I was writing a newspaper story about the Upper West Side of Manhattan the other day -- a real estate story about, basically, what a pleasant, family-friendly, and expensive place it is to live. Whenever I'm working on a story like that, I find myself thinking of my father's great-aunt and great-uncle. As it happened, they lived on West 85th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues -- owned a house there -- and my dad, who grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, used to stay with them for extended visits in the summers.
The reason I always think of them on stories like this is that their Upper West Side was a very different place. Very nearly unrecognizable, I'd say. The reasons are pretty complicated, rooted partly in housing and immigration policy and in partly in the postwar economy of New York City, but let's just say, for the moment, that it was rough. At one point, actually, mayor Robert F. Wagner famously declared a block of West 84th Street, exactly one block south of my relatives' house, the worst block in the city.
My dad has one particular story he tells, about a racially charged gang war that culminated in a mob trying to storm my relatives' neighbor's house, and that neighbor then shooting one of the intruders and going to jail. There is, in fact, still a bullet hole in the front of one of the townhouses up there on 85th Street, and my mom and dad have seen it, and I keep meaning to swing by one day myself. I'm not sure I'm getting all the details of this incident right, because I haven't been able to find any news accounts of it. That, actually, is what brings me to the point of this post.
The other day I was thinking about all of this again, because I had been talking to a real estate agent who also grew up on 85th Street. So I went searching the Times' web site for some contemporaneous accounts of the neighborhood, including the "worst block" one block south. Didn't see anything about that one shooting, but I did come across
this. Do yourself a favor and check this story out, because it's a doozy.
So ... where to begin?
How about that lead? (Note: People in the newspaper business often refer to the opening paragraph as the lede. I have no idea why it's spelled that way, and it's always bothered me. So I'm just going to say lead.) So, how about that lead? Are there any of the seven deadly sins that don't take place on this block? Also (and thanks to Jeff for the tip on this), if you want to play a fun game, try scanning the rest of the story to see where homosexuality fits into the whole brawl. It might take you a while, because homosexuality is never mentioned again. McCandlish Phillips evidently just figured he'd throw it in because, what the hell, why not? Just for fun, though, try substituting some other, equally random detail into the lead: "Drunkenness. Unemployment. Gambling. Overcrowding. Prostitution. Sweet Potatoes." Doesn't have the same ring, I guess, but it's equally relevant to the narrative. (Edit: No. I mean more relevant. At least sweet potatoes actually come up later in the story. And they're delicious and good for you, by the way, so I don't really get the hate in there.)
Oh and also: "fighting for they knew not what"? Because they were "Negroes and Puerto Ricans," presumably? I mean, can't we just give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they knew what they were fighting for? Or does only The New York Times know that?
At this point you may detect a certain snideness in my tone toward the story and its author. This is because the more I read it, the more it bothered me. Don't get me wrong: My initial reaction, and a large part of my reaction still, is to laugh at how hilariously overwritten and self-consciously dramatic it is. It's just that, by all accounts my relatives, the McGinleys, were nice people -- certainly not, let's say, sociopaths. Which is what the story's author basically comes out and calls them and their neighbors. Am I reading this wrong? I don't think so: "This is, clearly, more than a slum. A slum is good people in bad houses. But this, as one man put it yesterday, is 'a ghetto of sociopaths.'"
So, you're sure it's not just good people in bad houses? Or maybe only some of them are good? Nope. Ghetto of sociopaths.
Let me digress for a moment to explain another newsroom phenomenon. A lot of the time, vivid writing isn't the top priority in the newspaper business -- it's mostly about conveying information, and you can get fairly successful as a reporter while being basically fairly utilitarian as a writer. I actually think that's a good thing. But then every now and then, in this environment in which writing tends to be fairly straightforward and writers fairly humble, you get a guy who fancies himself a wordsmith. And somehow, through self-promotion or just by being somewhat more of a stylist than everybody else in the office, he gets a reputation as "the best writer at the paper." Every paper has one or more of these guys, and often their writing really is good (I read a Rick Bragg
story from the 1990s the other day that was genuinely emotionally affecting). But just as often, it's terrible, because in a newspaper environment, when a writer gets a reputation as a stylist, people start encouraging him to be more and more vivid, and he starts believing the hype more than he used to, and editors are less likely to rein him in, and eventually you have pretentious florid disasters like this story.
I was thinking about all that when I figured I'd google McCandlish Phillips, and sure enough,
this popped up:
Gay Talese, who left the paper in 1965 and became a best-selling author, says, “He was the Ted Williams of the young reporters. He was a natural. There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.”
Well, Gay Talese is a living legend and I don't want to contradict him in any way, so I guess I'll just say that even in his best season Ted Williams only got a hit in four out of 10 at-bats.
Oh, and the last thing that gets me about this story? See in the second-to-last paragraph where it notes, not disapprovingly, that the area is in for some slum clearance? And that "Fifteen buildings on Eighty-fifth Street and six buildings on Eighty-fourth Street, near Columbus Avenue, have already been condemned and vacated to make space for a new grade school"?
That resonated with me too, because I know what happened to the McGinleys on the Upper West Side: The city took their house away. They got some money in return, sure, and it was an amount consistent with the ghetto of sociopaths they were living in.
At times like this, though, I can't help wondering how things might have been different if someone from the family had managed to stick around. Entire buildings don't come up for sale often on West 85th Street, so this is just a rough comparison, but when I think about the whole situation, I think of places like
this: A building a block away that's selling for $5 million.
Clearly more than a slum is right.
Hahaha. Nice posts, guy.)
Anyway, anyway. What made my head spin. Since this post is now too long, I'd guess I'd just say, the vastness and depth of the internet. It's amazing when you start to think about it.
The thing is, when you're writing for a newspaper, at least in my experience, you're generally not thinking about the number of people who are actually going to read the story. But even if you are, the numbers are basically finite -- as long as the internet isn't involved. If the Daily Progress circulates to, say, 30,000 people, then you can figure that some percentage of 30,000 people are going to read about Peep the guinea fowl. (Probably a pretty small percentage, since from what I remember, roughly two-thirds of the paper's readers buy it just for the supermarket coupons.) Even with a big paper, like the Times, I could guesstimate the number of readers, and the number of readers in New York, and the number of readers likely to flip to section Q or whatever the City section used to be. And that's how many people would see the story. And then a short time later, all the paper copies of the story would end up in the dump or in the library and that would be that.
But with the internet, this stuff just keeps expanding and expanding outward. The number of readers is potentially limitless. I was talking with somebody about all of this after a bunch of Old Overholts the other day, and he started telling me about the philosophical concept of the sublime.
The sublime, Wikipedia reminds me now, has to do with greatness or vast magnitude and its effect on us. There are a few different types of it. Here I'm going to borrow from Kant, as explained to me after a bunch of whiskey, so please bear with me. As he saw things, the first type, the dynamical sublime, has to do with when we're awed by an overwhelmingly powerful natural force, like a thunderstorm or the ocean. Its strength makes us ponder our own weakness, etc. The other type is the mathematical sublime. To quote a guy on the internet:
This is how I feel when I google my stories and see all the weird places they've ended up, and imagine all the weirder places where they still will. It's also, incidentally, how I feel when I look at the blog stats that Google helpfully provides and see how many people are reading this crap, some of them in countries where I'm fairly sure I don't know anybody. Basically, I think that roughly 90 percent of you are people who know me personally. But that 10 percent, even that little bit makes my head spin.
I used to have this recurring nightmare when I was a kid that I could never really explain, and still can't. Basically I'd have the feeling of being in the presence of something overwhelmingly large, and being dwarfed by it, and I'd wake up with a sensation of unplaceable dread. (Fun kid, right?) But I guess that's the mathematical sublime. The mathematical sublime is also when I imagine my stories being read for the rest of eternity. And it's also when I consider how many people reading them think I'm an "arse."
Bonus content, because anybody who read all of that deserves a little bit extra...
-- Here's some stuff I wrote and actually got published recently:
City Limits
New York Magazine
-- I'm working on a thing about the NYC bike lanes now. If you haven't read the New York Magazine story on them yet, it's really good. Also, this piece by Tom Vanderbilt, who is a terrific reporter, and who sold me my current desk chair. (Great chair. Around the same time, I sold my portable dishwasher to the guy who played piano on Range Life. It's the circle of life.)
-- The original conversation on the mathematical sublime ... man, you should have heard it. Much smarter than what I've managed to scratch out here. Unfortunately -- Old Overholt, etc. -- most of it is lost to history. Reminds me of a story I heard about Dylan, from around the time the Eat the Document documentary was made. I guess he was staying up late in hotel rooms with Robbie Robertson writing some of the best stuff either of them ever wrote, but they were both so tired and strung out on drugs at that point that they never bothered to record or even write down most of them. The little fragments that survived -- and please click on that link, because it's so beautiful -- just make you heartbroken that there aren't more of them. And yes, I am comparing me and Austin and our butchering of Kant to Dylan and Robbie Robertson. Though I will grant you that Robbie Robertson is ever so slightly cooler in that video than we were at the bar.
-- Finally, somebody is impersonating Ghostface Killah in blog form. There's something sublime about that too, though I'm not sure which type.