New York is supposed to be the roughest and toughest of American cities. But is that still true? My father was raised in rural southern Indiana. After graduating from the local branch campus of a state university, he got a job in consulting and was assigned in 1978 to work in the Big Apple for his firm’s client, ConEd. He faced serious culture shock—so much so that before I moved to the city in the 2010s, he strongly warned me against it.
After moving to the Upper West Side, I managed to convince him to come visit me in the fall of 2015. It was his first visit since that consulting experience in the late 1970s. After spending a long weekend enjoying the city, we had a final lunch at an outdoor café. I asked him what the biggest change was from 1978. I expected him to say something about safety, or a lack of graffiti. His answer surprised me.
“I can’t believe how nice everybody is,” he said. “Back then, I was always fighting with people—fighting with cab drivers, fighting with waiters. People were always shaking their fist at you.”
But I thought about it and realized he was right: People in Gotham are very nice today. The city’s reputation from movies I’d watched was of a hyper-aggressive city of macho toughness. I was expecting people to say things like, “You, fucking fuck, if you do that again I’ll fuck you up.” But the entire time I lived there, only one person ever yelled at me like that.
In fact, I found New Yorkers to be as nice as Chicagoans or the inhabitants of other Midwestern cities.
“It’s not just the way people interact with you on the street that has changed.”
It’s not just the way people interact with you on the street that has changed, but the intellectual climate as well. In her recent book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, University of Oklahoma professor Ronnie Grinberg describes the in-your-face argumentative style of the New York Intellectuals—the coterie of writers and editors who defined the city’s literary life in the middle 20th century—as a new, Americanized expression of Jewish masculinity. It combined the Jewish intellectual orientation of the rabbinic tradition with the ideal of peak conditioning and competition drawn from Anglo-American sporting. The result was a kind of fearsome intellectual combat. Grinberg writes:
Men and women, Jews and non-Jews in the group all came to espouse a secular Jewish machismo. This evolved into an ideology of secular Jewish masculinity. Those who developed and embraced this ideology prized verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Hard-hitting and impassioned arguments, especially in print, undergirded their understanding of a new kind of masculinity.
An early example of this Jewish masculine style was City College professor Morris Cohen. As Grinberg notes,
his reputation for brilliance rested not just on his writings, but also on his aggressive classroom style. ‘You went to a Cohen class in order to be ripped open,’ recalled [the socialist critic Irving] Howe. Only ‘tough spirited boys … took his classes—many didn’t have the courage.’ Another student recalled Cohen’s ‘famous probing, combative style—a kind of smiling struggle to the death.’ When he challenged his pupils, ‘the room was electrified, we jumped to the defense of our fellow-student, but our teacher took us all on, in a razzle-dazzle of knowledge, of analytic power, of fighting intellect.’
An example of how the intellectual climate Grinberg documents has changed is the ministry of the late Rev. Timothy Keller of Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church. He and his wife founded Redeemer in 1989, and it grew to a multisite megachurch of 5,000 people. Keller was famous for his genteel style, in which he eschewed polemics and hard-hitting arguments in favor of an erudite and cultured but non-judgmental and non-confrontational approach. New York magazine said of him: “The signature Keller sermon is a mix of biblical scholarship, pop culture, and whatever might have caught his eye in The New York Review of Books or on Salon.com that week.” This style became known as the “winsomeness” approach, and the new generation of New York professionals loved it.
Keller’s approach was controversial within evangelical Christianity. One critic with family roots in Queens complained that the idea that Keller had cracked the code on reaching New York was nonsense, that a real New Yorker would engage in direct, chest-thumping intellectual combat. But this person failed to realize that his idea of New York was obsolete. Keller really did represent the new New York.
This shift in style appears to have taken place during the late 1980s and through the Giuliani era, when crime rates plummeted, the graffiti was scrubbed from the trains, and the grime was power-washed off buildings. Tolerance for public disorder declined, and the personal interaction style began to reflect this new sensibility. This more humane Gotham in turn drew many new educated professionals to the city, ones from places with very different mores; gentrification accelerated a cultural shift.
If the style of the New York Intellectuals was an exhibition of masculinity, then this new style would represent the feminization of the city. Some critics of gentrification call it the suburbanization of New York. But a better way to describe it might be the civilization of the city, with a new spirit of civility animating its public culture.
There was no longer a need for New Yorkers to treat the old style, and the old dysfunctions, as a badge of honor, as Woody Allen did in his comparisons of the city with Los Angeles. As the Manhattan Institute’s Stephen Eide wrote in City Journal, “California is the foil in Annie Hall,” which came out in 1977, the year of the blackout riots. In the film, “California is portrayed as uninteresting, if safe: ‘There’s no crime, there’s no mugging.’” While many lament the loss of the creative ferment of the 1970s, they aren’t calling for that old spirit of hostility to return.
But this transformation hasn’t been without its cost. As Eide recounted,
I’ve often told the story of when Richard Ravitch invited me to lunch and then spent the whole time berating me about my ideas about pensions, unions, etc. That was a real New York type: a mixture of egotism and generosity. I think he genuinely felt that I would feel honored to be given the opportunity to go head-to-head with someone as important as he was. And he was right.
Maybe it’s much rarer today in New York to be invited to lunch only to be berated. But there are also not as many people with the competence and public spiritedness of Richard Ravitch. Nor as many intellectuals on par with Irving Howe or Midge Decter. New York City’s new spirit of civility may be a blessing, but not an entirely unmixed one.