Heart of the City Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  A Note on Method

  Green - CENTRAL PARK

  Collision - THE STREET

  Navigation - GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL

  Freestanding - LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD

  Depths - THE SUBWAY

  Elevation - EMPIRE STATE BUILDING

  Crossroads - TIMES SQUARE

  Renovations - THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

  Sightlines - WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK

  Epilogue

  Postscripts

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Ariel Sabar’s My Father’s Paradise

  “Graceful and resonant ... A personal undertaking for a son who admits he never understood his unassuming, penny-pinching immigrant father, a man who spent three decades obsessively cataloging the words of his moribund mother tongue. Sabar once looked at his father with shame, scornful of the alien who still bore scars on his back from childhood bloodlettings. This book, he writes, is a chance to make amends.”

  —New York Times Sunday Book Review

  “If Ariel Sabar’s My Father’s Paradise were only about his father’s life, it would be a remarkable enough story about the psychic costs of immigration. But Sabar’s family history turns out to be more than the chronicle of one man’s efforts to retain something of his homeland in new surroundings. It’s also a moving story about the near-death of an ancient language and the tiny flicker of life that remains in it.... ”

  —Washington Post

  “A wonderful, enlightening journey, a voyage with the power to move readers deeply even as it stretches across differences of culture, family, and memory.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “A powerful story of the meaning of family and tradition inside a little-known culture.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A biography, a memoir, a meticulously reconstructed history of a largely vanished people and place, and a meditation on one of the world’s oldest languages. Transcending mere reportage, it acquires a novel-like warp and weft.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A remarkable new memoir ... Sabar’s Paradise is especially noteworthy because of its multilayered narrative. While it begins with a young man’s personal and familial crisis, it ends up exploring universal themes about the linguistic origins of culture and about the vital importance of tradition to the health of any community.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Sabar offers something rare and precious—a tale of hope and continuity that can be passed on for generations.... Readers can only be grateful to him for unearthing the history of a family, a people and a very different image of Iraq.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Be forewarned: you will lose sleep over this book.... [Sabar] mesmerizes with the very first sentences.... In the tradition of the famed story-tellers of Zakho, Sabar narrates a saga so touching, so amazing, so miraculous that the reader will feel awe for the resiliency of the human spirit.... Unlike many memoirs flooding the book market these days, My Father’s Paradise is both unique and universal.”

  —Roanoke (Va.) Times

  “With the novelistic skill of a Levantine storyteller ... Sabar explores the conflicting demands of love and tradition, the burdens and blessings of an ancient culture encountering the 21st century. A well-researched text falling somewhere between journalism and memoir, sustained by Mesopotamian imagination.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[Sabar’s] a lovely writer, slyly adapting his voice as needed to write about the different generations, shifting from the mode of a storyteller to the mode of a journalist. One of the best recent memoirs I’ve read.”

  —Huffington Post

  “Taut and extravagant. A sweeping saga with the cadence of a Biblical tale.”

  —Daniel Asa Rose, O. Henry Prize winner and author of Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family’s Escape from the Holocaust

  “An enchanting combination of history, family and discovery—Ariel Sabar’s chronicle of his journey is flat-out wonderful.”

  —Rabbi David Wolpe, author of Why Faith Matters

  “Excellent. ... The story is told with novelistic attention to narrative and detail, but its heart is Ariel’s heart, that of a son searching with love for the meaning of his relationship with his father.”

  —The Providence (RI) Journal

  “Written with a reporter’s flair for people and places ... Recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “An involving memoir that works as both a family saga and an examination of a lost but treasured community.”

  —Booklist

  For Meg, who first caught my eye in the mess-hall slop line

  “A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message . . . as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card.”

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  Introduction

  In its original telling, the story of how my parents met has a tidy simplicity. Yona Sabar was born to an illiterate mother and peddler father in a mud hut in the mountains of Kurdish Iraq. Stephanie Kruger was born to a Manhattan CEO and his fashionable wife, holders of season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. Yona, twenty-seven, had been in America for less than a year, for graduate school at Yale. He was depressed, homesick, and lonely, and was in New York for a long weekend to see friends from back home who now lived in the East Village. Stephanie, twenty-eight, was a caseworker at a foster agency in upstate New York. But her relationship with a boyfriend was on the rocks, so she drove to Manhattan for a few days to be with her parents.

  It was Labor Day 1966, late morning. Yona’s friends had gotten up early to see a parade, but Yona was too dejected to join them. He wandered the streets and eventually walked under an arch into a leafy refuge of curving paths in the heart of Greenwich Village. A sign said Washington Square Park. Yona wanted only to clear his head, to think.

  But then a woman caught his eye. She was in a raincoat and was photographing people—beggars, unwashed street musicians—on benches around the central fountain. Her subjects reminded Yona of his countrymen, hard-luck immigrants to Israel who struggled for a sense of belonging in their new country.

  He did not know then that the woman’s name was Stephanie Kruger, or that she was an amateur photographer whose parents lived just a few blocks away. Watching her flit through the park with her camera, he knew only that he wanted to talk to her, to see if she knew something about this country and its people that he had yet to grasp.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. Then, his legs moving as if by a force not wholly his own, he approached.

  “Pardon me,” he said. “Are you a tourist?”

  Four months later, they were married.

  IT SEEMED like a quintessential New York story: two vastly different people brought together by chance in America’s greatest city. It said a lot about our country, I thought. It showed how immigrants here could leap borders of culture and class in ways unthinkable back home. It showed how in a society as fluid as America’s, any two people could fall in love, anywhere. It was Horatio Alger recast as love story.

  I thought I knew their story well, having told it in my first book, about my father’s immigrant journey. But not long ago, when I asked my parents to tell it
again, my mother injected a detail I had not heard before.

  “Yona, didn’t you actually see me before I entered the park?”

  “Em, aha, Stephanie, maybe,” my father said, in his gentle Middle Eastern accent.

  “Yes,” my mother persisted. “You said you saw me on one of the side streets and started following me.”

  “Eh, possibly. Into the park?”

  “Yes, into the park! Where else? You followed me for a while on the street, and I remember what you once said.”

  He looked suddenly guilty. “What, Stephanie? What did I say?”

  “You said that it wasn’t until I was inside the park that you had the courage to walk up to me.”

  “Correct,” my father said, with a nonchalance he often used when he knew he’d been cornered.

  “So, wait a second,” I said, turning to my father. “You mean if she’d never gone into the park, you wouldn’t have tried to talk to her?”

  “Correct.” The streets were too exposed, he said. Attractive as she was, it would have felt improper to strike up a conversation there. The park, though, was different.

  I scratched my head. But how?

  It was, he said, like stepping into a village. The park shrank the city. It slowed time. With its roving paths, its fountain and trees, it filtered away the facelessness and noise of the street. Once inside, he said, people ceased being strangers. For a fleeting moment, they were on common ground. They were sharing something: not just the leaves and grass and water, but the human carnival. The park’s habitués in those days—raffish New Yorkers sprawled on benches, picking at guitars, sipping from brown bags—were a sight to see. But so were the reactions they inspired in other people. Like Stephanie Kruger. From the way she photographed people, up close and with obvious empathy, Yona felt as though he already knew something about her. She sees the image of God in human beings, he thought, even when they are not at their best.

  “The space was very important,” my father told me during a springtime visit to our house to see his grandkids. “The first thing I thought about when all my friends left that day was, Where can I go where I can be around other people? And friendly people. People who are open to communication. Whereas the rest of the city was tall buildings and all the noise and subways and buses and people rushing everywhere, Washington Square Park was the opposite. Here you could just be with people without all the commotion. This was a place where you could be yourself. You didn’t have to hide behind some mask.”

  More than four decades had passed since they’d met. My father, a resident of Los Angeles since the early 1970s, hadn’t set foot in the park for almost as long. I was surprised at the intensity of feeling. “What was so bad about the rest of New York?” I asked.

  “The rest of the city alienates you in a way,” he went on. “If you are not with somebody when walking on the streets, you feel just smaller and smaller. The park was a small place where even if people didn’t know each other before, they behaved like family.”

  My mom, sitting across the kitchen table from him, couldn’t resist a jab. “In that park, especially, there were a bunch of oddballs. You probably felt like you could fit right in.”

  “So what about you, Mom?” I asked. “Did the park do anything for you?”

  She assured me that for her, it was all business. She was there, she said, as a photographer. “I went because I liked to take pictures of the characters.”

  My father, seeing his opening, cracked a smile. “Were you also open to meeting a character?”

  In the coming months, I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation. I felt it contained some important truth, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I always knew I had America to thank, at least in part, for my parents’ meeting. But had I overlooked the role of Washington Square Park? Could a vibrant public space, in some subtle but essential way, play matchmaker?

  WHEN I turned to books on the history of cities, I saw that their builders understood from the start the power of the built environment over how people think, feel, and act. The walls that Gilgamesh built around civilization’s first city, Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq, in 2700 BCE, were both physical and symbolic. They were markers of the city limits. But they were also a kind of rope line between the lowly farmers outside and the craftsmen, religious leaders, and other elites inside. They were a potent signal to both subjects and enemies of the stability and power of the new city-state.

  “Esthetically,” Lewis Mumford wrote in his landmark history of cities, the earliest urban wall “made a clean break between city and countryside; while socially it emphasized the difference between the insider and the outsider, between the open field, subject to the depredations of wild animals, nomadic robbers, invading armies, and the fully enclosed city, where one could work and sleep with a sense of utter security, even in times of military peril.”

  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the narrator is downright swaggering on the subject of walls. “Behold its outer wall, whose cornice is like copper / Peer at the inner wall, which none can equal! ... / Go up and walk on the walls of Uruk, / Inspect the base terrace, examine the brickwork: / Is not the core of kiln-fired brick? / Did not the Seven Sages lay its foundations?”

  The Sumerians, for their part, erected ziggurats—terraced temple compounds—so their priests would feel closer to their gods. The Greeks built agoras, open gathering places at the center of cities, so citizens of every class (except, to be fair, women and slaves) could trade, mingle, and debate the issues of the day. New Englanders planted greens at the center of town to instill in residents a sense of communal obligation.

  Not long after Nazi warplanes bombed the British House of Commons in 1941, leaders began proposing new designs for its replacement. Winston Churchill was adamant in his opposition, grasping at a gut level the psychology of the original. He wanted the chamber to remain oblong—rather than semicircular—so that members of Parliament would continue to have to “cross the floor” to vote against their own party. A switch of allegiance should be conspicuous, he felt, so that it gives pause. He also wanted fewer seats than there were members, so that the chamber would seem bustling, even with members absent. Cramped was good.

  “If the House is big enough to contain all its Members, nine-tenths of its debates will be conducted in the depressing atmosphere of an almost empty or half-empty Chamber,” Churchill warned Parliament during a debate on rebuilding in 1943. The conversational style of parliamentary debate, he said, “requires a fairly small space” that projects “a sense of crowd and urgency. There should be a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided.”

  Whether they actually were, it seemed, was beside the point, so long as the design made it appear so. Churchill knew the stakes. “We shape our buildings,” he told Parliament, “and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

  SURE, I thought. But is there any hard evidence? Any architectural theorist could say that a wall antagonizes, or that a tower exalts, or that a green unites. But could any of this be measured? Where were the social scientists? I was particularly interested in landmarks and public spaces, like Washington Square Park, where people find themselves in close proximity to strangers. Were some such places more likely to induce friendly glances than others? Could some actually encourage people to take the first steps toward falling in love?

  After muddling through card catalogs and online databases at a few research libraries, I discovered writings in a field I had never before heard of: environmental psychology. The discipline came of age with the social movements of the late 1960s. Architects and psychologists began discussing how the design of everything from rooms and buildings to streets and cities might be contributing to social ills like poverty, crime, mental illness, overcrowding, and isolation. But soon the conversation shifted to a more universal question: how do the physical places in which we live, work, and play shape us?

  One of the field’s founders was a maverick psychologist named R
oger Garlock Barker. A small-town Iowa boy who earned a PhD from Stanford, Barker landed early teaching jobs at places like Harvard before growing irritated by what he saw as a major flaw in psychological research: psychologists of his era were great at running experiments in labs, but they rarely studied human behavior in the real world. This was in sharp contrast to natural sciences like chemistry and, say, entomology. “Although we have daily records of the oxygen content of river water, of the ground temperatures of cornfields, of the activity of volcanoes, of the behavior of nesting robins, of the rate of sodium iodide absorption by crabs,” Barker wrote in the introduction to his seminal 1968 book Ecological Psychology, “there have been few scientific records of how human mothers care for their young, how teachers behave in the classroom (and how the children respond), what families actually do and say during mealtime, or how children live their lives from the time they wake in the morning until they go to sleep at night.”

  Barker, whose rounded shoulders and oversized eyeglass frames made him the picture of the bookish Midwesterner, set out on just such a task. No sooner had the University of Kansas recruited him in 1947, to chair the psychology department, than he told the dean that he didn’t intend to live in the college town of Lawrence, the lone real city amid vast tracts of farmland. Instead, he was interested—for scholarly reasons—in settling in one of the rural outposts. Such towns were ringed by farm fields and largely immune to outside influences. They were naturally occurring laboratories. “My idea,” he once told an interviewer, “was to settle in one of these towns and study the children as biologists study the animals of nature preserves.”

  In retrospect, his words might have been better chosen. But the impetus was sound: to study an organism in its native habitat. He and his wife, Louise, who collaborated on his research, settled in Oskaloosa, a place of some 715 souls more than twenty miles north of campus. They set up their “Midwest Psychological Field Station” there and spent the next twenty-five years studying the behavior of Oskaloosans—particularly children—in their own environments. (In his research Barker gave Oskaloosa the fictional name “Midwest.”) An early book, One Boy’s Day, published in 1951, was a minute-by-minute stenographic record of an ordinary day in the life of a boy named Raymond Birch. Barker called it a “scientific document ... of what a seven-year-old boy did and of what his home and school and neighborhood and town did to him from the time he awoke one morning until he went to sleep that night.” Soon Barker was recording the behavior of scores of Oskaloosans in drugstores, Sunday school, 4H club meetings, and football games.