Everyone is Watching (12 page)

Please save any questions you have until later, the guide says. Please let me know if you get too hot. Please respect the rules of this house. Please respect the memories of the dead.

The memories of the dead. But they are everywhere, Edmund thinks.

Now please follow me.

Edmund and the other tourists cram themselves into the dark and narrow corridor. The wallpaper is hanging off the walls and a single dangling light bulb glares bare above.

Now it’s very dark in here, says the guide. And the wallpaper, as you can see, is black. The discoloration of the walls is due to the poor conditions in which these people lived. None of
these tenements had ventilation and everybody cooked on coal-powered stoves. Now turn around and look at the paintings on the wall.

The painting behind Edmund is dirty. He can’t see what the picture is. The painting on the opposite wall shows a rural scene. A cornfield, trees, bright blue sky.

This scene was painted to remind the immigrants of where they had come from, says the guide. They wouldn’t have been able to see the painting, however, on account of all the smoke. Would
someone please switch off the light?

Darkness.

The only light in this hallway would have been one oil lamp placed in that window. Can you imagine living mostly in the dark? Now follow me.

The tenement upstairs is divided into three separate rooms. There is a bedroom, a kitchen and a parlour. Electric fans nudge warm air. A dishrag hangs on the corner of the stove. There is a
cutting board with a knife and a slice of bread. Unlaced boots stand in the corner of the room. The bed is made. The eiderdown is neatly tucked. An oil lamp burns in the corner of the room. It is
difficult to breathe in here. The other visitors look uncomfortable. They stand with their backs against the wall. They stand with arms folded, hands interlaced. They are looking directly at the
floor. This apartment is not like theirs. They are standing in a stranger’s house. The guide passes Edmund a heavy clothes iron. Edmund holds it in the palm of his hand.

The mother kept it hot on the stove, says the guide. Mrs Gumpertz scrubbed the floors to prevent disease.

Mrs Gumpertz had memories of a home back in Germany, thinks Edmund. She remembered the colour and the smell of her village. She had come to New York for a better life. She thought about the
lives of her children. Everything she did was for the sake of their future. She suffered great hardship – the death of a child, abandonment by her husband – yet she and her daughters
survived.

Mrs Gumpertz became a dressmaker and she sewed fine clothes for New York’s upper classes, the guide says. Her work must have been greatly admired, for she earned enough money to support
herself and her children. Inspectors came to ensure her living quarters were clean because disease was regularly passed from the slums to higher society through workers in the textiles trade.

Mrs Gumpertz was a fastidious cleaner. A filthy city does not necessarily mean a filthy home. Edmund leans against the wall. He feels the hard impressions of the wallpaper against his back. His
sweat is soaking through his shirt. The dirt on the wall will now mark his clothes.

The guide is holding up a photograph of two blonde girls in present time. They are twins, eight or nine years old. They are standing in the sunshine in a garden beside a swimming pool. They are
wearing Mickey Mouse T-shirts and holding tennis rackets. The guide says these are the descendants of Mrs Gumpertz.

It is their history we are witnessing today, says the guide. There is always another story to tell. This is what we want to show you at the Tenement Museum. We want to forge a link between the
past and the present. The history we describe always comes from real individuals. We never describe fictional people. The Gumpertz family really lived here once.

The girls are smiling in the photograph. Their teeth are very white. They are rich and healthy-looking. They look like girls who don’t know about history.

The visitors file out of the tenement. Edmund waits in empty space for a moment longer. He crosses the kitchen to the bedroom and looks at the empty bed there.

The next tenement is empty of items except for debris piled on the floor, masonry, floorboards, kitchen cabinets. The wallpaper is falling away from the wall. Stacks of beams are piled in the
corner. Exposed electrical wire is hanging from the ceiling. There is no furniture, no family portraits here. There are no personal items, no clothes, no dolls.

This building closed in the 1930s, says the guide. The landlord couldn’t afford to maintain it during the economic hardships of the Depression. The building stood empty for fifty years
until the 1980s when the founders of the Tenement Museum discovered it. Our director couldn’t believe what she had found. One day she was walking through the Lower East Side. She stopped at
the store downstairs to use the bathroom. What she saw inside was a time capsule. Every room was exactly as it had been left. The landlord had repaired holes in the walls by shoving newspaper into
them and papering over the holes. When we moved in we found twenty layers of wallpaper in some of the rooms. We found one hundred and fifty years of journalism stuffed into those walls. Many of the
problems the city has today are the same as they were in Mrs Gumpertz’s day. Housing is still a major problem. Many people can’t afford to live in this neighbourhood now. This problem
is spreading through the city.

The group files down the fire escape. Edmund sees the glass towers ascending high above the horizon. Cranes are swinging steel beams into place. He remembers a photographic portrait he once had
taken. In it, he was screaming. Edmund couldn’t look at it, this silent screaming man. Had he known from the beginning to think of his life as an ongoing narrative instead of as an
accumulation of individual moments, he might have foreseen the bigger picture and thus protected his heart. They called him a pioneer. He doesn’t know what he has discovered except a broken
heart.

Outside the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, the guide says to the group:

When the Chelsea opened in 1884, it contained luxury apartments. As the entertainment industry spread uptown, however, after the completion of the subway’s first line in 1904, rich
residents vacated and moved uptown too. The apartments in this building were segmented and made smaller. The owners advertised for residents from the lower middle classes. During the Depression the
apartments were again made smaller. This was when the artists came.

Edmund thinks, They stayed in luxury suites that had been cut up and reordered. They lived in rooms with half a fireplace, half a ceiling rose. The outlines of the rooms were brand new and their
borders were confusing. Ghost apartments. Ghost hotel. Artists made use of smaller quarters. They didn’t care about the size. It was the low rent that mattered and the company. The sign on
the door reads
Renovation In Progress
. The windows of the hotel have been boarded up. Every room must now stand empty. The hotel’s residents have moved on. When the renovation is
complete, it will be a tourist hotel. Visitors will come to choose their rooms from a menu. The beds will be made with clean white sheets. There will be a concierge. A neat clerk will sit behind a
bare desk. This building will not now produce anything new. It will live off the memories of previous times. What Edmund is looking at is memory only. This memory is not one of his. It is the
memory of a city that is always changing. Visitors will choose rooms that best reflect their characters. Will they imagine for a moment that they are Patti Smith? Will they come here for a holiday
from themselves?

Fifth Avenue has been cordoned off and crowds are gathering. Music and drums echo off the buildings. Floats creep past. Dancers are dressed as superheroes. Batman shakes his
ass and spanks Robin. A marching band with baton-twirlers. The musicians are young men wearing evening gowns. There are Medusas and Evita Peróns, Marilyn Monroes and a female Elvis. Mothers
and fathers hold up banners that read ‘I love my gay son’. Men dance with men. Women dance with women. A convertible with the top down drives slowly past, princess-men sitting in the
back waving like the Queen of England; their make-up has smudged. Boys and girls hand out cups of water and towels. The paraders pat themselves dry and smile for the cameras. The music changes from
marching bands to drum and bass, from jazz to honky-tonk piano. A woman with a shaved head plays a classical piano on the back of a yellow pick-up truck. A DJ balances on a float, one hand stuck to
a set of pink headphones. She dances. Transvestite Miss Americas in sequined evening gowns wave stiffly from the back of a blue van. Banners read,
Whole Foods support gay marriage
;
Gay
Marriage
=
Gay Registry
=
Gay Clutter. Store with us!

But Edmund remembers love.

A reporter watches a promotional film from 1949 that shows the high towers of Stuyvesant Town, an eighty-acre high-rise development in the Lower East Side that was built at the
suggestion of Robert Moses. The film shows dozens of housing blocks built in landscaped gardens. Families are sitting on the grass with their children. Couples are strolling slowly along the
pathways. Old people are sitting on benches and feeding the birds.

The narration describes the miracle born to this area, once the site of slums and depravity – abandoned gas works and run-down tenements – people now have somewhere clean to live,
modern apartments with grass, children’s play areas, and a perimeter fence.

The voice-over says,

What was once a run-down, dying section of the great city of New York has been recreated and today this section is a beautiful park-like community. Yesterday there was hardly a patch of
green to be found anywhere in this district. Today there are many acres of lawns and shady trees and miles of winding walks close to everybody’s apartment. Yesterday, children had to play on
the sidewalks or fire escapes or in the dangerous streets but today there are safe play facilities for boys and girls of all ages.

The film doesn’t mention those who lived in the Gas House District who have been evicted from their homes or the fact that the people living in the development now are all middle class,
married and white.

The reporter reads back his notes for what Moses said about this.

It is well within the rights of the board to accept who they want into the estate. To let just anybody in would lower the value of the property and be detrimental to their annual
yield
.

Also:

What do I believe? I believe in limited objectives and in getting things done. If you want a text, let me quote George Bernard Shaw from the dedication of
Man and Superman.
‘This’, says Shaw, ‘is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the
scrap heap; the being the force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.’ Those were the words
of a courageous man and I can add nothing to them.

The photograph depicts a man wearing a mask, the face of Arthur Rimbaud, that look he has, slightly askance, ready for anything.

Arthur Rimbaud is staring at you through the crowds that pass the 25-cent peep shows of 42nd Street.

Arthur Rimbaud is lying on a bed, looking up at you. He is masturbating.

Arthur Rimbaud is taking a leak in a toilet. His piss arches clear before a smutty wall.

Arthur Rimbaud lies on a bed. A man is nuzzling his naked chest.

Arthur Rimbaud stands on a beach, the tide and a trail of rocks stretching behind him. A sailing boat is passing along the horizon.

Arthur Rimbaud slumps against a wall. Behind him is a target. A needle is sticking out of his arm.

Arthur Rimbaud is sitting on the subway, surrounded by people and graffiti. No one is looking at him.

David Wojnarowicz looks at the camera. His mouth is all sewn up.

The tide is turning for Robert Moses. The public of 1965 are angry. On whose authority does he knock these neighbourhoods down? What right does he have to build a road or a
bridge? He is not an elected official, yet he is allowed to do this? He is pushing out the poor and inviting traffic in. The streets are clogged with vehicles, and the more roads he builds, the
worse it gets. He says to people, If you don’t like it then move out. He says, Find another place to live. He calls working-class districts ‘slums’ but these places are where
ordinary people live. Without ordinary people this city would be nothing. Who built this city to begin with? The labourers and manufacturers, the shopkeepers and traders. They have always lived in
the city. Old tenements must be refurbished and rent-controlled. You cannot eradicate problems by bulldozing the past.

The public unite and take to the streets. They talk to the press. Journalists research cover stories and interview residents. They take photographs. They investigate claims of
corruption. Television crews come to record the action. There are public meetings and demonstrations. Finally, things are beginning to change.

In Times Square there’s an M&M’s World, a Disney Store and a Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant. There’s a Wendy’s and a Hard Rock Café and a
McDonald’s and a TGI Fridays. Edmund strolls into the Times Square Visitor Center. This used to be a theatre once. Now, it contains information and historical artefacts. Photographs and
memorabilia of Times Square line the walls. Where rows of seats once stood in the centre of the room there is now just space. On the stage a cinema screen is showing a documentary film about New
York’s past. These are eras Edmund can remember.

He remembers the look-back, the walk-up, the exchange of money for sex. He remembers the boys coming in from the country looking for a quick buck and a place to stay for the night, and the men
who were only too happy to help. He remembers the dark movie houses and the cinema screens hanging over theatre stages. The real-life actors were replaced by movies, depictions of people fucking on
a screen. The acting was bad but the scenes were explicit and that’s what you had come here to see – bodies penetrating other bodies. He remembers the live acts that were brought in to
warm up the show. A man and woman would enter and do their business on the stage for all to see. It was lacklustre and mechanical. The audience clapped politely when the man finally came on the
woman’s backside. He remembers the trash and the dirt outside the theatres, the hanging on the street, knowing everybody by different names. He remembers how good it was. Every time, he met
someone new. Every time, he was a different Edmund White.