Literary Excursion to New York City

By William Brightman, Professor of English
December 4, 2006

I had taught Literature of the City and the Country twice before, and it had never occurred to me that I might take my students to New York and say, “Notice this,” or “Listen to that,” or “Pay attention to how this neighborhood changes into that one.”

Through Oglethorpe's airline partnership, I and my colleagues have begun thinking of how our students’ educations might be enriched in ways we had never before imagined.

I met my students at 4:30 Sunday morning at the Brookhaven/Oglethorpe MARTA station, and by 10:30 we were walking east on West 42nd Street to that incredible kaleidoscope of neon that constitutes Times Square. We next looked at Bryant Park as I directed their attention to how its charming froth interacts with and is framed by the New York Public Library in the near distance. We then looked at the front of the library and went on to Grand Central Station to see how it quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) insists that it is (or was?) one of the greatest train stations in the world.

Then the subway to Canal Street and around and about Chinatown, repeatedly stopping at little markets full of fish and fishy smells. (In one of the novels we had read, The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle had repeatedly and satirically contrasted the overly-packaged and tightly cellophaned American food markets with a character’s memories of the very different markets of Mexico. My students had no idea what Boyle or I were talking about.  Now they do.) They wanted to know what one did with dried shrimp. I had no idea. But they were pretty clear about what was happening when men and women, loaded with watches, called out “Rolex!” They hesitated outside the Eastern States Buddhist Temple; I nudged them, and they went into a world of new smells, colors and sounds. Of course they had read very abstract descriptions of Buddhism, but this was an instance of the real thing.

We went quickly through what is left of Little Italy and up toward Prince Street. In Chinatown we had seen men squatting on the sidewalks repairing shoes, and I soon found a shoe store where we peeked through the window of a place where I assumed only tailor-made shoes were sold and then on to a number of very pricey boutiques. The point I wanted to make was that poor neighborhoods could be right next to the neighborhoods of the wealthy, in contrast to Atlanta where there is typically a much greater separation. I hoped to show them that their concept of neighborhoods, formed in the suburbs of a variety of American cities, was not a useful tool when considering the life of great American cities outside of the Sunbelt. (In Tuesday’s class I will return to this point and remind them of what they saw while they read both Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which is set in London, and Toni Morrison’s Jazz, which is primarily set in New York. We can then contrast that with two novels set in and around Los Angeles: T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Fine novels can be wonderfully instructive, but they can be even more so when students are able to bring their own experiences into play.)

We went through SoHo fairly quickly and up to Washington Square. When you stand in the middle of the square and look to the west and then to the south, you can see architectural styles that might have referenced one another. But when you look from the south to the east, you cannot miss the fact that some very creative architects very consciously created a dialogue of colors, lines and forms. One architect picked up a rusty color found in buildings to the west, intensified the color and covered a whole building with it. A different architect noted the conversation between a chapel of one denomination with a church of another and created shapes resembling the shapes of windows one might see in a cathedral. (The Five Sisters in the York Minster?) A small but lovely symphony in stone.

Then we took a long subway ride to East 86th Street and a quick side trip, quicker than I had planned, into Central Park. (They had written a short paper on the value to Atlanta of the Fernbank Forest, and I wanted them to see another version of how and why cities try to create the “country” within themselves.) But time is running out. So we made a much quicker tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art than I had planned. We glance at Degas, Cezanne and Van Gogh, but it’s now 4:30. Do we have time for Brueghel’s “The Harvesters,” the two great Rembrandt portraits, those lovely pieces by Vermeer? I unhappily conclude we don’t, not if we are going to catch the 5:30 bus from the Port Authority, and I don’t even want to think of the consequences of missing that bus. So I walk absolutely as fast as I can, and my students stay with me through those huge crowds gathered around the Christmas displays, crowds bigger than any of them has seen before. We just manage to catch the bus. (They have been walking for more than six hours with no complaints.) We get back to the Brookhaven/Oglethorpe station around 11:30.