Violent districts have been gentrified but, 20 years after The Bonfire of the Vanities, rich white bankers are even richer, reports Paul Harris
Sunday December 16, 2007 The Observer (U.K.)
Robert Thompson remembers vividly what happened when he opened The Bonfire of the Vanities, the chronicle of Eighties New York that captured the city as a decaying cauldron of racial and social division, poised to boil over into disaster.'I just sat down and kept on reading. I didn't get up until I had finished. He captured that moment of time so well,' said Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. Thompson was not alone. Twenty years ago this month Tom Wolfe's novel hit American bookstores and became both a literary sensation and a cultural landmark. It was a tale of how a wrong turning in the Bronx plunged rich white banker Sherman McCoy into a maelstrom of racial strife and skulduggery. It portrayed a city on the brink of collapse, with a white upper crust of bankers - the so-called Masters of the Universe - partying in penthouses as the rest of New York's inhabitants, often black, struggled against a tidal wave of crime and unemployment and were exploited by a ruthless political class. The book cemented a worldwide image of New York as mad, bad and dangerous. Now, as the city marks two decades since Wolfe's seminal tome first appeared, New Yorkers are living in a city that has changed beyond all recognition. Instead of sinking into decay, New York has rebounded beyond all expectations. A high-profile battle against crime has made it the safest large city in America. A wave of gentrification has washed over a city where once notorious neighbourhoods such as Harlem and even the South Bronx (now SoBro in estate agent slang) are the hot property markets. House prices have soared. New shops and restaurants open every day. Its streets are safe. But the transformation has left many New Yorkers wondering what they have lost. Wolfe chose New York because it said something about America. Now many are wondering if the safer, cleaner, richer city has not also lost its role as the heartbeat of American culture. Wolfe thinks so: his latest book tackling the modern American zeitgeist is set in Miami. 'New York, while it is flourishing, has become a less interesting place. It is not where America is changing any more,' said Brian Abel Regan, author of Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion. The 'new' New York is everywhere. Photographer Maggie Wrigley sees it from her apartment in a far-flung part of the East Village. She arrived in 1984 - as Wolfe was researching his book - and lived in a squat in an area riddled with drugs, gangs and penniless artists like herself. Two decades later she is in the same apartment but the neighbourhood has completely changed. Now the East Village is populated by young people fresh out of college and taking up jobs in the burgeoning financial sector. Apartment rents have sky-rocketed, pushing out the poor, the working class and families. Even the infamous Bowery - America's original Skid Row - which bisects the Village is now lined with expensive clubs and cocktail bars. The Bowery Hotel has just opened, offering rooms for $550 a night on a street once populated by flop-houses for the city's down and outs. 'There is no place for those without money. Everything is being eaten by the real estate market,' Wrigley said. Abandoned buildings that no one wanted decayed or became crack dens in the Eighties. The real estate boom changed all that, creating a spiralling market that seems immune from the house price collapse in the rest of America. The trend began downtown in warehouse areas such as SoHo and Tribeca, then spread north gentrifying the Village, then Chelsea, then Hell's Kitchen and out of Manhattan into Brooklyn and beyond. New York's tourist board has opened a new office in Harlem. It touts cultural tours, food tours and music tours. It is a long way from The Bonfire of the Vanities where racial divisions and street crime would have made a tour of Harlem unthinkable. 'There is not that fear any more at all' said Chris Heywood, of NYC & Company. Racial divides are coming down. In The Bonfire of the Vanities the character of the Reverend Bacon exploits the hit-and-run accident, fanning racial flames for political gain. It was suspected to be inspired by the real-life figure of the
Reverend Al Sharpton, based in Harlem, who was then a prominent activist. Sharpton is still there but he is a marginal figure. Last week his offices were raided on suspicion of tax evasion. The main tabloid news story in New York last week was of a heroic young Muslim who came to the aid of a Jewish couple being beaten on the subway by white teenagers. The murder rate is the lowest since 1963. It is now one a day, down from a high of six a day in 1990. Dubbed the 'Manhattan Murder Mystery' by sociologists, no one is sure why it has fallen. 'New York was more artistic and more interesting back then. But no one wanted to feel threatened,' said Wrigley. For those in search of ethnic diversity, the far northern reaches of Manhattan host a huge Hispanic population where Spanish is the language of the streets. Chinatown has boomed. In Queens, far from Manhattan's main drags, more languages are spoken in a smaller area than practically anywhere else on earth. The crime, poverty and racial problems that marked the Eighties are clearly not only a thing of the past. Instead they have merely been pushed out of the city's core. In the outer boroughs they still persist, in the huge projects that dot Brooklyn and the Bronx and rarely get much attention from the mainstream media. Shocking cases of police brutality still regularly occur. This year alone has seen the case of Sean Bell, a black man shot dead by police on his stag night. Bell had done nothing wrong but undercover cops mistook him for a drug dealer and he died in a hail of more than 50 bullets. There was also the death of Kheil Coppin, a mentally ill young black teenager who brandished a hairbrush at police. He was shot eight times. Then there are the startling statistics over police stop-and-search tactics. In 2006 police stopped half a million New Yorkers, 89 per cent of whom were non-white. Fifty-five per cent of them were black, double the percentage of the black population. Police also use force on black people 50 per cent more than on white people, despite the fact that police find guns, drugs or stolen property on white people twice as often as on black people. The lack of street outrage in the 2000s compared with the Eighties does not always reflect a lack of racism; it reflects a lack of power. So the picture emerging two decades after Wolfe's book is one he would both recognise and find strange - a New York that still thrives and still matters. It is still a place where the very rich live in the same town as the very poor and where racial disputes linger, where grafters of all kinds wheel and deal in dirty politics and tabloid newspapers can inflame a story. It is still a place where artists struggle and sometimes succeed. 'It is still the greatest city on earth,' said Wrigley. But it has become richer, safer, less individual and more suburban: more like the rest of America. Daniel Czitrom sees that. He was born in the Bronx and is now an expert on the city's history at Mount Holyoke College. He left in the early Eighties and has witnessed the transformation of the city from his old neighbourhood in the Bronx to the now leafy suburban feel of much of Manhattan's formerly crime-ridden streets. 'It is a cliche but it is true. The one thing that is constant about New York is that it is always changing. It has always been that way,' said Czitrom. But there is an uneasy undercurrent to what has happened that would have amazed those reading The Bonfire of the Vanities in late 1987. The book captured much of the terror and fear of the white population. They seemed about to flee. Yet in reality, 20 years later, it is rich white people who took over. With gentrification - spearheaded by the always booming banking industry - swaths of the city have become much wealthier, and also much paler. Even Harlem is becoming a whiter neighbourhood. That was never predicted in Bonfire Sherman McCoy went from being a Master of the Universe to facing a trial for manslaughter, brought down by New York's gritty system. Yet his kind have prospered in the Big Apple. Far from marking the beginning of the end of McCoy and his ilk in New York, the past 20 years have seen them take over the city. The Real McCoy ... First published in instalments in Rolling Stone magazine, Tom Wolfe heavily revised The Bonfire of the Vanities for book publication in December 1987. The plot centres on Sherman McCoy, a rich Wall Street 'Master of the Universe' who lives in a luxury Manhattan apartment. His life begins to collapse when he and his mistress, Maria Ruskin, take a wrong turn going home and end up in the Bronx. Ruskin is driving when they hit a young black man. The case of an unknown white driver running over a black student becomes a cause celebre for various factions of the city: a rule-bending civil rights activist, a sleazy British journalist out to rescue his career and a mayoral candidate after the black vote. When McCoy is named in the press as the driver, he becomes the most hated man in New York, which hangs on the edge of violence. His mistress flees the US, his wife leaves him and he ends up broke and facing manslaughter charges. The book sold over three million copies and was made into a film with Tom Hanks as McCoy.