New York, 2010

Two essential elements in this foundational tale of New York have continued to be central throughout the city’s existence: New York remains an urban enterprise predicated, first and foremost, on commerce; and, to succeed, the city must draw participants of unknowable diversity from wherever they can be lured. In other words, New York has always been a place rooted in a capacity to derive benefit from contacts among individuals or groups that otherwise consider each other personally loathsome. This is no less true today than four hundred years ago even as the cast of characters running through the New York story has changed constantly. In 1987, two very different reviews of the state of the city appeared almost simultaneously. The first was a report issued by an ad hoc commission on New York in 2000 chaired by Robert F. Wagner Jr., who was the son and grandson of beloved New York politicians and was himself deeply involved in city affairs. The second review was a special issue of the distinguished Leftist journal Dissent edited by the author and journalist Jim Sleeper. Although both presented a portrait of what was recognizably the same city, their differences pointed them in opposite directions. Wagner’s report was titled New York Ascendant, but Sleeper’s journal issue bore the title, In Search of New York. The city that became New York was born as an afterthought embedded in an obsessive drive to colonize the world. European sailors dispatched by various monarchs to beat other rulers to Asia found themselves bumping up against various corners of the Americas ever since Columbus sailed in 1492 (earlier arrivals, such as probable Viking incursions in North America, predate the Age of Discovery). In the 1520s, Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian explorer in the service of the French crown, and Esteban Gomez, a Portuguese captain commissioned by Charles I of Spain, both visited the estuary that would become New York Harbor. But it wasn’t until September 3, 1609, that the Europeans came to stay, when Henry Hudson, a British sea captain looking for a western route to Asia for the Dutch East India Company, sailed into the estuary and eventually up what is now the Hudson River, almost as far as today’s state capital of Albany. Early Dutch visitors recorded a fecund landscape overflowing with bounty. Humans already had found the area a congenial place to live for several millennia, with a number of Native American nations, primarily the Lanapes, thriving when Hudson first cast his anchor off what seems to have been known as Mannahata, for “hilly island.”

Both reports appeared at what, in retrospect, was a turning point in the city’s destiny. The city had reached a nadir a few years before with a disastrous brush with municipal bankruptcy in 1975, widespread civil breakdown during a 1977 blackout, and excessively publicized violence on the subway and in parks. In this dire context, Dissent’s contributors told a tale of slow and inexorable urban decline. Their New York had become a tough, nasty place full of paranoia, racial hatred and economic conflict.

All was not lost, according to the ad hoc commission’s report. They viewed the restructuring of the city’s finances in response to near bankruptcy as having improved New York’s ability to respond to economic change. The profound transformation of international financial markets, reflecting the beginnings of what we now know as globalization, they argued, enabled New York to firmly secure its position as the world’s financial capital.

Despite privileging different factors, both Dissent’s and the commission’s reviews identified many similar positive and negative trends. Both accounts lamented the absence of civility in New York life, for example. For the authors of the commission’s New York Ascendant, positive developments were offset by growing income disparities, continued high rates of crime and violence, and a floundering educational system that poorly served both the city’s youth and employers. For the contributors to Dissent, New York was experiencing a remarkable mixing of different traditions, especially of Hispanic and African cultures, producing unprecedented creativity on city streets.

A singular event on August 11, 1973 captured what the contributors to Dissent had in mind when they praised New York’s continuing bottom-up inventiveness. On that evening, residents of the high-rise apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Morris Heights neighborhood of New York City’s impoverished and crime-infested South Bronx gathered for a back-to-school party. The extraordinarily loud beat emanating from Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc’s giant amplifiers that evening marked the birth of the late twentieth century’s signature musical genre, hip-hop.

Puerto Ricans and African Americans had been coming together for years in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Protean musicians such as the towering Machito began to perform with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker; activist writers such as Jésus Colón, Piri Thomas, and the young “Nuyorican” poets, including Felipe Luciano and Victor Hernandez Cruz, explored new ways to express racial and national pride. Often sharing neighborhoods, these artists drew from each other as well as from their oftenshared African roots.

Lin-Manuel Miranda was born a dozen years after DJ Kool Herc launched hip hop. He was born in Manhattan of Puerto Rican heritage, and grew up in Inwood, a blue-collar neighborhood near the island’s

northern tip cut off from downtown by subway switching yards. The area had evolved from being the home of Jewish and Irish immigrants to the home of Hispanic, often Dominican, newcomers.

Miranda graduated from Hunter College High School and went off to Connecticut’s idyllic Wesleyan University where he combined the hip-hop of his home turf with a solid grounding in Wesleyan’s more traditional student theater company. While a sophomore at Wesleyan, he began working on a musical based on a book by

Quiara Alegría Hudes that told the story of the lives of his generation in the now largely Dominican American neighborhood of Washington Heights. That show, In the Heights, moved from Connecticut to OffBroadway, and on to Broadway by 2008.

In the Heights was just the beginning. In 2015, Miranda’s hip-hop interpretation of Ron Chernow’s authoritative biography of Alexander Hamilton broke every mold on Broadway, starting out with its two-month run at the Public Theater. As Miranda understood, Hamilton’s story is the same immigration tale that has been playing out on the streets of Manhattan since the eighteenth century. Four decades had passed between DJ Kool Herc’s 1973 back-to-school celebration in the Bronx and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rapping Hamilton, Washington and Jefferson on Broadway. A new blend of cultures once again had come together on New York’s streets to storm the castle of respectability.

Tensions between high-brow and lowbrow have marked New York ever since the Dutch arrived and declared Native American Manna-hata to be their own New Amsterdam. The city has grown and thrived from the fusion of diversity and a shared desire for commercial success. The city still bursts forth with an elemental human energy generated by the engagement of newcomers with traditions that have long been in place.

New York City street dancer. May 2016. Photo: Robert Jones. 2016. Pixabay License.