Two new books take up the case against cars, the dominant mode of twentieth-century transportation, from a generally progressive perspective. Meanwhile, the preservationist movement that stopped his worst plans is now under fire from the same progressives who used to despise him. Even our local effort to cast “master builder” Robert Moses as a unique culprit in the story of what went wrong in New York-too many expressways and not enough trains-runs into the fact that Moses was essentially executing ideas that nearly all reformers of his era shared what happened in New York happened in other big Northern cities at the same time. That this is, at best, a very partial truth does not weaken its claim on our consciousness. People always maintain, similarly, that the big auto manufacturers killed L.A.’s once efficient public-transit system, leaving the city at the mercy of polluting and gridlocked cars. People routinely insist, without evidence, that the wide boulevards of Paris were built by Baron Haussmann to prevent revolutionary barricades, even though boulevards were a nearly universal feature of urban development in the later nineteenth century Philadelphia built them extravagantly, and Kansas City boasted that it had more boulevards than Paris, without any Communards to cannonade. And so the history of roads and what runs on them often ignores the tragedies of good intentions and the comedies of unintended consequences that genuinely got them going. Perhaps because transportation histories take place on such a big scale, they tend to be highly moralizing: we can be amused by the small gradations in how we eat, but major alterations in how we move must have, we think, some cause or even conspiracy behind them. Any insular New Yorker instantly “gets” Paris and its Métro it’s harder for us to “get” Los Angeles. The weary and wary faces of Daumier’s people, in his images of “Les Transports en Commun,” are still familiar. The Paris Métro and the New York subway, built at roughly the same time, undergird two cities where people ate and made love in different ways but remained modern, in large part, because they moved rapidly in units. Food tastes can change from decade to decade, even from year to year the history of transportation tends to span half-century intervals, marking whole epochs in consciousness. The history of transportation will always be social history, writ large. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. Cars are for poets and outlaws, the subway for the intimidated and the enslaved. Allen Ginsberg’s “ Howl” pities those “who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on Benzedrine / until the noise of wheels and children brought them low,” while dreaming wetly of the glories of the open road, which leads to sex, possibly with an idealized version of Neal Cassady, subsequently memorialized as Kerouac’s irresistible Dean Moriarty. In Jack Kerouac’s “ On the Road,” the car was the vehicle of liberty for the bohemian kids of those working-class Brooklynites. Yet it was also in the mid-fifties that the hipsters and beatniks and rebels feverishly celebrated the car and the burst of autonomy, even anarchy, it offered to postwar life. Public transportation was the self-evident bedrock of working-class life. What’s striking is that no one watching in the fifties needed to think about any of this. When Ed and Ralph go to Minneapolis for a Raccoons convention, they take a sleeper car on a train. Neither the Kramdens nor the Nortons seem to own an automobile. He and his best friend, Ed Norton (Art Carney), who works in the sewers, make daily use of the subway and bus system, which was designed to whisk the outer-borough working classes into light-industrial Manhattan. His employer is the Gotham Bus Company, which seems to be the sort of private-public enterprise that, like the I.R.T., built the subways. Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) is a New York City bus driver, deeply proud to be so and drawing a salary sufficient to support a nonworking wife in a Brooklyn apartment, not to mention a place in a thriving bowling league and membership in the Loyal Order of Raccoon Lodge. “The Honeymooners” (1955-56), the greatest American television comedy, is-to a degree more evident now than then-essentially a series about public transportation in New York.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |