's description makes it sound quite appealing:
As for the selection from the 1990s? Are we really supposed to pick a whiny Upper West Side striver memoir over Tony Kushner's Angels in America or Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker?Tony Schwartz, who recently died, is a man perhaps best known for creating Lyndon Johnson's 1964 hawkish Daisy ad but he was also one of New York City's most dedicated sonic scribes. OK, so this is not a book, it's an album, but I've snuck it on to the list for the remarkable fact that Schwartz was a lifelong agoraphobic who rarely moved beyond the confines of his block, and yet managed to capture the cacophony of Manhattan's streets. New York 19 never ventures beyond the environs of Schwartz's postal code (10019), yet it resurrects the long-gone street preachers, children's skipping ropes, tire squeals, honking horns, and theatre barkers.
What would your decade-by-decade list look like?
This morning's Times reviews the current revival of the musical On the Town, playing through the weekend at City Center as part of a city-wide celebration of Leonard Bernstein's 90th birthday. Originally on Broadway in 1944 -- in the midst of the Second World War -- the musical follows three American navy men through a 24-hour shore leave in the city. They are eager tourists, quick to orient themselves ("the Bronx is up and the Battery's down") and to make hot pursuit of the reigning Miss Turnstiles, whose picture is prominently displayed in the subway.In the opening lecture of Writing New York we show a montage of film representations of the city, including a clip from the 1949 feature film adaptation of the musical. Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munchin play the sailors:
(Later in the semester we show the final sequence from Tim Burton's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which quotes the line about the Bronx and the Battery when Johnny Depp introduces Christina Ricci to a fabulously overdrawn 1800 New York.)
Considering this production as a WWII artifact (the current revival, like the wartime original, begins with the Star Spangled Banner) has me thinking, too, about the figure of the tourist in New York City literature. In lecture, I've often talked about the figure of the tour guide -- the Virgilian character, the flâneur, the person who provides access to the city's darkest corners for armchair tourists reading urban fiction. I've thought often as well about representations of tourists in the nineteenth century, from the country rube Jonathan in Royall Tyler's The Contrast (who has various tricks played on him by some scheming city servants) to the country cousin in Benjamin Baker's Glance at New York (a working-class entertainment), who also gets fleeced at every turn to the delight of the audience.
At what point, though, do we witness a shift that places the tourist figure center stage, as in On the Town? What is the particular appeal of that trope? Would this shift possibly signal the moment when urban entertainment in the city becomes a tourist industry rather than a pastime or entertainment for locals? Or is there something appealing in being a local, seeing the city on stage (or page, or screen) through a tourist's eyes?
The sequence from On the Town reminded me of one of the most touristy things I did last holiday season. A relative who'd been planning a trip to town had to cancel at the last minute and as a result we found ourselves with half a dozen tickets to the Rockettes' Christman Spectacular, something we probably never would have gone to on our own. One of the pieces in that exquisitely bizarre production that transforms a family-friendly leg show in an instant into a nativity scene (with the dancers now in drag as bearded wisemen hauling live camels across the stage to find the baby Jesus) is a ride on a tour bus that echoes, faintly, the Bernstein number:
Watching this live I had no doubt that we were witnessing something like the Las Vegas version of New York, absolutely designed for tourists to reassure them that they had, indeed, seen all the important sights. Why else use one of those obnoxious buses as a prop, except to remind the audience that just yesterday they were doing the same thing?
Not that our readers are the chattiest bunch, but I wonder if others can think of stories or plays that put tourists in the lead roles. When would this tradition have started? And is it designed purely for the pleasure of tourists themselves?
I've been dipping in and out of Dreiser's 1923 book The Color of a Great City, a collection of local-color newspaper sketches he had written between 1900 and 1915. He frames himself as a city walker, a young explorer, an observer in the vein of Stephen Crane or Dreiser's contemporary Djuna Barnes -- precursors, all, of someone like Joseph Mitchell, who would push such sketches into longer, sustained essays.
Just as he framed Sister Carrie (1900) as something of a period novel -- though set just a decade earlier -- Dreiser frames the sketches collected in Color of a Great City
as memorials to the "phases" of the city that "most arrested and appealed" to him as a young man, but were "fast vanishing or are no more":
I find suprising things downtown every day.
UPDATE (later that day ...): A very recent example of the lamentation for a more interesting, gritty, vital, and affordable New York can be found in the publicity for the new Berman and Berger edited collection, New York Calling, just out from Chicago:
I wonder, is this lamentation constant through the last century (and perhaps even longer)? Or is it cyclical?
(Thanks to Sukhdev Sandhu for bringing New York Calling to my attention.)
Just as he framed Sister Carrie (1900) as something of a period novel -- though set just a decade earlier -- Dreiser frames the sketches collected in Color of a Great City
as memorials to the "phases" of the city that "most arrested and appealed" to him as a young man, but were "fast vanishing or are no more":
For, to begin with, the city, as I see it, was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic than than it is now. It offered, if I may venture the opinion, greater social and financial contrasts than it does now: the splendor of the purely social Fifth Avenue of the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this, for instance, as opposed to the purely commercial area that now bears that name; the sparkling, personality-dotted Wall Street of 1890-1910 as contrasted with the commonplace and almost bread and butter world that it is to-day. (There were argonauts then.) The astounding areas of poverty and of beggary even,--I refer to the east side and the Bowery of that period--unrelieved as they were by civic betterment and social service ventures of all kinds, as contrasted with the beschooled and beserviced east side of to-day.I'm struck by a couple things, reading a passage like this one from his Foreword. Certainly the Lower East Side of the early twenty-first century would seem downright genteel when compared to the post-Five Points world he had encountered a hundred years ago. But this type of lamentation remains a familiar one. (Has Manhattan Lost Its Soul? a recent cover of Time Out NY asked, as if for the first time.) Is it simply that we're at the tail end of a long gentrification process that spanned the entire 20th century? Or, acknowledging that economic disparities still abound in New York, even in Manhattan, is there something about the persistence of poverty -- not to mention the durability of ethnic enclaves and even some old architecture -- that should cause us to question the tone of resignation in Dreiser's Foreward and the certainty with which so many observers from his time to the present declare that Manhattan just isn't as vital as it once was, say, ten or twenty years ago?
I find suprising things downtown every day.
UPDATE (later that day ...): A very recent example of the lamentation for a more interesting, gritty, vital, and affordable New York can be found in the publicity for the new Berman and Berger edited collection, New York Calling, just out from Chicago:
New York City in the 1970s was the setting for Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, and Saturday Night Fever, the nightmare playground for Son of Sam and The Warriors, the proving grounds for graffiti, punk, hip-hop, and all manner of other public spectacle. Musicians, artists, and writers could subsist even in Manhattan, while immigrants from the world over were reinventing the city in their own image. Others, fed up with crime, filth and frustration, simply split.
Fast-forward three decades and today New York can appear a glamorous metropolis, with real estate prices soaring higher than its skyscrapers. But is this fresh-scrubbed, affluent city really an improvement on its grittier––and more affordable––predecessor? Taking us back to the streets where eccentricity and anomie were pervasive, New York Calling unlocks life in the unpolished Apple, where, it seemed, anything could happen.
I wonder, is this lamentation constant through the last century (and perhaps even longer)? Or is it cyclical?
(Thanks to Sukhdev Sandhu for bringing New York Calling to my attention.)
I've been enjoying John Strausbaugh's new and (so far) monthly column in the weekend Arts section of the Times: Weekend Explorer.
To date, the author (a past editor of The New York Press and author of books on the aging Rolling Stones and blackface minstrelsy, among other topics) has explored Hell's Kitchen, the East Village, and Brooklyn Heights (specifically its role as a stop on the Underground Railroad). Each installment comes with several multimedia features, including mp3 walking tour downloads. I haven't test driven the walking tours yet but plan to at some point.
The first installment began with this observation --
-- which serves as a departure point for Strausbaugh's signature format: He's going to play the role of a meta-tour guide. That is, while he's offering his services as a tour guide for readers (and listeners) of his features, each installment will feature a long-time resident who plays Virgil to Strausbaugh's Dante, taking him through the neighborhood and allowing him to see the rings or layers of sediment by which he can mark that portion of the city's past.
I'll happily post links to future installments as they appear.
To date, the author (a past editor of The New York Press and author of books on the aging Rolling Stones and blackface minstrelsy, among other topics) has explored Hell's Kitchen, the East Village, and Brooklyn Heights (specifically its role as a stop on the Underground Railroad). Each installment comes with several multimedia features, including mp3 walking tour downloads. I haven't test driven the walking tours yet but plan to at some point.
The first installment began with this observation --
NEW YORK is a walking city. People walk everywhere: to work, to school, to shop, to worship. And usually we’re in such a hurry, with the whole city rushing headlong around us, that we can miss what we’re walking past.
It’s the past itself — fragments and layers of New York’s history unceremoniously preserved in its streetscapes, in stories told on park benches and bar stools, in ghosts glimpsed in shadowed doorways.
-- which serves as a departure point for Strausbaugh's signature format: He's going to play the role of a meta-tour guide. That is, while he's offering his services as a tour guide for readers (and listeners) of his features, each installment will feature a long-time resident who plays Virgil to Strausbaugh's Dante, taking him through the neighborhood and allowing him to see the rings or layers of sediment by which he can mark that portion of the city's past.
I'll happily post links to future installments as they appear.
