5 The Wave Transformations of the City
6.1Viewed from a ship entering New York Harbor or from a plane coming in over the city, New York appears as an enormous complex of hard, permanent towers–crystal-line asparagus. But these "permanents" are as impermanent as women’s hairdos. New York City’s permanent-wave architecture is in fact a progressively rippling dynamic wave system. The last half-century has seen three successive replacements of would-be permanent New York City buildings.
6.2 New York is a continual evolutionary process of evacuations, demolitions, removals, temporarily vacant lots, new installations, and repeat. This process is identical in principle to the annual rotation of crops in farm acreage–plowing, planting the new seed, harvesting, plowing under, and putting in another type of crop.
6.3 New York’s dynamic pattern of continually accelerating transformation was entirely unpremeditated by its static-minded, permanence-intending designers and their patrons. Up to the time when its earliest skyscrapers were built (the first was the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, completed in 1889 and demolished in 1914), its stone buildings, fine residences, banks, and commercial structures were thought of by architects, owners, and the public as "permanent" monuments of their conceivers’ era. And the building arts being the most laggard of all men’s activities, this conception of buildings as "permanent" still persists in most men’s minds. Most people look upon the building operations blocking New York’s streets–the piles of sand and brick, the huge cranes fishing steel girders from curb-parked trucks–as temporary annoyances, soon to disappear in a static peace. They still think of permanence as normal, a hangover from the Newtonian view of the universe. But those who have lived in and with New York since the beginning of this century have literally experienced living with Einsteinian relativity.
6.4 Said Newton, in the first phase of his first law of motion, "A body persists in a state of rest" (and then, as an after-thought, "or in a line of motion") except as it is affected by another body. This Newtonian norm of "at rest," which means without change, has long been the base line of all our economic charts. From this point of view all events and their growth curves are abnormal. On such charts the curves of industrial and economic performance rise abnormally above, or more normally fall back to, or parallel with, the base-line norm of "no change." The would-be conservators of peace and of economic health have throughout history sought to "iron out" the abnormal humps, to "return to normal," to no change.
6.5 Einstein’s relativity theory, evolved early in the century, made the static verities of Newtonian mechanics untenable. But it took almost a half-century for the dynamics of Einstein’s relativity to emerge in the daily papers as the atomic bomb, followed by a pattern of dynamic events clearly demonstrating that accelerating change is normal–just as normal as the human appetite for news of the accelerating accomplishment of breakthroughs that swiftly expand man’s domain in the universe.
6.6 źExtracted from "New York as a Focus of Energy" by R. B. Fuller, in The New York Guidebook, edited by John A. Kouwenhoven, published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1964.
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6.8 To the Newtonian conservative, the deliberately accelerated obsolescence of structures and equipment, such as we see everywhere about us in contemporary New York, constitutes waste. To the Einsteinian conservative, obsolete structures and equipment are a new mine of selectively concentrated chemical elements–a fundamental resource of the industrial commonwealth. The materials from this mine are the means of realizing ever more advanced design out of our improving scientific potentials. As a consequence, metal scrap and plastic scrap now recirculate increasingly.
6.9 New inventions increase our productive capacity per man-hour and per pound of resource–our "performance capability," as it is called. Every time we mine obsolete structures or equipment for metal or plastic to use in improved designs, we get increased performance out of the same tonnage of fundamental chemical resources. Which suggests, for instance, that we should take all the obsolete two-ton automobiles off the road, melt them up, and produce from the resulting scrap twice as many one-ton automobiles, each of higher "capability" than the former cars, in terms of performance per passenger and of fuel-gallons per safely accomplished higher-velocity mile.
6.10 All the world’s great cities that grew up prior to New York were products of the Newtonian "no change" norms. Their romance lies in their preoccupation with man’s historical, bastioned past. What makes New York City the "most important something" in all history is that long before the atomic bomb hit the front page, this city had become the first great Einsteinian reality. Its romance is its living manifestation of history continually in the making. Its streets and districts gradually grow, swell, transform, and disappear altogether. In the "gay ’90s" New York’s great exposition and sports building on Madison Square was known as Madison Square Garden. In 1924, the owners of that building built a new modern Madison Square Garden 1 1/4 miles north of Madison Square, on 8th Avenue. New York’s Bowery, now the deadbeats’ lingering threshold to death, was once the most splendid of growing New York’s districts and boasted its Bowery Savings Bank. The Bowery Savings Bank now has its main office 5 miles north of the Bowery on E. 42nd Street. The Madison Avenue of the "gay ’90s" meant the area between Madison Square and 42nd Street, dominated by the J. P. Morgan residence at 38th and Madison. Madison Avenue of the first half of the twentieth century referred to the great shopping section from 42nd Street to 72nd Street, dominated at its base by Brooks Brothers, the Biltmore Hotel, and the Roosevelt Hotel. So attractive did the Madison Avenue vantage appear to so many corporate newcomers that they, in effect, have pulled down all the old buildings and thus terminated all the old enterprises that constituted Madison Avenue. They have built a new canyon in the universe, whose preoccupation with the abstract function of shaping men’s conditionable reflexes, through advertising, has caused the words "Madison Avenue" to hold an entirely new meaning–having nothing to do with a physical avenue itself but with their "corporate image"–the collective archpropagandist, proselytizer, inducer, and seducer.
6.11 Propaganda, like most of New York’s manufactured products, has little weight or physical substance. Pittsburgh produces steel; Chicago warehouses wheat, steel, and cattle. New York manufactures pattern abstractions. London’s stock market, the Paris Bourse, and other world exchanges long predate New York in the exchange of abstract enterprise equities, but New York today centralizes all the world’s anticipatory discounting of forwardly reckonable values.
6.12 The United Nations’ world headquarters came naturally to New York as the world’s most concentrated pattern-processing and exchanging center. New York is today the world’s chief publishing headquarters, its leading drama and art market. One Oklahoma stockyard, last year, collected and sent forward to the slaughter house a nose-to-tail chain of cattle 550 miles long. New York’s 2,000,000 typewriters and calculating
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6.14 machines last year produced rows of letters and figures long enough to run twenty ribbons between the planets Earth and Venus when these two are in closest proximity.
6.15 The ideas in which New York traffics emanate from all around the earth. It is the world’s greatest import-export idea exchange. New York is not an idea factory, nor an idea mine, nor an idea garden, but it is the world’s point of highest velocity in idea exchanging. As such, New York is the world’s greatest traffic center in hopes and fears, valid or invalid.
6.16 There are but relatively few native New Yorkers. Its population is transient. The average residence is three years. Visitors to New York from around the world fre- quently assert antipathy to New York’s coldness and bigness. They have not seen the New York we have been describing. They have seen one frame of a moving picture. It looks static. Only the old-time New Yorkers can know the great transforming dynamics and, more importantly, the city’s myriad of rich abstract resources. Because pure abstrac- tions such as love, hate, happiness, and inspiration are as invisible as they are nonmer- chandisable, all the real meaning of New York is both invisible and nonmarketed. The lucky few millions who are old-time New Yorkers usually love New York passionately for they know not why specifically.
6.17 While the statistical voices warn us that the world population threatens to crowd itself off the earth, it is comforting to discover that New York City’s buildings could contain the whole population of the earth with no more crowding than that experi- enced at a cocktail party–not room for anyone to lie down but all under cover. New York is so knit together with underground wires, tubes, cables, and pipes–that in effect Man- hattan Island could be lifted in one piece and stood upon end, its roadways and tunnels act- ing as its supporting columns with Battery Park on top and Harlem at its base. In such a position its subways would become elevators and its elevators subway shuttles.
6.18 Its street level is not the bottom level of New York. Legal statutes adopted by early Knickerbocker burghers required that when the utility companies dug up its streets and inserted pipes, cables, and subways, they should thereafter put all the same earth back where they found it and the city would then resurface it. This the public utilities have done to the letter. The earth tucked back into the street is no more the earth’s natural top crust than is the earth tucked into the flower pots high above in Manhattan’s skyscraper apartments. The concrete and steel intrusions, below the streets and build- ings, have become so multitudinous and penetrate at so many levels that they reach hun- dreds of feet below the theoretical surface. Like an iceberg, structural and mechanical Manhattan is now chiefly below the surface.
6.19 Old-time New Yorkers remember the unique commercial districts–the leather district around Gold Street; the tea and spice districts along Water, Front, and Pearl Streets; the cotton and linen district on White Street; the machinery exchanges of Lafayette Street; and the great Gansevoort, Washington, and Manhattan market districts. These districts have been almost wholly diffused into uptown invisible districts. The real long- time New Yorker knows, however, that nothing has gone from New York and that its interests have multiplied a thousandfold. The unique vortexes continually transform and interchange.
6.20 Old-world church and cathedral spires were originally conceived and built to reach high above the surrounding houses and stores. In New York one can look down from on high into a deep valley wherein miniscule spires reach up from the bottom like fine jewelry spicules, for, unlike business enterprises, the churches have usually been unable 63
6.21 to move and have been swallowed by the commercial avalanche, being no longer the centers of their parish dwellings. But their spires as yet inspire when, in our thoughts, our eyes wander down into those New York deeps wherein approximately all that is physically left of yesterday is wedded with the physical of today, and we remember that we are as yet "quick" and not dead, and that yesterday only the dead were normal, and that New York City is now being synchronized with the dynamism of the quick whose norm is Einstein’s Cš, that’s 186,000 times 186,000 miles per second, the normal rate at which we see. "I lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help"–possibly because, of all our faculties, it is only our eyes that can apprehend the distant presence of the high hills–a presence of which we are informed by radiation from the sun, reflected from the hills to our eyes at 186,000 miles per second, all of which seems so instantaneous that we mistakenly say that we "lift our eyes." And we know that no man–no mere human being–invented that velocity, nor its reliable regularity throughout the full spectrum range of all electromagnetic wave phenomena, nor the regularity of its ultra-high frequency inter-trafficking.
6.22 Men of yesterday looked outward self-helplessly to the macrocosm, praying for miraculous salvation; today they look inward self-disciplinedly to the nuclear microcosm for vast sources of reliable physical power. What men thought they understood yesterday of their local experiences seemed regular, orderly, and logical; what they did not comprehend, extending outward to the macrocosm and inward to the microcosm, they thought of as turbulent, random, and chaotic.
6.23 Men of the Einstein Age are discovering the universal orderliness of constant, comprehensive transformation, utterly transcendental in the exquisite and magnificent orderliness of its wavelength and frequency when compared to the crude, disorderly, conscious thinking and articulation of mere humans.
6.24 And as the bees intent upon their honey-commerce are utterly unaware of the pollination-function of their bumbling tails, which inadvertently and unbeknownst to the bees service the organization of tomorrow’s flowers and honey sources, so are the little local real estate manipulators and separate venture builders who redot the New York City map utterly unaware of their part in the–only retrospectively scannable–comprehensive orderliness of New York City’s transformative growth. That growth is an invisible function of all men’s experience of all history, translated now into the world-surrounding, dynamically functioning industrial network-system in which New York City is, for the moment, the most radiant communication-relaying center on planet Earth.
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