“The Supreme Laboratory Of The American Experiment”

Despite how relatively new film is, it’s essentially an ancient storytelling medium. I mean, film rips through the camera and then through the projector at twenty-four frames a second in one direction and one direction only. We’re carried into a river of light and sound, and move from beginning to middle to end. What that means is that every time out you have to find what the story is. What is the one story to tell about a city that sprawls nearly four hundred years in its history, covers some 326 square miles, clearly embraces every conceivable human enterprise and kind of human being? I think we settled on a very simple proposition, which was to see how it happened that everybody in the world came to be living in the same place and could live together there. One can really see the experiment in the creation of a worldwide culture beginning in the early seventeenth century. That was the first step in a process we now call globalization. It’s not glib, I think, to say that the experiment that in a sense began in New Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century is the experiment of the turn of the millennium.

New York is the essence of what’s best about America, but it has always been both the best and worst of America. It has always been about creating a society in which anyone of ability can rise. That sounds warm, but it’s bracing in the honesty and challenge it presents to any individual, because you can fail as easily as you can succeed. And its democratic impulse has always taken an interest in the highest, as opposed to the lowest, common denominator. I mean, they didn’t have to build the Brooklyn Bridge. They didn’t have to build an 843-acre Central Park. The vaulting ambition and even vanity of New Yorkers has made them not merely address their problems but try to scoop the world in doing so, and this has left a treasury of large public works.

That is an amazing parallel story. The story of African-Americans in New York, like the story of African-Americans at large, is frequently and heartbreakingly the exception. You know, there’s a tendency to think of New York as a Northern city, but it’s really not a Northern city or a Southern city. It’s a kind of drain that everything in America funneled down into. In the seventeenth century the slave trade was a pillar of the city’s economy. It was routine in the early eighteenth century to see African-Americans owned by white New Yorkers walking freely down to the auction at the foot of Wall Street to be auctioned off. But in the end New Yorkers may have moved toward the light a little more quickly simply because they couldn’t avoid one another. They couldn’t be segregated.

From about 1790 to 1929 New York enjoyed the most extraordinary run any city has ever had, a run in capitalism and democracy, in commerce and hordes of people. No city has ever grown or been wealthy or pioneered both the negative and positive aspects of a culture that way. After enterprising New Yorkers like Alexander Hamilton helped ensure that their town was going to be first among all the ports on the Atlantic, the city simply took off without any competition. Each new technological development, transportation revolution, and breakthrough in communications either happened in New York or was quickly stolen by New York to leverage an even higher level of prestige, wealth, and population. Even the federal government was just a fly on the rump of a huge beast of New York by the end of the nineteenth century. When the Crash came, it was the end of an unrivaled unfettered run. What we learned by the end of the twenties was that capitalism could not be allowed to run so freely.

The zenith of New York in a sense came when in the depths of the Depression a group of New Yorkers went South and, as the historian Mike Wallace puts it, invaded Washington and said to the federal government, “You’re now going to have to do at a national level what New York City and State have done for decades: take care of all the people, at least in some minimal concrete ways.”

Yes. Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member in history, appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR in the depths of the Depression, said the New Deal had begun on March 25, 1911, when the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burned. The worst industrial disaster in New York’s history, in which 146 women in a sweatshop plunged or burned to death because they’d been locked into their factory, became a watershed. A coalition that included radicalized Eastern European sweatshop employees, journalists, progressive politicians, and even the daughter of J. P. Morgan came together to get government to act not on behalf of factory owners but on behalf of factory workers.

In the 1940s and 1950s much of the money that came from the federal government went into public works, but only one kind of public works: highways. It turned out that the Depression was the moment when cities began to be pulled apart by the automobile and the highway. This ensured that the great struggle for cities in the coming halfcentury would be the relationship of cities to cars. Every other form of transportation had in effect centralized power, wealth, population, and prestige; the automobile is the first great decentralizer. A great irony in New York’s history is that one of the master builders and chief architects of the decentralized vision of cities, Robert Moses, lived and worked in New York, yet New York miraculously escaped the fate that almost destroyed nearly every other American city. We came very close. The last really melodramatic story in New York’s history—maybe there’s one happening today, and we’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow—happened when Manhattan came within an ace of being cut in pieces by superhighways that Robert Moses hoped would run across 125th Street, 59th Street, 34th Street, and what is now SoHo. That would have destroyed life in Manhattan as we know it. The story of how it was prevented is one of the great cliffhangers. Because of it, Jane Jacobs is probably the most important New Yorker of the second half of the twentieth century.

Yes. She had the ability first to think through an alternative to the city of the car and then to lead a political movement that stopped the most powerful master builder who ever built in America. He had done whatever he wanted with the stroke of a pen for four and a half decades—until her book came out in 1961 and became the bible of a movement to preserve the traditional city, with its essential vibrant street life. The building stopped to such a degree that one could say that the problem of New York now is that it doesn’t have a Robert Moses. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his valedictory years as a senator has been saying, you can’t coast on your legacy of buildings and public works or you’ll be living off your capital. New York’s pride has always been that it’s on the cutting edge. When you’re in New York, you know you’re standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon, only it’s the future that you’re looking out into.

Immigrants, money, and the media. America is inconceivable without immigrants, and its identity is therefore constantly in a swirl. The country is in a perpetual adolescent crisis, and there’s nobody sterner than an adolescent when it comes to criticizing the childish behavior of people who may be two or three months younger. And New York has the most unvarnished, least hypocritical attitude toward money and class of any American place. People wish they could live in an America where Thomas Jefferson is President and Frank Capra is Vice President, but of course nobody ever lived in a Jeffersonian America. At the deepest psychic level we are and always have been an urban nation; we’ve just had this habit of thinking we wanted to be farmers. And, finally, the media are so powerful. They have been here since the Erie Canal made New York the transportation center. This is where the idea and the image of America are created. There’s tremendous ambivalence across the country about that. If you lived in a medieval town and were wandering in the countryside and bumped into a stranger who asked you where you were from, you could point to a steeple poking out of the tree line and say, “That’s where I’m from,” and that would be sufficient. The skyline of New York has been the steeple poking out of the tree line of American culture for a century now.

Yes. This has been the most professionally challenging and creatively rewarding project I’ve ever worked on. To find a narrative that works not only in summary but with its boots on, step by step, has been extremely difficult. There’s no Fort Sumter, no Gettysburg, no Appomattox. You have to go out and find those things, and, with a large team of historians, we’ve really been going into kind of uncharted terrain. But because twelve hours is nothing for the history of New York, the challenge has been to find moments and images that don’t just do double or triple or quadruple duty but do dodecahedral duty. They have to deal with all sorts of things at the same time, so that you can create the impression of encompassing a large amount of history while in fact you’re leaving out most of it.

The poetic challenge and obligation of the film became obvious as we made the first episode, which runs from Henry Hudson’s arrival in 1609 to the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825—two centuries and not a single photograph from the whole time. This made us grasp right away the fact that even when we had millions of photographic images and miles of newsreel footage, the images would have to work like haiku: powerful, condensed, and suggestive. What I hope people understand is that no matter what, we’ve had to make choices of the most draconian kind. We’ve wanted to get into the center of the stream, find the direction it’s moving in, and, as much as we possibly can, thrill people with the sense of motion and the beauty of what the moment is about. We’ve been forced to choose moments and images that will enter the eye and the ear and the heart and unfold, and explain a lot and say very little, and move on.

When you finally get one of these moments right and it does resonate, it resonates with a city so large and continuously interesting and full of every human feeling and emotion and ambition that you begin to feel something immense vibrating in response to that moment.

What we found in talking to the severity or so people that we interviewed—people like Mayor Giuliani and Senator Moynihan and David Dinkins, Ed Koch, Martin Scorsese, Fran Lebowitz, Brendan Gill, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Kazin, Margo Jefferson, and the list goes on—was that virtually every one of them spoke about New York with an unfeigned passion, as if they were talking about the most important thing in their life. They talked with the kind of fluency and candor we reserve for the deepest and most powerful things we know intimately. It seemed as if the performance standards of the city itself had rubbed off on everyone.

In New York you can’t just show up. You have to have gotten your act together. The cultural reality is that it’s a stage, and there are ten other people waiting in the wings, so you’d better kick high and make the gesture both broad and dazzling. All these people intuitively understood that. I’m still astonished by them all and what they’ve given the film.

The reason we made the movie has to do, oddly, with that most symbolic of New York landmarks, the Empire State Building. It’s as if since the Ice Age—in a completely unhistorical way of looking at things—New York had been moving in the direction of putting up that twelve-hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall building with a dirigible mast on top. They dug the ground, and in a few weeks the Crash came. It never should have been built; it was a last twitch in the great era of speculation. It’s almost a gift to the screenwriter. A number of techniques had to be pioneered, and it was put up by an army of workers with a speed and efficiency that were almost reckless, all while the Depression deepened. Then it was such a financial failure that it remained unsurrounded by other buildings—which is why you can see it from everywhere. It immediately became the icon of the city, the greatest expression of the manic upward aspiring thrust that had been the city’s ensign for centuries.

The most moving thing ever written about New York from within a very precise historical context, I think, was by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was the human emblem of the twenties, and he was on his way down, too, when he came back to New York in what he called “the dark autumn of 1931.” Zelda was in an institution, and he was woefully alcoholic, and in a famous essay, “My Lost City,” he took inventory of the New York that had flown too high and had its wings melted. It was in smithereens with the exception of this incredible building, which had just opened that year.

He described how, looking out from the top of the Empire State Building, he understood the mistake New York had made. Staring off into the infinite distance, he saw that the city was a finite entity, and “only the expanse of blue and green is limitless.” New Yorkers hadn’t realized the city was not a universe but just a city after all. It didn’t go on forever, it wasn’t the whole world, “and the entire edifice we had reared in our imaginations,” he wrote, “came crashing down.”

Rarely does a city have a narrative that’s that spectacular, and that tragicomic, in its essence.