Pulic Realm New Yorker Cover: Final Exam

   For most (if not all) Americans today, somewhere down the line your grandparents or great-grandparents came to this country as an immigrant from lands afar and they most likely came to live for a time in the grand urban sandbox known as New York City. Like a child entering an amusement park for the first time, they were most likely awestruck by the sights and sounds of so many people mixing and intermingling together in the inner city public realm under a new banner called America; yet tragically this idea of the productive and equal city realm has long since died out and has been replaced by the chastised and disregarded urban setting of today. The idea, which author James Kunstler argues in his essay "The Public Realm and the Common Good," is that the public intermixing of the big cities actually strengthens the community and nation as a whole and by exiting the big cities to live in suburbia, we are losing a major part of ourselves in the process. As expressed in the cover art of "The New Yorker," we need to reclaim this important part of our history before it is lost forever and our civilization falls into ruin.

   A prime example of what your grandparents must have felt like in New York City during the immigration rush of the 1920s and 30s, would have been expressed in the 1936 and 2007 cover of the "New Yorker." The imagery of an overstuffed elevator with all different people just trying to get inside this lift to the top is a powerful image to put into context; while the idea that hundreds of people from all walks of life mixing and passing on their traditions to those around them is a beautiful image in my mind, each one a precious gift or sweet treat to be savored as expressed in this cover. But it is a dream that has all but died out in our modern cities; the rich and cultural elite have abandoned these metropolises in droves to isolate themselves in behind the great walls of the suburban landscape and escape the confines of the big city. Without the vital intermixing of new cultures to the city, the urban dream began to stagnate and die out as the city became the stereotypical domain of the poor-underclass. With the poor left to their own devices, they created laughably poor recreations of the environment their grandparents lived and turned to television to ease their need for a positive, social role model since all the prime examples have fled to the urban setting. As quoted by Kunstler: "They do not see people routinely going about honorable occupations. What they do see all around is mayhem, squalor, and disorder, and almost no evidence that it is possible to live a happy life without being a sports hero, a gangster, or a television star."

   In the final "New Yorker" cover from 1974, we see a large glass cover building over a sunset with the reflection of an old museum in the background. This cheaply built and constructed office block is a joke compared to the grand and everlasting construction methods used in years past as the old building will last a hundred years longer then the new plastic-like model we have now. Just like the buildings, our own world of social separation and almost nonexistent cultural diffusion across class boundaries will not last for long.  It is only when we can all admit to ourselves that this separation was a bad idea, go back to the days of old and intermix again in the mighty metropolises that we will begin to start our nation anew, even better and stronger then it was before! This was the dream that your ancestors held in their hearts when they came to America, to start over again in a better land then what they came from. If we cannot get people to coming together and strengthen each other, then we have true become a failed society.