the washed and well-groomed masses

"The unwashed masses" is a phrase originating in Victorian England but we found much use for it here, especially in New York City in the same era. By 1894 the unemployment rate for all of New York State was 35 percent. In the city there were more than 20,000 homeless people. This period became known as the Great Depression in New York.

Yet one year later, in 1895, the main branch of the public library at Bryant Park was built. 
It was the best and worst of times - the 1890's saw the construction of many of NY's great institutions, the enormous prosperity and philanthropy and public works of the wealthiest in the midst of some of the worst poverty in the country's history.  Their design spoke to that disparity, in a way, as the regal public library, like many museums and movie palaces - not theatres mind you, but palaces - emerged from the noblesse oblige of the very rich, with a sense of egalitarianism ingrained in their blueprint: that for a few cents anyone could sit in a luxurious movie palace with red velvet ropes, and that it cost nothing to enter the stunning interior of this magnificent library, with its thousands of books and artifacts.

The visitors these days are anything but unwashed. they are a combination of people of all ages sitting at their computers, doing research, writing papers, working on books, and an equal or not greater number of tourists taking photos.
I spent about an hour late yesterday afternoon sitting in that glorious reading room, quite productive, soothed by its beauty and the proximity of others working nearby, only to leave and find myself surrounded by mostly foreign tourists snapping away. I took a few photos myself, but with the natural light streaming in from enormous arch windows and the small reading lamps on the rows and rows of long tables, it was hard to get the right exposure. Or maybe I just  didn't have the patience or interest at that point... it felt like a beautiful woman objectified, with all these people snapping her image. I sensed that the presence of books and scholars meant nothing to most of them, although we all were enthralled by that ceiling I struggled to capture,

. 

It was a civilized way to end the day, one that had started with a disabled Amtrak train leaving thousands of commuters waiting with no information as to how long we would be stuck on a track.  Fortunately I had a good article in the New Yorker about Sill She Rises, a program in Oklahoma - which has the highest rate of incarcerated women in the country, which is saying a lot, given that the number of women in prison has increased 800% in the past 40 years - started by folks from Bronx Defenders, which has been representing indigent clients for the past 2 decades. The article is chock full of awful statistics and tragic stories and great work, and if i don't make it to  Pittsburgh maybe I could go to Tulsa, a bastion of social change I'd never heard about.

And being so engrossed in the article kept me from feeling my frequent alienation from  other passengers, so many with their highest quality backpacks and shoes, brands and buttery leather in another strata from anything I ever could manage.  I remind myself that these very people might have philanthropic instincts as great as the Astors; after the well-tailored clothes and stunning haircuts, they might take a big wad of that expendable income and support a really effective program for incarcerated women, or a local library or a program for new immigrants, or in some way address the enormous discrepancy between their lives and that of most people. Now more than ever I need that reassurance that there are people who really care about creating positive change, that somewhere between the greedy and the indifferent there are people trying to make a difference. I look out the window and and up at a sky which will never be quite like it is at this moment. Someone else is looking too, I am sure.  I am not all alone.

Along with every other frustrated commuter, we finally make it to Hoboken, where all trains have been diverted, and I merge with thousands on the track, dressed for work or school or some other destination for which we will all be late, all impatient but passably civil as we cram into the train, washed and well-groomed masses streaming out in all directions, racing off to wherever we need to be in a city most of us are too busy to look up or look down and notice.