Category Archives: New York

Giuliani on immigration

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Here’s yet another example of mainstream American social conservatives putting on their silly hats when it comes to parsing Europe’s lurch towards illiberal liberalism: Rod Dreher, writing in the National Review Online in a piece entitled Giulianizing Holland, argues:

Holland, it seems, is getting Giulianized. The establishment-conservative CD and the populist LPF won big because Dutch voters lost faith in the Labor-led coalition’s leadership on several key law-and-order issues: welfare abuse, drug policy, lax policing, and most famously, immigration, which the outspoken rookie politician Pim Fortuyn, assassinated nine days before balloting, forced onto the national agenda.

Dreher thinks Fortuyn and Giuliani are similar because Giuliani was “a social liberal but a reformist, law-and-order Republican for whom many New York Democrats voted because they were sick and tired of the urban, welfare liberalism that had turned their city into a dirty, crime-ridden, ungovernable mess.”

But what did Giuliani think about immigrants? In his farewell speech he delivered one of the most eloquent defenses of immigration I’ve ever heard. It’s worth putting here in full:

I think the key to our success as a City, the reason that we are the most famous City in the world, and the reason that we really, legitimately are the Capital of the World, is really just one thing: immigration. We are an open City. We’ve never been afraid of people. We’ve never been afraid of people no matter what their color, religion, ethnic background. We’re a City in which our diversity is our greatest strength. I remember after the attack on the World Trade Center, it just came very naturally for me to say to people, “Do not engage in group blame. Do not go single out people who are Arab-Americans and blame the attack on the World Trade Center on them.” Because the people who attacked the World Trade Center, we weren’t even sure exactly who it was then, but the people who attacked the World Trade Center obviously are vicious criminals of the worst kind, and there isn’t a single group that sits out there that doesn’t have among them vicious criminals of some kind. Every ethnic group, religious group, racial group, has some bad, really bad people in that group. And then the question becomes, are you the kind of prejudiced, irrational human being that defines the group based on the bad people in that group – which means you’re going to end up hating everybody – or do you kind of get beyond that, and see that in fact, with every group, most people are decent people who are trying to do the same thing that you’re doing? I think New York allows more and more people to see that than any place else, because we keep bumping into each other all the time. People who look different than you do, and they have different outfits, and they talk different languages, and they wear different clothes and they say different things. And if you’re a person of some degree of common sense and intelligence, that experience opens you up to the feeling that people are basically all the same. And it’s the greatest strength that we have.

The greatest strength that we have as a City is immigration, and keeping ourselves open to people. And we shouldn’t allow what has happened to us in the last three months to stop that in any way at all. We should continue to be open to people. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have more security. That doesn’t mean we should be open to people with criminal backgrounds. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t in a very proper and appropriate and even tough way screen the people who come here to make sure that we’re not letting terrorists in. But it does mean that we should continue to be a City and a country that’s open to new people coming here from all over the world.

Holland is getting Giulianized? Is he kidding or what?

But the real clincher is that as a social conservative, Dreher believes that “Fortuyn’s squalid personal life, and even his pro-drug, pro-euthanasia politics, was anathema to most on the American right.” And in being offended by Fortuyn’s personal predilections he is in solid agreement with the Muslims he derides. Dreher apparently believes that such intolerance is only a threat to liberalism if the beliefs are held by non-white non-Christian immigrants.

When the Dutch founded New Amsterdam, Holland was the most open and tolerant society in the world, an advantage that had allowed it to build a global trading empire. Cast from such a liberal mold, New York has learned its lesson well, while the Dutch are forgetting.

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Perfect Day (May 5, 2002)

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On Sunday (May 5, 2002) New York experienced one of those periodic perfect days famously eulogized by Lou Reed. The weather was exactly as it had last been the week of September 11, 2001: impossibly sharp, dry and mild. But instead of triggering unsettling memories, it framed a city that felt fresh and strong, a role model to the world for tolerance and the right to be in your face.

My walk that day took me towards Broadway along 7th street. Between 2nd Avenue and the Bowery, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was emptying its brood of conservatively dressed Easter worshippers. Or perhaps they were on a smoking break from the infamously long ceremony, and as the men milled in the street cigarette packs collectively emerged from Soyuz-colored jackets adorned with mottled ties.

Soon they’d be off their favorite deli, for the pirogis and the blinis, but I was on my way to Strand Books, on Broadway and 12th, looking for Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete. I’d read a few chapters at my parents’ place over a year ago, and really liked it, but left before I could finish it. This book has become even more topical this past year, because the events in the three decades before Israel’s independence are grist for the mutually incompatible histories taught today in Palestinian and Israeli schools. It is unusual for these orthodoxies of victimization and entitlement to be appraised in light of an impartial account of the historical facts.

I eventually found the book in Barnes & Noble on Union Square, but not until after wading through the Asian Pacific American Heritage Festival, which mainly involved a lot of rap music. Off I went with my book to Tompkins Square park, intending to soak up a few hours of reading on a dappled grassy knoll, but that plan was loudly nixed by a massive daylight techno rave that had many of the improbably pierced jerking around colorfully to 180 beats per minute.

The backup plan was the garden on 6th and B. As I exited the park to the Southeast, I noticed a slow procession coming up 7th street from Avenue C. I approached what turned out to be a Cinco de Mayo tribute to San Martin de Pobres, whose idol was being slowly pall-borne by very serious-looking mature Hispanic men. The small brass band did its best, but was increasingly forced to parry the several-thousand watt-strong thump thump thumps rolling over the east village.

I finally did make it to my reading spot, but not without first appreciating that only in New York can a neighborhood stroll serve up so much cultural cacophony. And I didn’t even go see the Cuban Day parade held that day, or the 42-mile bike tour across the 5 boroughs, or the protests pro and contra Israeli and Palestinian policy. I will miss this city.

Zen One on St. Marks

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Six years ago Tom Atkins and Uta Harnischfeger introduced me to Sandobe, a miniscule 4-table Korean sushi den on 11th & 1st run by a genial husband-and-wife chef-and-waitress team. For a while, it was our secret–we’d rush in at least once a week to inhale the flawless seaweed and cucumber salad appetizer, and watch some of New York’s freshest fish cut into delectable rainbow rolls or Stefan rolls. Slowly.

But then word got out. The restaurant expanded, and expanded again; the chef delegated to a team of new chefs; the East Village was discovered by people who 2 years previous would have preferred a holiday in Haiti to a jaunt down Saint Marks; the experience became diluted as reams of diners who just didn’t know any better became Sandobe’s mainstay; they barely noticed the seaweed salad and quaffed their shabby rolls contentedly.

I’m glad he cashed in, but my East Village sushi dealer was no longer providing me with the fix I needed, and for the past few years I’ve been using sushi at Takahachi, a very capable restaurant populated by virtuoso chefs and rightly popular for it. But for all the obvious bliss of dipping a piece of slightly seared pepper-crusted tuna into mustard sauce and then into one’s mouth, Takahachi lacks the intimacy and personal attention I’ve craved ever since the early days of Sandobe.

It seems the prayers I would have said had I been religious but which I didn’t because I’m not have finally been answered, in the form of Zen One, a new miniscule 4-table sushi restaurant that opened this week–a mere 6 flights of stairs below my apartment, on the ground floor of 109 Saint Marks. They too have a husband-and-wife team; they too have a great seaweed appetizer, but here the cucumber is laced with crab, and it works. The first time I ate at Zen One they brought out what looked like an ancient earthenware Korean Bunsen burner, and placed on it an open-faced clam that proceeded to cook in its own juices. It was incredibly tasty, but fun too, and it was presented with a sense of humor. The rolls are delicious, and the presentation is beautiful. I’ll be dragging everybody there in the coming months, as long as they know how to keep a secret.

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Urban tribes

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Felix alerted me to this New York Times Sunday Magazine article. It’s a very accurate description of the social life my friends and I lead these days. In our particular case there is a twist–many members of our “tribe” are scattered across the globe, and while we stay in touch virtually via email and through sites such as Sighs, we rely, perversely, on weddings as occasions for gathering. When we run out of weddings, we’ll need other excuses for international gatherings–birthdays? New Years?

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After September 11: Vermont

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On a whim, Itay, Rosa and I rented a car last Thursday afternoon and drove it to Northern Vermont. With nothing to keep us in New York until Monday, we went searching for peace. What did we find? A field. A forest. A hiking trail. A view. A sparkling night sky and a pond so still it reflected the stars. The time to think.

On the back roads of Vermont and upstate New York, the American flag is now omnipresent, fluttering from porches, cars, schools and supermarkets. On the way back to New York, the Empire State Building’s red, white and blue lights announced the new skyline from afar. In the East Village tonight the flag is out in front of French cafes, Mexican burrito joints and biker dive bars.

And makeshift shrines are sprouting up everywhere. In front of fire stations, naturally, but also along unused walls, where graffiti artists have sprayed memorials, people have brought candles and children have taped their drawings. In Tompkins Square park large chalk drawings on the pavement are surrounded by hundreds of candles. This being the East Village, some pavement messages heatedly disagree as to what exactly President Bush should do.

On many traffic light poles and telephone boxes, missing-person notices are fixed, sometimes hand-written, often with color pictures. The losses are still felt at the individual level in New York—the tragedy has not been abstracted here.

Here is a good site pointing to original commentary on the World Trade Center attack.

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September 11: Night

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I’ve been able to reach most friends in NYC and so far everybody I know is fine. I’m home now, it’s night outside, and if I glance South out my window over the screen of my computer there is only darkness where this morning stood the two towers of the World Trade Center, 2.5 km away. It’s eerie, knowing that so close to here a familiar place has become a landscape of horror.

I’ve watched enough television for now and so I thought I’d write to let you know what I saw today.

I work across the street from the World Trade Center towers (in the World Financial Center) but since this was going to be my last week at Bridge I was only working alternate days (the company is bankrupt) so I was not meant to go to work this morning.

I had just gotten up and was in the bathroom when around 845 ET my radio (which is always tuned to WNYC) said they had just seen an explosion in the North tower. From my window, which has a clear view of the NYC skyline, I saw flames and smoke pour out of a large gash near the 80th floor of the tower. I went to my roof and watched.

About 20 minutes after the first explosion, a huge fireball erupted out of the South tower, about 2 thirds of the way up. People screamed on the roofs around me, where everybody was beginning to gather. Most memorable is the bright bright orange of that explosion, and also the crispness of it; it’s a quality difficult to describe–it’s the quality of NOT seeing it on television, at a much higher resolution and in the outdoors, under a clear sky. The boom came later.

It was difficult to know what had just happened. I already knew from the radio that the first explosion had been caused by a plane. Was the second caused by a news helicopter accident? The plane that caused this second explosion had in fact come from behind the tower, so from my vantage point I had not seen it.

I went back downstairs, thinking that the course of these tragic events had come to some kind of end. I went online to check the news and was glancing out the window (as I’m doing now) when the South tower just started going straight down. This was probably the singlemost shocking moment of the day for me. In retrospect, it is probably also the single moment when most people died. It was shocking because the buildings are huge, because they are not meant to fall down, because I am used to walking underneath them every day. More importantly, the area around the World Trade Center is like canyons made up of buildings–I was suddenly afraid that skyscrapers were going to topple over one after the other. And this was the South tower, the one most recently hit, the one with the least time to evacuate.

Some friends (Clarice and Zed) came by to see if I was OK, as did Sveta. We went to my roof and watched more, helplessly, not wishing to be any closer, while I tried to call people whom I knew had offices in the Wall Street area. Cell phones (and land lines) were only working sporadically, probably because of overload. In the meantime, it had become obvious with the dual plane crashes that this was an act of terrorism. As we stood watching, The north tower collapsed as well. Again, we saw huge dust clouds billowing through the canyons of lower Manhattan. Again, there was that strange dread I had never felt before this day, of being very aware at a particular instance that large numbers of people were dying nearby.

I don’t have TV reception at home so we decided to watch TV at Sveta’s. Walking along St. Marks and First Avenue was strange. There were very few cars on the road by now (over 2 1/2 hours after the first explosion) but many people walking in small groups, or gathered around televisions set out on the sidewalk by merchants. Strangers were talking to each other, ambulances and buses were driving past at high speed on mostly empty streets, and people kept on looking South, at the huge, volcano-like dust and smoke cloud the blanketed the southern sky. Noticeable were small groups of people in business dress walking or huddled around payphones, their cell phones useless, trying to call home.

Then followed hours of television watching, a ritual you all no doubt participated in. Eventually I went home, took a shower, and got a bite to eat at St. Dymphnas–bars that were open were full this afternoon, and still are tonight. New Yorkers were meeting up en masse this afternoon, sharing stories, needing each others’ company, and probably taking their friends a whole lot less for granted. I know I do.

I am still amazed that the 2 World Trade Center towers collapsed onto themselves, rather than topple in a certain direction. Many more buildings could have come down and many more lives lost. In fact, when I came home I went back to my roof, and not one minute later, around 1730 ET, I saw 7 World Trade Center, a big 50-odd story skyscraper directly underneath the North tower, silently slip to the ground. This was the third and final major building to collapse today.

It is very early after this catastrophe, but one thing already seems certain: The future will be decentralized–no longer will banks and stock exchanges concentrate trading floor and clearing houses so densely. People will work more from home, businesses will value less aggregating together. I don’t think they will ever build anything like the World Trade Center again in New York.

Thanks again for your calls or emails, but don’t worry about me, I’m fine. Right now I’m thinking about the survivors that are beginning to call on their cell phones from under the rubble.

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September 11

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I’m fine, so are Matthew, Kim, Itay, Rosa, Felix, Michelle, Liz Wollman, Zach and Julia–I’ve talked to or seen them all. [Sept 12–also heard about or got in touch with Liz jacobs, Fergus McCormick, Osten Johanssen and Kathy Blake, they’re all fine]. To get in touch, try to call me at 646 295 7733.

I was listening to the radio when the first crash happened, went to my roof and saw the horror unfold there. My mental map still has those building there, I walked through them yesterday evening, with the very same people who went back today. As Jame said who called me a little while ago, there is nothing intelligent to add to this, so I won’t. All I can hope is that the two towers stood long enough for most people to be able to evacuate.

If you want to post comments or say you’re OK or ask about others, do use the comment button below.

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San Francisco vs New York

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Pitting San Francisco’s Haight Street versus New York’s St. Marks Place is a fair contest; after all, the streets serve as twin coastal magnets for rebellious youth, and—given the fickle nature of adolescent tastes—the length of their respective reigns as the preferred catwalks for the weird and wonderful among us has bestowed upon these places a pedigree that no other American street can match.

Only London’s Carnaby Street possesses the same mystique in the popular mind. But are any of these streets’ reputations still merited?

Haight, St. Marks and Carnaby ruled as a triumvirate over hippy consciousness in the 1960’s. But since then their priorities have diverged. St. Marks’s beatniks turned to punk, whereas Haight’s hippies turned to surfing, and it shows. This at least was my impression from last weekend’s jaunt down both streets.

Haight is cleaner, wider, brighter, with more dainty boutiques selling hip skimpy things and bags and shoes. Especially shoes. St. Marks has a GAP store too now, but otherwise its consumer offerings are predominantly stall-based and of a certain sensibility—a perennial best seller is “I fucked Mick Jagger” T-shirts. Haight’s eating and drinking is done inside airy diner-like contraptions with more than one kind of mineral water. St. Marks offers dives and ethnic food and terrace cafes. It’s hard to find a smoker on Haight, while on St. Marks it’s de rigeur.

Dress on Haight is surfer casual. There a hint of dot com preppy affectation, though maybe only because those are the clothes finding their way into second-hand stores now. On St. Marks, dress is approached more studiously: Kids flock together after school to curate their latest punk fashion creations. The other zealots are Japanese tourists, whose relationship to punk ranges from slavish to obsessional. Either way, it’s a visual treat.

Haight Street is solving its homeless problem by denying the vagrants toilet facilities—or so it seems from the signage prominently displayed by every establishment you enter. This approach betrays what is perhaps the biggest difference between the two streets: Haight’s small business owners are eager to put a respectable face on their street, one where its hippy pedigree is served up as nothing more than a viable shopping theme. But while the collective memory of Haight Street fades in the few remaining drugged-out minds of aging hippies, St. Marks remakes itself with every 15 year-old’s first Mohawk proudly paraded across 2nd Avenue.