DAVID BROOKS, OUR FELLOW scribbler, is in torment. The emergence of a home team in Washington is forcing a break with the Mets, his last link to his native New York City. The Mets out, the Nats in, and what David calls “a spiritual crisis” is upon him. But he needn’t mourn. The city David remembers isn’t there any more.
Frank Sinatra is dead. In his place we have the likes of Michael Feinstein, a capable entertainer, but with no understanding of the high-risk, dark-to-dawn New York life. “Sinatra . . . defined the glamor of the urban night,” Pete Hamill tells us. His successors don’t.
Bobby Short is dead. The Carlyle remains, and some of its staff, notably the most famous bellman in New York, Michael, remain. But the Café Carlyle will never be the same–a place that Woody Allen could use in his movies as the venue for ending a great evening on the town. Short was living proof that you didn’t have to be born in New York to become a New Yorker–talent and a love of the city’s glitter were the only requirements for success.
Mike Milken is very much alive, now a successful entrepreneur in California after taking a fall for upsetting the WASP establishment. But in place of the excitement his creative genius brought to the world of finance, we have cops and accountants–Eliot Spitzer and his auditors, finding illegal bookkeeping tricks. Important, but unlikely to contribute as much to the dynamism of capitalism as Milken’s unseating of corporate fat cats.
And in place of flamboyant mayors like Jimmy Walker, Fiorello LaGuardia, Ed Koch, and Rudy Giuliani, we have what can charitably be called a colorless billionaire. Michael Bloomberg is certainly more honest than Walker, and a big improvement on David Dinkins, which is a plus of sorts. But it is hard to picture him reading the funnies to the city’s kids during a newspaper strike, or asking anyone “How’m I doing?” or rallying the city should it again face a disaster on the scale of September 11. Administrative competence has its virtues, as bookkeeper Abe Beame proved when he took over from the hyper-charismatic John Lindsay, but it sure doesn’t make me wake up of a morning eager to watch the goings on at City Hall. Boss William Tweed, who ran the city 140 years ago, was a crook, but left us with the courthouse, paved streets, sewers, and the Brooklyn Bridge, “the longest suspension span ever attempted to that time,” and one that required Tweed to hand out over $1 million (in today’s money) in bribes to New York aldermen to obtain approval, according to Kenneth Ackerman’s rousing biography of the old grafter. Bloomberg is honest, but so far seems unable even to keep Tweed’s legacy in good order, much less add to it: The Federal Highway Administration includes the Brooklyn Bridge among 182 New York city bridges classified as “structurally deficient” for lack of maintenance.
Then there is basketball. Anyone of a certain age can remember when a ticket to sold-out Madison Square Garden conveyed the privilege of joining the most knowledgeable fans in the world, and watching the Knicks elevate a mere sport into sheer artistry. Instead of cool, quiet Walt Frazier, and courageous Willis Reed playing on one leg to win a championship, we now have Stephon Marbury, the self-professed best guard in basketball, and Allan Houston, who continues to wait for just the right moment to test his injured knee. The Garden will be dark during the playoffs.
Finally, baseball. When Sammy Davis sang the praises of New York, he crooned happily about three baseball teams. That was then, before two went to the left coast in hunt of fans who like to watch their games from glass-enclosed private boxes, where they can’t smell the hot dogs, or feel the heat of summer.
True, the Mets, who finally replaced the Dodgers, were fun for awhile. But Casey Stengel is no more–losing now is just that, losing, with none of the fun that Stengel could bring to ineptitude on a heroic scale. We now have two teams: the Mets, who lose because trying to win is just too much work, and the corporate conglomerate that sails under the banner of the New York Yankees. That is not a team, but a merger of individual talents assembled by that great conglomerator George Steinbrenner, who calls his $200-million payroll Yankees “a great entertainment vehicle.”
In short, David, adopt the Nationals, forget the Mets. Sinatra had it right when he said, “It was a mess of good years.” But the New York you think you are abandoning long ago abandoned you.
On the other hand, if you need an adrenalin fix of the sort that is available where wealth is created, but not available in Washington, where it is merely redistributed, shuttle up and visit for a day, or two, or three.
–Irwin M. Stelzer
