JOHN HOLLANDER
GOOD-BYE BROADWAY
LOST NEW YORK.
By
Nathan Silver. Houghton Mifflin. $15.00.
Mr. Silver's beautiful and appalling volume embraces several
books at once, and they are all sad. From England, where everybody
is
very busy these days tarting up, with new colored paint and curatorial
polish, just the kinds and vintage of building that have shrunk into the
shadows of Mr. Silver's black-and-white photographs, they look even
sadder. As a sentimental antiquarian album that might have been pre–
pared by any town's historical society, it is a kind of grim joke: these
are pictures of what isn't there - they are like a text that consists only
of the list of its errata. As a topographical history of the past
three
hundred years, it reads variously like Minoan archaeology and Renaissance
poetical tears over the wreckage of Rome.
As
a plea for the preservation
of what has made American city life visually memorable, it appears
with tragic cogency at a moment when The City (with its problems)
has leaped off the Audenesque poet's page into the sleazy conceptual
apparatus of the political hack. In many ways, this almost medieval,
ubi sunt
lament for the subjects of a couple of hundred pictures speaks
to some of the immediate crises of civilization itself - the failure of
unfulfilled technology to do any more than drive wedges, anxiously,
between planning and memory, beauty and health. But there is more to
it than that.
C<Le vieux Paris n'est plus (La forme d'une ville
/
Change plus vite,
hllas! que le coeur d'un martel)"
-
the old Paris
is
gone; a city's shape
changes more quickly than a human heart.
There is, of course, the basic
technological problem of the voracity of the new; partially because of
sheer land shrinkage, new urban buildings cannot seem to coexist,
in
America, with their ancestors. All of this makes one want to leap wildly
off into visionary geopolitics: the surface of the planet is shrinking; the
biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply needs instant and heroic
allegorization lest it become a sick joke; the genuine historic city, like
some of the tradition of manliness itself,
is
in crisis in an economy of
abundance that is really a very badly packed cornucopia. And so forth.
But there are even more visionary questions raised by
Lost New York,
and neither the pious avowals with which it
has
been praised, nor the
pointless and ridiculous carping of one reviewer who questions the
