The Electric Egg Cream

  His alcoholism had been evolving since his college days at Princeton, reaching its acute stages amid the frivolity of the Roaring Twenties and its chronic stages amid the tragedy of the Great Depression.The ravages of the disease were showing on his once youthful face as he walked up 5th Avenue. He was in the heart of New York City, a city he had adopted as his own and loved as if he had born here. The opulent and poignant vision he had painted of the 1920s, in a masterpiece that was already beginning its rapid descent into the realm of the forgotten, was 7 years behind him; his adored wife Zelda, the spirit of his vision, was just beginning her rapid descent into insanity. All would be forgotten by the end of World War Two…like the decade of the 20s the two embodied (the characters of Jay Gatsby and Daisy given life in their image) more than anyone else.

He gazed up at the towering structure before him; the marvel of age that was sinking into a state of economic disintegration. Constructed out of the city’s defiance or (as some would argue) hubris in the midst of  America’s worst depression, the building was loved immediately. It was the culmination of every existing element of structural engineering and skyscraper technology known at the time. Even by its most vehement critics (who called it “The Empty State Building” because of its initial financial disappointments) , its brilliance of function and beauty of form was applauded…an applause that wasn’t shared by the man who had now reached the building’s observation deck and looked out across the city and beyond. What he saw inspired him to write the following:

“From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood — everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits — from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.” (1932)

I first read “The Great Gatsby” when I was in college, after F. Scott Fitzgerald regained the recognition his long-ignored brilliance deserved. The 60s generation may have had more in common with Fitzgerald and his time than was first realized. The turbulent rebelliousness and desire for change, after the horrific reality of the First World War’s futile underpinnings, fueled a new generation’s modernism as would the Vietnam War unleash its own radical backlash in America. Within NYU’s academic playground, I bid goodbye to couples who went to San Francisco “with flowers in their hair” never to be heard from again, encountered aging philosophers who appeared to be forever “on their way home” from Woodstock, and mourned various romantics and idealists who reached the heights of being wondrously high and are now buried sadly low.

 As an aside to it all, both generations ultimately observed a massive skyscraper rise before them, from the Empire State Building to the World Trade Center, their towering yet limited ascents contradicting their infinite visions. It’s a testament to his genius that Fitzgerald was able to see it so clearly from the Empire State Building’s lofty aspects long before the days of television and computers, even of Google Earth. The tragic end of fanciful troubadours who, out of love or of greed, attempt to monopolize the attractive allure of a moment and make it eternal in their own captivation.