Modernism in the Streets. Marshall Berman
young black or Latin person, along with most poor whites, will have experienced plenty of these—they encountered middle-class or upper-class people who perceived them as assailants, saw their eyes as drawn weapons and, like the woman in Baudelaire’s poem, called guards to get rid of them fast. What they have had to face, in Northern cities’ public space, has been not so much overt racism—though, God knows, they have felt plenty of it—as a free-floating hysterical fear. They have found themselves in the bizarre position of having to convince a multitude of strangers that they have no criminal designs on them. If they fail in this attempt—especially in encounters with police (often off-duty or in plainclothes) or, recently, with such free-lance vigilantes as Bernhard Goetz—they may well get killed.
Most of the young people I know have developed a repertory of dress and body language that manages to convince their social superiors of their innocence, and so enables them to move through the city in relative safety. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how they can possibly—to return to one of Walzer’s central ideas—be urbane in our urban space, if they are perpetually on trial in it.4 Their lot is depressingly similar to that of the Marranos in the Plaza Mayor three hundred years ago: Now, as then, only eternal vigilance can keep the subject alive, and any slip at any moment might be his last; even in the middle of the most spacious square, he is up against the wall.
A more contemporary kindred spirit would be Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It would be no surprise if many of these young people should come to feel, like Ellison’s hero, that it would make more sense to stay indoors or in a hole underground.
I hope they don’t stay away. If they do, it will diminish not only their lives—which already are constricted enough—but our own. In fact, poor people have taught us so much of what we know about being fully alive in public: about how to move rhythmically and melodically down a street; about how to use color and ornamentation to say new things about our selves, and to make new connections with the world; about how to bring out the rhetorical and theatrical powers of the English language in our everyday talk.
Middle-class people often have no idea how much they have learned from underclasses, because they have picked it up second or third hand. But our serious musicians and composers, our dancers and choreographers, our designers and painters and poets can tell us, if we ask, how much inspiration they have drawn from our underclasses’ overflowing life. And they have come into contact with this life, for the most part, not by making expeditions into dark ghettos (though a few adventurous spirits have done this), but simply by paying attention to the rich sounds and rhythms and images and gestures that poor men and women and boys and girls pour out on the sidewalks and in the subways of New York, and in all the rest of urban America’s shared and integrated public space.
Our underclasses are mostly black and Latin today, and the rappers, graffitists, break dancers, B-boys, et al., who have done so much to animate contemporary culture, are drawn mainly from black and Latin youth. But imaginative middle-class WASPs at the turn of the century—like William Dean Howells, Hutchins Hapgood, Jane Addams—could learn similar lessons from Irish, Italians, Slavs, and Jews. All those under-classed people, crammed together in tenements, exploited at work, oppressed in all social relationships, still overflowed with life in their teeming and violent streets, because the public space of the streets was the only place where they could come to life at all. Out in the streets, they could walk in the sun—even in streets where the sun didn’t shine. One thing that has made American culture so creative in the twentieth century is that it has had the capacity to nourish itself on the life and energy that our underclasses have had to give. It would be an ominous sign for our future if we were to lose that capacity now.
THE NARROW OPEN SPACES
Late in the 1960s, a number of promoters and developers, the Rouse Corporation most prominent among them, recognized that the overwhelming suburbanization of American society was bound to generate a powerful undertow of mass nostalgia for city life. They understood that this emotion could be spectacularly profitable. The fruits of their insight have been a whole new generation of public spaces, lavishly funded (through various complex public-private mixes) and often beautifully designed, throughout America’s cities. Houston’s Galleria, San Francisco’s Ghiradelli Square, Boston’s Quincy Market, New York’s South Street Seaport are only a few, and more are emerging all the time. (There have been similar movements in Europe, most strikingly in London’s recycled Covent Garden.) These developments have preserved parts of our nineteenth-century cities that would otherwise surely have been destroyed, and they have interwoven modern with traditional architecture in ingenious and occasionally inspired ways. They have come to constitute the reigning model for the public spaces of the future.
Americans who care about city life should be grateful for these spaces, especially since they supplanted a model of urban development that had no appreciation of public space at all. But it is hard to spend any length of time in them without feeling that something is missing. In fact, this something is the underclass, along with all our other “social, sexual, and political deviants.” The human mix in these spaces is overwhelmingly white, affluent, and clean-cut. It isn’t just that hardly anybody black, Latin, or poor is here; there isn’t even anybody scruffy or ragged-looking around.
These plazas are a lot less racially and socially integrated than the busy streets around them. Although their designs are meant to suggest microcosms of the cities they are part of, they are really urban-theme parks, Disney Worlds-by-the-sea; except for the skyscrapers that form their backdrop, they could almost be in the middle of the Everglades. There isn’t much menace in the air, but neither is there much flash or flair; not much to embarrass people or make them want to run, but even less to hold their attention and make them think. These plazas are too diverse to be single-minded, yet far too shallow to open up the depths in anybody’s mind. It would be too strong an accusation, too suggestive of conscious intent, to call them closed-minded. Maybe the word should be absent-minded, in memory of all that is out of sight and out of mind.
There are many ironies in this situation. The heyday of public space in recent American history was the 1960s. All over the country, in those years, streets came to life. And not just streets, but public spaces of every kind—squares, parks, malls, terminals, even highways—all filled up with people who were gathering, agitating, arguing, proclaiming, marching, stopping traffic, dancing, singing, waving flags, taking off their clothes or putting on strange new clothes, expressing themselves and making reasonable and outrageous demands on everyone else in flamboyantly theatrical but intensely serious ways; sometimes even burning things down, or getting themselves killed. Our streets were never so vibrant, so colorful, so sexy—but at the same time, and for some of the same reasons, they were never so violent or scary. By and by, more and more people began to fall prey to the pressures, including many people who had worked for years to lift those pressures. And our years of urban self-assertion and rebellion were followed by an era of wholesale de-urbanization, demographic flight beyond the suburbs to remote rural areas (which of course became suburbs overnight), and great cities on the ropes.
The masses of people who moved far away from their cities may well have found the comfort and security they sought. But many of them seem to have felt a sense of emptiness amid the flowers and the freeways, and yearned for a world they had lost. These urban refugees and their children have been among the main markets courted by the entrepreneurs of the new public space. But although many of these new spaces are pretty places, suburbanites who come in search of something missing in their lives won’t find it here. This is because what they really miss is not urban forms in themselves, noble as many of these forms are, but rather a thickness and intensity of human feelings, a clash and interfusion of needs and desires and ideas. For it is this clashing and fusing of human energies—as Baudelaire said it, “their luminous explosion in space”—that fills a city’s forms with life.
GROWING UP IN PUBLIC
Let me now pull together many of the strands of this argument by sketching briefly what my own vision of an open-minded space would be. It would be open, above all, to encounters between people of different classes, races, ages, religions, ideologies, cultures, and stances toward life. It would be planned to attract all these different populations, to enable them to look each other in the face, to listen, maybe to talk. It would have to