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Chapter 1

Up Broadway: AWAKE!

Surely Henry David Thoreau was the most incongruous pedestrian who ever trod lower Broadway. In the fall of 1843, Thoreau had come to Staten Island to serve as tutor to the children of Ralph Waldo Emerson's brother William. He was still a year and a half away from his radical remove from Concord Village out to his homely cabin on the south shore of Walden Pond, yet he had plenty of contrarian critique of this world-renowned avenue of luxury. At P. T. Barnum's American Museum, which faced both St. Paul's Chapel and America's premier luxury hotel, the Astor House, Thoreau was treated to a kind of proto-Disneyland, a spectacular simulacrum of adolescent American fantasies of exoticism, cheap titillation, and vicarious adventure. Writing to Ralph Waldo Emerson but a week or two after his arrival, Thoreau described a cartoon canoe race on the Hudson between "Chippeway" Indians and straw-boater-topped Gothamites. The farce was almost as foolish as the "buffalo hunt" Barnum staged across the river in Hoboken. The showman's "free" spectacles (Barnum was collecting a considerable cut of the ferry fares) were the real sideshows, thought Thoreau: "Canoes and buffaloes are lost, as is everything here, in the mob." Encountering hordes of immigrants going up Broadway from Castle Garden, whole families cooking their dinner on the pavements, Concord's vagrant philosopher had hoped that they might preserve their individuality in this New World: "It must have a very bad influence to see so many human beings at once-mere herds of men."

On the first day of the spring of 2017, padding that same pavement in my well-worn walking shoes, it was hard not to weep bitter tears over Henry's nearly two-century-old lament. In the place of hoe-toting Norwegians and sunburned Irish and Italians there were clustered around the voluptuous bronze Charging Bull adjacent to Broadway's Bowling Green hundreds of selfie-snapping tourists, jockeying round its Taurean testicles at one end, its flaming vampire squid Wall Street nostrils at the other. A thousand portraits an hour uploaded to Instagram and Facebook and WeChat might serve as symbol as well as any other contemporary symptoms of a profound and troubling somnambulism at Broadway's foot and across America and the whole world.

That antebellum autumn on Staten Island, Thoreau was himself suffering from an acute episode of somnambulism; his sleep was literally interrupted by the "family curse" of sleeplessness. For the wide-awake Thoreau, it merely doubled his resolve to rise alert and aware, and to champion to his neighbors the benefits of being wide awake. Of all Henry's "excursions"-in that classic sense of deviating from a direct course-in those years leading up to his two-year Walden Pond experiment in living, the New York City sojourn most directly inspired his embrace of his most famous mantra: Simplify. Simplify. SoHo's spring 2017 shop windows have nothing on A. T. Stewart's Marble Palace, a block north of City Hall, and a long line of luxury-laden Broadway arcade windows in autumn 1843. Just blocks off Broadway, Henry's pavement-pounding manuscript peddling had finally found its mark, with John L. O'Sullivan, who published Thoreau's essay "Paradise (To Be) Regained" in his United States Magazine and Democratic Review. The piece was more than a savaging of J. A. Etzler's 1842 technotopian book The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery; it was a prophetic plea for America to bring an inner "motive power" equal to its outer one: "There is a certain divine energy in every man, but sparingly employed as yet, which may be called the crank within-the crank after all,-the prime mover in all machinery-quite indispensable to all work. Would that we might get our hands on its handle!"

Today that sublime and secret handle seems more elusive than ever. The "crank" of nearly all human endeavor reduced to the tip of one's index finger, the arcade window shrunk now to the size of an index card, we universally worship at the altar of menu consciousness, our relentless expectation of Heaven on Earth now supremely satisfied by the hidden magic of the silicon chip behind a slick glass screen. It is perhaps too obvious to point out that we have fallen far from the $28.12 cents' worth of boards, lath, old brick, casks of lime, iron nails, hinges, and screws of Henry's Walden cabin, or the $8.7 cents he spent for provisions he consumed (all else he raised himself) in his two-year residence at the pond. We all sense that we are awash in a tide of luxury, an ersatz "Paradise" that makes Hurricane Sandy's storm surge seem trifling. America is drowning in its own prodigious prodigality, inundated by "Broadway," estranged from Walden Pond, and Walden.

5

Throughout the summer and fall of 2017 the Cathedral of Commerce-the Woolworth Building-was wearing a black shroud upon her crown, as her upper floors were converted from office space to luxury apartments. Alchemy Properties hired Thierry Despont, the architect who oversaw the conversion of the Ritz Paris, for the job. While one-bedrooms can be had for as little as $4.5 million, and whole-floor spreads for $26.5 million, the seven-story penthouse will run you $110 million or so. Even F. W. Woolworth, the five-and-dime department store magnate who built this tallest-in-the-world office tower in 1913 with cold cash, would not be able to come up with that kind of money.

From the glorious Gothic entrance and from the east-facing windows of every one of those new palatial apartments, as one looks just slightly north to City Hall, one sees Manhattan's most understated monument to the American Revolution. The top of the City Hall flagpole is crowned with a gold weather vane bearing the simple word liberty. It is no vague slogan, but a faithful remembrance of the Liberty Poles erected upon this once-English common, where King George III's soldiers were quartered in barracks that stood just about where the Tweed Courthouse stands today.

In my mind's eye, I always see a gang of red-capped Gotham teenagers raising those stolen British navy masts in the middle of the night, silently counting coup against the Crown with the scarlet liberty flag that flew from its spire. I imagine most of those Liberty Boys as seventeen-my age when I read Walden for the first time. Passing it on this March 20, I am reminded that it was March 21, 1769, when the British army chopped the Liberty Pole down after that month's Stamp Act repeal celebrations. The next time the Liberty Boys put up a pole on the common, they sheathed it in iron to stop the British soldiers' axes; the commemorative flagpole is similarly sheathed.

Though you can't now see the spot from Broadway's sidewalk, it was just two blocks from here that the "First Blood" of the American Revolution was spilled, six weeks before the Boston Massacre. Redcoats attacked a group of citizens defending the Liberty Pole raised in the Golden Hill wheat field-about where the John Street Church stands today. Francis Field, an innocent bystander, was slashed in the face by a British bayonet as he stepped out to see what the ruckus was. A peddler and fisherman were injured, and another man took a near-fatal bayonet stab in his chest.

F. W. Woolworth might rightly say that New York City, and America with it, has nickled-and-dimed its way from the courageous spirit of the Sons of Liberty to our current cowardly, craven posture of luxury. Our national obsession with luxury stands starkly caricatured before all the world in the person of one of Gotham's native sons, whom American citizens freely placed in the highest office of the land. That the nation's first president humbly walked from Federal Hall on Wall Street, up Broadway to a service at St. Paul's Chapel-a block south of the Woolworth Building-after his inauguration goes unremembered and uncelebrated, while ten thousand tourists a day stream under the golden threshold of this or that Trump Tower, sleepwalking to the deadly drumbeat of the American cult of celebrity.

Born a stone's throw from where the "shot heard round the world" was fired, Henry Thoreau never for a moment forgot that the price of liberty was eternal vigilance. Only five years before his birth, Concord's citizens, including his father, had fought a second war for independence against that empire of luxury-Great Britain. Those who had taken part in the events had tutored Henry and other Concord children in tales of the Revolution. He heard from his mother's mother that after her Tory brothers had been arrested, she had smuggled metal files to them in the Concord jail. An elderly neighbor told Thoreau how her brother, the morning after the famous battle, had come home to fetch cider and cheese for himself and his fellow Minutemen. That the Battle's of Lexington and Concord were known by all Thoreau's neighbors as simply the "Concord Fight" attests to the degree to which this mythic event was engraved into both the local landscape and the folk soul. That he began his Walden Pond vigil on the Fourth of July was the simplest and most obvious of his often obscure choices.

Manhattan's role as American cultural capital tends to erase local myth and legend in favor of the national. The sidewalk of lower Broadway is punctuated with 206 granite flagstones commemorating ticker-tape parades from the Battery to City Hall Park. In the wake of the first ticker-tape parade celebrating returning World War I soldiers, the ritual quickly devolved into imperial posturing, from the 1924 parade for the American Olympic team to Charles Lindbergh's triumphal transatlantic flight in 1927, and then, from 1945 to 1965, 130 parades to welcome foreign heads of state. In 1969, John Lindsay threw a parade for the Mets! The city's "Canyon of Heroes" conveniently obliterates Broadway's august history of rambunctious street rebellions-beginning with the July 9, 1776, parade from the Commons down to Bowling Green to tear down the gilt equestrian statue of King George III after the first public reading in New York of the Declaration of Independence. Such truly heroic local events are in danger of disappearing completely from living memory. It is sobering to think that as recently as 1899, New York City's most celebrated monument was the flagpole at Battery Park, up which John van Arsdale-who had enlisted as a sailor at age nineteen-had shimmied on the twenty-fifth of November 1783, to replace the Union Jack with the American flag. As General George Washington and his troops paraded down Broadway, the street filled with New Yorkers celebrating the end of seven years of British occupation.

"Luxury," "extravagance," "false refinements" were the bywords of Revolutionary rhetoric, linked inextricably to British tyranny. Even as the Woolworth Building was raised up on Broadway, to a man its builders-masons, carpenters, steelworkers, and sculptors-knew the tale of John van Arsdale and the Battery Park flagpole. Stand on the sidewalk today, at quitting time on any weekday afternoon, and ask the guys with hard hats what New York's most heartily celebrated holiday was for the first century after American independence. Not a soul can answer Evacuation Day-November 25. But most will freely guess how much Donald Trump is worth.

5

My notion-like HenryÕs-was to walk deliberately, to Òfront only the essential facts of lifeÓ as I headed out toward Concord, and so my goal on that first day of spring was to lay my head down on the earth inside one of the Indian caves up in Inwood Hill Park that evening. Having walked and bicycled BroadwayÕs length dozens of times, I had no doubt IÕd reach my destination by midafternoon, immune to any of BroadwayÕs delicious distractions. Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square, Times Square, Columbus Circle-not one of the eccentric agoras kept me from my steadfast allegiance to walk upstream, to feel the invisible rush of energy that comes when one walks north against the southward-streaming traffic. Though the prevailing wind on Mannahatta is from the south, any wide-awake body takes immediate note of a more palpable current from the north, a track laid down in the ether by ten thousand years of moccasined feet and a couple of centuries of pedestrians, peddlersÕ carts, streetcars, and automobiles. Like walking or running in the woods when the trees press close along the path, that current imparts vigor and vitality, an electricity wholly hygienic in contrast to the neon and LCD emanations of Times and other Broadway squares.

I pass a thousand moments of my own biography as I walk north, each one bringing a small pulse of gratitude for the deep mystery that is life. And then, up at 166th Street, I am stopped dead in my tracks. NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center is a massive, beige brick, postwar building-really four buildings all on top of one another. Somewhere up among those anonymous windows, on March 25, 1956, I was born. I wondered how my mother could have abided such a monstrous edifice as the place to welcome her firstborn. In the space of sixty seconds, three different emergency vehicles screamed up to the hospital's entrance. I retreated across Broadway to a little green sanctuary called Mitchell Square.

A thin sliver of land wedged between Broadway's wide swath and St. Nicholas Avenue, with only a half dozen benches and no other amenities, this park seems more orphaned than my imagination of all the babies born across the street. There is only a single London plane tree, half a dozen Callery pears, and a misshapen locust at its northern end where the park comes to a narrow point. A glacially smoothed bit of bedrock, big enough for a ball team to sit on, crops out right smack-dab in the center of the park. I stepped up to this humble summit of schist, faced south toward the sun, closed my eyes, and recalled words spoken by Joan of Arc, as she confronted her difficult destiny six centuries ago.

"I was born to do this. May God keep me here. I act, so that God will act." I've long forgotten where I first heard Joan's three-part prayer and pledge; most likely it was from Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, his 1896 serialized novel, which he had published anonymously in order to free his readers from hearing it in his renowned comic satirical voice. There seemed in Twain's relationship to Joan something of the singularity of destiny that marked her extraordinary life. One day in 1849, while the thirteen-year-old Sam Clemens was working as a printer's devil (an apprentice who performed a number of tasks) in Hannibal, Missouri, a gust of wind blew a stray leaf from a book across his path. Picking it up, he discovered that it described the persecution in prison by rough English soldiers of a person called "Joan of Arc"; on this single page he read the story of how the soldiers had stolen her clothes. Sam hurried home and asked his mother and older brother if Joan of Arc was a real person, and learned that she had been a young French peasant girl who had saved her nation from English tyranny. He would on occasion tell this story as the turning point of his life; indeed, from the moment of finding that tumbling page on that Hannibal street, the worlds of both history and literature opened up to young Samuel Clemens, and, though history has largely neutralized his radicalism, he became a fiery crusader for justice. Twain seemed to be drawn to Joan's story because he saw it as the epitome of the age-old struggle of the common folk against political and religious oppression by those more powerful. Twain's story of Joan of Arc affirmed the value of a spiritual life at a moment when his culture was madly pursuing a path of industrialism, imperialism, and materialism.