Is my new tattoo a history lesson or an exhausting new personality trait?
When being The Guy Who Read the Power Broker is no longer enough
Why does my new tattoo advertise the 1999 Ric Burns (brother of Ken) production New York: A Documentary Film, a 25-year-old PBS documentary?
Okay I’ll stop there, this isn’t something where I’m asking you the reader to solve the problem of my questionable decision making this past Saturday like I did with that Catch the Vibe NYC t-shirt (by the way a piece of the “N” has already fallen off and I had to draw it in with a Sharpie). No, this time I wanted to publicly debut a fun new personality disorder/trait that, much like that time I was the guy who read The Power Broker and my friends didn’t, revolves around retellings of the city’s history. Namely, that my new thing is that I watched the almost-20-hour documentary series narrated by David Ogden Stiers and I liked it. I really liked it, clearly.
But I also really like Star Wars and the Mets and Waxahatchee and pro wrestling, none of which are seared into my body in ink forever, so why did the logo for this documentary series join my collection of other tattoos? The dumb guy/smart guy explanation is the same: As I watched the series, I kept seeing the movie’s title screen and something about the simple white font on black screen activated the intrusive voice in my head that doesn’t stop until I get a tattoo of the thing it’s screaming about.
Have you seen the documentary? It really is quite good, an extremely engaging way to tell the story of New York City from the moment Henry Hudson came rolling down the river to the late ’90s moment the Bad Old Days were over and done with. If you’ve got a spare 17 ½ hours, I think there are much worse ways to spend your time, which I didn’t believe when I first heard about New York.
My friend Molly told me about it last summer, and she was scandalized that I hadn’t watched it, me the guy who read The Power Broker and loves being the guy who talks about New York all the time. I in turn was scandalized when she told me she finished it over a summer because it worried me that that meant she hadn’t spent enough time at the beach. And yet, my notes from last year show that after our conversation, I did start the documentary series and not only finished it in about a month, I still went to the beach almost every weekend in that timeframe. One weekend I didn’t make it down there only because I got really fucked up and played softball with my friends so I was at least outside. I think it’s extremely important to get out in the sun during the summer, perhaps the most important thing in all of life.
But anyway the documentary, which is extremely entertaining and also educational. I’m not here to review each and every moment and episode for you, both because it has been a few months since I finished the series and because that would be boring. And besides you don’t get a tattoo advertising a documentary because you have an encyclopedic memory of it, you get the tattoo because the documentary gives you a kind of vibe.
The series never insists to you that New York is the greatest, but it builds the case, bit by bit, that the city has been a living miracle of sorts, one that’s also always relied on its people. In that way, it’s similar to one of my favorite birthday gifts someone once gave me, the July 1939 issue of Fortune that’s devoted entirely to the majesty of New York City (ironically it’s fucking lousy with car ads). There are visceral and harrowing retellings of some of the city’s lowest moments, like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire or racial pogrom that was the Civil War draft riot, and there are simple yet memorable moments like a voiceover reading Emma Lazarus’ “New Colossus” as black and white photos of immigrants pass by the screen.
And on that note, there’s something incredible about watching the whole thing in a compressed timeframe and experiencing the city’s history story told first as paintings, then photographs, then crude moving images and finally the familiar black and white and then colorized film that we all preserved our history on from the early 20th century onward. And that final media shift allows you to experience some of the city’s larger-than-life figures you might otherwise read about, especially Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses. I had actually never seen Moses speak before watching the series, and so watching interviews with him in all his patrician arrogant glory was cool, even if those interviews were moments of him arrogantly explaining why we had to run an expressway clear across lower Manhattan.
Along with Moses the documentary also gives plenty of time to the man who defined him, Robert Caro, another guy who I’d previously only experienced on the page. And while the man who helped make Moses into a kind of Freddy Kruger for urban planning spends plenty of his time as a talking head beating down on the master builder, it’s also fascinating to watch Caro kvell about the degree to which Moses was able to focus America’s entire industrial capacity towards the city to build the Triborough Bridge. There were, after all, as Caro’s famous book goes over, simply moments you had to hand it to the guy.
In some ways, the documentary seems tailor-made for my enjoyment. In addition to the focus on the ways Moses built the city, the documentary spends a lot of time building the case that the city was entirely too welcoming of the private car, and goes over the ways trying to bend the city to Henry Ford’s will was antithetical to what we were all about. And while I’m aware that I didn’t invent Streetsblogging, it was fascinating to see that even by 1999 plenty of people were lining up to critique what it meant to replace a pedestrian-first city with an auto-first one. Burns also shines a light on the groundbreaking work that Jacob Riis did with his book How The Other Half Lives, which set off joyful recognition buzzers in me, a guy who once was able to tell a couple of extremely surprised beach babes exactly who Jacob Riis Park was named after (as charming as I am in that exchange can you believe for one second I’m still single? I can’t).
But as the dumb guy and smart guy on either side of the bell curve will tell you, none of that matters as much as the fact that I thought the title screen was cool and would fit well on my thigh just below where I cut my jorts. While the idea came to me in the summer, I put it aside for a little while to make sure the impulse was still there a few months later, once it was I knew it was time. Also it’s always nice to see Miykey at New York Hardcore Tattoos, who’s now done three of my tattoos and gave my dad his first-ever tattoo. That’s a different story though.
My friends seem to like the tattoo so far, whether or not they’ve seen the documentary, which is nice. Though the same day I got the tattoo, I met someone at a party who was introduced to me as someone who’d done some camerawork for other Ric Burns productions. His reaction to the tattoo was pretty muted, though it wasn’t as bad as people’s reactions that one year I was Robert Moses for Halloween.
The new tattoo also fits my collection of other city tattoos, including my Brokelyn logo as Brooklyn Nets logo tattoo that everyone mistakes for a Nets logo, my New York Groove tattoo, my tattoo of the Statue of Liberty holding up a bike that has a MOLON LABE flag on it and the other tattoo I got this weekend that says Deputy Mayor Maria Torres Springer Will Never Resign.
I guess I’ve sentenced myself to a lifetime of talking about the documentary every time I’m at the beach or a summer barbecue with new people, but in some ways that’s nothing new, since I have already been the guy everyone at the party wants to ask about congestion pricing. So in some sense, nothing changes. And maybe in ten years when everyone is doing podcasts and watch clubs about the series, I can once again cast myself as ahead of the curve and find time to criticize the way Tim watches the thing.
What will I loudly tell everyone I’m into by then? There are a lot of old movies about the city, I’ll find one I’m sure.
Dave Colon
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