MK: - New York Public Library



REBECCA SOLNIT | JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO | GARENETTE CADOGAN |

SUKETU MEHTA | LUC SANTE

Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas

October 18, 2016

LIVE from the New York Public Library

live

Celeste Bartos Forum

MATT KNUDSEN: Good evening, and welcome again. Thank you, Paul. Welcome to the New York Public Library. I’m Matt Knudsen, and Paul gave you my long title, so I will spare you a second time. These images are a tiny sample of our holdings, flecks of gold, suggestive of the enormous troves contained within an otherwise dry list of collections – 5.6 miles of archives; 500,000 photographs; 450,000 maps; 250,000 prints; 200,000 books published before 1800; 4,000,000 books published after. More on troves and gold flecks in a second.

First, a quick story of how I came to and stayed here for the last fifteen years, as it bears on tonight’s conversation. My obvious roots in historical geography pegged me as “the map guy” at art school, and then led me here, where I practically stumbled into the inside-out Faberge egg that is the map room upstairs, Room 117. While I was helping a game designer make a Battle of Somme board game, within minutes, librarians brought copies of World War I topographic maps, and those were FedExxed to Berkeley straightaway. This intoxicating first draft from the deep well of research collections was followed, amazingly in my opinion, by my own employment, at first as a specialist, then as map curator, which was a really soft landing in this wonderful intellectual home shared with inspiring researchers and colleagues, some of whom we’ll hear from tonight.

The deep well metaphor was inadequate, and I replaced it with “the mine”. The librarians are the expert guides, identifying rich veins of ore, the raw materials of art, technology, culture. Each trip down the shaft is a magical exchange between guides and researchers. Every project offering a new valance, a facet, a knowledge of the value of these extraordinary riches in this place. The memory of the journeys accumulates, connects to, and eventually bores laterally to adjacent shafts, previously unknown to researcher and curator alike, like an illuminated network of interconnected information. New York City’s places provide an incredibly rich opportunity to drill down, take a core sample of thickly textured stratigraphy of historical documentation, where old maps, troves unto themselves, are just the beginning.

And myriad visual and textual documents put flesh to the bone. Firsthand accounts; corporate records; landscape prints; photographs; government and legal documents. These images are a trickle of the vast, flowing network of places, people and events; narratives recorded in and interwoven throughout library collections. The raw materials of many historical atlases begging to be written. George Washington co-authored Culper Spy Ring letters. Revolutionary War maps, delineating the big fire in the city’s freshwater source called the Collect Pond. The very same pond where slaves were publically executed on ginned-up conspiracy charges in 1741. Also, incidentally, where Fulton pioneered the screw driven propeller steam engine. Water lines, cisterns and hydrants charted to help manage rampant 19th Century fires. Like 1835, when most of Lower Manhattan’s commercial district burned, shown here, later rebuilt. Closer to home, right in Bryant Park, a magnificent Crystal Place rose for the 1853 World’s Fair and burned in a great conflagration in 1858, and was commemorated by song called The Fireman’s Quadrille.

Draft riots ruptured the city in 1863, and places like Murray Hill Hotel, at bottom left there, were looted of alcohol and cigars by enraged drunken mobs who burned businesses like Brooks Brothers, suppliers of Union uniforms. Everything in that draft riot itemized in a city comptroller document. Incredibly boring, right? Maybe not. Rioters targeted innocents as well, of course, burning the colored orphan asylum which was on 43rd Street. Temperance societies left tons of documents like maps of overcrowding, disease and insalubrious activities. Vice committee of 14 and 15 surveyed illegal dancing, prostitution and drinking. Tenement house condition surveys were deposited right upstairs here at this library for the good of the municipality.

Photographic surveys of the ever-changing city commissioned by the New York Public Library were permanently deposited here. Tens of millions of local historical newspaper pages loaded with people, places, events, sit silent on microfilm reels below Bryant Park. Phone books and city directories across two hundred years attest further to the lives of millions of New Yorkers. Playbills detail the history of theater. Photos tell a very small part of the oyster’s big history. Municipal maps trace the nascent electric grid. Popular press assures us that Electro City is safe by having a parade where people have wires running through their clothes. [laughter] Can’t make it up. And finally, poor neighborhoods, seen here at left in red, still reliant on gaslights well into the 20th century, documented as being on fire many times per year, were on the right. Not so much, because that’s where the electricity went.

And so, to tonight’s program. It’s an honor and my pleasure to invite the thinkers and makers behind Non-Stop Metropolis to the stage. Their work uses the city’s geography as a framework to tell stories as numerous and varied as New York itself. It’s my hope that while the Atlas Trilogy may now be complete – and I’m looking at you guys over there – the work to uncover and tell these stories, especially through the powerful lenses of space and time, will continue for as long as you – researchers, thinkers, intellectuals, artists, cartographers – and we, the library – are in existence. So to our speakers.

For the past seven years, Paul has asked guests to write a biography, or something which approximates them – or not – in seven words – like haikus or Tweets of a sort. Here are the seven words of our five guests. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro loves maps and islands, scribbling too. Suketu Mehta – New Yorker, public and library-loving guy. Garnette Cadogan. Garnette walks radiant streets anticipating enriching encounters. Rebecca Solnit roams, remembers, writes, revises, resists, celebrates, scorches. Luc Sante – curiosity, skepticism, doubt, rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, memory, hope. Please help me welcome to the stage Josh, Suketu, Garnette, Rebecca and Luc. [applause]

JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO: What is place? Why does place matter to humans? How is it that we arrive, whether we’re pondering where we are or where we want to go, at our sense of place? If these questions are as complex as they are necessary, no matter where we find ourselves, they’re perhaps extra complex and extra necessary in a city like New York, a place perhaps best described as Rebecca Solnit here, one of our great authorities on these questions has said, it is many worlds in one place. The question of how to describe or narrate those worlds of the city, their collisions and confluences, their layers and their mysteries, suffuses everyone’s work on the stage. It suffuses Luc Sante’s instantly classic books on New York and now Paris; deep dives down the alleyway and the guts and hidden histories and nether earthy worlds that make these cities go, by a writer whose erudition and sentences I don’t think I’m alone in saying I’ve been learning an unrepayable amount from as long as I’ve been reading the New York Review of Books. It’s a question that’s occupied Suketu Mehta in his masterpiece on Mumbai, Maximum City, one of the great books ever written really on all the characters that comprise a city and whose years-long approach to, shall we say, in-depth reporting, has found him in immersed in recent years with following New York characters ranging from aspiring policemen to the employees of a boutique marijuana delivery service, all of whom happen to be young models from Eastern Europe, and with who he’s managed somehow to go undercover. I know you’re good. I’m not sure how you pull that off. And all to write what will no doubt be another masterful book about this city that we can’t wait to read. It does matter too to Garnette Cadogan, whose book on walking we’re waiting for hungrily, but who has at least fed us over recent months with one essay in particular on walking while black that was the piece really that this country needed to read this summer on that subject. And they also of course [inaudible] at the heart of what my dear collaborator here, Rebecca Solnit, and I have tried to do in this atlas of New York. Garnette and I sometimes like to joke that Rebecca’s name must be a pseudonym for three people. It’s hard to know really how she keeps up the pace she does, book after book and column after column, and Facebook post after Facebook post. But she does, and she’s an indispensable voice in our national conversation and our reading lives about so many things. And Rebecca’s also done something else, and that all of us have in common here. She created this series of map books culminating in this atlas of New York, Nonstop Metropolis, to which all of us here have contributed in different ways. And here tonight we’re going to talk about a lot of things. We’ll talk about riots, some of which Matt mentioned, butterflies, languages. But I wanted to start with a question to Rebecca that I’m not sure I’ve asked in a direct way though we’ve been exchanging ten emails a day for the last three years. And that is the question of, all of us are invested in writing about cities, in using narrative and prose to describe these worlds of the city – but what is it about maps? What do maps allow us to do that prose doesn’t?

REBECCA SOLNIT: You know, [inaudible] – oh, it’s always – I apologize to the people who I mostly turned away from the beginning. It’s lovely to be here. Lovely to have so many friends in the crowd and Californians and New Mexicans and New Yorkers. And what do maps do? You know, I started this project at the end of the Bush era to come home and to really kind of go deep into San Francisco after feeling like I’d been thinking abstractly, internationally for a long time. And I wanted to make a bunch of propositions. Maps have a kind of authority and immediacy that’s really different than essays. And they also, I found out after the first book came out and I saw how people responded, have a kind of joy and a kind of mystery. I think people try and locate themselves on any map they get really absorbed in, even if you know you’ll never go to Shanghai, a map of Shanghai – you’re like, well, this is how you walk from the Tea House to the Temple to the… And you know… So I did these books of maps and essays to make a series of postulates about what cities are and can be, how we can imagine places. And these three cities, which are the three great capitals of the United States, you know, were the three we did on the three, the three coasts of the lower forty-eight – Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf. And early in the book I introduce a famous line by Tennessee Williams: “The United States has three cities – San Francisco, New Orleans and New York. All the rest is Cleveland.” [laughter] But I really wanted to say that anyplace is inexhaustible. Anyplace can be mapped innumerable ways. I was very influenced by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and by Jorge Luis Borges, who we were just talking about a minute ago as Paul Holdengraber was leading us through the bizarre labyrinth sort of backstage in this grand library. And you know, and so each book – the first two contained 22 maps apiece; New York, 26, with the sense that this is not comprehensive, exhaustive. But it makes a series of proposals about what a city is, as only maps can do. And one of the things that felt very really important to these maps, that feels also very important to this political moment and was central to what we’re doing – maybe we should go to Monarchs and Queens – is it makes postulates about cities as places of beautiful co-existence. And, you know, which New York is. I think that democracy, as I said in my book on walking, depends on a kind of trust in strangers and people who are unlike you. And cities, with their endless mingling and crossing paths and coexistence, at least cities where people actually walk and take the subway – maybe not some of the Western cities I’ve spent time in where people go push their garage door opener before they go to another parking garage, to another piece of infrastructure segregated for people like them – but great cities, pedestrian cities, cities of mingling – I think make democracy the kind of fervent joy, almost ecstasy that Walt Whitman celebrated. And our atlas is about this as a city of Jews, of immigrants, of Latinos, of Cari – people from the Caribbean, of extraordinarily rich black culture of women. And funny, you know, we didn’t design it this way, because we started on this a while ago, but it’s really New York as a big fuck-you to Trump, among other things. And you think that’s funny? And… So, you know, so those were some of the things I wanted to get at. And this is a map from the first atlas called “Monarchs and Queens” – the monarchs being butterflies, the queens being drag queens. And it was sort of the template that we varied in a lot of ways for this idea of coexistence. And it’s literally about the thirty-something butterfly species that are still found in San Francisco, and queer historical sites, and what they have in common is the sense of San Francisco as a refuge city, a place where things flourish that flourish nowhere else. It’s also kind of like a handy way to get more bang for your buck, to map two subjects rather than one per map. And then there’s a lot of metaphors. The slang in Spanish for “queer” is “mariposa”, which means butterfly. The great poet of San Francisco and former New Yorker, Aaron Shurin, wrote a piece about being a gay man in gay bars and in this very gay city about, where metaphors of wigs and wings and cocoons and coming out were really pivotal. So it was really about what flourishes here. And you know, so those coexistences… Where one of the things we’re really interested in, the way that many different things can be found and that exist at the same time – as Josh said, many worlds in one place. And sometimes they’re in an intense conflict. Sometimes they’re separate. Sometimes they’re merging. But it was partly to just – you know, this one was really just – well, above a kind of complementary thing that didn’t necessarily overlap. Although each map has its own story of how it came to be and half this map came from books in the gay/lesbian archives in San Francisco that I burrowed in deeply. And some of it came from this gay man on disability because of HIV who one day saw a tiger swallowtail fly past his window, and it changed his life, and he became the great devotee of butterflies and the great expert on where they all are. I just took out a gas station map, and he wrote every, where every species was to be found in the city. So the maps were made – since you’re going to see a lot of them – they began with a concept and then with the research to flesh it out, and then instructions to cartographers. And then the great University of California Press art director, Leah Chandra, designed each map to give it a kind of house style, a title plate, margins, a palette, etc. And then if the map wasn’t too busy we commissioned an artist, and every map had an essay. So there’s – each map had a huge number of moving pieces which is why three atlases has been enough for me. But I suspect Josh and Garnette and a number of other people we know, and possibly University of California Press, have more coming.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: And of course one of the ideas behind these maps I think we’ve talked about a lot is that, the basic idea that no one lives in the same city.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: Alright? That everyone could map their city in a different way, or in many different ways. And one of the maps – to move to one from New York here, that you like to say is the sort of lie that tells the truth – which is their map archipelago, which I think is up next on the slides – which grows from a couple sort of insights about the city being, one, it’s sort of – the large number of people from the Caribbean Islands who live here. But also, of course, it gets to the geographic fact about the city which is its kind of islandness, that it’s a group of islands. And so the idea here of course, we sort of took license and said, okay, we’re going to sort of mash together the islands of the Caribbean, the islands of New York – the Bronx of course being the only borough that’s not, that is a part of the North American mainland, which is interesting to think about. We were going to just label it North America, but I think we decided against that. But archipelago, right. And this I think was your idea, was it not?

REBECCA SOLNIT: It was, it was. Even though you’re the Caribbean expert and Garnette is the actual Caribbean in the gang, our beloved editor-at-large here. And so yeah, and it really – and the maps do a lot of different things. And you know, I had two other agendas I should mention in the get-go. One was to – I mentioned, was to make a lot of postulates about what cities are as these inexhaustible places of infinite coexistences, intersections, cross-pollinations, unresolved conflicts. But another was to bring back what maps had been historically, the kind of maps Matt takes care of and studies and preserves for us. Maps as works of art; maps as beautiful, imaginative; maps as a kind of intersection between three representational systems – cartography, language and visual representation. And you know, and we’re in an era where people… Somebody said to me, maps are obsolete, which I didn’t accept. People get around with their phones a lot now. But Josh wrote a beautiful article for Harper’s a while ago addressing this. And we talked about this in the New Orleans Atlas and elsewhere – that your phone will get, will get you where you’re going but it won’t help you understand where you are. And there is a kind of post-geographical obedience to the machine, a kind of outsourcing of orientation to machines which often fail and mislead us. You know, and I worry kind of about people not really knowing where they are. And so I really wanted to think about, well, what do maps do? How do they help us understand? And we’re long past the era where geography was something children had all through elementary and high school. But we wanted to give a kind of series of festive and subversive geography lessons and, you know, that thought about what maps do. So we have maps about the past, about the future, about the present; maps like this that, in some sense, are fictions, lies that tell the truth. And our maps do a lot of different things.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: And we have a map of New Jersey in our New York [inaudible – simultaneous speakers] somewhere.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah. And this one was really about – this does a bunch of things that… One thing is that, so if you make, if you show the rectangle of New York City, something that happens all the time is that a big chunk of what’s on that map is New Jersey, and usually there’s like data superimposed over it. It’s blanked out. And New Jersey gets no respect cartographically on maps of New York City. And it came out of a conversation with somebody from New Jersey had a long time ago, when I realized that William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Smithson were all Jersey boys. And so we wanted to reverse the usual background and foreground, what’s empha – what’s treated as important and attention-getting, and what’s treated as kind of like, oh, that other stuff over there. So we kind of – like New York is plenty celebrated in those 25 other maps. But in this one, we just like shaded it out and dropped a quote on it about Passaic. So, and then we celebrated New Jersey which has this – you know, which is often thought of as the suburbs, but has – from Blue Note Records and the jazz greats up there in Englewood Cliffs, to Patti Smith to Celia Cruz, just has an extraordinarily rich cultural history that was there, that wasn’t just sub New York. And I should say one of the great things that happened for this atlas, is years before I did an event at the New York Public Library about my book, A Paradise Built in Hell, and Paul Holdengraber had the genius to invite Peter Coyote to conduct the conversation with it. We’d never met before. We’re now great friends. And he actually grew up in Englewood. And so when it was time to think about – you know, and he was passionate about music, wanted to be a musician, had a black, you know – the family had a sort of housekeeper/nanny who was like the mother who really raised him. And she hung out with all these amazing musicians, bebop musicians and gospel musicians and everything else. And so here’s this little kid who was always being taken around to sort of avant garde black Jersey. So thanks to New York Public Library, the essay that accompanies this map is Peter Coyote talking about his Jersey days and the music and culture there.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: I love… You know, one thing that this map, I think, does – I hadn’t thought about it before – but you know, really thinks about New York as a sort of, as a place of arrival, right, and the idea that this thing of, we sort of lionize certain characters as sort of tied to the city or as icons of the city.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: But so many people here of course, like anywhere, come from elsewhere. And it makes me think of – Garnette and I were talking the other day, and you said to me, you just came back from London, so you could actually speak to this I think in an interesting way. But the idea that New York is a place that allows one to sort of join its story in a kind of rapid way, at least compared to the cities of the old world. I think – was that some… Is that what you said, something like that?

GARNETTE CAGODAN: Yes. And the way that New York sometimes is a low bar of entry. I mean, if you’re on a subway platform and you recognize at 5:00 there is no such thing as an empty carriage in the subway. If it’s empty, the AC’s not working or somebody’s in there saying, I want to be in here alone. [laughter] You recognize that New Yorkers, like, “Yeah, you’re a New Yorker.” Whereas I’ve been in all the cities where you’ve been there twenty years and they hear the accent, and they’re like, oh, no, you’re not really from here; where are you really from? I mean, people hear my accent and ask for directions in Flatbush, ‘cause I seem – oh, Jamaican accent, of course he lives in Crown Heights. [laughter]

REBECCA SOLNIT: Right, right. Which he doesn’t.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: [laughs] You had that great line – speaking of archipelago – that there’s parts of Crown Heights, right. And there’s sort of something about immigrant worlds. But they’re not just, it’s not just that it’s Jamaicans. It’s like they’re living in Jamaica ’91.

GARNETTE CAGODAN: Like Jamaica circa 1991.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: It’s like, they’re listening to the music from when they came, and it’s this incredible thing about…

GARNETTE CAGODAN: Yeah, seems like a moment in time, frozen, often from when they arrived.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: Right.

GARNETTE CAGODAN: Or it’s like [inaudible] that there are ways in which their parts, if you look at parts of New York and like, oh, this is this particular village in Mexico, that it’s, this trans-local relationship is happening.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: Right.

GARNETTE CAGODAN: And that you see that here is this part of the world, lifted and dropped here in New York City.

JOSHUA JELLY-SHAPIRO: Right. Which produces all these remarkable, not just coexistences, right, but cominglings that you have – right, those people, the sort of immigrants who’ve come from a small village in Mexico who learn Spanish here… Right, they’ve come and they speak an indigenous language in Oaxaca but have learned Spanish here.

GC: Yeah. Like in the Bronx…

JJS: Right.

GC: …I remember that experience where, in the Bronx, and someone went to this restaurant and said, oh, this place is wonderful; you have to eat Mexican food here. And he goes, they’re too unfriendly. I’ve been there, talked to them in Spanish. Everybody ignores me. And said, oh, well, that’s simple, because they don’t know Spanish. They’re from Oaxaca. They speak this endangered language. So they’re not answering in Spanish, because they don’t know what you’re saying.

JJS: Right. Yeah, precisely. And this gets at I think another sort of theme that runs through this book that I wanted to ask all of you about. But is this theme – that if everyone can map the city in a different way… Which is to say that we can all, we all live in a different city in a sense, and then we also live in a shared city. But something that the map, “City of Women” gets at, and also this map, “City of Walkers”, that you worked on, Garnette – but “City of Women, if we could see the next slide there… We’ll talk about climate [inaudible – simultaneous speakers]…

RS: We’ll get back to carbon inference…

JJS: We’ll get, we’ll get to climate, yeah.

RS: Okay.

JJS: Is, is that “City of Women” – this map, of course; some of you might have seen it on New Yorker’s website this week – but this was a very simple concept where the sort of idea behind it I think is, right, to ask this question of what it is to live in the city if you inhabit or are a certain kind of person and inhabit the body of a woman or a black man or a white man, or whatever you might be – that we all inhabit a different city, and the way we experience space is shaped by who we are. And this is a map I think that has a concept that’s quite simple. You just sort of took the subway map and replaced every name on it with, with the name of an illustrious woman who’s either associated with that neighborhood or that area. But how would you articulate what we were trying to do with this map, Rebecca?

RS: You know, I wanted to do a map – and New York has extraordinary women… I’m so excited I’m meeting Gia Tolentino, the great writer, feminist writer who’s just joined The New Yorker staff, in a couple of days. I’m meeting Emma Sulkowicz later. But you know, New York has centuries of extraordinary women. And we could have tried to… But women are also often very missing from history, and you know, not allowed to be at universities, not allowed to become physics professors or, you know, astronomers or athletes or etc. And so I really wanted to do two things. I wanted to find a way to celebrate all these women in New York who might literally not have a place in the city, and to in a sense give them a place. And I wanted to criticize the fact that every city I’ve ever been in is essentially a manscape, meaning that large numbers of things in it are named after men. And that it’s so naturalized to have Madison Avenue and the Bronx and Lexington… You know, I’m thinking of Lexington or Lafayette, etc. That there’s like hundreds of men’s names all over New York City. There are very, very, very few things named after women. I’m a visiting artist in Columbia right now. And on Saturday I went on a walk with some of the students I’m working with. And I asked them a question based on this map. “How would they…” And there’s like students of all, you know, races and genders. And I asked them, “How would you feel differently if you moved through a city in which the sort of place names, monuments, museums, buildings, bridges were commemorated, you know, women as much or more than men, people of color as much as whiteness?” And two young women had extraordinary answers for me. One of them said, “I have slouched all my life; I would stand up straight in a city that was named for women.” And the sense that this goes all the way down into the body and kind of how you feel – your rights, you know, etc. – was just stunning for me. And the other young woman said, “I would feel like I was entitled to take up more space than I do now in a city where things were named after women as well as men.” And I should say, there are five statues of women in New York City, possibly a few more. There’s a few streets and thoroughfares named after women. But it’s all relatively minor. You know, it’s not, it’s not fifty percent, it’s not ten percent. I’m pretty sure it’s not five percent. There’s a very good chance it’s – well, for statues, I’m sure it’s less than one percent. So the other one said that not only would she feel that she had more right to occupy space, but she wasn’t sure if she’d be sexually harassed on boulevards named after women…you know, the way she is in a world named after men. So it was really… And I should say that this is a feminist map. But it’s, the great women of New York are all colors. And Grace Lee Boggs is here. Venus and Serena are out by the tennis courts; they’re their stars. Sonya Sotomayor is in, you know, where she grew up. Yoko Ono’s…

GC: We have Salt, Pepper and Spinderella, in order.

RS: Yup. Yup.

GC: And we have [inaudible phrase]

RS: And we have this beautiful feminist moment, where I was working on a really kind of wonky hard data map with Heather Smith, who had a gorgeous essay for us. And Garnette and Josh and our chief researcher, Jonathan Tarleton, were with sort of great exuberance and joy in the next room, trying to come up with more names to round out all our subway stops. And it just felt like a feminist moment to see these guys so enthusiastically engaged with this map that I see as a deeply feminist project. It was really nice. And one of the things I like about feminism in this moment in history is that, you know, a lot of men are actively engaged with it, and speaking out against and acting against abuse and misogyny, but also in creatively engaging with what questions it raises, who we will be, etc. That it’s not, you know – feminism; not just for women.

JJS: Yeah. And you know, what you say about the ways in which sort of speaking to your students about the sort of power of maps, and thinking about the ways in which they have the power to see us, to help us see place in new ways, that they organize information, they also are narratives. But they also, they are sort of incredibly authoritative documents. Naming place is a remarkable thing.

RS: Yeah.

JJS: And I wanted actually – we’ll sort of jump around a little, because I want to get these two gents involved – to, if we could look at map nine, “Riot.” This is a map that really of course gets at this idea of conflict in the city. That we think about coexistence in the city and the ways in which the city is sort of miraculously harmonious in all kinds of daily ways. But it’s also productive, at some points, of conflict. And this is a map, “Riot”, where sort of maps the social history of New York really through its kind of civil unrest. So that it’s everything from the Peachtree Riots or the Dead Rabbit Riots or the Draft Riots to more recent riots in Tompkins Square Park and elsewhere. And Luc wrote a marvelous essay for us to go with this map. And there’s a moment in it where you talk about having experienced a couple of riots at least in your time here in New York. And you say that they were, of course, distinct. One was sort of, in a sense, a police riot. One involved other people. But you also say that they also hinged on property in a way. But I wonder if you could just speak to how – what do riots or civic unrest tell us about the city or its ability to sort of contain its energy or, at times, not?

LUC SANTE: Right. Well, it was – when it came down to looking at this vast list of riots – not that vast, really – and seeing commonalities. And I’d just been working on Paris, which of course during the 19th century had an insurrection every five years. And that was, you know, people trying to gain power. But in New York City you never had a revolution, not of that sort. Instead what most riots in the city in the 18th – or rather – well, even in the late 18th, early 19th centuries and early 20th century – all the way through – is property, class and especially race. That so many, going back to like the Doctors’ Riot of, I forget what year that was – 1788, something like that – it was sparked by the racial identity of the corpses that were being stolen from cemeteries for dissection in medical schools. And you know, you don’t think of New York as being – or perhaps people in recent years though no longer think of New York as being a city trembling on the lip of huge racial problems the way, you know, Newark, our near neighbor, for example. But actually, you know, every… I mean, with very few exceptions… There are ephemeral riots – you know, the Straw Hat Riot had nothing to do with any of these things. You can barely call it a riot. You know, aside from really the Stonewall Inn in 1969, and not much else, most riots have, in New York, of any size, have had to do with those three ingredients.

JJS: Right, right. And it seems to be – you know, the power of labelling of course, which we get at in the “City of Women” map – but of course that is also a huge topic in the sort of historiography – who gets to call a riot a riot, right, is a sort of potent question and way to think about the history of New York. But of course we have sort of all these examples of coexistence in this atlas too. Suketu worked on an essay about, well, your old neighborhood in part. If we could look at image ten, please. This is our map, our map of languages in the borough of Queens. Many of you may know that the borough of Queens, and especially the sort of area around Jackson Heights, is really by any measure the most linguistically diverse place on earth. You know, you have a few square miles where hundreds upon hundreds of languages are spoken, which is its own kind of remarkable miracle and fact. This map, of course, we worked on with this wonderful organization, The Endangered Language Alliance, which helped us look into some of the really rare languages. People from the Himalaya who, there’s ten speakers, and there they are – off the 74th Street subway stop. But anyway, I wonder, Suketu, if you could tell us about both working on this essay, but also sort of returning to the neighborhood where you, if not grew up, at least attended high school and had formative time.

SM: Right. I got to Jackson Heights, or “Jackison” Heights as we call it – [laughter] – in 1977. And I came there, dragged by my family from Bombay. And I spent eight years of my life there. And I grew up in a building which was filled with Indians and Pakistanis and Jews and Muslims, Chinese, Poles, Russians. The building had a Greek super, but the building was owned by a Turk. So these were all people who had been killing each other just before they got on the plane to come to New York. [laughter] And here we were, living together. And it’s not that we stopped hating each other. We said horribly racist things about everyone else when we went back into our own apartments. And the one thing we had in common was, Sunday mornings there was a program on a Spanish language TV station, WNJU from Linden, Newark, which broadcast a Bollywood program called Vision of Asia. And that’s when the entire building – the Russians, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Greeks – all sang along to the Bollywood songs. [laughter] So the language we had in common was the language of Bollywood. But…you know, when I was working on this, I went back to Jackson Heights, which Daniel, who runs The Endangered Language Alliance – and I was proud to show him something that even he didn’t know – Scrabble was invented in Jackson Heights. And it has a signpost on 37th – on 35th Avenue and 82nd Street, where the street sign have the Scrabble, the 35th Avenue, the letters “avenue” have point scores, like in Scrabble. [laughter] It’s the most stolen street sign in the city. [laughter]

JJS: They need to bolt it on the thing there…

SM: And so there’s a plaque where – it’s a church building where Scrabble was first played – I think it’s 1932. And that church conducts services in about a dozen different languages, ranging from Indonesian Bahasa to Korean to Punjabi, on and on. So it just – I think it’s just a wonderful image of Jackson Heights, that God is worshipped in many languages in the house where Scrabble was born. [laughter]

JJS: Good. Superb.

RS: Eight across.

JJS: Yeah, exactly. [laughter] And, you know, I should say this map, it endeavors the sort of map – not every language – as I say, there’s hundreds and hundreds in Queens – but many of them – we worked with Daniel to do that – and also the branches of the Queens Public Library, which is worth shouting out, given our context. And all of the languages…

SM: Oh, I spent my teenage years in the 82nd Street Public Library. Because there was no [inaudible] space – there weren’t any parks in Jackson Heights. So that’s where we all hung out and tried to pick each other up, in the library – of teenagers. And I went to an all boys’ school. And that’s the only place we could meet girls – in the public library.

JJS: Right.

SM: And the library’s amazing, because you see all these immigrants studying for their civil service exams. And it’s really incredibly well used throughout the day. And they have periodicals and books and oh, that seems like a hundred different languages. It’s intensively used. So when library hours are cut back because of budgetary shortfalls, it’s the worst thing you could do to the city, to the lifeblood of the city. You want to see libraries that are used, go beyond Manhattan and go to the boroughs, any afternoon, and you’ll see how many people… You know, old people hang out there because it’s, again, the only community space in many of these boroughs. And as a kid – this is when I went every afternoon after school.

JJS: Yeah, remarkable. And I love, you know, Daniel Kaufman, who we have invoked a couple of times, runs The Endangered Language Alliance. He tells a great story about how the geography of a particular part of Nepal is – I’m not going to remember the details – but he said that, you know, there are a couple of dialects that are spoken. And some people who are below a certain altitude speak this one language, who are above speak another. And in Jackson Heights, that divide is replicated by a few blocks. It’s not altitude.

SM: Oh, yeah.

JJS: But if you live on 84th you speak this way; at 81st, that way. But I wanted to bring Garnette in as someone who’s thought a lot about sort of why this works, how the world can be sort of modeled in the sort of space of the city. If we could see image eight, please. Garnette, one of the maps that we sort of commissioned him to do – and he’s crazy and energetic enough to do this. You’d think it was sort of a strange experiment, but he was all for it. We asked him – he’s a great walker; he writes about walking – we said, Garnette, take a 24-hour walk around the city, do all five boroughs. And he said, excellent; when can I go? And so we sort of schemed a route for him, which was meant to be a sort of perfect O. He had his little meanderings, as you can see. But the idea here, right, was the ways in which you can sort of traverse or circle the world in a day. But tell us about that walk. You did it like three times, did you not?

GC: Yeah, and I’m doing it again. There’s a young man here, Matt Green, who is walking every single block of every single borough in New York City. He set it a few years ago. You can find it on his website. He’s [inaudible] called I’m Just Walkin’. And he and I are doing it in about a month, before it gets too cold. Well, maybe fifteen people are doing it. But by the time we head in three or four hours, everybody’s going to peace out, and then more likely it’s going to be me and him. [laughter] But one of the wonderful things about the city is – you know, a city is many things, but part of it is a collection of memories. And what better way to form these memories than by walking. It’s the way you transform a space into an actual place. And just about anywhere – you know, my beloved Auntie Maxine lives near Times Square. And I remember calling her once and I wanted to harass her and drag her out of her bed to come walk with me. And she’s like, “No, I’m going to bed.” I said, “But I’m bored.” And she said, “Because you’re on the wrong block.” It’s New York. If you’re bored, you’re on the wrong block. So shift blocks. And her point being, that its not merely the block, it’s that every block, which is a thing that [inaudible] is wonderfully interesting. Because we’re irreducibly complex. And what better way to know that than by walking? That New York allows you to discover that by way of walking. What it also does, it allows you to see at once how accessible the city is. Just how much more warm, how much more friendly, how much more beguiling it is than people often think it is. But also ways in which it’s inaccessible, but inaccessible in a marvelous way. That by walking, you know, all these neighborhoods suddenly become very mysterious. And so they beckon you to return and to start forming memories by repeated walking[s]. Because as you keep walking and keep recognizing, ah, something new – or there are times when you won’t discover something new, but you recognize just how far decent it is. Just, you know – as you see [inaudible] look at this map – and I want [inaudible phrase] Jackson Heights – there’s so many different neighborhoods, so many different ethnicities, so many different cultures, which means so many different traditions, so many different family lore. And so there are so many ways in which you can be here – I mean, you can be elsewhere by being here in New York. And so walking and making your way through all these five boroughs, one, shows how multitudinous and interesting and fascinating the place is. But it also shows how absolutely mysterious the city is. And so it makes it inexhaustible. And so if you’re tired of New York, I mean, pretty much means you’re not walking enough. [laughter]

JJS: That’s it. You know, and you have that beautiful line in your piece where you say that walking is an activity for you that can be less about mastery than mystery, right. That it’s a way to walk into wonder, walk into new experiences, new knowledge. But that it’s not about sort of totalizing or owning the city, in a way.

GC: Yeah. And New York is wonderful in that way, in a way it humbles you. Because so much of even the way we think of cities now is about control. Especially a city this big. People just – there’s always this fear of chaos. Oh, there’s a fear of riot. And in New York there’s always this sense of, if you don’t control this energy in a city so vibrant, a city with so much energy – if you let that unbridled energy get too ahead of itself, then it’s chaos. But one of the wonderful things about walking, it reminds you that, no, we should give up some of these illusions of control and these illusions of mastery. And so you don’t walk to say, oh, I can exhaust this neighborhood. You walk to remember, in New York, just how little you know. It’s a reminder of your finity [sic].

JJS: Indeed, yeah. And it’s interesting – so let’s sort of stay in Queens for a minute, because we have another sort of map of Queens that we can all sort of speak to… If we could see image eleven. This idea of coexistence and the ways in which the city pushes worlds together and forces people, in a sense, or allows them to get along – there’s a deep sort of legacy of this. And I think it’s a particularly ironic thing – and that’s not even the right word – but about our political moment. That there is a sort of someone in the public sphere who’s really talking about the ways in which difference is essentially a sort of excuse or a sort of prompt to not get along, to sort of be fearful. But Queens, of course, is also the sort of seed bed for – in Flushing – for the Flushing Remonstrance, which is a remarkable kind of document about toleration and about learning to coexist. This map, this map called “Planting Liberty” is a chart of Flushing, which I believe Rebecca suggested to us by Emmy Catedral, that wonderful artist from Queens.

RS: Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And she really came to us and talked about the great arboreal history, Flushing as a place of beautiful trees and historic nurseries that brought a lot of plants to the United States or to North America for the first time. But it’s also place of religious tolerance and coexistence. And really early on, when it’s a sort of special place way out there when New York City is just this little tiny thing at the bottom of Manhattan… And so Garnette took Emmy’s idea and ran with it, and really wrote a beautiful essay about – we should hand it over to you. Tell, tell us about Quakers and the Flushing Remonstrance and toleration?

SM: Well, Peter Stuyvesant, who was not a man – I mean, well, [inaudible] Stuyvesant, his name is thrown all around the city – but he was running things in what was then New Netherland. And he just wanted the Dutch Reform. Dutch Reform was the religion, the expression of worship that he wanted there, and none other. And you could have your forms of worship, but do it privately; not in public. And the Quakers who settled [inaudible] in 1657 weren’t having it that way. They were preaching on the streets. They weren’t giving him the kind of deference he wanted. If they were, appeared before him, they refused to take off their hats. And so in short order, he decided, you know, he wanted the Quakers out. And along with that, he would fine anyone who housed the Quakers. And thirty-one people from different religions – you know, some of whom could hardly care less for the Quakers and thought that they were off their rockers – I mean, the term “quaker” was even a disparaging term for them – and they put forward this remonstrance saying that it’s not for us to control people’s – you know, whether we agree or disagree with them – that they should be free to worship as they will, and be given liberty of conscience. You know, the law of love and liberty requires that we do that. Stuyvesant wasn’t having it. Locked up a few people. And made a lesson of them. And then later on, when John Bowne who had lived on what, you know, street that’s now his namesake, Bowne Street, started having Quaker meetings – meetings with Quakers, after his wife had converted, in his house. And Stuyvesant got hold of him, eventually kicked him out. He went, argued with the Dutch. And the Dutch – partially because they wanted commerce; it wasn’t so much that they were huge fans of religion or for religious liberty – but they recognized that the more freedom you give people of different religions, [inaudible] the more money that will be exchanged and allow them to come back. And so it became this signal document of people [inaudible phrase] as a way to remind us of our responsibility, not merely to man our boundaries; to, to, as it were, this idea of tolerance that is free to do what we wanted and be left alone. But also to fight for others, that others can flourish, whether we disagree with them… And a huge part of New York’s identity at its best is the idea that it’s not merely enough to be able to put up with those you disagree with, but we also have to fight for the right for them to disagree with us. Because we flourish, we thrive [inaudible] everything… Which is why when years later – much, much longer – when they were arguing that there shouldn’t be a mosque close to the site where 9/11 was, because it was disrespectful, Bloomberg appealed again to the Flushing Remonstrance, or maybe Bloomberg’s speechwriter – he couldn’t even pronounce it properly – [laughter] – and argued for it to be there for religious freedom and religious [inaudible]. And it’s also fascinating. Because there’s such a marvelous horticultural diversity in Flushing, as if to say, if we love this in nature, why not in also human nature?

JJS: Yeah, exactly. And there’s a – we had great adventures sort of walking out to Flushing, and going to eat. It’s a great thing in Flushing. of course there’s marvelous food of all kinds out there. But in the basement – is it the Hindu temple that has the, has the…

GC: Yes.

JJS: Yes. I [inaudible phrase – laughter and simultaneous speakers]…

GC: I hear somebody [inaudible phrase – simultaneous speakers] going yes…

JJS: Yeah, serious… But there’s this extraordinary… You know, you walk around Flushing and you know, there is – there’s the mosque and there’s the synagogue and there’s the Hindu temple, and they’re all right there – the AME.

GC: Yeah. Or even St. George’s Church. You know, you look in… and just, you know, services in Spanish, followed right in Mandarin, followed by English.

JJS: Right

GC: Or on Bowne Street, a place that has services in Urdu, Korean, Chinese, English. And so then you walk past that, and there’s a synagogue. And there is [inaudible] temple and mosques. And it’s just marvelous.

JJS: Exactly. And so the question I wanted to ask about that – and I wonder, we’ll stick in Queens for a minute; we’re going to go to Staten Island and back to the subway and all over – but is what – I mean, you sort of wrote a piece about this thing that happens in the 1650s’. And then you walk to, you walk through Flushing now, and you see this sort of remarkable image of things. But why? Is it something in the air? Why does it – what’s, what’s there? What works? What’s working in Queens? How are people, how are people getting along?

SM: Well, I think this is one of the most remarkable things about New York. And I often take groups of visiting Europeans, particularly, walking through Jackson Heights and Elmhurst and Woodside. And I look at all those people in the parks and the school playgrounds, on the streets. And the question they have is, why aren’t they fighting? I mean, think about the last time New York really had major ethnic conflict. It was the 1990’s – you know, the Korean grocery boycott, the Crown Heights riots. It’s quite some time ago. So there’s something about the city, the city off the attacks on the World Trade Center, that the people who want to hurt the fabric of the city by attacking this or that religious community have failed. It’s also this city… this election is really a New York City election. The three leading candidates are all either from New York City or represent New York City. So you know, I went to school in Queens with people like the man who you did not name, who grew up in an all-white enclave, Jamaica Estates. And then they were shipped off to private school, and then a military school. But that’s also Queens. When I was fourteen, I was put into this all boys’ Catholic school in working class East Elmhurst, where I was one of the first minorities in the school. And every day after school I’d have to run like hell from the Italians, the Irish, the Germans. This same school now is full of South Asians. So we overcame them by force of sheer numbers. [laughter] But it is true that there’s something about New York that’s working. And I think one of the reasons of that – there’s no single community that can be scapegoated. So it’s not just Mexicans or Vietnamese or Chinese or whatever. There’s so many people that, if you’re a hater, who are you going to hate on? Who will you pick first?

JJS: Right.

RS: These 34 groups are responsible for our problems. That would be quite an exercise.

JJS: Yeah.

SM: And it’s part of the inexhaustible to the city, that it’s also exhaustive. You’re going to hate, I mean – there’s just so many people to hate if you don’t like difference. You might as well just move on the outskirts.

JJS: Right. And it’s important to say that, you know – you mention the sort of facts about your high school. But that now of course we think, if you limit yourself to Manhattan, you could be forgiven for being mistaken that sort of immigrant in New York – oh, yeah, there’s some immigrants; they drive cabs; they’re around. They’re certainily not on the Lower East Side. You know, that’s sort of hipster bars and so on. But immigrant New York is extraordinarily alive and well in the outer boroughs. And in fact, there’s more foreign-born New Yorkers now than at any time since that Ellis Island moment.

SM: Two out of three New Yorkers are immigrants or their children.

JJS: Hm. That’s it. And on this stage – well, we have three immigrants at least, and we have [inaudible – simultaneous speakers] grandkids of Ellis Island folks. But, you know, this is, this is New York. And some of the sort of cross-pollination that I think is – you know, we wanted to think about, okay, if people are getting along. But what are they sort of borrowing or thinking about, it’s sort of forming their sense of place from if they’re all unified around Bollywood films, or whatever it is? And one of the ways we looked at that is in this map of Staten Island, Image Twelve. We were committed from the start, right, to have this atlas not just be a sort of Manhattan and Brooklyn atlas, but to have all of the boroughs. And Staten Island, I think I sort of fought for this one initially, but…

RS: Oh, you didn’t have to fight for it. I loved the idea. This was…

JJS: [laughing] Indeed.

RS: This was, there’s a few ideas I had before Josh even got involved. And this was Josh – and he brought so many brilliant ideas to the atlas. But this was, this was like his darling, his baby. And it let him meet one of his great idols, as you will presently hear.

JJS: Yeah. Indeed. Well, “The Mysterious Land of Shaolin”. The idea here being that we wanted to map Staten Island. There’s a map of, having to do with trash. You probably can…

RS: Fresh Kills.

JJS: …guess – Fresh Kills.

RS: Yeah, that…

JJS: But, it was important we thought to do – or I thought – one of the sort of really potent I think reimaginings of place in the city over the last couple of decades has been the Wu Tang Clan’s reimagining of Staten Island as “Shaolin” – the Wu Tang Clan being an incredibly important, inventive hip-hop group from Staten Island, who discovered sort of kung fu films in the old grindhouse movie theaters on 42nd Street. The inset in this map charts those actual movie theaters. Now they’re Disney stores and so on. But I had the privilege to have interviewed Rizzo from the Wu Tang Clan about sort of how that happened. And he had all these extraordinary sort of stories about going to see these films on the ferry, in particular. His anecdotes about the Staten Island Ferry were something, back in the day. But then we sort of sent Garnette out, as we were wont to do, as you’re sort of learning at this point. Garnette, go walk around Staten Island and come back and tell us about it. I’m there. But you actually did the sort of leg work of thinking about – what we wanted to do is not just map the Wu Tang Clan’s Staten Island, but to actually map that alongside the extant Chinese community in Staten Island, and the ways in which these stories and traditions are actually alive there. You know, there’s actually a Shaolin temple in Staten Island. But we sent you out, and what did you – how did you go about looking into that stuff?

GC: Just walked the entire island. [laughter] And then of course, one of the things that both of you are interested in doing in this book was taking immigrants on their own terms. So far too often when you think of immigrants, it’s about: how can they dance for us, cook for us, sing for us? And particularly with Asian-Americans and Asians, it’s, you know, Chinatown, where we go to eat, all their source material, almost is their prehistory, rather than taking them on their own terms. And so how do Chinese-Americans and Korean-Americans, Indian-Americans think of themselves? What about Sri Lankans living in Staten Island? And so I wanted to see, how do the Chinese-Americans think of themselves in Staten Island? And I kept encountering and talking to different Chinese Americans. And there’s a Chinese scholar garden which was there, which is one of the only ones – this scholar garden, this – in this hemisphere. And I kept being led back to Staten Island, Chinese Christian Church, where the Pastor is Steven Ma. And, you know, began to talk with him about different contributions that they had. And I discovered that there are any number of ways in which they are having an effect on the borough, the ways in which migration was happening at a higher rate in Staten Island than elsewhere, you know, partially because they wanted to keep the family unit together, and it was cheaper to do so in Staten Island. Also because Staten Island’s lush surroundings. It’s, there’s just a lot of wonderful nature, you know, flora and fauna in Staten Island. It’s a lovely place to breed, and you know, to be in the city but also an expanse that puts you close to nature. But also they’ve found wonderful ways to keep the family unit, you know, to have both partners working, and still to be able to have parents and grandparents together by having these day centers in which parents, grandparents would go, and they would – the Tai chi, or they would learn English, or they could read Chinese language papers, you know, from many different regions. And suddenly all the parts of the city and all the groups starting following suit, and started having all these centers pop up. And so does this marvelous way of seeing them on their own terms but also recognizing ways in which just the close proximity between them and Tompkinsville and other places where the Wu Tang grew up, where they were clearly influenced. And so suddenly you saw Chinese-Americans actually making rich cultural contributions and not being treated as source material or pre-history or objectified in some way like part of a service industry.

JJS: Yeah, RZA--RZA said great things to me about uhm, when we spoke about how Staten Island, you know, which is a place – [LAUGHTER...]-- you had a nice line in your essay about how many people engage with Staten Island simply by going on the ferry and turning right around and coming back...

GC: [LAUGHTER...]…

JJS: …right. It’s sort of literally turning your back to the borough.

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

JJS: Essentially, right. Turning your back to the borough, literally, uh, but RZA said to me, you know, this sort of difference between being in Brooklyn and—and being in Staten Island as a kid was literally this phrase, breathing space. You know, it’s sort of the ways in which being on an island allowed a sort of imaginative thing that wasn’t available elsewhere, uhm…

REBECCA: And I was just gonna say one of the things we really wanted to do with this [FALSE STARTS]... uh, all of that [inaudible] was to look at the received ideas about places—there’s a kind of casual knowledge people have that often erroneous and there’s a tendency—Staten Island, for example, I think is often characterized as like conservative white people—so like you know, one of the world’s greatest hip hop groups influenced by Chinese culture and Chinese culture itself, you know, and also the idea of Staten Island as this incredibly magical place—the mysterious land of Shaolin—I think really re-thought and it’s something we tried to all the way through that [INAUDIBLE...]. In the first one, there’s a map called the “Right Wing of the Dove”, I and I spent most of my life in the Bay Area—although my mother was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens—and uhm, and taught me to walk fast—

[LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …and, uh… [PAUSE...]… you know, there’s a tendency to think that the Bay Area is wall-to-wall peace/love/tree-hugging and left wing politics, except that without us, the Pentagon would be nothing. You know that, uh, the making of uh… [PAUSE...]… thermonuclear bombs and weapons designed and the management of the nuclear weapons system by UC Berkeley, Stanford and Hoover Institute, you know, wherein Condoleezza Rice is the provost of that University; John Yu, architect of the Torture Memo is tenured faculty at the law school at UC Berkeley, you know, and there’s all these other pieces and so we—we really wanted to kind of dig deeper and complicate people’s sense[s] and there’s a lot of love in these atlases but there’s a lot of critical perspective, too, and like, what—what else can you say about these places? What are—you know?—what—everybody says certain things—what don’t they say? What gets glossed over? What gets erased? What kind of trouble is lurking as well was really one of the things we wanted to chase down…

MALE1: Yeah…

REBECCA: …with maps, you know, in some ways with maps like “Riot” and uh…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

INTERRUPTION JJS: …and one map where you, you know, this was sort of one that came really from you, were you thinking about unsettling our notion of a city in the most fundamental way I think, which is that we think of cities as sort of essentially human environments…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

REBECCA: Yeah!

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

JJS: …that they were created by people…

MALE VOICE: Mmmm…

JJS: …uhm, that they are concrete, that nature essentially is absent from them, uhm, if we could see Image 13… uh, but in this map, wildlife… [PAUSE...]… essentially that sort of question of the idea driving this one, I think, was—well, a couple of things going on—there’s often a couple of things going on—[LAUGHTER...]—in these maps, as you can see…

REBECCA: [LAUGHTER...]…

JJS: …uhm, but one of them was absolutely this sort of question—this—this idea of the city as essentially, or exclusively, human, that there’s all these other sort of species and things going on here, uh, there’s also a sort of contrast or apposition between the ordered city—the grid, the sort of…

INTERRUPTION REBECCA: Yeah!

JJS: …the sort of economic city and then the sort of chaotic and wild and ecstatic and euphoric that exists here, too…

REBECCA: Well, you know, one of the things also, there these very doctrinaire place—ways people think about place; we did an atlas of New Orleans, which Josh was instrumental in and Garnett was as well without making any map called like, “This is Jazz…” because New Orleans is where jazz was born. We did—we tried to think about music in more complex ways that integrated with other parts of the culture and I wasn’t gonna do a map called like, “This is… [FALSE STARTS].... Welcome to Gay New York!” or something—you know, “Monarchs and Queens” was one take on it. But something—and there’s a couple of things that—are a number of things—that were really striking that came together to make this map, one of which is that New York is an incred[ible]—a city of authoritarianism and, you know, uhm, is it Giuliani or Bloomberg who used to brag about the police depart[ment]—the police being the world’s largest private army…

NOISE IN THE BACKGROUND.....

REBECCA: …and you know there’s… and you know, back in the days of Stop ‘n’ Frisk, there’s a lot of attempt to control and manage—there’s a lot of thinking about using money and capitalism and the market as a metaphor for everything from love to you know, nature, but there[‘s]—you know, and cities are these ordered—ordered places of production, you know? There’s a kind of daytime city that’s there to kind of like make catch [sic]—cash registers ring—I guess they don’t—they don’t exactly ring anymore—but I have a lot of old phrases…

GC: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …[LAUGHTER...]… and uh, you know, and kinda make capitalism go, et cetera—but cities are always also places of resistance and not only are they places of resistance in the sense of revolutionaries and Emma Goldman and people like that get shout-outs in other maps and Marc Rudd who’s here in the audience, uhm, and but also, uhm, there—there’s other kinds of resistance to that rationality, that logic, that tight-fisted in greed and I think ecstatic—there’s a kind of ecstatic city and that’s both spiritual and sexual and it was a real joy to make a map that refused to treat those things as completely separate as we often do that this is the mind and this is the body, this is kind of, you know, getting—going low-down and to the gutter and this is the sort of [FALSE STARTS]... ethereal realms and this was partly inspired by friend and former student, Tino Rodriguez, who’s always painted as though human and animals, spiritual and erotic, are inseparable and he’s a person who’s got refugee status in this country because of homophobic persecution in Mexico and this lovely guy who lives up the street from me, so I really mapping spirituality in New York ‘cause a number of people who are saints—or close to sainthood like Dorothy Day and Toussaint—what’s Toussaint’s last name?

VOICES IN THE BACKGROUND...

REBECCA: You know this…

MALE1: Not Louverture—we’re talking about a different Toussaint—

REBECCA: Yeah… that… but…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

REBECCA: …if somebody knows it—shout it out! You know? Usually we have our atlas Cliff Notes with us—but you know, he’s this wonderful Haitian immigrant who was a hairdresser—a slave and a hairdresser to the elite—who was freed and incredibly kind and gentle, humane person who kind of moved everywhere, did a… [PAUSE...]… with everyone and uh, you know, poor, black communities and slave communities and wealth—the wealthy white people whose hair he did and et cetera and was very devout so you have all these—all these sort of uh… [PAUSE...]… you know, and to be deeply spiritual is—is itself form of resistance often to a kind of status quo that wants everything to be quantified and measured and profitable in this life…

GC: Mmm hmmm…

REBECCA: …and not in the next, you know? And—and the kind of—and eroticism often expressed itself as we thought of it as dancing and my dear editor, Neils is here—whose actually a DJ and a bartender at Mother and a lot of the other clubs where voguing and some remarkable things happened when he was a younger man in Manhattan in the nineties and uh, you know, so there’s this incredible expressiveness that can be actual, you know, bodies coming together and actual sex in places like the Chelsea Piers on their era—the era Luc has written about so beautifully between the Chelsea Place—Piers as a place of kind of working class production and upper class—or upper middle class—consumption—there’s this wild era David Wojnarowicz wrote about so beautifully; but then also animals which was not to suggest that humans are like animals but animals are one of those places of euphoric and often—often even ecstatic liberation. I—I thought of animals first of all as the residents of New York City who don’t pay rent…

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …and uhm…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …and never will… [PAUSE...]… but you see like the birdwatchers of Central Park and the way people respond to the coyotes and raccoons and things that are now showing more 'n' more; the whale-watching in the Harbor, you know, the attempt to bring back the oysters [FALSE STARTS]... there’s a… is The One Billion Oysters Project and uh, this sense of the—the—you know, something we don’t talk about much which is that there’s a lot of ecological reasons we need animals; there’s a lot of [INAUDIBLE...] —but the animals are also this kind of [INAUDIBLE...] passionate joy, this way of escaping the more narrower definitions of what it means to be human and the kind of dreariness of city life; you know, we all saw the people walking their little dogs—the dogs are kind of yanking them into pleasure ‘n’ joy ‘n’ immediacy and the need to do this at least a twice a day…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …that the—you know? So I was really trying to think about all those things at once, as all these things is [sic] liberatory phenomena that happened in the City that are forms of resistance, not in a kind of “smash the state” way, but “ignore the state” and you and enter in[to] an ecstatic state so that’s kinda what this map was about was the Other City, the Night City—the Wild City—the… uhm… [PAUSE...]… Untamed City and, you know, and I don’t know what—how it looks to you two, uh, and you know, Garnette and Josh were very much a part of mapping this, you know, these—there’s a lot of collaboration, like, “Well, what else belongs here? Who are we leaving out?”

GC: The Transgressive City…

REBECCA: Who should we talk to… yeah…

GC: …It’s a lot of people, I mean, if you work with a [INAUDIBLE...] of that one, do you know, there’s a lot of … [PAUSE...]… in abandoned, illegal pets that people have in their apartment and they’re like, “Well—this alligator’s gotten too big—I’ll just dump it out in the East River at two o’clock in the morning…”

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

REBECCA: Oh yeah… yeah…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

GC: …and so that happens quite a bit like, you know, the “friend’s thing”, showin’ up on people like, “What? This isn’t in Manhattan [INAUDIBLE...]…” “Well, no, it isn’t but somebody need to drop into their apt at 3:00 A.M. It got too big…”

REBECCA: And of course the most famous story about that is the guy—and what are those Housing Projects called in Harlem?

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

REBECCA: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE...]…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

MALE1: Uh… the Frederick…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

REBECCA: …the one with the tiger…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

MALE1: …yeah, Grant Houses?

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

REBECCA: There’s a guy who had like a three hundred and eighty five pound or so… do you have an at—does anybody have an atlas here? I’m gonna read that little passage—is there an atlas in the house?

[PAUSE...]…

REBECCA: Thank you… so, but there’s a guy named Antoine which always make me think he must’ve really been from New Orleans…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …uhm, really loved animals and loved wild animals and was bringing them into his apartment and it got really interesting and uhm, c’mon, Map! Somehow these maps are not always obvious—[FALSE STARTS]... okay, uhm, not there… [PAUSE...]… it’s worth it! Bear with me! You’ll be happy you waited… and… [PAUSE...]… okay… one oh four…earlier than I thought—[PAUSE...]…okay, at uhm… [PAUSE...]… oh, and there’s a lovely quote from Luc Sante to who’s writing about uh, that it’s 1970s New York of [FALSE STARTS]..... and its own kind of wildness has been in—it’s one of my favorite essays and one I’ve taught a lot—but here’s The New York Daily News reporting and this was I think about twenty years ago? “A woman who shared her Harlem apartment with a four hundred and twenty-five pound tiger said yesterday she was terrified at first. But soon got used…”

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: “…to living the man-eater down the hall. Caroline Domingo told The Daily News that she couldn’t believe her eyes when she spotted the big cat roaming free in the apartment where she and her husband rented a room from tiger-owner Antoine Yates…”

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …[quote], “I walked in the door and the tiger was standing there looking at me,” recalled Domingo, a seamstress…” And I love kind of the total journalism…

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER...]…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: of this…

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER...]…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …you know, “I walked in the door and the tiger was standing there looking at me,” recalled Domingo, a seamstress. “I said I know I’m not seeing this—I know that wasn’t a tiger…”

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: “He turned around and looked at me like I was a damned fool,” she said, “but eventually,” she said, “We all became family…” [LAUGHTER...]…

AUDIENCE [LAUGHTER...]…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: “…and Ming the Tiger was not destined to become a permanent residence [sic] of NYCHA—permanent resident of NYCHA Housing, uhm, the police whiff of it and actually like lowered a guy on ropes with a tranquilizer gun…

MALE1: Hmmm…

REBECCA: …who shot the tiger through the window and it was because Yates had shown up mauled by the tiger and tried to claim it was a dog but…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …it didn’t—it didn’t look too canine…

GC: That’s some dog! [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …and sadly, he had to go to Riker’s Island but then… and the tiger went to a refuge and did fine and you know, you’re not really guilty of being a tiger exactly but you’re guilty—you can be guilty of having a tiger so he went to Riker’s Island—one of the numerable islands of the city…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

SUKETU MEHTA: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE...]… You know, I remember that story and one of the… little details in The Daily News, they brought up this story was, “Antoine Yates would go to the local bodega…”

REBECCA: Yeah!

MALE1: “…and buy fifty pounds of chicken…”

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: [LAUGHTER...]…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]… [INAUDIBLE PHRASE...] at a time and no one would ask him questions…”

AUDIENCE:` [LAUGHTER...]…

MALE2: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: You know… well, it sounds so New Orleans—it’s like your family’s coming…

[LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …at uh… yeah! Yeah!

JJS: Well, you know, with the tigers and chickens aside, thinking about wildlife and thinkin’ about the sort of Dionysian City and—and the sort of uh, the city as possibility, right? And the sort of idea that we are going to come to the city to find ourselves, sort of lose ourselves, uh, is something I think that’s run through this book and all the atlases in a sense. Uhm, but I wonder if we could just talk a little about uh… [PAUSE...]… sort of where we are with that in New York—which is to say that… [PAUSE...]… there is a sort of lot of nostalgia I think that goes around now in particular for example, for the 1970s—which was a really hard time in the City—but people who like to, you know, fantasize about $50 rent as many of us do—uh, are given to thinking about that time. And that it was a—it was a moment that one could sort of come here to be—to be free in some sense; but I wondered and I guess to—to sort of throw this to Luc, first of all, because you’ve written so eloquently about that moment—that 1970s moment—

LUC: Mmm hmmm…

JJS: …uh, is that there is a lot of this sort of casual nostalgia I think that gets thrown around about that time; we’ve gained some things—we’ve lost some things…

LUC: Hmmm mmmm…

JJS: …but how would you—how would you sort of typify that, uh, that line?

LUC: Well, beside the obvious, you know, it was, uhm… it was cheap; the infrastructure was falling apart—it’s not doing so well these days, either in some—many respects—subways, et cetera—uhm, but you know, the great thing, too, is that power was not particularly interested in New York at that point, neither was money—so a lot of great things happened as a result, so you had this [FALSE STARTS].... you know, complete diversity of classes and everything in—in New York and it’s one of the reasons why so much music happened in the City—this colliding influences and uh, and this was going on in Manhattan, you know, but it was going on elsewhere, too, and uhm… and I think we have a chance of seeing something like that going on, uhm, in the boroughs where power ‘N’ money are not paying attention at the moment. You gotta work behind their back[s], otherwise nothing will ever happen. But, you know, sad thing is that, you know, Manhattan—and Brooklyn—are well on their way to becoming homogenized. It’s—it’s a tricky thing, of course, uhm, because great things happen because, you know, a lot of artists live in a place and then uhm, the forces of profit moved in and very soon, the—you know, any kind of artistic activity has to move to someplace else…

JJS: Right… Who’s the? Who has that line about if you wanna stop gentrification, shoot the first artist?

LUC: Mmmm…

SM: That’s me…

MALE2: Was that you?

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

[INAUDIBLE PHRASE...]…

REBECCA: But you know, Josh…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

SM: Let—let me explain…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

JJS: Yeah… yeah… yeah…

[LAUGHTER...]…

SM: I like artists—some of my best friends are artists…

AUDIENCE [LAUGHTER...]…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

JJS: I just remember—it was [INAUDIBLE PHRASE...]…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

SM: …but if… no, I… I [INAUDIBLE...] draw the line that if—if I were living… a place where the rent was low because uh, there were drug dealers on the block, uhm, and I wanted to make sure that my rent would stay low, then I'd shoot the first artist who moved on to my block…

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER...]…

SM: …because after the artists come the bankers who want to date the artists and then pretty much, your rent doubles. But that is something what… in… [PAUSE...]… [FALSE STARTS]..... you… uh, as you point out about the seventies, it wasn’t a city which was, you know, attractive; there’s that movie, Escape from New York, which depicted Manhattan as this penal colony that everyone was trying to get out [of], uhm…

MALE2: [LAUGHTER...]…

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER...]…

SM: …and I came here in the 1970s and it was—uh, there was a lot of crime and it was a much dirtier city but it was a more accessible city in so many ways…

MALE2: Mmm hmmm…

SM: …I mean, today the top 1% of New Yorkers make more in one day than the bottom half make in a year…

MALE2: Hmmm mmmm…

SM: …one out of five people on the island of Manhattan is a tourist, uhm, so the—the greatest danger I think to all of this [sic] things that we [are] celebrating is this grotesque economic inequality that characterizes the City today; it doesn’t matter how nice the City is; it doesn’t matter how great the parks are or how well run the subway were if you can’t afford to live there. And for artists, for immigrants, uh, for young people, uhm, it’s now the most unaffordable city in North America…

JJS: Right… and it’s remarkable…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

JJS: …I mean, you’ve written about this but the…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

INTERRUPTION REBECCA: Will I ever get a word in?…

JJS: …the ways in which the juxtapositions of sort of class…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

INTERRUPTION REBECCA: [INAUDIBLE...]…

JJS: …of sort of extreme wealth and—and poverty, uh, you know, you can be in Lower Manhattan, you can rent an apartment for $50,000 a month; you can also rent a bed in Chinatown for eight hours a day uh, you know the… [FALSE STARTS]... payin’ for two hundred bucks a month—whatever it is—uhm, but it’s interesting—one thing that you ‘n’ I have talked about, Rebecca, a bit…[PAUSE...]… about San Francisco and New York in particular…

REBECCA: Yeah!

JJS: …but these sort of—these global cities, the sort of megacities…

MALE1: Hmmm…

JJS: …the ways in which they’re not only become gentrified but at least in—well, right near here, in this part of Manhattan, that you have buildings that you know, where apartments sell for $50,000,000, but they’re not even to be lived in, that they’re just places to park money, that they’re literally…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

INTERRUPTION REBECCA: Yeah!

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

JJS: …is a way that…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

INTERRUPTION REBECCA: …no… [INAUDIBLE...]…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

JJS: …the center of the City is hollow…

REBECCA: Yeah, you know, I actually did a book about gentrification called Hollow City. I wanna speak to the idea of like shoot the first artist because what I’ve seen in a lot of uh… [PAUSE...]… there’s a narrative that comes from the East Village that artists are gentrifiers; I live in San Francisco where a lot of artists of color are the people who get gentrified out; we’ve watched René Yañez, for example, who is kind of like the Godfather of the Mission [INAUDIBLE...] Movement and the Chicano Arts Revival in the 1970s go through a brutal eviction battle while he and his wife both had cancer and it probably helped kill her and uhm, you know, and there’s a way in which you know, poor people, people of color, long time people—whether it’s gospel music or murals or something like that are also artists and uhm, but there is a bigger question for me about these cities have been, uh, these three cities in our atlas cities, other cities like London ‘n’ Paris, have been great cities of cultural production—they have been cultural capitols—cultural centers—and there’s an often a fict—[PAUSE...]… a bullshit association of affluence with culture and [FALSE STARTS]... like you can go give money to the opera where you can sing things that were written two hundred years ago but it doesn’t necessarily produce live, thriving culture…

MALE1: Hmmm mmmm…

REBECCA: …and I think there’s a number of kinds of crises going on; my current Harper’s column is about the fact that—[SNIFF.,..]—there was a kind of, you know, Luc’s era, the nine—nineteen seventies New York was a New York of what happened after White Flight and Disinvestment and then middle class white people decided that cities were actually cool sometime in the 1990s and they wanted them back and saw a lot of forced relocation happened to the people who were in the cities all along or had been there for a long time, and the whole new—we had a completely new landscape uhm, where cities aren’t even urban—you look at 42nd Street and it’s a shopping mall and what kind of businesses are there? And that’s true of a lot of urban places now; they have that same kind of chain stores you have in your—your megamall that—with the giant parking lot ringing it—and that the new landscape in a lot of places—including the Bay Area—uh, is [FALSE STARTS].... [PAUSE...]… poor non-white people are being pushed to the suburbs as the infrastructure of the suburbs starts to decay; Geoff Chang wrote a brilliant piece in his new book, uh… it’s… [FALSE STARTS].... It’s Gonna be Alright, about how—how much Ferguson was partly a story about… [SNIFF…]… uhm, redlining and discrimination and the way black people were first confined to a sort of inner city St. Louis and then—then white middle class white [sic] people were like, “Hey—we actually want that! Now you’re gonna be confined to the poor periphery!” And that has so much to do with Ferguson and the regressive taxes that [INAUDIBLE...] Republican revolt against taxes that means police are now tax-collectors and they’re hassling people to— you know and kind of taxing poverty—“You have a tail-light out [and] we’re gonna impose a fine; [if] you can’t pay the fine, we’re gonna put you in prison; you run because you know gonna put you in prison ‘cause you had a tail-light out a year ago and we’re gonna shoot you in the back…” is a lot of what Black Lives Matter is addressing—not just police, uh… brutality and racism but also this new inequality so we’re seeing a kind of complete rearrangement economically and geographically and it’s extremely ugly and a culture’ll continue to be made—Geoff talks about how like in these kind of… [PAUSE...]… outer suburbs people are still making great hip-hop but we don’t know what it is and I think it’s a big question for New York which has been a city of great cultural production for a couple of centuries. I don’t know what its future looks like, uhm… [PAUSE...]… [FALSE STARTS].... what’s her name? The curator of the “Berkclaire” Museum—he used to be at the Whitney—uh, Lawrence… [PAUSE...]… why am I forgetting his last name? Shout it out! Somebody’s gotta know it here… [PAUSE...]… c’mon! Crowd-source it!

VOICES IN THE BACKGROUND...

REBECCA: Lawrence What? Lawrence Rinder… uh, said years ago during the dotcom boom that Manhattan was destined to become a place of cultural consumption without cultural production and you have like sixty year old poets with rent-controlled apartments and you know, I’m friends with Lucy Lippard whose son lives in the SoHo—huge SoHo loft she bought for $5,000 in 1964; but you know there isn’t really a big future for cultural production in places like this and uh, so i—you know, we’re looking—[SNIFF…]… at a really uncertain future both for cities and their demographics and for cultural productivity and you know, and the kind of diversity of the inner city and there’s a kind of hollowing out of its culture and of actual residency as Josh made reference so we’re in a period of great uncertainty whether we’re gonna continue to dig economic inequality deeper and return. I used to think we’re returning to the 19th Century with our economic arrangements; our times now I think we’re returning to the 12th Century or something…

MALE1: [LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …with the kind of the feudal overlord billionaires and the desperate, uh, precariousness of a great many people around the world as a result of the maldistribution of wealth and uhm, you know, and so that’s part of kind of where we are now. It’s not resolved; it depends on the policies we make in our elections on all scales and on how we imagine what we owe each other, how we exist together, uhm, you know, how we plan a deep or shallow future for cities, how we address other things that are gonna affect New York City like “Welcome to Our Eighty Degrees in Late October…” and another happening to New York City is going to be sea-level rise, which is gonna just take away parts of lower Manhattan and the sort of Brooklyn coast and et cetera, and uh… you know…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

INTERRUPTION MALE1: [INAUDIBLE...]…

REBECCA: …climate refugees…

JJS1: …we still—we still keep coming here… and I think that’s the…

REBECCA: Yeahhhhhhhhh…

JJS: …that’s an…

REBECCA: Yeahhhhhh…

JJS: …interesting thing to think about…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

INTERRUPTION REBECCA: We keep coming here…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

JJS: [INAUDIBLE...]…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

REBECCA: …but what’s here gonna be…

JJS: What’s here gonna be…

REBECCA: What’s here gonna be?

JJS: …but there’s a poll, right? And we think about…

REBECCA: Yeahhhhhhhh…

JJS: …the ways in which the City—New York in particular—right? It draws people who… [PAUSE...]… who as I say, want to—to find themselves or lose themselves; but it also has a way of course of tossing people off; there’s this kind of centripetal thing…

REBECCA: Yeahhhhhhhh…

MALE VOICE: Hmmm mmmm…

JJS: …but people—people keep coming, right?

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

INTERRUPTION REBECCA: Although…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

MALE1: What is it? Why do—why do people come?

SM: Well, I think it’s the City of the Second Chance that you can, uhm, have failed somewhere else—you can have failed right here in the City, uhm, you can be broke, divorced, alcoholic, uh, and you can keep coming back to the City and it’ll give you a second chance and a third chance and it might also kick you out as it’s doing uh, increasingly; but you know, it’s the one place where… [FALSE STARTS]..... [PAUSE...]… if you’ve gotten off the plane from JFK, you’re a New Yorker. And there’s not many cities around the world that you can say that of… uhm, the remarkable thing about the City is how it allows you not to belong so, uh, the passage the Garnette was referring to it’s something that I’ve been writing about uhm, about these groups of people who live in different communities so there’s a great book called Mexican New York by L. Robert Smith, and he follows a group of peop[le]—of Mexicans who live in a neighborhood in Sunset Park and a village in Puebla and they go back 'n' forth to uh, these two places—those who have papers—and they live in a continuum of Sunset Park and this village in Puebla; they don’t need to belong to America, New York State or even New York City; they’re perfectly fine working… [PAUSE...]… finding friends, finding apartments in this little community—they don’t have to make it into any sort of thought … uh, and I think that’s… [PAUSE...]… uh, that’s a great sign of the vitality of the City, that it doesn’t force you to have this, uh, civic allegiance, uh, you can go through many neighborhoods of the City where people are speaking Bengali or Urdu or Croatian or even Italian, uh, and they don’t need to learn English—they might need to learn Spanish—

[LAUGHTER...]…

SM: …uhm… [LAUGHTER...]… they’re being Neuva York—but…

[LAUGHTER...]…

SM: …but they can—they can do [INAUDIBLE...] I think as long as that city has that latitude for people with or without papers uhm, I mean Mayor Bloomberg said a remarkable thing once in the Senate Hearings—when he was still a Republican—he said that if it had not been illegal immigration, then the economy of New York City would’ve collapsed after 9/11. So he was talking not just about legal but also illegal immigration uh, and—and this… I mean, imagine if all the undocumented were to be removed from New York City—the City would completely collapse…

MALE1: Mmmm…

SM: …and so the City makes use of talent and energy wherever they come from and it’ll give everyone a second chance…

GC: Yeah… and there are many things that pull people here and [INAUDIBLE PHRASE...] points to a lot of things is that there’s a way to be here and be elsewhere—I mean, it’s an old immigrant joke and people say, “Oh—why do you like livin’ in Crown Heights?” the Jamaicans and they’re like, “Oh—we love it! Because it’s so close to America…”

[LAUGHTER...]…

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER...]…

JJS: Right… close to Jamaica, too…

GC: Yeah… [LAUGHTER...]…

JJS: Yeah… excellent! Uhm, we have a sort of one final map I think we could look at, uhm, if we could see image 14… [PAUSE...]… uhm, and I think of this one, this is a map we did called “Oscillating City”, which sort of closes the book—it’s sort of the—uh, “Goodnight Moon Map”…

[LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: [LAUGHTER...]…

JJS: …[LAUGHTER...]… but the idea here… [PAUSE...]… right? Is that New York is this incredible as we sort of have on this sort of cover illustration, right? It’s the sort of… [PAUSE...]… incredible pulsing non-stop heart, right? This idea of this kind of circulatory system, people moving into and out of it, uhm, this charts essentially Manhattan’s daytime population, its density versus its nighttime population…

MALE VOICE: Mmm hmmm…

JJS: …this incredible movement of people, you know, it’s a city the size of Seattle moving through Grand Central everyday, uhm, that incredible sort of pulsating life and also that kind of centripetal energy of pulling people in, pushing them out. But I wonder if we could, uh, just think as a sort of final question, uhm, about sort of New York… [PAUSE...]… as sort of centripetal system—as sort of circulatory system—and why is it—what is it about this place that sort of gives it the energy it has? That’s an energy that’s sort of fed by all of us who come to it, uhm, but I wonder if—if any of you have thoughts on that?

REBECCA: I just wanna say part of why we called it Non-stop Metropolis is that it does have this quality of a perpetual motion machine, sort of, you know, this sort of constant—the subways that never stop—the city on the go—this restlessness, the impatience with anyone who’s not moving fast enough…

[LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …you know? Or doesn’t quite know where they’re going and I’ve have those movements in places like Grand Central where I feel like the butterfly who’s flown into to the beehive…

[LAUGHTER...]…

REBECCA: …flapping around and uhm, but it was fascinating. This was—this map was inspired by David van der Leer and uh, you know, one of his… and his colleagues at the Van Allen Institute for Architecture who told us that Manhattan has this almost unique volume of people pumping in ‘n’ out of it and that really helped us take the—the cliché heart image, which is supposed to be you know, I♥NY and make it really kind of that… that… [PAUSE...]… non-stop organ that keeps things going and that pumps—and part of what I think that you know, the metaphor speaks to is that there are people who come from Africa, you know, and other parts of the world who kinda come in and stay in whatever part of the boroughs they find themselves; there are people who come as tourists or as medical patients or come to try and find their fortune or get educated and then there are just people who come in from the surrounding states and suburbs, you know, [INAUDIBLE...]... uh, who kind of get pumped in for their jobs and pumped out again and uh, you know, but just this sense of this constant, incessant movement as the city sets up every day and [FALSE STARTS]...—partially shuts down every night and then gets the nightshift of janitors and nightclubbers and other people was part of what we were trying to get at with this map…

JJS: Right… and the sort of idea of that we have all these photos of the 3:00 A.M. city, right? And the sort of city at rest and, you know, you can to the place where all of the—all of the pretzel carts live at night, right? Or the sort of depot New York uh, so Suketu and Garnette you—you all took a trip to the—to the food market…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

GC: Yeah, in the Bronx…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

SM: …from midnight to like five o’clock…

GC: That’s right… oh, it’s a swinging place at 5:00 A.M.—Hunt’s Point!

[LAUGHTER...]…

SM: Yeah, we, uhm, went out there from uhm… [PAUSE...]… the upper eastside which is the richest zip code in America, uh, to Hunt’s Point which is the poorest congressional district in America. So these extremes are possible and then we went to the vegetable, meat and fish markets uh, I'd suggest bringing a disposable jacket if you go to the fish market…

[LAUGHTER...]…

GC: …uh, that’s… that’s my kind of [INAUDIBLE...]…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

INTERRUPTION GC: And a heavy blanket—it’s freezing cold!

SM: Yeah… but you—you see all these people again, you know, this is where our food comes from and it’s a… [PAUSE...]… a completely different ecosystem, economy, there’s people… [FALSE STARTS]..... [PAUSE...]… who are representative of the City’s diversity—they’re working there, uhm, and at 8:00 A.M. when the rest of the City is waking up, this thing completely shuts down. You written this uh, essay about walking around Hunt’s Point…

GC: Yeah, and—and part of it is the absolute vibrancy of—of the place in spite of the poverty, you know, they kind of [INAUDIBLE...] the many overlappin’ spirits that are there and it—it gives a sense also why people are so attracted to the City that it’s like this place where there are all these many in different frequencies and you come for the two or three frequencies that you can hear and sometimes only you and another two hundred people can hear it but it feels like a place in which there is so much… [PAUSE...]… [more]… so many more frequencies and so there are many different reasons that people are pulled here; many different ways in which, to use that old expression, [INAUDIBLE PHRASE...] is “Deep calls the deep” and say, you know, you’ve come to find your frequency or your sort of frequencies, which is also some of the reasons why you know, some people pretty much have a half-life of two years here that two years and you’re like you're ready to go because suddenly there are other frequencies that—that comin’ in and so that [INAUDIBLE...] only gets pushed out in a way that has certain kind of… [PAUSE...]… in a cacophony that you can’t—you can’t bear to put with anymore—but we were there in Hunt’s Point and it’s four o’clock in the morning and we’re having a marvelous time and you’re seeing just this different world in which [INAUDIBLE PHRASE...] with these people are in the freezin’ cold makin’ their way through eight—eight hours in the middle of the night—there’s this… [FALSE STARTS]..... you know, terrific sense of community and [INAUDIBLE...] affection and humor and warmth that in spite of, you know, all of that, there are ways in which… [PAUSE...]… there’s a certain kind of solidarity—especially a solidarity of the night that we’re all in this together and we’re all sort of muscling our way through this city that is marvelous—yes!—but also can be brutally in a—in an unforgiving if you don’t have the means with which to survive here—and it gives—it—it pulls together in a certain way that—that holds it together and that you actually create new frequencies, that you found a new frequency with which to get around with other people who are in the same thing together or you know, who share some of the same tastes or who are thinking of it as a Mecca or a Promised Land or a Place of Arrival or a Place of Escape…

[SIMULTANEOUS TALKERS...]

SM: Not so on the upper eastside, though…

[LAUGHTER...]…

SM: …as you point out in your essay and when was it… thing Garnette writes about we—we were discussing was the ways in which to be rich is also to impoverish yourself if you don’t step out beyond your apartment so the gated communities also wall in people…

GC: Yeah…

SM: …uhm, you know I’ve long thought that with these street festivals—there’s… festivals in these different neighborhoods but what if they were to be a festival of Jackson Heights on the upper westside? Uhm…

[LAUGHTER...]…

SM: …where people would, you know, find the quaint customs and foods and uh… [PAUSE...]… uh, languages of Jackson Heights and one of the things that [FALSE STARTS]... although it’s a fluid city, it’s also—it’s a city of bubbles that people who live in some parts of the City have less experience of the other boroughs than they do of rich areas in other cities, uhm, and—and one of the great tings about walking around the City is that you get to go beyond your bubble…

GC: Yeah… and you also see the other bubbles, I mean, I mean we’ve all heard this or overheard this in a subway where someone says, “How did that second date go?”

NOISE IN THE BACKGROUND.....

GC: “Man, there’s no second date—she lives in Brooklyn…”

[LAUGHTER...]…

GC: Yeah…

[LAUGHTER...]…

JJS: Yeah… well this—and I love this—this sort of notion of—of this sort of bubble and—and the ways in which we spoke about New Orleans in particular, uh, we’d spoke about in this way, uhm, that New Orleans is this place that in the sort of imaginary of the US, people go to sort of get messy, get dirty, uh, and then they wanna wash it off and leave; I think that part of the allure of cities—New York—and certainly the way that the seventies, for example, has been nostalgized for—in good ways and not so good ways—uhm, is this idea that, oh—we want some of the chaos; we crave some of those different frequencies…all of those, uh, all of those different, uhm, ways of being in the City… but I think that one of the sort of real take-aways—at least for me in working on this project—and that I think Rebecca has sort of suffused these [INAUDIBLE...] with [inaudible] from the start is this idea that that cities are these places of extraordinary if not infinite possibility that we’re drawn to them because they make things visible to us, that because they represent possibility, uhm, and these maps—we’ve showed you just a few of ‘em—there are a few more in this book but the idea, of course, is that possibilities are limitless. Uhm, and I think just to—to close with a quote from my collaborator here, which seems especially appropriate to the library uhm, and this in—in part about books and about these atlases—these—these uh, books of maps—Rebecca wrote that a book “is an elegant technique for folding a lot of surface area into a compact, convenient volume; a library is likewise a compounding of such volumes, a temple of compression of many worlds…” and I think that’s a beautiful line to close with because this library—it seems to me—is an amazing sort of model of the city and what it can be at its best so, here’s to books! Here’s to New York! Thank you all…

AUDIENCE: APPLAUSE…

RS: Thank you…

AUDIENCE: APPLAUSE…

AUDIO CLIP OVER AT 01:40:23.0

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