The Eyes of the Rich

Having lived in NYC for what is now the majority of my adult life, catching a glimpse of the skyline still doesn't disappoint. Whether I'm taking a far-off look from my bedroom window, catching a glimpse on the subway as it crosses the bridge, or most dramatically, during nighttime plane landings when the cloud cover is punctuated with cavernous peeks of rainbow skyscrapers, this city continues to exceed expectations. But there's been a lot of new construction in recent years, changing the outline of our horizon, and I wasn't sure what to make of the general aesthetic. But it occurred to me that what might be governing the aesthetic is actually the horizon itself. However, I don’t mean that developers are developing with an eye for how our shared horizon will change, but that I think they are developing from the point of view of those who live on the horizon—those who live among the clouds.

Case in point, the recent new addition to Manhattan’s skyline is the Hudson Yards project. Apparently the largest real estate development in American history, it’s essentially a massive shopping mall with a number of boring glass towers attached. It’s the type of development you might expect in a more non-descript or conservative city, but not something you’d expect here. But more and more, this is what we’re getting, if they range from the 2 million dollar bachelor pad to the 125 million dollar penthouse.

But what’s driving this development aren’t people who live here—not really, at least—but those who are just visiting. Whether you’re buying a pied-a-terre for the twice a year you visit from London, Dubai, Moscow, or Hong Kong, or a more permanent home, but one in which you descend below the clouds only to dine at the Michelin star restaurant adjacent to your lobby, when it comes to the city—to the street—they rarely visit. They’re just a tourists here.

But for them, the city isn’t the city that the rest of us share and enjoy, it’s the city as seen from their hundredth floor penthouse. And that city isn’t a lived city, but the city as a diorama, it’s the city as something you watch out of your window just as you would any other screen. But the rest of us only get to catch a glimpse of this city when we act as tourists in our own town, travelling to the Top o’ the Rock or the Empire State Building or the new observatory at Hudson Yards. For a brief moment, we get to be a tourist in their world, leaving the grime of the street behind, so that we can enjoy their city for the purely visual experience that it is. But soon our time is up, and these sights are replaced with the sounds and smells of life on the ground.

I’m sure there’s nothing new in these random thoughts. But it dawned on me that what was driving the development of our city was not a thought for those of us on the ground, but only for those who live above the clouds. The challenge is therefore to develop the horizon, but not as an experience for those on the ground, but as the perch atop the rich treat the city as a purely visual experience. But the people in these perches never have to look up at their towers, nor live among their footprints, because their perspective is always downward.

And so, when you’re looking up at all that glass, it might be just another uniform monolith. But when you’re looking down, every extra inch of glass is one additional glimpse at our city.

This reminded me of Baudelaire’s poem, “The Eyes of the Poor.” While Haussmann’s boulevards were razing neighborhoods to the ground, they were also connecting people like never before, because they created public spaces in which the rich and poor intermingled. And as Baudelaire notes, the poor quickly became a spectacle for the rich, sometimes pitied while at other times shunned, but with the inequality often eliciting a measure of embarrassment.

Baudelaire wasn’t alone, as Marx later noted the way that the Paris Commune had become a spectacle for the temporarily exiled bourgeoisie. These bourgeoisie considered “the civil war but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through telescopes, counting the rounds of cannon, and swearing by their own honour and that of their prostitutes, that the performance was far better got up than it used to be at the Porte St. Martin. The men who fell were really dead; the cries of the wounded were cries in good earnest; and, besides, the whole thing was so intensely historical.”

However, for Marx, the real Paris was a Paris filled with the  visceral sounds, smells, and touches of the city, it was “working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris.” But the bourgeoisie never joined this Paris but merely watched it from afar, because it was a Paris to be consumed through their eyes.

In NYC, we’ve built these towering glass towers, each with endless windows in which to watch the spectacle of the city. But while you can visually enjoy the city from those heights, it is also high enough that you never have the embarrassing experience of actually seeing the poor, as in Baudelaire’s Paris. It’s the perfect bourgeois experience—the spectacle of the city without any of its reality, the enjoyment but sanitized of the embarrassment.

But it also seems the tide is turning. And if the billionaire backlash to Bernie is any indication, from their hundredth floor penthouses they definitely can’t tell just how pissed we are.