By Bruce Poli
So often, we Villagers say, “I never go above 14th street,” as our cool and proud neighborhood defense. When you step across 14th street, and out of Greenwich Village, the world immediately changes: you’re entering the Grid, the crisscross pattern of streets that march uptown, sweeping to the tip of Manhattan and well up into the Bronx.
Photo Credit: A Dope Artist
The Grid is New York’s well-planned commerce foundation, launched in 1811 at the street commissioners’ office (located on the second floor at the northeast corner of Christopher and Bleecker Streets). It is the very essence of how our city became the diverse business capital of America. It has been called “the single most important document in New York City’s development.” It’s our democratic glue, and why “we all get along” in New York despite our vast differences. Because business is its grand theme, our civil war in NYC is with our landlords, not each other. It was called commerce, and now called capitalism—originating with Alexander Hamilton and the founding of the United States.
New York and American culture and business are widespread, and nowhere less intense and welcoming than uptown. Herald Square is one of our great uptown tourist magnets. Its brand has a long and colorful history. The New York Herald (1835-1924) and its renowned owner James Gordon Bennett built a major news and cultural force in the city’s rise during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The New York Herald building (1908-1921), designed by Stanford White, was an iconic architectural wonder until its demolition.
At the center of Herald Square is the story of Macy’s, the world’s biggest store and the source of the Thanksgiving Day Parade (formerly the Christmas Parade, 1924), the birth of Santa Claus in the department store, and (not the least celebrated) the July 4th fireworks, often produced by the world famous Grucci family, adorning our two great bordering waters—the Hudson and the East Rivers. The fireworks stage a celebration of New York Harbor. The dynamic nature of our harbor is the reason the Dutch first settled here and why this city became so important in world trade over the past four centuries.
The story of the sinking of the Titanic was headlined by its most prominent patrons, Isidor and Ida Strauss, owners of Macy’s, who lost their lives. Because she refused a lifeboat to remain onboard with her husband, they both drowned—a tragic but upstanding story of devotion.
A place where history, culture, and commerce have mingled for a century and a half, Macy’s (founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy at West 14th Street and Sixth Avenue, at the edge of today’s Greenwich Village), is a testament to the endurance of the very fragile democracy we so cherish and are now fighting to maintain amidst rampant autocratic aggression all around us.
Macy’s, I would say, is the ideal symbol of democracy and capitalism, rolled into one enduring historic story. The very essence of international tourism to this day includes a trip or two to this iconic store that serves as the touchstone of New York City.
It is perhaps a stretch to call such a “capitalist institution” an ambassador, but that is exactly what Macy’s is—welcoming the entire world to its doors (a large percentage of customers are tourists). The doors of a much larger dream, of “personal business” as a theme (everything in Macy’s is for your personal life use), represents a society’s historic democratic strength.
Because of the Macy’s “experience,” we can continue to share the hopes of our long experiment of America. And with Russia about to challenge the world to a duel, we’re reminded that our centuries of fighting for democracy have commerce and culture as its two principle tenets. And these are exactly what we celebrate as Villagers.
