{"product_id":"hearts-of-the-cityisbn-9780375404061","title":"Hearts of the City","description":"From the late Herbert Muschamp, the former architecture critic of \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times \u003c\/i\u003eand one of the most outspoken and influential voices in architectural criticism, a collection of his best work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe pieces here—from \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eArtforum\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e—reveal how Muschamp’s views were both ahead of their time and timeless. He often wrote about how the right architecture could be inspiring and uplifting, and he uniquely drew on film, literature, and popular culture to write pieces that were passionate and often personal, changing the landscape of architectural criticism in the process. These columns made architecture a subject accessible to everyone at a moment when, because of the heated debate between modernists and postmodernists, architecture had become part of a larger public dialogue. One of the most courageous and engaged voices in his field, he devoted many columns at the \u003ci\u003eTimes\u003c\/i\u003e to the lack of serious new architecture in this country, and particularly in New York, and spoke out against the agenda of developers. He departed from the usual dry, didactic style of much architectural writing to playfully, for example, compare Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao to the body of Marilyn Monroe or to wax poetic about a new design for Manhattan’s manhole covers. One sees in this collection that Muschamp championed early on the work of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Thom Payne, Frank Israel, Jean Nouvel, and Santiago Calatrava, among others, and was drawn to the theoretical writings of such architects as Peter Eisenman. Published here for the first time is the uncut version of his brilliant and poignant essay about gay culture and Edward Durrell Stone’s museum at 2 Columbus Circle. Fragments from the book he left unfinished, whose title we took for this collection—“A Dozen Years,” “Metroscope,” and “Atomic Secrets”—are also included. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eHearts of the City\u003c\/i\u003e is dazzling writing from a humanistic thinker whose work changed forever the way we think about our cities—and the buildings in them.\u003ci\u003eAcknowledgments \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIntroduction \u003c\/i\u003eby Nicolai Ouroussoff \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTHE NEW REPUBLIC, 1987–1992\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Temple of Marketing\u003cbr\u003eCorbu Saved from Drowning \u003cbr\u003eThe Breached Wall \u003cbr\u003eThe Perils of Public Art \u003cbr\u003eThe Leaning Tower of Theory \u003cbr\u003eThe Lie of the Land \u003cbr\u003eHow Buildings Remember \u003cbr\u003eThe Winds of Windsorism \u003cbr\u003eWhen the Cathedral Turned Black \u003cbr\u003eAmerican Gothic \u003cbr\u003eThe Wrong Prescription \u003cbr\u003eEast\/West Side Story \u003cbr\u003eCrowds and Power \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eARTFORUM, 1995, 1999\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCritical Reflections \u003cbr\u003eMoral of the Stories \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTHE NEW YORK TIMES, 1992–2007\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne Building That Knows What It’s About \u003cbr\u003eFor All the Star Power, a Mixed Performance \u003cbr\u003eSteel and Backbone in Hard Times \u003cbr\u003eBarcelona Breaks the Record for Inspired Urbanism \u003cbr\u003eFor Times Square, a Reprieve and Hope of a Livelier Day \u003cbr\u003eThe Thrill of Outer Space for Earthbound Lives \u003cbr\u003eIn Philadelphia, a Showcase of Abandoned Hopes \u003cbr\u003eReduced to Luxury \u003cbr\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eNiña, \u003c\/i\u003ethe \u003ci\u003ePinta, \u003c\/i\u003eand the Fate of the “White City” \u003cbr\u003eArt and Science Politely Disagree on an Architectural Jewel’s Fate \u003cbr\u003eFor Staten Island, A Ferry Terminal Rooted in the Past \u003cbr\u003eGehry’s Disney Hall: A Matterhorn for Music \u003cbr\u003eSt. John the Divine: It Can’t Go On. It Goes On. \u003cbr\u003eThinking About Tomorrow, and How to Build It \u003cbr\u003eThe Tale of a Chimney That Turned into an Oasis \u003cbr\u003eSome Unfinished Business on St.-Germain \u003cbr\u003eRoadside Attractions to Reckon With \u003cbr\u003eModernism and Morality in the South Bronx \u003cbr\u003eNew Public Housing, French Vintage 1922 \u003cbr\u003eShaping a Monument to Memory \u003cbr\u003eThis Time, Eisenman Goes Conventional \u003cbr\u003eTo the Beach: A Baedeker for Baskers; Long Beach Island \u003cbr\u003eThe Unconventional as a Convention \u003cbr\u003e“Things Generally Wrong in the Universe” \u003cbr\u003eIn This Dream Station Future and Past Collide \u003cbr\u003eMiami Virtue: Arquitectonica’s Low-Rent Housing \u003cbr\u003eViñoly’s Vision for Tokyo, and for the Identity of Japan \u003cbr\u003eMore Is Less at a Free-Form Jamboree in Chicago \u003cbr\u003eA Nervous Prism of a Building for Manhattan \u003cbr\u003eWhat Makes a Building Shrivel Up and Die? \u003cbr\u003eThe Gehry House: A Brash Landmark Grows Up \u003cbr\u003eA Man Who Lives in Two Glass Houses \u003cbr\u003eFear, Hope, and the Changing of the Guard \u003cbr\u003eFrank Gehry Lifts Creativity Out of the Box \u003cbr\u003eThe Homeless and the New Cold War \u003cbr\u003eRude Awakening; Quake Jars Assumptions: A Critic’s View \u003cbr\u003eArchitecture as Social Action, and Vice Versa \u003cbr\u003eAn Appraisal; Columbus Circle’s Changing Face: More than Geometry \u003cbr\u003eBack to the Future \u003cbr\u003eQueens West: Why Not Something Great? \u003cbr\u003eIn Paris, a Building That Melts Away Like Ice \u003cbr\u003eFrank Gehry’s American (Center) in Paris \u003cbr\u003e“Boss” Design: A Los Angeles Sketchbook \u003cbr\u003eRadical Moderation, Right Out of the ’60s \u003cbr\u003eIf You Squint, This Is Not a Faulty Tower \u003cbr\u003eIn California, an Art Center Grown from Fragments \u003cbr\u003eVisions of Community with Roots in the ’60s \u003cbr\u003eA Show Brings on a Severe Case of Period Envy \u003cbr\u003eRem Koolhaas’s New York State of Mind \u003cbr\u003eStay of Execution for a Dazzling Airline Terminal \u003cbr\u003eSighting Beauty on the Far Side of Fear \u003cbr\u003eThe Moment When the World Seemed New \u003cbr\u003eAn Architect with a Knack for Synthesis \u003cbr\u003eAn Emporium for Art Rises in the West \u003cbr\u003ePlayful, Even Goofy, but What Else? It’s Disney \u003cbr\u003eWhat of Cities If the Blueprint Is Republican? \u003cbr\u003eArt, Setting, and the Architecture of the Heart \u003cbr\u003eA Declaration of the ’60s, Before the Doubts \u003cbr\u003ePreserving the Shrines of an Age, Not the Spirit \u003cbr\u003eA Flare for Fantasy: \u003ci\u003eMiami Vice \u003c\/i\u003eMeets Forty-second Street \u003cbr\u003eWhere the Readers Are Inside the Books \u003cbr\u003eBroadway’s Real Hits Are Its Antique Theaters \u003cbr\u003eA “Monster” of a Masterpiece in Connecticut \u003cbr\u003eAmong the Fountains with Tadao Ando: Concrete Dreams in the Sun \u003cbr\u003e    King’s Court \u003cbr\u003eRemodeling New York for the Bourgeoisie \u003cbr\u003eIn a Bygone Day, This Was the Look of the Future \u003cbr\u003eGetting Goofy on the Santa Ana Freeway \u003cbr\u003eChelsea Dawning: Reawakened and Resplendent \u003cbr\u003eBuildings Born of Dreams and Demons \u003cbr\u003eThe Prisoner of Beauty \u003cbr\u003eA City Poised on Glitter and Ashes \u003cbr\u003eIn the Public Interest \u003cbr\u003eThe Short, Scorned Life of an Aesthetic Heresy: Designed in Defiance of \u003cbr\u003e     Modernist Tenets, 2 Columbus Circle Awaits Its Fate \u003cbr\u003eNostalgia Tripping in Times Square \u003cbr\u003eIn Japan, Art and a Museum Breathe as One \u003cbr\u003eA Primal Phantasmagoria Not Just for Gamblers \u003cbr\u003eWhere a Room Is a Calling Card \u003cbr\u003eArchitecture of Light and Remembrance \u003cbr\u003eDarling: Having a Surreal Time. Are You Here, Too? \u003cbr\u003eA Crystal Palace of Culture and Commerce \u003cbr\u003eWorthy of a World Capital \u003cbr\u003eRethinking the Meaning of the Modern \u003cbr\u003eForm Follows Function into Ideal Circles \u003cbr\u003eMaking a Rush-Hour Battleground High Art \u003cbr\u003eA Chance for an Architect to Let His Imagination Run Free \u003cbr\u003eA Flower Reopens in the Bronx \u003cbr\u003eArchitects’ Visions of How the Modern May One Day Appear \u003cbr\u003eA Palace for a New Magic Kingdom, Forty-second Street \u003cbr\u003eMake the Modern Modern? How Very Rash! \u003cbr\u003eThe Designs of a Genius Redesigning Himself \u003cbr\u003eFor the Body, a Curvy Home That Calls to the Soul \u003cbr\u003eSearching for Yourself in Versace’s Mirror \u003cbr\u003eIn Form and Function, It’s a Tale of Two Terminals \u003cbr\u003eThe Miracle in Bilbao \u003cbr\u003eIt’s Dark. It’s Scary. It’s Your Garage. \u003cbr\u003eA Midas of the Gold (Yes, I Do Mean Gold) Cudgel \u003cbr\u003eA Mountaintop Temple Where Art’s Future Worships Its Past \u003cbr\u003eLeading Lights, Whose Destiny Was to Be Dimmed \u003cbr\u003eAalto, a Modernist Ahead of His Time \u003cbr\u003eA Return to the Glamour of Flying: Kennedy’s New Terminal Offers Style\u003cbr\u003e     and Comfort for Jaded Travelers \u003cbr\u003eOf Sculpture and the Past Revivified \u003cbr\u003eLooking at the Lawn, and Below the Surface \u003cbr\u003eChoosing Prose over Poetry to Span a Bay \u003cbr\u003eRestoration Liberates Grand Vistas, and Ideas \u003cbr\u003eAn Islamic Reminder of the Sacred in Design \u003cbr\u003eLiving Boldly on the Event Horizon \u003cbr\u003eThe Village as a Satirist’s Milieu and Muse \u003cbr\u003eBlueprint: The Shock of the Familiar \u003cbr\u003eA Twelve-Block Glimmer of Hope for New York \u003cbr\u003eThe Premiere of a Koolhaas Fantasy \u003cbr\u003eThe New Berlin—Building on the Rubble of History: Once Again, a City \u003cbr\u003e     Rewards the Walker\u003cbr\u003eCulture’s Power Houses: The Museum Becomes an Engine of Urban \u003cbr\u003e     Redesign \u003cbr\u003eNew Zoning Leaves Room for Skyline of the Future \u003cbr\u003eIf the Cityscape Is Only a Dream \u003cbr\u003eAn Appreciation: Style and Symbolism Meet in Design for Penn Station \u003cbr\u003eA Stunning Pier Hotel Design Stands Out Amid a Flawed Plan \u003cbr\u003eA Humble Manhole Cover Conveys the Global Grid \u003cbr\u003eA Tower That Flaunts Its Contradictions \u003cbr\u003eArt Deco Authenticity \u003cbr\u003eTrump, His Gilded Taste, and Me \u003cbr\u003eCrystal Corridor in the City of Glass \u003cbr\u003eThe Passages of Paris and of Benjamin’s Mind \u003cbr\u003eExploring Space and Time, Here and Now \u003cbr\u003eIt’s Something New Under the Stars (and Looking Up) \u003cbr\u003eTray Chic \u003cbr\u003eOur Anxieties to the Lions \u003cbr\u003eReaching for Power over Streets and Sky \u003cbr\u003eFusing Beauty and Terror, Reverence and Desecration \u003cbr\u003eHow Modern Design Remains Faithful to Its Context \u003cbr\u003eTibor Kalman: Seeing, Disbelieving \u003cbr\u003ePublic Space or Private, a Compulsion to Fill It \u003cbr\u003eThe Air-conditioned Reverie of a Fundamentalist \u003cbr\u003eInterior City: Hotel as the New Cosmopolis \u003cbr\u003eWhere Ego Sashays in Style \u003cbr\u003eA Rare Opportunity for Real Architecture Where It’s Needed \u003cbr\u003eA Rational Vision That Lets You Know Who’s Boss \u003cbr\u003eLincoln Center’s Next Big Production: Itself \u003cbr\u003eDefining Beauty in Swanky American Terms \u003cbr\u003eImaginative Leaps into the Real World \u003cbr\u003eA Message from a Poet of Public and Private Memory \u003cbr\u003eCamelot’s Once and Future Glamour \u003cbr\u003ePostcards from the Old World Gone Global \u003cbr\u003eAustro Turf \u003cbr\u003eForget the Shoes, Prada’s New Store Stocks Ideas \u003cbr\u003eWith Viewing Platforms, a Dignified Approach to Ground Zero \u003cbr\u003eLeaping from One Void into Others \u003cbr\u003eThe Deadly Importance of Making Distinctions \u003cbr\u003eA Courtyard at the Heart of the Story \u003cbr\u003eA Lesson Abroad: Get Comfortable with Continuity \u003cbr\u003eWhen Art Puts Down a Bet in a House of Games \u003cbr\u003eA Gift of Vienna That Skips the \u003ci\u003eSchlag \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Handsome Hunk of a Glass Tower \u003cbr\u003eLessons of a Humanist Who Can Disturb the Peace \u003cbr\u003ePeace Lobby \u003cbr\u003eA Latin Jolt to the Skyline \u003cbr\u003eCastles in the Air Adorn Cities on Paper \u003cbr\u003eFashion’s High Priestess of Gnosticism \u003cbr\u003eThe Memorial Would Live in the Architecture \u003cbr\u003eA Heritage Rediscovered, Then Remade \u003cbr\u003eFrom Olympus, Divine Dresses \u003cbr\u003eThe Way We Live Now: 5-18-03; Who Gets It ? \u003cbr\u003eZaha Hadid’s Urban Mothership \u003cbr\u003eBlond Ambition on Red Brick \u003cbr\u003eA Building with a Song in Its Heart \u003cbr\u003eA Moon Palace for the Hollywood Dream \u003cbr\u003eDesign Guidelines for Ground Zero Point More to Space City, U.S.A. \u003cbr\u003eLunch Box for Art: A New Museum \u003cbr\u003eA Building’s Bold Spirit, Clad in Marble and Controversy \u003cbr\u003eUncertain Future for the Past’s Treasures \u003cbr\u003ePATH Station Becomes a Procession of Flight \u003cbr\u003eGlamorous Glass Gives 10 Columbus Circle a Look of Crystallized Noir \u003cbr\u003eFor Lower Manhattan, Tower Offers a Residential Stairway to the Sky \u003cbr\u003ePlanet Prada \u003cbr\u003eThe Library That Puts on Fishnets and Hits the Disco \u003cbr\u003eFor the Classy and the Climbers, the High Priest of Art Deco \u003cbr\u003ePeep Show \u003cbr\u003eEden Rocks \u003cbr\u003eThe Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle \u003cbr\u003eThe Grassi Is Greener \u003cbr\u003eSchadenfreude.com \u003cbr\u003eFreudian Slipcovers \u003cbr\u003eThe Heir Bag \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFragments from HEARTS OF THE CITY, 2006\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Dozen Years \u003cbr\u003eMetroscope \u003cbr\u003eAtomic Secrets \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIndex\u003c\/i\u003eHerbert Muschamp is the author of \u003ci\u003eFile Under Architecture \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Man About Town: Frank Lloyd Wright in New York City\u003c\/i\u003e. He died in 2007.This book presents a theory about the contemporary city. I arrived at this theory a few years ago by flipping around an idea proposed by D. W. Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst. Winnicott once observed that artists are people driven by the conflict between a desire to communicate and an even stronger desire to hide. My theory states: A great city is a place driven by the conflict between a desire to expose and an even stronger desire to overlook. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI start with the premise that conflict is the most important cultural product a city puts out. Works of art—books, plays, paintings, dances, songs, or buildings—are effects. They are interesting in themselves, of course, but so is the conflict that Winnicott considered their cause. The modern democratic city is an accumulation of effects, brought about by a constant pileup of conflicts. What binds the effects together—the First Cause of Cities—is the conflict between the desire to overlook and the desire to expose. This conflict is the major source of energy on which cultural production depends. It drives the contemporary city toward a deeper comprehension of its place and time. It is what distinguishes culturally productive social environments, like New York, from suburban shopping malls and other environments designed primarily for consumption. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eM. P. Baumgartner, a sociologist who teaches at Rutgers University, coined the term \u003ci\u003emoral minimalism\u003c\/i\u003e to describe the prevailing social ethos among suburbanites. The key feature of this ethos is the avoidance of conflict. In \u003ci\u003eThe Morality of the Suburb\u003c\/i\u003e, Baumgartner writes, “The most basic component of [moral minimalism] is a strong conviction that conflict is a social contaminant, something to be avoided if at all possible and to be ended quickly once begun.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBarking dogs. Unmowed lawns. Barbecue smoke. Vandalism. Traffic infractions. Zoning violations. Gossip. Clearly, suburban dwellers can’t avoid neighbor squabbles and other conflicts. But within the suburban moral order, such conflicts register as bad things—contaminants, to use Baumgarten’s word. This order reinforces the desire to overlook, even at the expense of social justice or personal dignity. The desire to expose is suppressed. The inner conflict between these two competing desires is avoided. \u003cbr\u003eIn the city, this is not possible. The desire to expose is constantly breaking through, however much it threatens to disturb the peace. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI write about architecture, but buildings are not discrete objects floating in space. They are pieces of the city, elements of modern democracy’s greatest project. How they look, how tall they are, how much space they take up, who uses them, what is torn down to make room for them: by raising such questions, buildings are an inexhaustible source of conflict in city life. That conflict is one of the driving forces in American democracy. I’ve wanted to be part of it since I was ten years old. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was born in 1947. My family lived in a suburban area nine miles from downtown Philadelphia. My father bought the house, a decrepit prerevolutionary stone farmhouse, during the Depression. He was a young man at the time and the house cost a pittance. He devoted much time and labor to restoring it. When he bought the property, the location looked more like open country than a suburb. Fields surrounded the one acre that came with the house. Two of the roads surrounding the house had not been paved. Our property included a stable where my father kept a horse. He also built a picturesque swimming pool with stone sides that was fed by a natural spring. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was a special place to grow up. Too special, in fact. For one thing, the house was haunted by a secret: unmentionable memories of my father’s first wife and her suicide. Also, it was isolated—not just physically, but psychologically, too. This was a problem that befell many upwardly mobile, upper-middle-class families in the postwar decades. Cut off from their real roots, my parents sought to send down artificial ones by constructing a one-family Colonial Williamsburg. The house resembled a grange.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBut it wasn’t one, of course. The fields around the house were up for grabs. Eventually they were sold to developers who had a very different vision of what this neighborhood might become. In the course of my childhood, their vision came to prevail. Streets were paved. Lots were sub- divided. Row houses and semidetached houses went into construction. Against my father’s protests, the spring that supplied our swimming pool was diverted so that a water main could be installed. The pool dried up. A brick spring cellar in the basement dried up. Our house became a freak show in the middle of a normal postwar suburban neighborhood. This metamorphosis was the great drama of my childhood. It initiated the physical and emotional bifurcation that has colored my writing on architecture. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI had mixed feelings about the new community taking shape around us. The houses invaded our psychological space. But they also gave me a chance to invade new spaces in turn. When I was seven, the construction sites seemed a superior form of playground. The houses themselves, when nearly completed, were the greatest toys you could imagine. It was an enormous adventure to tear around inside them, with their smell of new wood frames, their unfinished look of exposed cinder block and electric wires hanging out of the ceiling and walls. My enthusiasm for Frank Gehry’s work is partly rooted in that thrill of roaming through those rows of unfinished houses. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThings got even more complicated when people started moving into them. This was my first lesson in how difference can breed feelings of superiority. My father regarded the new neighbors as social inferiors. Actually, they were far better off than his parents had been. Also, many, if not most of them, were Jewish. As it happened, so was the rest of his family. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a Hungarian Jew, which meant, by Mosaic Law, that my mother and her children were also Jews. My father was by no means a rabid anti-Semite, but neither was he immune to the WASP prejudices of his day. \u003cbr\u003eIt’s hard to turn down the opportunity to feel superior, particularly if your parents lead isolated lives. In hindsight, I see that it was our responsibility to break out of the shell and make friends with our new neighbors. But if we’d been that kind of family, we wouldn’t have become so isolated in the first place. Instead, our isolations—our freakishness—stood exposed. It is hard to sustain an attitude of superiority when you feel like a freak inside. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1956 my parents decided to sell the house and move to a rich, upperclass neighborhood a mile or two away. The distance was short geographically, but socially the new neighborhood was light-years away. It was populated by “old” families with inherited wealth. The houses were imposing. The lawns and gardens were breathtaking. In summer the air was stirred with the sound of leaves and the pop of tennis balls from the cricket club’s grass courts. Visually, it was an Eden. Psychologically, it was an expulsion from the Garden I’d left behind. When you’re very young, the home is a surrogate mother. It’s hard to tell where it stops and you start. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe rationale for the move was snobbish and paradoxical. At the precise moment when potential playmates were moving into our neighborhood, my father decided that we didn’t have enough friends to play with. What this meant was that we didn’t have friends who fit his narcissistic image of us. He must have thought he was doing us all a huge favor by inviting us into such a lovely fantasy. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy parents weren’t social climbers. I wish that they had been. We would have had such wonderful status symbols to play with. We would have been spoiled rotten. I could have had a soda fountain in the basement. I could have had a nose job. The young Tony Bill could have played me in a movie. But the truth is that our move to this place was just a more extreme version of their isolation. Here was a fancy house. Here was a fancy neighborhood. And here was a fantasy about living there. The fantasy included substituting desirable neighbors for unwanted ones. That was all. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe house we moved into had a swimming pool. Early one spring we heard the sound of jackhammers coming from the backyard. We looked out the window and saw a wrecking crew demolishing the concrete walls of the swimming pool. In a few hours there was nothing but a large rectangular crater filled with rubble. The crew got into their truck and drove away. A few minutes later a dump truck pulled into the driveway and backed into the yard, and deposited its cargo of earth into the crater. This operation was repeated three times. Finally, another truck appeared, filled with rolls of grass sod. It took all afternoon to lay them on top of the new earth. But by 6:00 p.m., a perfect lawn had materialized. There was no way to tell what had been there just twelve hours before. The excuse for this maneuver was that the pool was an insurance hazard. A neighbor child might trespass when we were away, go for a swim, and drown. The real reason was that we weren’t properly furnishing Dad’s fantasy of our becoming social animals. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne day I was sitting on the edge of the cricket-club pool. My mother was lying in a beach chair on the other side. Two women behind me were gossiping. It took me a while to realize that they were talking about us. Her mother is Jewish, but she converted. His first wife gassed herself in the garage. Exposed. Which was unfair, because it had never been my intention to hide. I didn’t want to be examined through someone’s lorgnette. I hated it here. Didn’t want to be looked upon as someone who wanted to be here. I might have said: Yes, I’m a Jew. We’re all Jews, and on top of that, I’m a fag! I’m in love with the lifeguard! Any lifeguard! And we’re all nuts! Mad as hatters! You think my family looks bad from a distance? Try looking up close. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe truth is that I would have loved to be friends with these people. They were so handsome, assured, and gilded, and they scuffed around in cordovan loafers. Whereas the first day I went to the pool, I had to cross from the parking lot to the pool wearing my usual black dress shoes and socks. I looked ridiculous. Even my skin was the wrong color. In contrast to the ruddy or tan complexion of the rich children, my skin was pale olive. Then, my hair, which had been straight, had began to curl, but the local barbers only knew how to cut straight hair, with the result that my hair always looked frizzy and unkempt. It looked like my nerves. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe had gone from pretending to be lords of the manor to feeling like interlopers. Even at home I couldn’t get rid of that feeling. Outside or inside the house, I felt unsafe. I began to feel estranged from my body. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSalvation arrived in the form of a train. The commuter station was two blocks away. A one-way ticket cost thirty cents. The ride downtown took thirty minutes. Just standing on the platform, waiting for the train, I felt my panic slip away. It would be a long time before I came to understand the value of intermediary spaces. For the time being, I simply enjoyed it as the preliminary to my destination: downtown. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe thirty-minute ride was a symbolic rehearsal of what I hoped would be my future. For now I could only make day trips to the city, but one day I wouldn’t return. With the cards I’d been dealt, I couldn’t win at any of the games my parents wanted me to play. In the city, I was prepared to take my chances. I’m a Jew, I’m a fag, I’m a sissy, and I’m smart. And I saw no reason why these shouldn’t be major assets. Downtown, there was no reason to regard them as secrets. Everyone there was a kike, a fag, a dago, a chink, a spade, a mick, a psycho, a spic, a wino, an artist, a pedophile, a bum, a hustler, a drag queen, a con artist, a lost young man, a poet, a musician. . . . The ticket in was to be smart. One day I would get a one-way ticket. Until then, there were plays and movies to see, department stores to wander through, libraries and museums to visit. Above all, there were streets to be devoured, street smarts to be learned. For the first time since my family moved, I felt at home. Now the city would be my surrogate mother. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen people ask who I’m writing for, I sometimes say: I write for me, when I was twelve years old, standing on a train platform, reading a column by Ada Louise Huxtable in \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e while I’m waiting for the train downtown. Actually, the person I have in mind is a mall rat, stranded somewhere in the suburbs, seeking to lift his or her horizons above the maze of American consumerism. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAda Louise Huxtable was hired in 1961 as the first full-time architecture critic at \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e. I can’t remember precisely when I first read one of her columns. And I couldn’t have analyzed the hold her stories had on me. I did sense the power with which she claimed the city— possessed it with words. She used her authority to challenge the authority traditionally represented by architecture. With a pen she cracked open walls. She faced an art that, historically, has been used to cover up problems and turned it into an occasion to expose problems. In the process, she produced a powerful mythology about the city’s potential as a democratic form of art.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303404687589,"sku":"NP9780375404061","price":50.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375404061.jpg?v=1730754181","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/hearts-of-the-cityisbn-9780375404061","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}