Financial Capital Didn’t Make New York City Great
Original Opinion:
It’s the beginning of the new Ric Burns documentary on New York City, and Adam Gopnik is choking up. He’s talking about the diversity and tolerance that New York, at its best, embodies. He’s talking about the challenges the city has faced over the past fifty years. Above all, he’s talking about how it met those challenges: through its willingness to adapt. Cities are “self-emergent” and “self-sustaining” forms, Gopnik argues, but self-sustaining requires transformation. Happily, New York has been up to the task. “We accept [New York’s] remaking of itself again and again,” he avers, and it is this tradition of demographic and developmental pluralism (“plural pluralisms,” in his inimitable phrasing) that allowed Gotham to transcend its postwar decay and become the beacon of cosmopolitan, progressive liberalism we adore today. It’s a powerful way to open. It’s a message that many other bards of Gotham, from Walt Whitman and Jane Jacobs to Richard Sennett and Teju Cole, have proclaimed. But it’s a message almost entirely undercut by the structure and argument of the documentary that follows. That’s because, in the two latest episodes of Ric Burns’s long-running series — whose first five episodes aired in 1999, with two following in...
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