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Authors: Steven H. Jaffe
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isolation, often leaving the impression that the issues and conflicts they recount have been anomalous or relatively short-term in the city’s history. On the other hand, while the grand historical narratives of New York City have covered the wars and their implications for the city, they have, understandably, cast war as a minor theme against the larger sweep of the city’s rise in economic, social, political, and cultural terms.
My purpose in this book is not to recast New York’s history—inaccurately—as that of a perpetual armed camp. When compared to other world cities (London, Tokyo, Calcutta, and Moscow make only a partial list), New York has been lightly touched by war and its devastation. Closer to home, battle is far more conspicuous in the history and public memory of a host of North American cities, ranging from Quebec to Atlanta, New Orleans, San Antonio, and Mexico City. Looked at another way, New York’s nineteenth-century emergence as the nation’s commercial, industrial, and cultural capital, and its twentieth-century role as the world’s largest and arguably most influential metropolis, dwarfs its military history. War is something largely extraneous to New York’s experience, most educated New Yorkers seem to think. And yet New York City occupies a distinctive place. Simply put, no other major American city has so repeatedly faced the risks and realities of wartime turmoil and attack as has New York.
The horror of 9/11 was unique in our urban and national life, and facile historical comparisons run the risk of trivializing events that remain raw, painful, and present for many people. Yet it seems to me that New York’s long past as a military site does afford a context—a deep background—for reflecting on 9/11 and its place in the city’s and nation’s history. The landmarks of bygone conflicts, in fact, suggest a particular double narrative of New York’s relationship to war.
On one hand, the city has repeatedly been a military stronghold. It has been a workshop, warehouse, and bank furnishing the tools of war; a mobilization center and embarkation point for armies and navies; and a vital hub protected by a ring of forts, batteries, and early-warning systems. With their urban economy tied to these imperatives, New Yorkers used war as an opportunity. Making money from war, or trying to, has been a recurring theme in the city’s history, from colonial merchants and privateers to Civil War manufacturers and Depression-weary workers during World War II.
On the other hand, just as repeatedly, the city has proved vulnerable to attack, a target for a steady stream of enemies provoked and lured by New York’s strategic location, wealth, and political importance and eventually by its role as a symbol of American might and values. Indeed, the city’s evolving defenses—from earthen parapets and cannon to air raid wardens and Nike missiles—have represented four centuries of responses to this sense of vulnerability and to the changing nature of the threat.
These two aspects of the city’s history are ironically intertwined, for New York’s very importance—first as one of the major seaports on the colonial seaboard, then as the nation’s largest and most influential metropolis—is precisely what has made it an attractive target and hence vulnerable to attack. New York’s evolution from a marginal to an increasingly central place in American society has repeatedly reshaped the circumstances of its vulnerability and its defense. As the city grew in size, population, and influence, and as it became more complex and more porous, officials, soldiers, and its own people faced the ever-changing challenge of how to defend and safeguard it. In another irony, as New York’s unrivaled size, sophistication, ethnic diversity, and extremes of wealth and poverty led many Americans (including many New Yorkers) to see it as a place standing apart from the rest of America, the city’s very primacy
My purpose in this book is not to recast New York’s history—inaccurately—as that of a perpetual armed camp. When compared to other world cities (London, Tokyo, Calcutta, and Moscow make only a partial list), New York has been lightly touched by war and its devastation. Closer to home, battle is far more conspicuous in the history and public memory of a host of North American cities, ranging from Quebec to Atlanta, New Orleans, San Antonio, and Mexico City. Looked at another way, New York’s nineteenth-century emergence as the nation’s commercial, industrial, and cultural capital, and its twentieth-century role as the world’s largest and arguably most influential metropolis, dwarfs its military history. War is something largely extraneous to New York’s experience, most educated New Yorkers seem to think. And yet New York City occupies a distinctive place. Simply put, no other major American city has so repeatedly faced the risks and realities of wartime turmoil and attack as has New York.
The horror of 9/11 was unique in our urban and national life, and facile historical comparisons run the risk of trivializing events that remain raw, painful, and present for many people. Yet it seems to me that New York’s long past as a military site does afford a context—a deep background—for reflecting on 9/11 and its place in the city’s and nation’s history. The landmarks of bygone conflicts, in fact, suggest a particular double narrative of New York’s relationship to war.
On one hand, the city has repeatedly been a military stronghold. It has been a workshop, warehouse, and bank furnishing the tools of war; a mobilization center and embarkation point for armies and navies; and a vital hub protected by a ring of forts, batteries, and early-warning systems. With their urban economy tied to these imperatives, New Yorkers used war as an opportunity. Making money from war, or trying to, has been a recurring theme in the city’s history, from colonial merchants and privateers to Civil War manufacturers and Depression-weary workers during World War II.
On the other hand, just as repeatedly, the city has proved vulnerable to attack, a target for a steady stream of enemies provoked and lured by New York’s strategic location, wealth, and political importance and eventually by its role as a symbol of American might and values. Indeed, the city’s evolving defenses—from earthen parapets and cannon to air raid wardens and Nike missiles—have represented four centuries of responses to this sense of vulnerability and to the changing nature of the threat.
These two aspects of the city’s history are ironically intertwined, for New York’s very importance—first as one of the major seaports on the colonial seaboard, then as the nation’s largest and most influential metropolis—is precisely what has made it an attractive target and hence vulnerable to attack. New York’s evolution from a marginal to an increasingly central place in American society has repeatedly reshaped the circumstances of its vulnerability and its defense. As the city grew in size, population, and influence, and as it became more complex and more porous, officials, soldiers, and its own people faced the ever-changing challenge of how to defend and safeguard it. In another irony, as New York’s unrivaled size, sophistication, ethnic diversity, and extremes of wealth and poverty led many Americans (including many New Yorkers) to see it as a place standing apart from the rest of America, the city’s very primacy
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