Capital

New York, Capital of the 20th Century

Kenneth Goldsmith

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784781569
• eBook ISBN: 9781784781583
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources-histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails-and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis.

It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York, bringing the streets to life in categories such as "Sex," "Commodity," "Downtown," "Subway," and "Mapplethorpe."

Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail-for can a megalopolis truly be written? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible passage.

Part 1

Preface

Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no, make that, he-he … romanticized it all out of proportion. Now … to him … no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Ahhh, no, let me start this over. Chapter One. He was too romantic about Manhattan as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle-bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles. Nah, no … corny, too corny … for … my taste … I mean, let me try and make it more profound. Chapter One. He adored New York City. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity to cause so many people to take the easy way out … was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in—No, it’s gonna be too preachy. I mean, you know … let’s face it, I wanna sell some books here. Chapter One. He adored New York City, although to him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage. Too angry. I don’t wanna be angry. Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. I love this. New York was his town. And it always would be.

Allen and Brickman, Manhattan, p. 1

A Dream City

Enough leeks to coat all Fifth Avenue with vichyssoise.

Brook, p. 53

A Good Humor bar gooily obstructing Park Avenue.

Conrad, p. 316

A violin crafted from wood from an old house in Elizabeth Street.

Berger, Eight Million, p. 164

The Library lions refuse any longer to guard people who believe that wisdom lies in books and vow that they’ll repatriate themselves to Africa, “where there is still some freedom.”

Conrad, p. 203

The statue of Father Duffy in Times Square, mummified on his pedestal by a shroud of plastic sheeting, bundled in his sacking against his cross, against a sky of streaming neon and balletic peanuts.

Ibid., p. 169

When the south tube of the Lincoln Tunnel was officially opened on December 12, 1937, it had already been sanctified by the legend that its glass roof was intended to give travelers a good view of the fishes in the North River.

Federal Writers, Panorama, p. 407

On Sutton Place a man fishes out his eighteenth-story window for eels.

Talese, p. 48

If it were blood pouring out of the hydrants, would people stanch the flow?

Atkinson, p. 229

A naked butcher on a roof in Hester Street.

Mitchell, Ears, p. 189

Dogs wag their tails up and down instead of sideways in the Flatiron Building.

Barnes, New York

Sea monkeys from a curio shop peddling twentieth-century Americana, and these sea monkeys mutate into King Kong–sized jumbo shrimp that almost destroy the futuristic city of New New York.

Bennett, Deconstructing, p. 41

An urban science fiction.

Koolhaas, p. 15

A thick-hipped and swollen-breasted nude ignores the snow on the Museum of Modern Art courtyard, tilting her pelvis at the muffled landscape.

Conrad, p. 174

Cloud-descended, these Venuses in transit between the sky and the streets land on the city’s rooftops.

Ibid.

What is a ship, in fact, but the great skyscraper turned upon its side and set free?

Sanders, Celluloid, p. 279

Los Angeles is just New York lying down.

Steele, p. 26

skyscrapers
filled with nut-chocolates

Williams, Collected, p. 187

An evening up on the Empire State roof—the strangest experience. The huge tomb in steel and glass, the ride to the eighty-fourth floor and there, under the clouds, a Hawaiian string quartet, lounge, concessions and, a thousand feet below, New York—a garden of golden lights winking on and off, automobiles, trucks winding in and out, and not a sound. All as silent as a dead city—it looks adagio down there.

Powell, p. 12

The Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older.

Didion, “Goodbye,” pp. 168–77

The buildings, as conceived by architects, will be cigar boxes set on end.

White, Here, p. 55

Dalí’s New York is a laboratory of intensified entropy, where things become surreal in a thermodynamic malaise.

Conrad, p. 146

One of Oldenburg’s 1965 projects was an ironing board, canopying the Lower East Side. The board replicates the shape of Manhattan and with its shadow blesses the former ghetto. Its baldachin testifies to the “million miles of devoted ironing” done beneath it by immigrant mothers sprucing up their offspring.

Ibid., p. 318

He would love to pad Central Park and the slope of Park Avenue with green baize, in homage to the grass of the former and the merely titular vegetation of the latter, and to use them as pool tables. Colored balls would be sent bumping through the park to roll down the declivity of the avenue. They’d be collected at Grand Central and shipped back uptown on the underground railroad tracks. At 96^th Street they’d pop into view again, ready to resume the game.

N. cit.

Christo during the 1960s planned the packaging of three New York buildings, 2 Broadway, 20 Exchange Place, and the Allied Chemical Tower in Times Square.

Conrad, p. 312

Bill told me he had been walking uptown one afternoon and at the corner of 53^rd and 7^th he had noticed a man across the street who was making peculiar gestures in front of his face. It was Breton and he was fighting off a butterfly. A butterfly had attacked the Parisian poet in the middle of New York.

Denby and Cornfield, p. 3

Breton continued to live in New York City; he remained totally French, untouched by his residence in America, almost as though he had never left Paris.

Myers, p. 37

As reality goes into hiding in the prudish city, realism becomes an illicit art. Sometimes Marsh was denied permission to sketch in the burlesque houses, so he taught himself to scribble on paper concealed in his pocket.

Conrad, p. 97

He wishes that some aesthetic tyrant would make amends for the grayness of New York by decreeing that all the avenues be painted in contrasting colors.

Ibid., pp. 139–40

The patterning of tracks in Washington Square after a blizzard is decorative rondure.

Ibid., p. 175

Surreal New York is a pornotopia, a jungle of regression or an infirmary of the psychologically maimed.

Ibid., p. 142

Invading New York, the modernists put it through a succession of iconographic torments. It’s demolished by the cubists, electrified by the futurists, sterilized by the purists. Cubism piles up New York’s architectural building blocks only to capsize them. Surrealism carnivorously interprets its stone and steel as flesh, of which it makes a meal. Inside the body, the surrealist city rots; purism arrests that fate by setting its temperature at a sanitary degree zero. But the radical muralists, unrelenting, inscribe on the city’s walls a prophecy of doom.

Ibid., p. 127

Tex Rickard built a giant swimming pool in Madison Square Garden in 1921. The giant white-tiled pool was 250 feet long by 100 feet wide, two-thirds the size of a football field. The water tank held 1,500,000 gallons of water. The ends of the pool had a depth of three feet and sloped to the center for a depth of fifteen feet, an area that served amateur and professional swim and dive competitions on Thursday evenings. A cascading waterfall was incorporated into the design at one end.

Aycock and Scott, p. 137

On the side of a blazing warehouse is a proud advertisement for the food products manufactured therein: “SIMPLY ADD BOILING WATER.” And the fire occurs, to make the joke even crueler, on Water Street.

Conrad, p. 291

Astronauts from the future discover that the mysterious world on which they have landed actually sits atop a post-apocalyptic New York—the ruined Grand Central has become the temple for a future race; a wide, double staircase serves as the altar. Like Luthor’s lair, this set is not a reconstruction of the real building, but a rather free interpretation that takes advantage of the enormous familiarity of the station’s design, manifested in details as simple as the shape of an arch or a style of lettering. In such details resides Grand Central’s power as an almost universally recognizable “place,” even as it offers a superb springboard for fantasy. How many other structures could be so universally identified by a few fragments of their graphics?

Sanders, Celluloid, p. 284

Stephen Crane’s description of the sensation of riding in an elevator, written in 1899: “The little cage sank swiftly; floor after floor seemed to be rising with marvelous speed; the whole building was winging straight into the sky.”

Crane, Active, p. 32

Transference of night imaginations to the daytime world—a way of forcing the impressions gained on the radically changed night streets back upon the “real” world.

Haden, p. 49

The city is a built dream, a vision incarnated. What makes it grow is its image of itself.

Conrad, p. 207

I am going to carry my bed into New York City tonight
complete with dangling sheets and ripped blankets;
I am going to push it across three dark highways.

Stern, p. 55

A dream, not a place.

Pomerance, p. 3

These New Yorkers are often shunted to the margins of a spectacle that is half like a poster and half like a dream. They exist in an urban-scape made up of just bits and pieces that have little in common but their amputation by the frame.

Kozloff

Sleep … is where you find it. But the other fire escape is somewhat overcrowded … it’s not so bad sleeping that way … except when it starts to rain … then back to the stuffy tenement rooms.

Weegee, Naked, p. 20

Both Kansas and Oz, both black-and-white and technicolor, with wicked witches on both sides of town, and good ones too, showing up in bubbles every so often—if you know how to blow them.

McCourt, p. 79

Battery Park, the rendezvous of dreams.

Riesenberg and Alland, p. 13

Absent-minded city of unconscious revelations in our mental age of the nightjar and the candle.

Ibid., p. 206

I stopped in this restaurant down on 2^nd Avenue, sat at the counter for a moment and ordered a cup of coffee, feeling kind of warm and happy, the remnants of some dream from that morning still in my head.

Wojnarowicz, p. 187

There were tracks of iron stalking through the air, and streets that were as steep as canyons, and stairways that mounted in vast flights to noble plazas, and steps that led down into deep places where were, strangely enough, underworld silences. And there were parks and flowers and rivers. And then, after twenty years, here it stood, as amazing almost as my dream, save that in the waking the flush of life was over it. It possessed the tang of contests and dreams and enthusiasms and delights and terrors and despairs. Through its ways and canyons and open spaces and underground passages were running, seething, sparkling, darkling, a mass of beings such as my dream-city never knew.

Dreiser, p. 1

Here, in this ever renewed dreamland of the city, the comic-book shadows and cinematic styles of 1930s Manhattan are always present, always available, beckoning us to a mythical past.

Kingwell, p. 200

Cinema

A thousand movie screens flickered in New York from morning to midnight.

Jones, Dynamite, p. 200

Wandering through the souk of the Lower East Side, you could find the Palestine, the Florence, the Ruby, and the Windsor (among many others, most of which were nicknamed The Itch); they, too, died, driven into the Lost City with the great Yiddish theaters: the Grand, the Orpheum, the Yiddish Arts. Out in Queens, around 165^th Street, the Loew’s Valencia closed, along with the Alden, the Merrick, the Jamaica, the Savoy, and the Hillside. On East 14^th Street in Manhattan, there was a place called the Jefferson, where we went to see the Spanish movies and vaudeville acts, improbably trying to learn the language from Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, lusting for Sarita Montiel, laughing at the comedy of Johnny El Men, while ice-cream vendors worked the aisles. Gone. In Times Square, the Capitol disappeared, the Roxy, the Criterion, the Strand. The Laffmovie on 42^nd Street played comedies all day long, but now, where Laurel and Hardy once tried to deliver Christmas trees, the movies are about ripped flesh. Who now can verify the existence of the old Pike’s Opera House on 23^rd Street and Eighth Avenue (converted first to vaudeville and then to movies after the Metropolitan Opera established itself at 39^th Street and Broadway)? It was torn down to make way for the ILGWU houses, thus eradicating the building where Jay Gould once had his office and where Fred Astaire learned to dance. And most astonishing and final of all, the Para...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments