The question of the existence of New York City is one each generation of residents confronts in their own time. The spot on the map remains, the streets still heave with bodies, and the business of the municipality grinds on. But between youth and maturity every New Yorker wakes up to the possibility that the city that possessed them, The Real New York, is gone.
This last month has forced the question on me. What was once one of the city’s pre-eminent restaurants, the Four Seasons, served its last Dover sole in early June, after 60 years. Gloria Vanderbilt, most famous descendant of what was once the city’s pre-eminent family, died not long thereafter, aged 95. Both represented a connection to the middle of the 20th century, when New York ruled the world.
The Four Seasons was already on its way out a few years ago, when it moved out of Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece Seagram Building. I ate there occasionally when I passed through the world of finance after the turn of this century. The people-watching was as good as advertised, but the magic was the room’s design, by Philip Johnson, which was functionally a time machine: its simple, glowing surfaces sent diners back to a time when Modernism felt new, a postwar moment when New York had the final say on everything and seemed like it would do so forever. A different restaurant occupies it now. I have entered only as far as the bar for a swift martini, for fear that in the course of a full meal the old spell would be broken.
As far as the social elite that Vanderbilt and her family personified I never got much of a look. I moved to Manhattan 20-some years ago as a graduate student with little interest in power or social life. But the grimier city I lived in then is dwindling, too. This month, Ricky’s NYC, the beauty, costume and who-knows-what chain, is close to shutting its doors. Brightly coloured, vulgar, humorous, useful, chaotic and sexy, it has a slogan — “Looking Good, Feeling Good” — that got to the spirit of downtown New York in the 1990s.
The legendary Mars Bar on the Lower East Side in 2005 ...
...and one of a ubiquitous coffee chain's outlets in SoHo
The dive bars in which I slurped through my twenties and thirties are now gone. It is apparently impossible to make the economics of alcohol work unless you serve $14 guacamole and the bathroom is clean. Most missed: the hilariously filthy and legitimately punk Mars Bar of the Lower East Side and Jackie’s Fifth Amendment in Park Slope, where old-timers and hipsters got along just fine, thanks. The same tide that has borne the New York watering hole out to sea has taken plenty of used book stores, art cinemas and corner coffee shops with it, making way for the astonishing reproductive fitness of Walgreens drug stores and the coffee chain that shall not be named.
To see the worst, visit SoHo: once an industrial-bohemian-Italian-Chinese mishmash, it is now Mall of America East, with the Apple Store as the anchor attraction.
It is easy to complain about gentrification. I’ve no quibble with the rich. But I can’t be alone in thinking New York attracts a duller strain of rich folk than it once did. I’m just old enough to remember when Wall Street prosperity was roughly subdivided by religious pedigree. Say what you will about the Wasp, Jewish and Irish Catholic factions of money world — and a world where ethnicity mattered so much is well lost — all three cultures celebrated eccentricity.
I was close to the generation of Wall Street Wasps who are dying now. They were fantastically snobby and had unearned privilege shovelled on them from the moment the sterling silver christening gifts rolled in. But when they were not writing securities contracts at white-shoe law firms, they dressed oddly, drank like poets and cultivated a deeply informed and passionate interest in the arts. That’s all over now. Your Waspy Wall Streeter today loves to sail, goes to the gym daily and could bore a buzzard off a shit wagon.
Indulging in this flavour of nostalgia from the comfortable perspective of middle-age is risky. The young and interesting, having successively colonised Williamsburg and Bushwick, have moved on to their own dives in a neighbourhood I haven’t even heard of. Perhaps I have gone as thick in the head as I have gone around the middle. But there is a risk, too, in spouting nonsense about how the City is renewed by every generation of immigrants and star-struck youths. Cities can lose their power and their point. Rome may be the eternal city, but the Athens of Socrates couldn’t survive even a single generation of imperial misadventure.
Like its poet laureate Walt Whitman, New York contains multitudes; like its guardian angel, Satan, it is legion. Blame it on money or tech or just the old march of history, but homogeneity is getting a hold on the place. Real New Yorkers need to get busy pushing back.
Robert Armstrong is the FT’s US finance editor
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