Gothamland

[bapopik at AOL.COM]

Sunday's New York Times has Op-Ed contributors suggesting how New York can "get its groove back." It seems, after a hole at the World Trade Center site and the defeat of the West Side Stadium, that nothing can get built or done here. I have a lot to say about that, but I'll say it somewhere else.
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Tom Wolfe says that New York has become "Gothamland," like Disneyland. "Gothamland" has been used sparingly before, but Wolfe's use could spur an image.
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(GOOGLE GROUPS)
Hunchback Reopening?- RUMOR 
... It's not meant to seem like NYC to anything but a camera lens. It's not Gothamland,
it was built as a movie set. This is why it's thin on attractions. ...   
rec.arts.disney.parks - Oct 9 2002, 3:25 pm by Jiromi - 36 messages - 19 authors 
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12intro.html
Pleasure Principles
By TOM WOLFE 
MARSHALL McLUHAN waited for the reporter's lips, mine, in fact, to stop moving, leaned back in his seat in the rear garden of that year's (1967) restaurant of the century, Lutèce, looked up at a brilliant blue New York-in-May sky, lifted a forefinger and twirled it above his head in a loop that took in the 30-, 40-, 50-story buildings that rose all around and said, apropos of nothing anybody at the table had been talking about:
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"Of course, a city like New York is obsolete. People will no longer concentrate in great urban centers for the purpose of work. New York will become a Disneyland, a pleasure dome ..."
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At that stage of his mutation from unknown Canadian English teacher to communications swami and international celebrity, cryptic, Delphic, baffling, preposterous predictions were McLuhan's trump suit. Intellectuals argued over whether he was a genius or a dingbat. If the case of New York is any proof, however, the man was a pure genius.
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Twenty-first century New York is fast becoming what Marshall McLuhan saw as he looked up in that garden out back at Lutèce almost 40 years ago: a one-industry town, strictly in the pleasure dome business, with a single sales pitch, "You're Gonna Love Gothamland."
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When it comes to the industries that created the metropolis 100 years ago, New York, like many big American cities, is a ghost town. Manufacturing, most notably New York's once famous garment industry, has moved to sweatier shops in China, Thailand, Mexico and Fiji. Mainstream retail has long since departed for the suburban "edge cities" Joel Garreau writes about. New York's original reason for being, shipping, is so far gone that the great piers on the Hudson River are now used for everything from an aircraft carrier welded to a dock as a museum to a golf driving range with a net to keep the balls from landing in the water.
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Real estate development and the construction industry have never recovered from the commercial real estate crash of the 1990's that left nearly 60 million square feet of office space vacant, much of it in lonely and still unlovable Lower Manhattan. In terms of the location of the big investment firms, Wall Street today should be called Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Moreover, it is now obvious that there is no sound economic or geographical reason a financial market should consist of a great mob of men with sopping dark half-moons on their shirts beneath their armpits flailing about on "the floor" of some antiquated "stock exchange"... or in New York at all. The hemorrhaging of corporate headquarters from New York during the 1990's was stanched finally by a drug available only in Manhattan - Lunch.
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Many a chief executive who knew it would save his corporation a fortune if he moved it to Pleasantville, Cincinnati or South Orange could not conceive of ... life without Lunch ... that daily celebration of his royalty at the sort of peculiarly Manhattan restaurant where a regular ensemble of maîtres d' and captains hovers about the great man and his guests cooing sweet nothings in movie French ...where nothing so vulgar as a three-martini lunch ensues but, rather, a refined one-gallon-of-Côtes-du-Rhône lunch ... and his majesty the chief executive feeds in a supragustatory bliss upon Brazil-nut-and rosemary-encrusted day-boat halibut lying on a bed of millet infused with a double fermentation of malbec grape ... and the waiters arrive bearing the artistry of a chef for whom the owners of this restaurant, this month's restaurant of the century, all five years of it, combed the earth.
Such an ambrosial experience is a product not of the food industry but of the pleasure dome. None of Gothamland's stocks in trade are tangible. Rather, all offer the sheer excitement, even euphoria, of being ... "where things are happening."
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Humanity comes to New York not to buy clothes but, rather ... Fashion ...not to see musicals and plays but to experience "Broadway," which resembles the turn-of-the-19th-century trolley town one finds himself in upon entering Disneyland in California. If the traffic on Broadway should ever lack congestion, if the people ever stop spilling over the sidewalks and out into the street, if they ever stop hyperventilating in a struggle to get to the will-call window before the curtain goes up, the producers and theater owners should hire hordes of the city's unemployed actors to serve as extras and recreate it all.
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Millions roam New York's art museums each year, not to enjoy the artwork but to experience the ineffable presence of ...Culture. People throng Yankee Stadium game after game, season after season, not to see the Yankees play, not this year's Yankees, as the fellow might say, but to inhale ...The Myth ...
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Which brings us to the fate of the West Side stadium proposal. In the short run, it may look like a foolish expenditure of billions desperately - it's inevitably desperate, government's "need" for money - desperately needed elsewhere. In the McLuhan-length run, however, a few billion might prove to be a bargain, especially if it led straight to holding an event the magnitude of the Olympics in New York. After all, what does our city now live on? Why, something about as solid as a sharp intake of breath: the world's impression that Gothamland and only Gothamland ...is where things are happening.
Tom Wolfe is the author, most recently, of "I Am Charlotte Simmons."