Both Boston and Philadelphia (founded in 1682) feel older than New York; even the positively youthful Baltimore (established in 1729) harkens back to its beginnings in a manner that Gotham simply doesn’t. On the Acela Corridor it’s only the relatively antiseptic planned city of Washington DC that feels legitimately younger than New York. So allergic has New York, and Manhattan in particular, been to this colonial past that the ever-churning tumult of asphalt and concrete, iron and steel, glass and marble, erase and reinscribe New York over and over – a past that is always disturbed, always unstable. Sure, there are Victorian brownstones in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the occasional homestead in the Bronx or fortification ruin in the Financial District, but on the whole there is no equivalent to Rittenhouse Square or a Boston Common in New York. Today only a few farmhouses and a bevy of names are all that really survive of that century when New York was established. So out of place is the colonial in New York that when one happens upon it, such as the 1765 white-clapboard, Palladian Morris-Jumel House in Washington Heights, it feels as if you’ve left New York to wander into Cambridge or Germantown.
Whether or not Heraclitus was right that you can’t step into the same river twice, you certainly can’t return to the same New York. This is the image – and in many ways the reality – of the city on its 400th anniversary; that it never slows down enough so that it can be pinned down, even on its birthday. This is the metropolis of jack-hammers and sidewalks closed for construction, of rerouted traffic and high-rise cranes. Leon Trotsky, who lived in a Bronx exile for ten weeks before the February Revolution and who annoyed all of the wait-staff at Triangle Dairy by refusing to tip since it was a bourgeois affectation, wrote in 1917 that “New York… more than any other city… is the fullest expression of our modern age,” that is of “of capitalist automatism… of cubism…. of the dollar.” More romantically, Thomas Wolfe (after he got off the train from Asheville, North Carolina in 1924) said that “New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting sea, and earth, and stars.” When visiting in 1946, the French philosopher Albert Camus dragged on his Galouis and pronounced that the city which never sleeps is a “desert of iron and cement… an island of un-reality.” Truman Capote of Monroeville, Alabama succinctly claimed that “New York City is the only real city-city.” What’s notable is that for all of their variation, the Russian revolutionary’s respectful acknowledgement, the Gallic philosopher’s nihilistic horror, and the dual opinions of the Southern novelists – respectfully wondrous and bitchy – is that they weren’t made by the native born but by those who, even if briefly, made New York their own, as it ever is.