The rainbow city

Pete Hamill

[1] New York is the rainbow city. All the colors and the races of the world are here, all languages, religions, and dreams. Our triumph is plural, and throughout our history, the New York rainbow has drawn the adventurous and the brilliant, the mad, the brave, and the ambitious, For many, of course, there was no pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow; New York is above all a human, imperfect city. But for most the rainbow was enough. Welcome to the rainbow.

[2] I was born and raised here, but if you ask me to explain New York and show you its sights, I’ll sometimes mumble about ghosts, More than any large American city, New York is a place where the past keeps shoving its way into the present. I see the great bridge across the Narrows on a summer morning from the Belt Parkway, and I also see Giovanni da Verrazano on that morning in 1524, nosing his tiny caravel into the wide, inviting harbor, to be welcomed with flowers by the original native New Yorkers.

[3] I look at the skyline at dusk, rising from the harbor, in Truman Capote’s phrase, "like a diamond iceberg." Bul I also see the Dutch erecting their wooden forts while slaves ripped from Africa worked their way into the rainbow from a camp at 75th Street and the East River. At the Battery, I see the English lowering the Dutch flag at musket-point in 1664, changing the names of the Dutch towns (’t Vlackbos, for example, became Flatbush), building a flourishing slave market on Wall Street, and then giving us, in spite of their almost congenital hypocrisy, double-dealing, and cruelty, a common language and common law.

[4] I walk lower Broadway, above the bones of the old town, and in my mind’s eye I see, coming out of Maiden Lane, Aaron Burr, teeming with irony and schemes, devising ways to rescue the revolutionary triumph from Hamilton’s aristocrats, and inventing Tammany Hall. Burr is there, among the West Indian messenger boys, the Puerto Rican girls going to work in the banks, and the commuters in from the suburbs; so are Diamond Jim Brady and Boss Tweed, Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, all those grasping brigands of the nineteenth century, and so are the 1969 Mets, champions of the world, drowning in ticker tape and torn-up phone books on the last day in New York when everyone I knew was happy.

[5] But much of the time, I think about the immigrants, those millions of Irish, Jewish, Italian, German, and Polish men and women who came here in flight from czars, kings, poverty, and injustice. They survived the hazards of the Atlantic crossing and then were jammed into an old quarantine station on Staten Island or the round stone fort called Castle Garden, and, after 1892, into Ellis Island. They were humiliated in those holding pens, or robbed, or scorned; their names were sometimes arbitrarily changed; they stammered in their own languages before the steady, arrogant force of English and shivered in the winter cold or broiled in the stinking summer heat; and when they were finished, when the papers were signed and stamped, when the degrading and patronizing processes of entry were over, they picked up their sad, cheap suitcases tied with rough cord, and walked out the door and built America.

[6] This is their city: impatient, traditional, tough, generous, and plural. It’s a port city, an archipelago with only the Bronx of our five boroughs attached to the mainland. And since World War II, it has been the port of entry for still another great migration, this time from the American South and the Caribbean, from South America, and, increasingly, from Asia. The new arrivals have strained our resources to the breaking point, because many jobs available to the earlier immigrants have vanished, or gone to the Sun Belt and other places.

[7] But in the face of anger, tumult, harsh words, and bitterness from older New Yorkers, the new immigrants have become a permanent part of the city. None of them have starved. None of their children have been denied schooling. And in return they’ve given us music, art, food, a denser, darker texture, a wider sense of the world. This is their city too. You can’t see this multilayered New York from an airplane or a hotel room, because the city is too specific and too local. Here are a few places that will give you the sense of our pluralism: our past, our present, our future. Go out and walk around. You might even trip over a pot of gold.

Comprehension Questions

1. What reasons for immigration are stated by the author?

2. How were the first immigrants treated?

3. Are the new immigrants a permanent part of the city?

Topics for Discussion and Writing

1. Why is the rainbow a suitable image to describe New York City?

2. Write an essay describing the main features of your home town or city. Like Hamill, use history, specific places, and people to illustrate your point.

Part IV

Special Assignments: Summary, Analysis, Interpretation, and Essay Exams

Although your knowledge of the process of writing can be applied generally to all types of assignments, it is helpful to learn some strategies for dealing with specialized assignments typical of college and university requirements.

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