A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One-Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby
by John Marsh
136 pages / $19.95 / 978-1-68590-083-0
Excerpted from Chapter 2: Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires
“But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.” —Nick Carraway, on closing his relationship with Jordan Baker
Can a book change a landscape? If ever a book did, it was The Great Gatsby.
The previous chapter explored how clothes in The Great Gatsby followed a Veblen-like logic of conspicuous leisure and, still more so, conspicuous consumption. For Veblen, what unites conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption, beyond their need for visibility, is waste. To conspicuously consume, the wealthy need to advertise that they can waste resources. So they spend thousands of dollars on a watch when a ten-dollar one would do, or, spend grotesque amounts of money on food and alcohol, as Gatsby does for the parties he throws.
But waste informs The Great Gatsby in ways other than conspicuous consumption, nowhere more so than in the valley of ashes that characters pass through on their way to Manhattan and on whose outskirts George and Myrtle Wilson live. In these ashes, we can foresee the culture of waste that has irrevocably harmed our own world and threatens to harm it still more. Although no one is innocent, including us for mimicking them, the wealthy, just as they did in the realm of clothes, bear more responsibility for this culture of waste than do others. The story starts not on Long Island, where The Great Gatsby largely takes place, but in Brooklyn. It ends, like the novel, on Long Island, but it ends with one extraordinarily ambitious reader, the urban planner Robert Moses.
By 1898, when Brooklyn joined the other boroughs to form New York City, it had already run out of room for its garbage and the tons of ashes generated by the coal its residents burned to heat their homes. Until 1906, the Street Cleaning Department had used horse-drawn carts to collect garbage and ash and haul it to dumps, some as far as ten miles away. Or they simply threw it in the ocean. Because of this laborious system, the New York Times reported in 1907, “It was a common thing in any street in the borough to see barrels running over with ash standing for days and sometimes a week in front of houses.”
Enter the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company and its treasurer, the Tammany Hall confrere John “Fishhooks” McCarthy. Accounts vary, but his nickname is thought to refer to how, whenever a bill appeared, his hands, like fishhooks, got caught in his pockets, making it impossible for him to pay. In 1906, in a sweetheart deal that nevertheless smelled as bad as the offal it disposed of, his Brooklyn Ash Removal Company won a contract with the city to gather its ashes and street sweepings (a pretty word for horse manure), haul them by trolley to a railway station, and then send them to what the New York Times called the “the waste lands around Coney Island,” where they were unceremoniously dumped. But all that waste—ash, manure, garbage—did not go to waste. They turned the “waste land”—in reality ecologically vital marsh lands—of Coney Island into valuable real estate, which was owned by none other than the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company. This was nice work if you could get it. As the Times reported, “The coal brought to [Brooklyn] out of the Pennsylvania hills finds its way in its reduced state as taken from the stoves and furnaces to her tide- washed meadows, to convert them into sites for new homes.” “The scheme,” the Times added, “is also making wealth for those who own the once valueless marsh lands.”
By 1910, the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company had buried the meadows of Coney Island beneath layers of ash. (Look at a map and you will notice that Coney Island is no longer an island.) So, McCarthy and the Brooklyn Ash Company shifted operations to the waste lands of Flushing Creek in Queens which, it so happened, it also owned.
Since the glaciers retreated roughly 10,000 years ago, the land around Flushing Creek had been marshland, a low-lying sponge that soaked up tidal waters from Flushing Bay and overflow rain from the surrounding areas. In a monumental act of ecological hubris, the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company proceeded to fill it in. From 1910 to 1934, when the city canceled its contract with the company, Fishhooks McCarthy and his crew deposited an estimated fifty million cubic yards of ash across its three hundred acres. Mounds rose as high as 30 and 40 feet and one, dubbed Mount Corona, rose 90 feet.
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Long Island and commuted to Manhattan by car and train. His path skirted the Corona Dump, which would play a crucial role in the novel he was writing at the time. In the second chapter of The Great Gatsby, Nick famously describes what he called, mixing two biblical images, “a valley of ashes”:
About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
The beauty of this passage, if you can speak of beauty in it, is how the ashes in the valley of ashes are come alive. A “certain desolate area of land” turns into “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat.” The ashes turn into a landscape—ridges, hills, and gardens—that encompass the farm. Finally, the landscape gives birth to humans, first their houses and chimneys but then the ash-grey men, who appear dimly and, like the geographical formations the ash creates, already crumbling. The final sentence is the most disturbing. It could easily belong in one of the circles of hell Dante describes in The Inferno. Its verbs invoke discomfiting creatures: the grey cars “crawl” like a snake; they give out a “ghastly creak” like a ghost; and the men “swarm” the cars like flies to a carcass. Eventually, all disappears behind a veil of ashes.
No wonder the road shrinks away. The description invokes Psalm 23, which begins “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death….” The difference is that unlike the Psalm, the valley of ashes offers no consolation, no Christ-like shepherd who will comfort us and lead us to fear no evil. Instead, we are on our own.
Like the nauseating smell of the Corona Dumps, which wafted to adjacent neighborhoods and forced residents to keep their windows closed, especially in the summer, the dust in the “valley of ashes” does not stay put. In the novel, not only does it invoke death; it figuratively brings death.
In the opening paragraphs of the book, Nick declares, implausibly, that “No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end.” Rather, it is “what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams” that Nick blames for the tragedy he will recount.
Readers sometimes hurry past these lines, but they reward closer attention. Gatsby is preyed on, which is a clear enough image, but what preys on him and floats behind him—the dust—makes less sense. At first glance, when Nick uses the word “wake” it seems like he describes the dust in terms of water. Like a boat through the sea, perhaps like the one the Dutch sailors arrive in at the conclusion of the novel, Gatsby and his dreams leave a wake behind them. Then the dust, which floats, preys on Gatsby and his dream, like a gannet or tern that dives into water for fish. That George kills Gatsby in his swimming pool, that he falls prey to George, underscores that reading. So too does the use of “wake” in funerary rites. At the end of the novel, Nick will keep a lonely vigil beside Gatsby’s body.
In any case, dust comes for Gatsby. All these images—dust, dreams, water, prey—converge in the next to last chapter, when Gatsby realizes that Daisy will not come to him:
He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream…. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
The ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him is George, who will kill Gatsby and himself. And George Wilson, who murders Gatsby, is dust personified. “A white ashen dust,” Fitzgerald writes of him early in the novel, “veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity.”
Here and elsewhere in the novel, Fitzgerald has arranged his ashes and dust just so. The motif appears over and over again:
(1) In the second chapter, when Myrtle is at her liveliest, she is described as “smouldering.” Later in the chapter, she includes “one of those cute little ashtrays where you touch a spring” on the “list of all things [she’s] got to get.” After Daisy runs her over, Nick observes that Myrtle “knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark blood with the dust.” And riding through the ashheaps to Manhattan, Nick will cross to the other side of the train to avoid seeing “a curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark spots in the dust.”
(2) In the penultimate chapter, as Tom, Nick, and Jordan stop for gas, Gatsby and Daisy pass them on the way to Manhattan, “their car flash[ing] by us with a flurry of dust….” Daisy will soon kill someone in that dust (Myrtle) and Gatsby will be killed by someone from it (George).
(3) When Gatbsy returns to his mansion after Daisy has forsaken him, he and Nick search for a cigarette—more ashes—and Nick observes “an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere.” Soon, the ashen figure of George will appear to spread the dust from mansion to owner.
(4) At the end of the novel, Tom tells Nick that Gatsby threw “dust into your eyes, just like he did in Daisy’s….” That is rich coming from Tom, who threw dust personified, George Wilson, at Gatsby.
Then there is this: As Nick and the gardener carry Gatsby’s body to the mansion, the gardener spots Wilson’s body “a little way off in the grass.” “[T]he holocaust,” Nick observes, “was complete.” Prior to the Second World War, holocaust did not refer to the mass murder of Jews and other outsiders. It referred to wholesale destruction, usually by fire. Its etymology makes that clear. The word comes from the Greek, holos, meaning “whole,” and kaustos, meaning “burnt.” The whole of it is burnt.
Seen through the dust, darkly, The Great Gatsby reads like an exercise in the waste of energy (coal), land (Flushing), and life (Myrtle, Gatsby, and George). One can read its famous ending many ways, and I will, but for now note that once developed, there is no returning to the “fresh, green breast of the new world” that “flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes.” Like Tom, Daisy, and Jordan, whom Nick will call “a rotten crowd,” the continent, like milk, has soured. Ashes cannot turn back into coal—nor garbage dumps back into marshland. Starting with the Dutch sailors, as the land is developed, it is simultaneously despoiled.
One of the titles Fitzgerald gave to his novel—he was never satisfied with any of them—was Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires. The title juxtaposes landscape (ash heaps) and humans (millionaires), and its preposition, among, implies more than just a relationship between the two. It implies a shared world, one that includes both setting and character. And so it is. Or was. Until the city turned to its master builder to clean up the mess—a master builder whose reading of The Great Gatsby would inspire him to redeem the waste land.
If you go looking for the valley of ashes today, you will find not ashes but a baseball stadium (Citi Field), a tennis center (home to the U.S. Open), two man-made lakes, an amusement park, and most disconcerting of all, a stainless-steel sculpture of the globe measuring 115 feet in diameter. There is also a zoo. In less than a decade, Flushing Meadows went from blight to blessing. In doing so, it embodied the decisions that would lead, step by step, to our own experiment in creating waste, and to the potentially catastrophic climate change we face today.
In 1934, New York City decided that it had lined the pockets of Fishhooks McCarthy long enough. It cancelled its contract with the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company and started disposing of its own waste. But now it had a valley of ashes on its hands.
Where others saw ashes, Robert Moses, the infamous urban planner, saw an opportunity. In 1932, Moses was appointed Commissioner of the New York City Parks Department, the perch from which he would oversee the remaking of the city for the next 25 years. In 1934, Moses added to his resume when he was appointed chair of the Triborough Bridge Authority and salvaged that project from runaway costs and runaway incompetence. Unsatisfied by his bridges, Moses sought to build a parkway—what eventually became Grand Central Parkway—connecting the Queens-Wards Island span of the Triborough Bridge to the existing parkway of Eastern Long Island. (See Figure 2.5 for a contemporary view of the park.) The route, Moses wrote a few years later, “led inevitably along the Flushing Bay through the Flushing Meadow and the middle of the Corona Dump.” “This was the logical place for it,” he added, “but only on the assumption that there was to be a general reclamation of the surrounding area.” In the midst of the Great Depression, however, “there was no sign of money in the offing.”
Until, that is, what Moses called “a group of prominent citizens” wanted to hold a World’s Fair in the city in 1939. Moses told the planners that “the flushing meadow was the only place in New York where they could get any cooperation from the Parks Department.” Of course, Moses was the Parks Department, so Flushing Meadow it would be. Moses could not have cared less about a fair, which he dismissed as an exercise in “amusements and ballyhoo.” For him, as he wrote in 1938, the “fair was the obvious bait for the reclamation of the meadow.” The fair would fund his ambitious plan to turn the Corona dump into a park even larger than Central Park.
Strangely, and (for me anyway) a little surprisingly, Moses often credited The Great Gatsby as part of his inspiration for remaking Flushing Meadows. In his 1938 article for The Saturday Evening Post, Moses immodestly described his heroic efforts to turn flushing meadows, as his title put it, “From Dump to Glory.” In the same article, he quotes the “valley of ashes” paragraphs from Fitzgerald and says of The Great Gatsby that it “remained a good yarn even after the Depression had leveled off the moraine of gold deposited on the North Shore in the delirious Twenties.” Keep in mind that by 1938, the novel—and its author—had been all but forgotten, so much so that Moses had to summarize the plot for his readers. (“It was a gaudy tale about a racketeer who tried to break into North Shore Long Island to be near a woman with whom he had enjoyed a fleeting romance.”) In 1966, after scholars and readers had rediscovered Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, Moses published a pamphlet, The Saga of Flushing Meadow, that described how “two Worlds’s Fairs had ushered in, at the very geographical and population center of New York, on the scene of a notorious ash dump, one of the very great municipal parks of our country.” The cover of the pamphlet depicts the aerial photograph of the dump that Moses commissioned in 1934 before work began on the Corona Dumps. Moses has labeled the photograph “The Valley of Ashes.” And in 1974, Moses wrote a 3500-word letter to The New Yorker after it published excerpts of the unflattering biography of him written by Robert Caro. In it, Moses bragged “of the huge task of reclaiming this fetid meadow blocked by the biggest ash dump in municipal history, so well described in ‘The Great Gatsby.’”
One can imagine a world in which, absent The Great Gatsby, there would be no Flushing Meadow Park. At the least, the park would have dropped down the list of urban planning priorities Moses kept.
In the 1974 letter, Moses defended himself from critics “who shout for rails and inveigh against rubber but admit that they live in the suburbs and that their wives are absolutely dependent on motor cars.” Like it or not, he asserted, “We live in a motorized city.” (Alas, he was right.) If so, the 1939 World’s Fair prepared the way for that motorized city. As part of the planning for the fair, Moses got his roads. Flushing Meadows was now bounded on three sides by highways: Whitestone Parkway (later the Van Wyck Expressway) to the east; an expanded Union Turnpike to the south; and Grand Central Parkway to the west. Today, Flushing Meadows looks like a park circled and intersected by highways. (The Long Island Expressway bisects it like a crease in a piece of paper.) Near Flushing Bay, which borders it to the north, the park contains some of the most dizzying cloverleaf interchanges in the city, perhaps in the country.
In Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the official name of the park, one can witness the layers of waste that would eventually threaten a motorized city and a motorized country alike—indeed, a motorized civilization. Coal mined in Pennsylvania, as the 1907 article in the New York Times observed, made its way to Brooklyn and other cities, where it heated houses and buildings and left behind millions of tons of ashes, which would lay waste to marshland. Yet the burning of coal would generate another form of waste, carbon dioxide, which did not leave behind a material residue like ashes but would cumulatively cause as much or more environmental damage as ashes. And those cars zipping up Grand Central Parkway past Flushing Meadows burned through gasoline that would generate still more carbon. The coal came from Pennsylvania, the gasoline from Texas, and the carbon from the consumption of each. Unsurprisingly, global carbon dioxide levels began to increase around the turn of the twentieth century and, except for a few years during the Great Depression, steadily swooped upwards. To this day, the sector that contributes the most to greenhouse gases is transportation.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy would reveal everything that went wrong with the human engineering of Flushing Meadows. The burning of coal added carbon to the atmosphere. The burning of gasoline added still more. Both raised sea levels and made hurricanes stronger and more likely. And by turning Flushing Meadow into Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the city replaced a sponge that would soak up seawater into, effectively, a concrete slab, which like a shallow tub would fill up and overflow into the basements and first floors of houses and businesses in surrounding neighborhoods.
You cannot pin this waste wholly on the wealthy, but they may deserve more of the blame than others. In 2019, the bottom 50 percent of earners in the United States generated a little less than 10 tons of carbon dioxide per capita. That same year, the top 10 percent produced 75 tons of carbon per person. Globally, the top 10 percent was responsible for nearly half of all carbon emissions. And the top one percent created 17 percent of all emissions. In short, the wealthier the filthier, which makes sense. It is the wealthy that fly and buy the most.
If you believe, as I do, that the wealthy set the standard for consumption, which those below them aspire to and, as much as possible, adopt; and if you believe, as ecologically inclined economists do, that more and more consumption generates more and more waste; then it would seem that no small part of the environmental damage visited upon the earth in the century since The Great Gatsby was published traces back to the wealthy.
Follow the money, and there you find the waste.
Indeed, you can read The Great Gatsby as an allegory of impending environmental catastrophe. The “death car” that kills Myrtle transpires in a waste land of ashes. The repurposing of that waste land, its transformation from, as Robert Moses wrote, dump to glory, meant surrounding it on all sides by highways, which would exploit other forms of resources, namely oil refined into gasoline, which would generate the carbon dioxide that is heating up the earth at record and unsustainable levels.
On the surface, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park looks more bucolic than when it was a valley of ashes. But from a longer perspective, it looks like another icon of waste.
All this waste can change how we read the last comments Nick offers about Tom and Daisy. “They were careless people,” he writes. “[T]hey smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….” We are still cleaning up that mess. In many ways, we have not even begun.
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