New York Values
Ana Levy-Lyons
January 24, 2016
First Unitarian, Brooklyn
In 1939 a guy living on State Street here in Brooklyn Heights opened up the basement of his brownstone to a group of Yemeni Muslims. Back in those days, a lot of the sailors who worked on the cargo ships that docked on the waterfront were from Yemen. They would come here working on one ship and then often get stranded in Brooklyn for months before being able to make the return trip on a different ship. In the meantime, they had nowhere to go to pray together. So this man made his basement available to them and they gathered there for services. This became the very first mosque in the United States and it’s still a thriving congregation today. New York values.
Were these the kind of New York values that Ted Cruz had in mind when he suggested that Donald Trump embodied them? Or what Trump had in mind when he agreed? Inviting undocumented working class Muslims into your brownstone? I doubt it. And yet, this is exactly the kind of thing I think of when I think of New York values. Who gets to decide what New York values are? Or if they even exist? Who gets to decide what New York is about?
When Cruz made his comment about New York values during the debate in South Carolina, he said, “You know, I think most people know exactly what New York values are.” The moderator, Maria Bartiromo said, “I’m from New York. I don’t.” Cruz shot back, “You’re from New York? So you might not. But I promise you, in the state of South Carolina, they do. …the concept of New York values is not that complicated to figure out.” Not that complicated. When did it become okay to do that? When did it become okay to look at an other –a person or in this case, a city—and say, “You’re not that complicated to figure out. I’ve got your number. I can net out in thirty seconds what you have taken a lifetime to become.”
And it’s not just politicians who do this. We all do it. Novelist Lawrence Hill says, “When it comes to understanding others, we rarely tax our imaginations.” He’s right. We don’t want to work hard to imagine the internal world of someone very different from us – we don’t want to have to make room in our hearts for an other. Especially if what they’re saying or how they look or what they eat or what they think is threatening to us. And so we net it out. We flatten them out. We here in this room probably have all kinds of assumptions about those Bundy militia guys who are holed up in a wildlife refuge building in Oregon. We don’t tax our imaginations to really try to understand them. Some of us probably lump them together with all the white Fox-news-watching, fast-food-eating right wingers in the “flyover states,” the ones you have to – inconveniently – fly over to get back and forth between the only two places that matter (and you exactly which two I’m talking about).
New Yorkers, of all people, particularly defy being flattened out in this way. And figuring out New York values is especially complicated because – for people and for cities – values are not something that we decide on somehow in advance of our lives; values are revealed over time in the lives we lead. The person or city in question may have no idea what their own essential values are. New York, we know, is a city of immigrants, built initially by people who arrived at Ellis Island from all over the world, usually poor and focused on survival. Former slaves later moved up from the south, also struggling to build a life in this new world. All these various peoples, ancestors to some of us, probably weren’t thinking much of New York values except insofar as they wanted to either keep or get rid of their own cultural and religious values. They found places to live, families crammed into tiny tenements, the Italians over here, and the Poles over here, and the Jews over there, and found ways to scrape out a living, starting small businesses with next to nothing, working for pennies, always hustling. And everyone knew that everyone else was just doing the same thing, maybe speaking a different language, maybe worshipping in some weird way, but doing the same thing, just trying to get by. And we all learned to live together, side by side, in a small space.
Today you could say that New York City is a bigger, richer version of the same thing. In 1643, at least 18 languages were spoken among the city’s 500 inhabitants. Today there are about 800 languages spoken among nearly 8.5 million people. (I didn’t know there even were 800 languages.) New York is known for its extraordinary diversity and for its tolerance of diversity. Like most cities, we also have devastating inequality and violence against people of color. We are far from the promised land of multiculturalism. And you could say that our famous tolerance is a grudging tolerance that comes from necessity, rather than a conscious ideal. But as Jordan Fraade writing for Al Jazeera America puts it, that tolerance “is still something to be proud of. ‘Do what you want, live how you want, be how you want, just let me make a living’ isn’t the worst outlook to have on life,” he writes. “Just ask pizza rat.”
A friend of mine who lives in Queens told me a story about one afternoon recently when he was sitting around a table with a bunch of his neighbors. They had come together to try to work out some complicated deal involving air rights on their block. There was a little tension in the room, everyone guarded against getting cheated. Before they got started, my friend called a timeout, looked around the room at his neighbors and said, “You know, this is really a beautiful thing. I’m a tenth generation New Yorker. Like, my family came here on the Mayflower. And Enzo, you’re from Italy, right? Moved here when you were a kid? And Alexis, you’re Greek?”
“Yeah, my parents immigrated in the 30’s.”
“And Emmanuel?”
“Port-au-Prince. Haiti.”
“Rajveer, I know you’re from Pakistan and your wife’s still there. And you two are Russian, but not the same part.”
“No, I’m from Novosibirsk, he’s from Moscow.”
My friend said, “Isn’t this a perfect New York thing that we’re all neighbors on the same block in Queens from all over the world and we’re all sitting here together right now trying to work this thing out.”
And he was right. If anything is New York, that’s New York. And was any one of them sitting around that table because of some ideal of multiculturalism and the value of everyone deserving a seat at the table? Of course not. They were there as homeowners on the same block who each wanted to hustle the best deal they could and get out of there. But the end result of the intersection of their individual interests was this beautiful little New York moment. And my friend named that moment and there were smiles and recognition and a little softening in the room.
When the guy on State Street in 1939 opened up his basement to the Yemeni Muslims, it wasn’t an idealistic act of charity – he rented it to them, probably for whatever pittance they could afford. And so he made a buck and everyone scraped by. But in the process, they ended up founding the very first mosque in the United States.
New York moments. Individually the mean nothing, but collectively they shape this city. Take those moments and multiply them over the millions of people and millions of micro-transactions every day, all day, across the five boroughs. It’s the fabric of a culture that is infinitely complex and deep and rich. It defies definition; it resists being flattened out or reduced, but collectively it amounts to something like “values.” It’s an ethic that says, “It’s hard to make a living in this place. We’re all doing what we can to get by. If there’s a blizzard, sure, I’ll shovel some of your sidewalk too; if you’re pregnant, I’ll give you my seat on the subway; and yeah, if the world trade center comes crashing down, I’ll risk my life for you. But the rest of the time? On normal days? Leave me alone and let me make a buck. And I’ll leave you alone and let you make a buck.” If that’s New York values, than I, for one, am proud to be a New Yorker.