Excerpt from Crossing the Expendable Landscape

Over the past few years, whenever I had money or the inclination, I set out to explore the late-twentieth-century American landscape. I began this unusual odyssey because the increasingly new built environment made me curious and suspicious, feelings that reached their peak one morning in 1992 when I opened the New York Times. Bypassing the Bosnian horror on the right side and finding no engaging feature on the left, I scanned the middle column for the national news and soon let my coffee go cold.

The IRS and Federal Reserve were reporting that during the 1980s the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans had increased their share of the country's private net worth from 31 percent to 39 percent; the rest of us lost approximately what the richest had gained. Coming much closer to a controlling interest in the economy, this 1 percent now owned 49 percent of all publicly traded stock, 62 percent of all business assets, 78 percent of all bonds and trusts, and 45 percent of nonresidential real estate. This was the first significant rise in wealth concentration since the 1920s, what an MIT economist called "an unprecedented jump in inequality to Great Gatsby levels."
I had, of course, suspected something of the kind. We'd seen a class of tramps and a building boom, the same as when wealth moved up in the 1880s and the 1920s.

A decade earlier there had hardly been any homeless people in my northern Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood except Dave, a tiny, mentally damaged man who lived in Inwood Park and danced to a strange and secret music when he walked on Broadway, hands to his ears to shut out the world. A few years later, a guy began sitting on the Siamese pipe outside the 207th Street liquor store, panhandling people as they came out happily supplied. Then came the A-train beggars with their rags and missing limbs, and the bundled men who slept in the end-of-the-line subway station on winter nights. Later the women came. There was a small white woman about my age named Annie at the 207th Street station to whom I'd once given my last six dollars and whom I'd briefly glimpsed, weeks later, disappearing amid the sidewalk Christmas trees, still outside.

But the homeless were transient, they were excluded, they could apparently be blinked away. The era's buildings offered weighty, material, and more lasting testimony to the reapportionment of wealth.

Inwood was too built up to have seen much of the building boom. You could see it in midtown Manhattan, but that had been skyscraper land for so long that the substitution of one tower for another wasn't especially dramatic. The suburbs and outlying lands, however, had been transformed. And just as the 1920s downtown office buildings had dwarfed the red-brick storefronts of the 1880s, so the buildings from the 1980s dwarfed in scope and scale what had gone before. In an age of global dreams, the land had become a showcase for the big-sized e everything, the megamarkets and the megamalls and endless vistas of development housing. Sleek, developer-designed office extravaganzas of reflective glass dotted the suburbs. Malls engineered by marketing experts to control how people moved and behaved and spent had virtually replaced the downtowns of many cities, and much of the American landscape had been turned into a kind of endless commercial. The aesthetic was repetitive and plastic on the roads, where chain food outlets and gas stations and quick-stop marts surrounded nearly every town of size, distracting yet alluring in the protected shopping wonderlands with their beautiful things to see and touch and buy. In the walled-off communities and isolated campuses of corporate headquarters, the feeling was sanitary and impersonal, the watchword security. Everywhere the new rose up to engulf and diminish the past.

Copyright 1998 by Bettina Drew.  All rights reserved.