That Was Then, This Is Now
The first cityReader could have been written today
(I wrote this more than four years ago. I
rerun it once a year.)
Before you move here from Ohio, you have this image of New York
City as a bookish place. The
photograph of the famous writers gathered at the Gotham Book Mart. The New Yorker. Random House. Esquire. The Strand. Susan
Sontag. The Reading Room at the big library. Simon & Schuster. Farrar,
Straus & Giroux. Columbia. NYU. James Baldwin. The New School. Woody Allen. The New York Times Book Review.
Vintage paperbacks. John Cheever. The
New York Review of Books. J.D. Salinger. The
Paris Review. The Algonquin. The
Partisan Review. Delmore Schwartz. You even see it call itself Book
Country in ads for some kind of book fest. It would be your kind of place, you
believe.
Then, about the time you’re moving here almost
15 years ago, you see a photo on the front page of the Times as you’re skimming the headlines
before you sit down to read the whole paper, and you think, oh, that must be a
picture from some place like Harlan County, Kentucky about some hardscrabble
issue, one of those features the Times does now and then about some place
remote from New York and its refinement. But when you’re in your
seat on the couch and you look closer you’re shocked to see that it’s not
Kentucky at all but a picture of one of the ball fields in New York City where
the public high school teams play their games. There are other pictures inside
of other sorry-looking fields. You’re not so naïve to think the public school
fields would be like a suburban school’s fields, but you can’t believe that
they’re that bad and you feel like a fool for being so unaware and you get
angry at New York for not being a good person if that’s how it lets its playing
fields for its kids go. You hope your friends don’t see the article.
But you move to Manhattan as planned and the
condition of playing fields doesn’t come up much. Anyone you knew from college
who lived here has moved to the suburbs, for reasons like playing fields for
their kids. You do read, maybe prompted by that article, that some mogul(s) is
fixing up some of the fields. That makes you feel better. You wanted more
outrage from the citizenry maybe, but at least some progress is being made.
What you really wish is that the Mayor would declare eminent domain and seize
all sorts of parking lots and raze under-used buildings and put in rich, green,
playing fields throughout the city. He could even take too-exclusive and
over-blown Gramercy Park up the street from where you live and turn it into a
hockey rink. You very much wish for spaces for kids here. You’re surprised no
one else brings it up ever.
But that’s not really about the New York
bookishness that drew you here. That’s only a first instance of how you are
disabused of some of your New York illusions. Those nasty playing fields would
be as nothing compared to what really starts bugging you, and what bugs you
still about the city. But maybe those playing fields will come in handy as a
metaphor. You’ve come to see too many of the public schools in this bookish
city as just as hardscrabble and under-watered and un-tended-to as those
awful-looking fields. You aren’t talking about the physical plants of the
schools, though they usually look pretty uninviting. No, you are talking about
the reading life of the kids in so many of those big schools.
In the neighborhood you live in now, you
can stand, on a holiday, when traffic is light, in the center of the
intersection in front of your apartment building, and you can see five bodegas
of varying quality, two of them selling flowers. Three dry cleaners, one with
washers and dryers. A newsstand with a busy lottery machine, an internet café.
There’s an off-brand grocery store, a couple nail salons, two liquor stores, a
CVS, a Starbucks, a Dunkin’ Donuts, two good bagel places, one pizza place (you
refuse to count the one that sells a-shot-and-a-slice). Maybe a dozen
restaurants, and almost that many popular bars. It’s a great neighborhood,
with, hey, that exclusive park-with-a key just a short block away. It has all
you wanted when you moved here. Except it doesn’t have a bookstore. The
newsstand will sell you fashion magazines from Milan, muscle magazines, college
hoops mags. But there’s no bookstore in sight. You can walk to Union Square to
the vibrant, four-floored Barnes & Noble and you do that. And Strand is
not far beyond that. But you wanted your neighborhood to have its own
bookstore, a small one like where one of the bodegas is.
You know you have no real reason to
complain about what your immediate neighborhood lacks when you compare it to
the parts of the city where those ball fields are. There aren’t really any bookstores out there. You think of
that promo that said New York is Book Country. Just parts of it, they must have
meant.
There’s another metaphor you use when you’re having a pint with
friends and
you steer the conversation your way and you start going on about kids and
reading and the poor results poor kids get in reading tests. You say that in a
small island culture where everyone lives near the shore, swimming would be the
most important skill that would be needed to be taught to kids so they’d survive, so
they wouldn’t drown. They wouldn’t teach soccer or traditional dance steps until
every child knew how to swim. When you see that your friends accept that as
obvious, you bring up New York City’s schools. You say that in order to survive
in this culture you have to know how to read, more than you need to know how to
sing or shoot hoops or play volleyball or know who dug the Erie Canal. You have
to know how to read before anything else. In order to survive really. In order not
to drown.
Mayor Bloomberg, in his treasure chest
campaign, so touted the success he claims he’s
Don’t they see, kids are drowning still. So
many of them can’t read well enough to pass their swimming test. And you know
that many of the kids who pass are really only dog-paddling. Why does the Mayor
who fastidiously saw to it that 100% of the bars complied with his no-smoking
edict, why does he not demand that 100% of the city’s kids know how to read? In
Cleveland, where you came from 15 years ago, there’s a plaque on the front of
the big library that says: Kids Who Read Succeed. Hell, maybe Cleveland is Book
Country.
You wonder if anyone really cares. It
isn’t talked about much. The Times and other publications talk about
numbers and unions and rubber rooms. You can’t even name the Times’ education editor. Do
they have one? You wonder why mothers of kids in the schools don’t take to the
street with pots and pans and march down to Chambers Street to demand that
their kids be taught to read. They know what it means for their kids not to
know how to read, if only from seeing the neighborhoods filled with the bodies
of kids who’ve drowned.
If the Mayor can up-end centuries of
tradition and outlaw tobacco from public houses, why can’t he buck Albany and
the Board of Regents and turn the city’s schools into reading academies where
kids will immerse themselves in books and magazines, and the state syllabus be
damned. It isn’t longer hours at school the kids need, it is focused hours. It
is reading time. Time to make up for what they lacked in their earliest years.
The city has them for 12 years. That’s a long time. Enough time to teach every
kid to read well.
