Making Tracks: A week in New York - understanding a nation?

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In a city once infamous for the manners of its inhabitants, I found all but the weather in New York to be genial. It was a classic city break. If one were to Google a list of tourist attractions in New York, everything we did would be on it. Central Park, the perhaps less well known but amazing High Line, Grand Central Station, Times Square, the Rockefeller Centre, the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, the Met, Liberty and Ellis Island. The list goes on. It seemed fitting to write about New York with my previous piece on York, the English cousin with whom the city shares a name. Yet, the Big Apple could not be further from the comparatively quiet York.

The skyscrapers, giant department stores and of course, the omnipresent, giant American portions of food. These are features of New York that to the outside world can seem big, loud, excessive and, well, stereotypically American. Yet, something I did not expect to find in New York was a new respect for American culture. The ‘American Dream’ is the philosophy of each having equal opportunities in order that they may work hard and achieve the highest levels of prosperity and success.

To the outside world, this key tenet of US culture seems now laughable, long since picked apart by such subversive American literature as the Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men. Indeed, it is certainly not an ideology with which I unwaveringly agree. Yet, New York, and in particular the Rockefeller Centre, Empire State Building and Liberty and Ellis Island illustrated both the extent to which this ideology has both valid historical route and also the way in which events in American History have bolstered it.

The Rockefeller Centre and Empire State building are instantly recognisable features of the New York skyline, the Empire State perhaps the more famous for its role in the original King Kong. Both are successors of the original skyscrapers built in New York and Chicago that were products of the new technological developments of the late 1800s. The Rockefeller Centre, financed by a single private investor, John D. Rockefeller, provided employment for around 75,000 workers in the interwar depression years. Despite losing half his fortune in the crash at the end of the 1920s, Rockefeller continued with the project and didn’t cut costs, ensuring it was one of the most innovative and impressive works of architecture of its time.

Rockefeller chose avant-garde Art Deco over Gothic for the design of the centre, which actually consists of eighteen more buildings than the skyscraper most will recognise. The determination with which Rockefeller invested in and saw through the completion of the Rockefeller Centre ensured the survival of many New Yorkers during a period of worldwide economic dearth. The Empire State Building too, although completed earlier in 1931 and so not the same bedrock of security that the Rockefeller was to the economy, played its part in securing New York and America a reputation for innovation and impressive technological feats that the rest of the West could wonder at with envy during the 1930s depression. The Empire State required a huge feat of organisation and construction in order to ensure its completion in a record time. It surpassed the height of the Chrysler building, its nearest rival, by hundreds of feet, and achieved multiple craftsmanship awards. Like the Rockefeller Centre, it provided invaluable jobs. These two buildings are not just loud, large exhibits of American brashness. They are, without sounding too much like an advocate of American supremacy, symbols of American prosperity and success against the odds. In an era when the rest of the Western world, including Britain, was lagging behind technologically and economically, it is no wonder the amazing feats of innovation that took place in 1930s America, bolstered and still do bolster, American pride in their cultural ideology.

If the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Centre are buildings which bolster Americans’, especially New Yorkers’, belief in their cultural values, Ellis and Liberty Island can explain, in part, the root of the values themselves. Ellis Island was the processing centre for all those entering the States as immigrants. Immigrants were checked for disease, their papers were scrutinised and if accepted, they became US citizens.

Ellis Island ran from 1892 to 1954. A huge number of immigrants from places including the Congo, the Gold Coast of Africa, China and Japan had already arrived prior to the Ellis Island processing centre being opened. 1892, however, saw immigration control pass to the federal government. This transition coincided with a period of political instability in Europe that drove a huge number of European emigrants to America and through the doors of the Ellis Island processing centre.

In total, Ellis Island saw the arrival of 12 million immigrants from countries including Ireland, Poland, Bohemia, Russia and Greece. The immigration processing centre, now converted to a museum, conveys the extent to which America and New York, its entry point by sea, represented a better life for millions. The striking stories conveyed through oral history tapes in the museum told how despite the risk of being sent back to their own countries which were often war zones or run by dictator governments, the 12 million travelled weeks by sea, in appalling conditions in the hope of obtaining entry to what had become, in their eyes, a promised land.

The tapes also told how often due to one member having a disease, families would be split up never to see each other again. The reconstruction of a dormitory was shocking to see. It looked more like a prison cell, cramped with a noticeable lack of privacy. In this way, the museum was unexpectedly honest in conveying that for those who went through Ellis Island, the experience on the Island and once into New York and beyond, was not always a good one. Not all were welcome in the ‘promised land’. In 1875 Congress brought into law the first federal restrictions on entry.

Over the next decade the number of ‘excludable classes’ grew to include the mentally ill, paupers and many more. In some ways, this was a practice of eugenics not vastly dissimilar to that practiced in Germany during the 1930s and 40s. The Chinese Exclusion Act, then expanded at the start of the 20^th century to include all Asians showed how there was racial discrimination too. These groups were excluded over fears that they would become “public charges and social contaminants”. This phraseology, too, has an echo of the Third Reich’s desire to create a pure society and is the darker side to the American Capitalist ‘each man for himself’ attitude. The comparison with Nazi Germany ends there. The museum also showed the music, art and skills, which immigrants to Ellis Island and immigrants to New York today, brought and still bring to the US, shaping and altering American culture in the process.

In turn, immigrants have subscribed to the American ethos. In this way, the museum told the story of a nation which could be exclusive in its struggle to forge a new successful society but which was not in any sense isolated. A Romanian taxi driver I met on the way to JFK airport at the end of the trip told me proudly how in the forty years he had lived in America he had not stopped working; 20 years as a welder then as a yellow cab driver. He didn’t care about politics and who was leading America but what I did notice was his pride in his ability to buy things, earn a living, educate his children and better himself. History books can teach the tenets of the American constitution, and the American victory in the war of Independence and how democracy originated in these political and military moves between nations. But, going to New York enables one to see that, despite some crises over the years and certainly less regard for it outside America, the American dream and American values have continued to lay down roots in the minds of new immigrants and American citizens.

London may claim to be a multicultural city but New York is the ultimate city of immigrants. Ellis Island, listening to the immigrants' first hand accounts of coming to Ellis Island by ship and seeing Lady Liberty made me comprehend why the chance to build ones own life on cheap land with cheap housing, through ones own work seemed so appealing to immigrants who had been subject to the whims of dictators, high prices in economic depressions and constant fear of upheaval. It may even explain the large food portions, perhaps a result of the determination never to go hungry again. Or, it may just be a desire to eat what they like, when some can still remember living in Communist countries where there were often shortages of food. Immigrants travelled to America and began to form the American culture long before Ellis Island and New York became the gateway to the US. Yet, Ellis Island and Liberty Island in New York Bay show how the promises of America in the minds of hopeful, desperate even, immigrants from far and wide, forged the ideology of the American dream. This trip to New York unexpectedly gave me a newfound respect for the American culture and values, which stem not from a desire for glory or political power, but from a historical desire for prosperity, security, freedom and democracy.