A Tale of Two Cities had little to do with the poverty Chants Dickens witnessed two decades earlier on his tour of the Five Points slums in 1842, but the title has become a metaphor for income inequality anyway. (Benjamin Disraeli's "two nations" would have been more apt.) Bill de Blasio invoked the phrase in his successful 2013 New York mayoral campaign, having borrowed it from Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president, who used it eight years earlier and who acknowledged: “I stole it from Mario Cuomo, who stole it from R.FK., who stole it from Michael Harrington, who stole it from Jacob Ris, who stole it from Dickens, etcetera. By now it should be public domain.”
The theme has been universal- and recurring-because the income gap has never gone away. In 2012 the richest fifth of Manhattanites made over forty times what the lowest fifth reported ($391,000 versus $9,600).
The gap is graphically revealed in what is arguably Weegee's most enduring image, his November 22, 1943, staged photograph dubbed The Critic. It features the withering expression of an inebriated woman imported from a Bowery dive as she sizes up two socialites (Mrs. George Washington Kavenaugh and Lady Decies) arriving for the Metropolitan Opera's opening night at the old yellow-brick house on Broadway and West Thirty-Ninth Street. The eviscerating visage captured New York's cultural and economic divide, which survived the evolution of the alms houses to welfare and food stamps and today has reached proportions that some politicians, public officials, and advocates for the poor describe as an inequality crisis.
Weegee (the photographer Arthur Fellig; the name was a corruption of "Ouija, a nickname inspired by Fellig's timely, telepathic arrival at crime scenes) vividly captured the juxtaposition. Years later, Robert Walker captured a similar dichotomy in a classic photograph that depicted two contrasting limbs protruding from a midtown taxi- the driver's hairy arm and a woman thrusting a cigarette holder from the back window. (The only anachronism in this contrasting view might be the cigarette.)
Deriding the elitist nineteenth-century notion that only four hundred plutocrats really counted in New York City, O. Henry credited "a wiser man"-the census taker- with a "larger estimate of human interest," which he memorialized in fiction as The Four Million. The four hundred (supposedly the number who could fit in Mrs. Astor's ballroom) stuck, though. Nothing epitomized the excesses of that age, or its last gasp, more than the Bradley-Martin ball on February 10, 1897. Cornelia Bradley-Martin lowered the bar enough to let eight hundred aristocrats participate in what was dubbed "the greatest party in the history of the city," a
multimillion-dollar costume fete (it cost the hosts almost $9 million in today's dollars) that transformed the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel into a replica of Versailles and redefined wretched excess. Bradley Martin (his wife hyphenated his name) may have begun with a noble goal: to give a concert that might help lift the spirits of a city mired in a depression. His wife had a better idea: a costume party on short notice, so guests would have to patronize local merchants rather than import their attire from Paris. She came as Mary, Queen of Scots, he as Louis XV (about fifty women, apparently oblivious to the consequences of her "Let them eat cake" advice, appeared as Marie Antoinette)
A few days later, the Reverend George L. Perlin delivered a sermon at his Every-Day Church that echoed the sentiments of a chorus of clergymen and civic leaders. He said the ball "involved a great waste, notwithstanding the familiar excuses that are made for it, even by so-called philanthropists, on the ground that it benefits the poor. If the enormous sum-$100,000 or $200,000, whatever it may have been, did accomplish good, it was not intentionally expended with that object in view, but solely to provide an evening's entertainment for a limited number of people." After what was called the last hurrah of the Gilded Age, the Bradley-Martins were more or less laughed out of town. They decamped for their second home in Britain and returned to New York only once.
TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
