by Eric Miller
"When they ask you in America," a cousin said to Ayn Rand (then Alice Rosenbaum) as she prepared to sail to New York, "tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery and we are all dying slowly."
New York was nothing but lights on the horizon to Rand then, but she would sit through a feature-length silent film several times just to get a glimpse of it. For the aspiring writer leaving a country to which she never would return, the skyline of New York represented the philosophy that made the motor of the world move.
It was dark when her boat docked in New York Harbor. Catching a glimpse of the Woolworth Building, then the tallest building in the world, it has been quoted that Rand said it looked like "the Finger of God," though she denied saying that. "It was dark then," Rand's words say as read in the film Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, "it was kind of early evening, I think about seven o'clock or so. And seeing the first lighted skyscrapers--it was snowing very faintly, and I think I began to cry because I remember feeling the snowflakes and the tears sort of together." To Rand, New York was what life was about: a purposeful pursuit. It was a place where achievement abounded. "New York is activity and activity is life--that's what Ayn Rand would say" says Dr. Harry Binswanger, a long-time associate and editor of The Ayn Rand Lexicon. New York was not only a place different in appearance, but it represented a different way of thinking and another philosophy. To Ayn Rand the skyscrapers of New York weren't built out of steel, stone, bricks and mortar, they were built out of adherence to the only moral philosophy she believed the earth had ever known: individualism.
"America is the land of the uncommon man, " Rand wrote, "the land where man is free to develop his genius--and to get its just rewards." New York is the capital of a place where such thought prevails, where uncommon people prosper--and as a result, the financial capital of the world. New York symbolized what Ayn Rand idealized in her novels--man as a creator. The city fostered invention and ingenuity.
The New York skyline stood against the Atlantic looking towards a corrupt world as a proud achievement boasting of what could happen when men played their proper role. New York showcased the magnificence of the Empire State Building, George Washington Bridge and the RCA Building, structures which surpassed anything ever built. "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline," she wrote in The Fountainhead, "The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?" she asked. "I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."
Rand would live in New York for most of her life. There were other cities that would grow to rival New York, such as Chicago and Los Angeles. But Chicago grew from New York capital and Los Angeles could never measure up, though she lived in Los Angeles for two periods, once shortly after arriving in America, and once while the big-screen version of The Fountainhead was being produced, New York was the only city that could be home. "Chicago was always a second-city," Dr. Binswanger noted. "In New York the whole area from Wall Street to the Cloisters is one solid man-made environment." And in Los Angeles, the people were less the doers, creators and achievers than the schemers and others who just wanted to be famous. "In New York, people seemed happy with their work and weren't waiting for the weekend." Moving to Los Angeles at one point himself, Dr. Binswanger recalls that Rand told him her opinion of him went up significantly when he moved back.
"New York represented, to her, the pinnacle of human achievement in physical terms," Dr. Leonard Peikoff, Rand's legal and intellectual heir said in Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. "It wasn't about acquiring philosophy, it was acquiring ideas and science and then remaking the earth accordingly." Rand and the builders of New York recreated the world accordingly. In the 1970s, a period now known as New York's "darkest hour," Binswanger explained that it appeared as if the city were going downhill. "I said to her, why don't you move." he recalled, "She looked at me sternly and said, 'I'll go down with New York.'" "In passing," Binswanger recalls, "Ayn referred to New York as the center of the center of the universe." If the center of the universe were to go dark as it seemed to be in the 1970s, the world may be coming to a point in which the creative "prime movers," as she called them, may just not want to live. "Now in our age, collectivism, the rule of the second-hander and second-rater, the ancient monster, has broken loose and is running amuck," Rand wrote in The Fountainhead.
Binswanger recalled Rand told him that New York was the intellectual capital of the country, because it was the publishing capital of the country, because it was the financial capital of the country. The buildings, the people and the energy of New York would serve as inspiration for a number of fiction works about the ideal man and then what would happen if he went on strike; these include The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and later the non-fiction works she used to expound her philosophy: The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and For The New Intellectual.
Many New York sites have either direct or philosophical connections to Ayn Rand. While she set both of her major works in New York for the most part, most of the specific locations and characters were imaginary. But New York was where she imagined them, and they are likely her interpretations of real-life places and people. A statue that stands across from Saint Patrick's Cathedral depicts Atlas holding the weight of the world on his shoulders. Atlas Shrugged, of course is named after the same mythological god. "If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders--what would you tell him to do?" Rand wrote, answering, "To shrug."
Grand Central Station also has some significance to Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged depicts a fictional railroad known as the Taggart Transcontinental which was handed down in the family from its creator Nathaniel Taggart to an incompetent heir, James, and was kept going only through the capabilities and effort of James' sister Dagny. The real-life railroad families like the Vanderbilts have similar stories to tell of men who accomplished great feats which their sons could not live up to.
Walking up Park Avenue from 28th to 36th Street, Rand finalized a way to prove her ethics, the root of the concept "value" in the concept "life". "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil," she wrote in Atlas Shrugged. If Rand had lived to see New York today, Dr. Binswanger says she would be quite happy with it. The sun that was setting on the city in the late 1970s has risen again, and today the city is as safe, dynamic, and alive as it has ever been. At the end of Rand's time in New York, many buildings like Grand Central Terminal were threatened with demolition, but today they stand as a more permanent part of the city. In the late 1970s, Times Square was dirty, deteriorating and unsafe. Today it has been reclaimed. "This is the best time I've ever seen in New York," Binswanger says as he points to seven new buildings of at least 30 stories he can see from his window. In short, New York has changed since then, as it always does. Any working, living city always does. "In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action." Rand wrote, "The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every movement, is the organism's life."
New York has the most potential for change and innovation because it is the crossroads of the world where people from an innumerable number of countries, ethnicities, races, and educational and philosophical backgrounds come together to do things. And as Ayn Rand would say; they move the world. It's said that some people in New York spend most of their lives in their co-ops and apartments, rarely venturing out to see a show or shop on 5th Avenue. It's enough to be where the heart of the world is beating a few floors below. It's enough to be living on a little piece of land bordered by a river and a harbor with a magnificent statue of a lady called liberty assuring them that hope is great, the game is fair, and that the little, congested, condensed place known as Manhattan Island is a place where men are not subservient to anything but their own will and ability. For some it's enough to just be in the city of life.
Eric Miller
This article has been condensed from a chapter in the book Literary Trips.
