'New York Night' The mistique and its history

September 25, 2005
'New York Night'
By MARK CALDWELL
Night, in its perpetual journey around the earth, speeds over the East River and reaches the foot of 42nd Street at 73 degrees, 58 minutes, and 4 seconds west longitude. It then pursues the sunset across midtown - and the 74th meridian - to where 42nd meets the Hudson, at 74 degrees, 7 seconds. On the evening of March 31, 2005, night dropped on the FDR Drive shortly after pedestrians' cell phone clocks blinked 5:19 P.M. Then it hurtled across the island roughly one and a half times faster than the speed of sound - just over 1,100 miles an hour - taking about eight seconds, swallowing one east-west block every half second.
Collaborating with land, water, and buildings, this astronomic nightfall, every day different and striking no other place on earth at just the same angle, dictates the look and feel of the oncoming dark hours. New York daylight is cold and hard-edged; at sunset it disappears almost without warning into fluid shadow. Office buildings empty. Fluorescent cubicles blaze on, and in the early darkness of late fall and winter afternoons the towers become geometric clouds of imprisoned light, winking off as the hours pass, as if lonely for their occupants, gone home to their apartments, suburbs, and exurbs.

Such is the classic evening rush hour scenario, still enacted in New York as it has been since the beginning of the 20th century and before. Yet it's no longer a universal rite, if it ever was: the city's nightfall harmonies are and always have been rich, with notes of day suspended into evening. Office hours flow into nightshifts; arriving crowds whirlpool into outbound multitudes as reverse commuters return from the suburbs to Penn and Grand Central Stations. Many of New York's largest industries - theater, restaurants, newspapers, and broadcasting - begin a crescendo of activity with each dusk. Seen through their vast windows, lofts may bask in expensive residential lighting or cringe beneath the harsh bluish tubes of a sweatshop. The lamp in an apartment building window may be illuminating an architect on charette or a writer on a deadline. The silky forms laughing and chattering behind the tinted glass of a club or restaurant are probably cutthroats engaged in the first skirmishes of the evening, when a hundred thousand gang wars for love and success are waged at their fiercest.

Stores close, the smaller ones with a crash of steel security gates, and the quieter stretches of commercial avenues turn into rows of illuminated grillwork. Behind the red crosses that mark the hospitals and the green globes of the police stations, shifts change. Radio traffic reports and local TV news arc into frenzy. The acrid fumes of diesel combustion, the flash of wheel sparks, and the chemical-industrial reek of brakes follow the commuter trains out into the suburbs. The later the hour the swanker the passengers: the loud workers peak at four or five, to be followed by the sweet-voiced bourgeois at six, seven, and eight.

Workdays repeat themselves; night reinvents itself with every sunset. After the commute, and as full darkness is accomplished, first restaurants come to life, then theaters, bars, and clubs, then after-hours dives - all of them venues for drama, rewritten every second it plays. Glamour, lust, license, and crime emerge from the shadows and parade under the lights, high life and low life, polished veneer and sweaty beastliness. Toward dawn, as if released at the rasp of iron hinges, succubae and incubi fly out: nightmare thoughts, in check during the day, point with skeletal fingers to remorse, death, and vanity, their victims everywhere - tossing alone in bed, staring at the ceiling beside a snoring stranger, or plodding home after the bartender jerks on the lights and watches the deflated customers file out.

Approached at night by air, road, or water, Manhattan is a spectacle, fireworks that rocketed up and froze in place. Towers rise in black masonry or glass and metal against the sooty satinness of the New York sky, an effect immortalized in the black-and-white prints favored by urban photographers of the 1940s and 1950s. As you walk or ride, the towers seem to change places, dipping and gliding in a formal dance, moving before and behind each other. As they rise they dissolve, columns of windows stacked in thousands, bursting aloft against the black East and Hudson Rivers - a liquid, invisibly mobile frame to countless pinpoints of light.

Empty side streets give way to avenues where crowds sweep like squalls, then blow away into nothingness. Yet Manhattan's dominant north-south axis makes even random movement seem purposeful. No other city is so polar, with uptown and downtown its lodestars, apparently fixed yet always shifting according to where you are, and eclectic in connotations as diverse as the city's demographics. "Downtown" somehow captures the clashing atmospheres of Wall Street and Greenwich Village, while Harlem and Carnegie Hill, mutually skittish neighbors, nonetheless share a distinctive uptown building style and sense of street space.

All the world's celebrated night cities have their own ways of rearing up from earth to illuminate the sky. Chicago's skyline is as vertical as New York's, architecturally stronger, and seen from aloft even more dramatic. But its character is entirely different - a jagged knife edge of light bolting up between the black vacancy of Lake Michigan and the level panorama of road lights stretching away into the Midwest. Paris, first to hang lanterns above its streets on moonless nights, first to set off fireworks for public display, remains unique in the warm brilliance flowing along its boulevards at night, bathing its public buildings and bridges, and shimmering along the Seine. In London, the Thames at night urges itself on, a cold void in the city's midst; light ranges from garish Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square to serene neighborhoods of knitted, sibilant greenery and thick-curtained windows.

But New York's verticality exerts power everywhere. Even a stranger senses the interplay of levels: subways below the street, audible and smellable through their ventilation grids, more subways and conduits below the subways, communications racing invisibly through cables and between antennae and cell towers making spidery appearances on rooftops. A New Yorker, self-conscious about not looking upward, nonetheless feels the vertical pull almost as instinct. Aviation and photography have together created an archive of skyline images that, absorbed into consciousness, project the grandeur of an aerial view onto every corner and street, burnishing even the most desolate neighborhoods into ebullience.

A percussive clash between light and dark is what Henry James might have called the "note" of the contemporary New York night (though he lived to see Manhattan's earliest skyscrapers and detested them). In Manhattan, darkness rests at eye level, refreshed by the downglow from illuminated signs ten to 100 feet above the sidewalk. Streetlights, from stanchions that range from stark masts to neo-retro filigreed posts, discharge blasts of pink, blue, and yellow. Windows pile up to skyscraper crowns, some brooding, others floodlit and alive with fantastic traceries of mercantile Gothic exuberance. Whether clear or overcast, the Manhattan night sky behind them looks preoccupied, physically near the rooftops and pinnacles, yet also infinitely remote. Romantic moonlight is a rural thing. The city moon is aloof, hung far away in self-contemplation.

From a plane at 30,000 feet, passing on the way to somewhere else, New York looks like an organism too huge to survive, a Portuguese man-o'-war with tentacles and a tangle of semitransparent organs seeming to cost more in hugeness than they deliver in function. But we survive in spite of our gigantism thanks to the technology of connection: tunnels, cables, and tubes carry water, information, people, electric current, voices, steam, gas, sewage, images, shutting down only for repair, spelled by backups that usually somehow hold us together even though no human fully controls them. Policing, garbage collection, entertainment, medical emergencies, even lawbreaking: all demand transit, from trains and subways to police cruisers, trucks, fire engines, ambulances, and getaway cars. No one escapes: through wire, pipe, and wave, the city, the nation, and the world snake in and entangle everyone.

In the uncannily perfect fall weather of early September 2001, New York balanced on a pinnacle never so tall, rich, or cosmopolitan, so domineering as a global talisman. The city's euphoria, like the investment boom that stoked it, was a product both of substance and fantasy. The World Trade Center had dominated the sky over New York for almost exactly a generation, just long enough that a million or so New Yorkers had never known our skyline without the twin towers. When the planes struck and they toppled, gouging out chasms in both the earth of lower Manhattan and the consciousness of the city, they left us, at first, at a loss to cope. When they collapsed they diminished - for the first time in more than three centuries - a skyline forced relentlessly upward since 1697, when Trinity Church raised its first steeple above Wall Street. It was a hammer blow against a keystone of the city's pride. But in the 21st century any town that wants to make a statement can throw up a record-breaking tower; and the catastrophe presents an opportunity to reevaluate the urban texture.

And indeed new possibilities suggest themselves if one traces the urban spine backward through time. Strangely, as each new year slides offstage, revealing the city of the year before, and postwar skyscrapers disappear, the skyline seems to soar higher and higher in appearance. The twin towers, no matter how sobering their loss, were uninspiring boxes, popping up as if from a gigantic industrial extruder in the basement. They looked best at night, when they seemed to dematerialize, leaving two columnar stacks of light. And as one goes back, few towers, however remarkable in themselves, diminish Manhattan's urgent verticality as they vanish one by one, restoring the skyline to the appearance of its past. The bulky Worldwide Plaza evaporates from its bastion on Eighth Avenue in 1989, the refrigerator-like shoulders of the Morgan Bank Building sink back among the 17th-century artifacts still buried under Wall Street in 1988, and the Chippendale AT&T (now Sony) building on Madison Avenue is gone by 1983. Accelerating backward, the Pan Am (now MetLife) tower flips below ground in 1963, and then the skyline loses the Chase Manhattan headquarters on the Battery (1960), followed by Mies van der Rohe's fabled Seagram Building (1958), Lever House (1952), and the UN Secretariat (1947).

Yet what's left in the 1940s, with the products of a postwar building frenzy gone, looks startlingly leaner, bolder, stronger, and taller than ever afterward. In a mid-1940s night photo taken from the Municipal Building on Centre Street (just after the World War II dimout had been lifted), lower Manhattan is breathtaking - a bold, stark, and brave exertion of force against the sky. Three brutally handsome towers, all still standing today, dominated the skyscape: the slim Cities Services (now AIG) Tower at 70 Pine Street, spinning upward to a floodlit spire; then the massive Bank of the Manhattan Company at 40 Wall Street, with its huge pyramidal crown; lastly, the Farmers Trust Tower at 20 Exchange Place, a powerful square column with beveled corners and topped by three arches and a stepped pediment.

Together, surrounded by lesser but similar structures, they make the night city of the 1940s look boundless, their eccentric forms assured, inevitable, rocketing upward beyond the columns and church spires that once defined urban tallness. The walls are stone, the windows carved into their facades. In 1940 their lights would have been warm, incandescent rather than cold, gaseous fluorescent. As one circled the Battery by water, the towers in the foreground stood up, aloof, threatening, then seemed to deflate and sink into their streets as they receded. They posed a bold backdrop against the postwar crowds packed further north into the Stork Club, El Morocco, and their rivals, and to the wide-flung skyscrapers of midtown: the Metropolitan Life tower at 23rd Street, with its Light That Never Fails, the Empire State at 34th, Chrysler at 42nd, General Electric at 51st, the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. Nearer the street elevated railways, soon to vanish, still grated north and southward along Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues. By day they cast deep shadows on the streets below. At night their tracks, stanchions, and stairways, visible embodiments of the darkness passing over the city, raised a roof of black noise over loiterers and revelers. Crowds streamed on and off the trains and down to the sidewalks. It was no accident that the ground-floor storefronts along Third Avenue became a favored site for gay bars; the Sixth and Ninth Avenue lines, passing just to the east and west of Times Square, disgorged and reabsorbed the crowds that thronged it.

And the Times Square of the early 1940s and late 1930s, despite lingering depression and the shadow of war, looked more alive and quicker-pulsed than the doggedly restored, upbeat spectacle of the present. This "old" Times Square gloried in its circus savor, its pasteboard, hand lettering, poster-cluttered theater entrances, its daubed-on paint, the popping electric bulbs of its frenetic, herky-jerky animated signs. During the World War II dimout unlit signs appeared, made of quarter-sized sequins stitched onto painted block letters (these made their debut and survived into the 1980s, reaching their tawdry best when the sequins began falling off). Even the paper and cardboard litter of the wartime and early postwar square was more pleasing than today's Styrofoam and wind-dizzied plastic bags.

Even back in the mortal poverty of the 1930s, a reaction against despair generated glorious extravagances like the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and the vast, scintillating Art Deco International Casino north of Times Square. But during the 1920s, nighttime New York was at its zenith, more various and unpredictable than ever before or since. Prohibition-ridden New Yorkers were mad to squander at night the money they were raking in by day, and they parted with it in thousands of speakeasies, nightclubs, supper clubs, movie palaces, and legitimate theaters that offered an array of plays and musicals never equaled since. It was a cityscape without the RCA, Empire State, or Chrysler Buildings, yet New York still seemed towering and crowded, muscular and aspiring.

Past World War I, the city begins to resemble often sentimentalized Old New York, year by year shedding height, phones, radios, electric light, subways, railways, and streetcars. Movies drop away first, then nightclubs and restaurants catering to evening and late-night diners, leaving the theater as the 19th-century linchpin of respectable after-dark entertainment. Before 1900 there were proto-skyscrapers, many still standing now, but not nearly so high. The 30-story Park Row Building with its twin cupolas, and its 309-foot-high neighbor, the Pulitzer World Building (1890), modest-looking in photographs, nonetheless dwarfed the 284-foot steeple of Trinity Church, completed in 1846.

By 1880 the skyscrapers have sunk below the Trinity steeple, to ten or twelve stories, with windows lit by gas. In 1875 the Western Union headquarters at the corner of Broadway and Dey Streets was Trinity's nearest competitor, and was the tallest commercial structure in New York, boldly engineered to showcase the company's prestige and its place in the vanguard of technology. It was massive, and with an intricate, even frilly gray granite and red brick exterior and a great 23-foot-high hall on the seventh floor where 290 operators pattered out messages by the million 24 hours every day. A clocktower, slapped offhandedly on top, seems to have been intended as a respectful echo of the nearby St. Paul's and Trinity steeples.

Toward the Civil War, New York lowers its spine yet further and begins a two-century-long southward retreat from Inwood Hill, at the northern tip of Manhattan, to Harlem. By 1800 the developed area has shrunk back to Greenwich Village, then to present-day City Hall by the Revolution. Theaters are gone by 1730, leaving coffeehouses and a few public assembly rooms for exhibitions and dances. By 1695 all three successive Trinity Church buildings and their steeples are nowhere to be found, and by the 1660s the developed town has withdrawn downtown to Wall Street. . . .



Excerpted from New York Night by Mark Caldwell Copyright © 2005 by Mark Caldwell. Excerpted by permission.
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