Sean Tarjoto
Prose Composition II
Prof. R. Goldfin
March 21, 2000

New York: A Sentimental Narrative

	“It is a place where capitalism is been allowed to work itself out with the least kind of impediments.” - Mike Wallace, Historian, New York: A Documentary Film.

	“We love New York, the narrative promises, because it matches our energy level.” - Joan Didion, Sentimental Journeys

	There is a difference between Manhattan and New York City.
	In her essay Sentimental Journeys, Joan Didion believes that most people see in Manhattan is the candy-coated topping.  That what we, or often the media, often choose to focus as the conflict of a story are merely illusory sketches of what is truly pressing. That the real problems are the socio-economic factors which reside underneath news stories of crime, and the media spectacle is a tool which allows us to be too busy to face what our should be our real concern. The five episode PBS New York: A Documentary Film, directed by Ric Burns, presents to the national public a New York that is epic, and as Didion might concur, narrates in the sentimental. But what is implicit in both is a realization that the modern world is centered on New York, as a result of three centuries of economic, technological, and idealogical innovation.  The documentary, aired on PBS and continuing production on a sequel, discusses everything from Peter Stuyvesant to Tamany Hall to Al Smith.  A selection of history as epic and diverse as the city itself.  But this may be no more than an attempt to overwhelm New Yorkers, if not the nation of public television viewers, with the pure sentimentality  that Didion sees as a part of this city.  
	Manhattan was built for money.  And this had been the idea from the very beginning, although it had not become a reality until the arrival of its first patriarch, Peter Stuyvesant.  A Puritanical emmisary from the Dutch East India Company, Stuyvesant delivered the message to the failing colony that this was a business, not a party or a place to practice whatever version of religious freedom you had in mind.  He reinvigorated what was then New Amsterdam, and made good on the 60 gilder investment (the popular 24 is a myth), sprawling the southern end of his14,000 acres of real estate. And so the motif was chosen: that the city constantly be in development, and that this development be powered by capitalism.
	Much later, but proposed simultaneously with the grid plan, Dewit Clinton delivered the Erie Canal, coined by business and political opponents as well as those who believed it was the concotion of a madman, “Dewit’s Ditch.”  It was to their chagrin that pure politcal genius which Clinton possessed that both the grid plan and the canal were constructed, and in an economic feat.  The canal finished three years ahead of time, and even payed for itself by being partially open as it was built.  Afterward, it became one of the city’s greatest economical resources, ferrying in commerce from the entire Midwest via the Mississippi River.
	If it were not for Washington D.C. , New York might have ruled the world.  The capital of the Union moved from the island to the Potomac River when Thomas Jefferson, an abhorrent of the city, offered to Alexander Hamilton the full amount of the debt incurred by the Revolutionary War under the condition that the capital be lifted from Manhattan.  Hamilton agreed, believing that it was not where one governed a nation, but how.  It is difficult for one to imagine the political power added to the already internationally influential cultural and financial strength.
	But even in this cosmopolitan city of teeming resources, the three-block neighborhoods where one can find well-bred dogs are adjacent to the ones where what they do best is smelled worst.  I find that there are plenty of smaller supermarkets, no larger ones, except, for Kmart, whose business ties are as exemplary of the tradition set by J.P. Morgan and the corporate economy.  There are four shelves each half an aisle long of Folgers coffee, and across the other half of the aisle are Maxwell House. None of the other aisles are devoted to other brands, but here, with two companies (whose own affiliations may not necessary be rival), an aura of competitive marketing is displayed for all of discriminating consumerville.
	It is difficult to tell if Burns’ documentary predicates anything Didion might have felt strongly against in Sentimental Journeys.  What Burns has to say is narrated entirely in the sentimental, and his medium, by virtue of its effect and its popularity, is already suspect in Didion’s investigation.  Which is to say that it is defining the illusions that shadow the reality; or the conflicts that overshadow what are the cause of those conflicts. It is possibly incorrect to say Burns’ documentary has no sympathy to the socio-economic problems that really perpetuate the problems in New York.  He dedicates an extensive and sympathetic time to the story of social welfare reformist Al Smith, New York’s most astounding and forgotten public figure.  Smith, an Irish Catholic immigrant received no formal education.  He did not go to college, but as it was said about him, “If Al Smith went to college, he wouldn’t be Al Smith.” one interviewer said.  Smith was instrumental in forging the first labor unions in the city, upsetting many of it’s industrial figures. And he was a hero to the Irish immigrant population, as he was the first Irish Catholic to be elected governor of any state. We see some Smith’s integral place in the city foreshadowed in Episode Four, and prevalent throughout Episode Five.  He is the only public figure to gain as much screen time as he did.
	Burns also devotes an incredible segment toward Jacob Riis. His social commentary on the truly misfortunate peoples of the city, How the Other Half Lives, an important work, “a wake-up call” to the aristocratic elite living in the mid-19th century.  Riis had tried to write of the poor housing and economic conditions of the truly downtrodden, but found the newly developed technology of flash photography to be far more dramatic, and consequently, effective.  “Imagine in dark strange figures.... manipulating something like a tripod, a flash, and then the pattering of feet running away, and you will understand what those people saw when I saw them.”  Reese said of his experience photographing Blind Man’s Alley, overcrowded tenements, and underground taverns too dark to capture on film in any other manner.  Burns does not hesistate to use several of Reese’s pictures; some capturing young children covered in filth and surrounded peeling paint, flooded floors, unsafe and unlighted conditions. A montage of these photos sentimentalizes the narrative, and what has occurred engulfs the “chasm between [the city’s] actual life and its preferred narrative” (Didion 299). Burns makes no mention of the majority of the photography work Riis’ did, which took place outside the tenements, in lit alleyways, or outside the ghetto, or the numerous illustrations Riis included with his photographs.
	One of the chief differences between the sentimental narrative offered by Burns and the one Didion stipulated was being run by the New York popular media is that Burns has no Jogger in his.  The documentary features no singular victim, although it does take pains to show the victimization of many.  And those victims have a place in Didion as “those who had seized upon the arrest of the defendants as an exact representation of their own ” (Didion 300).  The same minority groups (which are actually now overshadowing the majority) are in the place in history once served to Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century of this city. Hispanics and blacks were not the first populations in the city to be underserved or overlooked by the system, intentionally or otherwise.  However, before the Irish immigration African-Americans had the sole burden of being the city’s prodigal lower-class.
	In regard to Central Park itself, Burns has sentimentalized its beauty, but not its half a million cubic yards of imported topsoil. “The pork and the sentimentalization that worked to obscure the pork” (Didion 282) is quite present here in Burns’ account of what was a relief to New Yorkers, who by now had expanded past 14th Street, pioneering into Midtown.  Crowded, noisy, and post-Grid Plan,  the park was an invocation of “the healing power of nature”, according to Burns’ narrative.
	The Jogger herself is quite mysterious.  Newspapers and other media sources took pains to try to not reveal the identity of a rape victim, under the convention that rape is a “Violation of a nature best kept secret” (Didion 260). Regardless, the abstraction allows the members of the city not estranged by its system to identify quite well with the city’s new heroine.  If the Jogger had been named, then a separation would occur, a sentimentilzation and, even better for the press, an identification with the unamed would bolster support for those advocates of the city, and reinforce pressure on the assailants.  The stigma of the unidentified victim (protected, as she had failed to be in the park, now by the mercy of the public), in addition to the lower-class, ethnic assailants, causes a narrative biased by its sentimenality.
	Walk in any direction and look east in the morning and the west at the evening, and you will be another spectator to New York’s brilliant gold lined streets and checkered avenues.   Sartre loved New York for its intersections, where one could see for miles in any direction, and, from the middle of Fifth Avenue, witness the full brilliance of the grid-planned sunset.  The grid plan was the result of the audacious Dewit Clinton, widely regarded as the most influential and important individual in the entire history of New York (even at the time it was called New Amsterdam).  In 1811, when the city had living in it 100,000 people, Clinton proposed to level the natural hillside and prolific oak tree life in favor of a city whose projected land area would house a population of one million.  A sort of pruient expression of human dominion over nature.  The project itself is a metaphor for the truimph of reason over savageness, wildness, the environment which nurtures the brute side of man.  And it is this motif which Burns presents us.  “The Grid Plan is not totalitarian.” Phillip Lopate says in Episode One: The Country and the City of Burns’ documentary. “It is a powerful underlying order where these is so much anarchy.” And, now, a whole new narrative of maudlin proportions is erected.
	Look upwards and see a building, tall, simple, on 34th street. Its place in the city is not necessarily synonymous with its place in history, as a construction project which, through common sense, should never have been built.  With breadlines and apple sellers down the block, how could this thing, and how could John Jakob Raskob, and the man Raskob promised the CEO and ownership of the building to, Al Smith,  possibly have the audacity to appear in the middle of the worst financial crisis in the 20th century?  It is the last segment in the latest episode in the series, and Burns cements the building for the grand, symbolic spectacle it is and was at the time.  But this sentimentalization does not adumbrate the building’s history; it was a commercial failure, I learned, as well as an unsuccessful  mid-air mooring station for transatlantic dirigibles (a grand plan which deserved some sentiment, but ultimately could not earn it).

	New York City is powerful.  It was engineered with conscious disregard to the topography of the island it was built on. Brute knowledge, of architecture, was the power harnessed, and the environment (in every sense of the word), was no longer dominant over its human inhabitants.  Having learned of what controlled us, we gained power to control it.
	Once the island had been built, its people began to not just survive.  The forces which inebriated the citizens with life manifested themselves in the sociological, economical, artistic, historical, and institutional creations of individuals with vision and amibition and ego. They planted parks and threw down streets and rose up skyscrapers.
	What makes the city’s problems seem incurable only because they seem like the problems of some great existential universe, and not that of what this island is, a city, albiet, one of the largest cities; one of most demographically proportionate; one of the most populated, crowded, noisy, and economically prosperous.  However, it is simultaneously that which gives it its power which also attracts its “grave and disrupting problems” (Didion 298). 
	There are moments when I walk down a street and wonder when the next avenue will arrive.  But when I walk down an avenue, I see the street ahead, and it does not at all concern me.  The uncertainty which a street produces in its perpendicular subservience with the avenues frightens me; I avoid avenue hopping, I try to cross streets. I haven’t yet been to the Upper West Side.
	It seems that the modern man is a product of his environment, until he learns to control it.  This is the ultimate divergence of power from knowledge; where the phrase, “knowledge is power” looses its ethereality and becomes quite solid, as concrete as the street.
	That the truth is much more disturbing, and thus difficult to look at is a notion, an idea frequently manifested in history, often with ugly consequences.  Didion has said something about the inherent economic conditions, the demographics, the unequal distribution of wealth - perpetuated by the corrupt politics of the city - is the truth which its citizens find difficult to see, or even accept.  Underneath these problems may be the products and results of shrewed capitalism that shouldn’t be ignored but is actually made attractive through sheer overwhelming culture of advertising.  Thousands of billboards and posters and attention-grabbing 30 second commercials oversee that the truth, the sweat shops, the subliminal psychology, the veiled ethnic fascism of some ads, is distracted from by advertisement of the promise of happiness through consumer-based lifestyle.  But these speculative notions are as sentimental to some socialists and incomprehenisble to some bourgeoisie as Burns’ filmaking is”good”; because Burns is dramatic about both the romance of New York’ skyscrapers and philanthropists and Irish immigrants and African ancestry.  How one can both find the beauty in the building of a skyscraper whose cost was not only lives but taken from the capital produced by poor wage-earners and yet sympathize with the history of those downtrodden is a dichotomy that borders on hypocritical. Yet, Burns does a great job of espousing the truth, while illuminating the illusion.  I believe Joan Didion might think this film is entirely sentimental, but uses that power in the proseletyzing the reality and romance of both commerce and welfare, both rich and poor, both truth and lie.