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May 4, 2018 |Afghanistan, childhood, manliness, PTSD, Sebastian Junger, Tribe
Men Searching for Their Lost Tribe
by Mark Judge|4 Comments
Presslab/Shutterstock.com
Recently an old friend of mine contacted me on Facebook. He was checking in to see about my mother, who suffers from dementia. He was also feeling nostalgic about our 1970s childhood in Maryland — the summers at the pool, the skateboarding, the snowball fights, the girls we had crushes on. He and I started comparing notes on the characters in the old neighborhood: the athletes, the heavy metal guitarist nicknamed "Wino" who lived next door to me, the dentist who gave out toothbrushes every Halloween, and the TV anchor who covered the Apollo moon shots. My friend recalled a spot where one of us had wiped out on a mini-bike. "Our blood is on those streets," I said, using mock melodrama. My friend replied with seriousness: "That was our tribe."
His comment brought to mind Sebastian Junger's 2016 book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Tribe tackles the crisis of modern manhood. The book argues that modern men are adrift because peace, technology, and wealth have broken down the ability to form tribes, which are often the result of coming together to deal with disasters. Tribes, like the Native Americans before Columbus, give people a sense of purpose and belonging. Junger revisited the theme recently in a piece about "the anthropology of manhood" that ran in National Review.
It's an insightful theory that nonetheless, at least as presented by Junger, has some deep flaws.
Junger's argument centers around military veterans, who owe their distress not only to traumatic experiences during their deployments, but also to the alienation they feel when they return. American society offers these men no close-knit family, or tribe, the way the military does. As a reviewer in The Guardian put it:
With its toxic politics, yawning rich-poor divide and racial tension, the US has strayed so far from the egalitarianism, self-sacrifice and solidarity that ensured the survival of our hominid ancestors that it now takes the extremes of war and disaster to spark such values back into life.
Junger notes an interesting fact: while the media often portrays many war veterans as broken or disabled by their experience, many of the warriors actually miss the camaraderie and thrill of battle. I discovered this when I recently interviewed Army Chaplain Justin Roberts, who served in Afghanistan and directed the documentary No Greater Love. I noted to Roberts that a couple of the soldiers interviewed in No Greater Love described the mad rush of combat, an adrenaline high that they miss when they return home.
Like Junger, Roberts documented not only the trauma of battle, but the exhilaration. "You don't really realize the physiological effect," Roberts told me. He recalled that when he retuned from Afghanistan he "was really craving" a fist fight. He finally realized that he wasn't craving the fight, but the adrenaline that comes with it. "You get that rush. I couldn't find it at home." Roberts noted that's why so many returning soldiers buy motorcycles and engage in other physically and emotionally charged hobbies.
"As awkward as it is to say," Junger writes in Tribe, "part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up." He goes on: "If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does." Junger then observes that "in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty and self-sacrifice that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them."
Junger presents two options for modern men — the thrill and bond of battle or a soul-deflating life of dull jobs and suburban ennui. This excludes the possibility of a middle ground. Between the adrenaline charge of combat and the banality of work, boys and young men used to experience what might be called "mini-traumas." As my childhood friend recalled to me, our lives as boys and then young men were punctuated by small disasters that were part of being a tribe. And yet we were not left with serious PTSD.
Guys wiped out on skateboards, nearly drowned in the creek, got beaned with baseballs and bitten by dogs, were bloodied up in fights, dislocated shoulders, had their hearts broken. These common experiences are nothing comparable to war, of course, but in the age before the digital revolution would keep kids inside and helicopter parenting prevented youngsters from getting hurt, kids learned how to deal with pain, take care of each other when adults were not around, and form deep bonds — all without being seriously traumatized. It's frequently noted that kids don't play outside anymore, but I'm not sure the true devastation of this is appreciated. As a kid in Maryland, my friends became a second family, people to depend on in case something life-threatening occurred. We steered each other out of riptides, took keys away if there had been too many beers, and encouraged each other to stay in the game after minor injuries, or to keep pedaling when we had ridden our bikes miles too far from home (there were no cell phones). That kind of small group inter-reliance used to be carried into adulthood, making it easier to form teams to deal with problems. Additionally, our outside adventures frequently led to dangerous situations, giving us an appreciation for pain and awareness of what violence is like that many kids today don't really have.
In Tribe, Junger writes about growing up in a comfortable Belmont, Massachusetts, where he claims nothing ever happened: "I'd grown up in a Boston suburb where people's homes were set behind deep hedges or protected by huge yards and neighbors hardly knew each other. And they didn't need to: nothing ever happened in my town that required anything close to a collective effort." As a young man Junger says he longed for "a hurricane or a tornado or something that would require us all to band together to survive. Something that would make us feel like a tribe." His ideas in this respect are reminiscent of Walker Percy's, but with less sense of the dangers.
Junger was born in 1962. He and I are the same generation, and while there is some truth to what he says about the boredom of the suburbs, in the one I was raised in there was often quite a bit going on: baseball games, block parties, dances, and all the summer adventures that boys have when they are out on their bikes looking for excitement. There were also constant situations that required the collective effort that Junger longs for. After one blizzard, some friends and I shoveled out the single mother who lived at the top of a long driveway. When someone was sick a neighbor would drive to the store for cokes and medicine. One night a neighbor came to our house in tears because her dog wouldn't get up. The animal was fifteen, and I knew when I saw him in the backyard that he didn't have much time left. I picked up and placed him in the back of her car, but he died shortly after getting to the vet. When cars broke down, neighbors picked each other up. These weren't responses to invasions from a hostile country or the piecing of lives back together after a natural disaster, but rather the everyday community activities that bring and keep people together.
In a way, Junger's longing for disaster is an easy way out. It's a cinematic nightmare that in its abstraction is easier to celebrate than the daily work of building a community. The kind of calamity that Junger longs for can destroy lives as much as bring them closer. As one critic of Junger's pointed out, in much of the world something dangerous is always happening, and those catastrophes are as likely to break tribal bonds as form them.
Junger is on to something quite real in Tribe and his piece in National Review, but his reductive reasoning reduces the potency of his argument. In his National Review essay, Junger argues that our evolutionary and biological imperatives override our spiritual or moral sides:
Men … have been programmed by the implacable math of evolution to impregnate women and keep moving; their reproductive potential is limited only by the number of sexual partners they have. That makes fatherhood a poor measure of manhood; plenty of good men don't have children, and plenty of bad fathers have made enormous sacrifices for their community or their nation. So in our modern age, how does a man demonstrate his worthiness — his manhood — if he has no children to raise and no enemy to fight?
Leaving aside the possibility that any communal or national self-sacrificing that bad fathers accomplish can be outweighed by the damaged kids they usher into the tribe — kids that are most often bullies without empathy — there's an answer to Junger's question. There are plenty of enemies to fight in the world, and they're not all in the hills of Afghanistan. They are the enemies of loneliness, illness, and despair that come to all tribes, modern or not. When my mother was diagnosed with dementia and I became her primary caretaker, a lot of my dreams were put on hold, including going to Hawaii to see the childhood friend who had contacted me on Facebook. I soon discovered that other members of my tribe also had parents who are now elderly and enjoy a visit from someone like me that they had watched grow up. Making the rounds a couple times a week to check in on them shows it doesn't take a fire fight or a hurricane to become what the men who were leaders in our tribe growing up in Maryland taught us to be, or at least try to be. In the words of the Jesuit motto of my high school, we should be men for others.
Mark Judge
Mark Judge is a journalist and filmmaker whose writings have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Daily Caller.
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aez says
Excellent piece–thank you.
Moritz Graf von Sachsen says
An obvious connection to be drawn here is with the writings on the experience of man in war and peace of another Junger, Hptm Ernst Jünger – indeed, at first glanced I leapt to the assumption that it was Jünger who was referred to, not Sebastian Junger.
Ernst Jünger's well-known Frontkämpfer memoir, Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), is rich with observations of the bonds of camaraderie, the thrill of danger and the deep emotional resonance which shared experience of war creates in men. And yet in his later writings such as Aladins Problem, Jünger dealt with the problems of solitude and manhood, "loneliness, illness, and despair", which Mr. Judge suggests are every bit as much the battlefields of the modern man.
steve baker says
Has anyone ever made the connection between the Detroit "Muscle Cars: of the late 1960's – early 1970's and the returning Vietnam Vets?
Peter Brennan says
Glad to see you back in the saddle!
Scruton's crime was to have attempted to take the New Left seriously, finding it severely wanting, if not absurd.
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Park Row is a street located in the Financial District, Civic Center, and Chinatown neighborhoods of the New York City borough of Manhattan.  The street runs east-west, sometimes called north-south because the western end is nearer to the Financial District. At the north end of Park Row is the confluence of Bowery, East Broadway, St. James Place, Oliver Street, Mott Street, and Worth Street at Chatham Square. At the street's south end, Broadway, Vesey Street, Barclay Street, and Ann Street intersect. The intersection includes a bus turnaround loop designated as Millennium Park. Park Row was once known as Chatham Street; it was renamed Park Row in 1886, a reference to the fact that it faces City Hall Park, the former New York Common.

History

Early history
In the late 18th century Eastern Post Road became the more important road connecting New York to Albany and New England. This section of the road which became Park Row was called Chatham Street, a name that enters into the city's history on numerous occasions.

The tobacco industry in New York City got its start in 1760, when Pierre Lorillard opened a snuff factory on Chatham Street, and in 1795, the Long Room of Abraham Martling's Tavern on Chatham Street was one of the first headquarters used by the Tammany Society and the Democratic-Republican Party on election days. Those who gathered there became known as "Martling Men", "Tammanyites" or "Bucktails", especially during the time that Tammany was attempting to wrest control of the party away from governor De Witt Clinton. In the 1780s, Chatham Street was the site of the Tea Water Pump, a privately owned company which took water from Fresh Water Pond, the city's only supply of fresh water, and which remained purer longer than some of the other sources which drew from the pond.

Chatham Street was also a center for entertainment. In 1798, Marc Isambard Brunel designed the 2,000-seat Park Theater on Chatham Street, intended to attract the upper classes of the city.  The theater cost $130,000 to build, and tickets were 25 cents for seats in the gallery, and 50 cents in the orchestra.  In the early 1800s, more taverns, theaters and small hotels on the street started to offer free entertain to attract customers to drink. These were called "free and easies", "varieties" or "vaudeville" and offered numerous different kinds of performances: comedy, dance, dramatic skits, magic, music,  ventriloquism, and tellers of tall tales.  New theaters such as the Chatham Theater sprang up as well to attract the overflow from the entertainment strip on the Bowery.  Boxing was also a popular entertainment.  The Arena on Park Row packed in fans with its nightly presentation of "the manly art".

Early in the 19th century most of the Manhattan portion of the street was suppressed, the Commons became City Hall Park, and the stub of a street was renamed Park Row.  By the mid-19th century, the street had a bazaar-like atmosphere from the many used clothing shops and pawnbrokerages open by recently immigrated Jews from Germany and central Europe. This gave rise to anti-Semitic caricatures, although many New Yorkers could not distinguish German Jews from other Germans. Chatham Street was also the site of several anti-African American incidents, as in the 1863 New York City draft riots, in which rioters were repulsed in their attempt to attack black waiters at Crook's Restaurant on the street. Poverty was also commonplace; in 1890, Jacob Riis revealed in How the Other Half Lives that over 9,000 homeless men lodged nightly on Chatham Street and the Bowery, between City Hall and the Cooper Union.

Newspaper era

During the late 19th century, Park Row was nicknamed Newspaper Row, as most of New York City's newspapers located on the street to be close to City Hall. Among the earlier newspapers in the area were The New York Times, which in 1857 became the first New York City newspaper to be housed in a structure built specially for its use. Part of the southern section of the street, centered on the intersection with Spruce Street, was known as Printing House Square. The newspapers housed on Newspaper Row, combined, printed more than 250,000 copies per day at their peak, leading the area to be considered "America's preeminent press center". Other papers, such as the New York Herald and The Sun, were near Newspaper Row but not actually housed on Park Row itself.

The newspapers on Chatham Street would be among the first to construct early skyscrapers for their headquarters, reflecting their newfound wealth. The first of these major newspaper buildings, the New York Tribune Building, opened in 1875 as a nine-story,  structure; the headquarters of the New-York Tribune was then the city's second-tallest building after Trinity Church. The next major structure to open was a new New York Times building at 41 Park Row, which was completed in 1889 and stood 13 stories tall. The third early skyscraper on Newspaper Row was the 20-story New York World Building, the New York World headquarters, which at a height of  was the first building in the city to be taller than Trinity Church. The Times and Tribune Buildings were both expanded in the first decade of the 20th century.

Two other buildings on Park Row were also part of Newspaper Row but not built specifically for newspapers' use. The Potter Building, at 38 Park Row, contained tenants such as The Press, a Republican Party-affiliated penny paper, as well as The New York Observer. The Park Row Building, at 15 Park Row, housed the early headquarters of the Associated Press.

The Revolution, a newspaper established by women's rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was also headquartered on Park Row, at 27 Chatham Street.

The decline of Park Row as a newspaper hub began in 1895, when the Herald moved to Herald Square. Ten years later, the Times moved to its new headquarters at One Times Square. The Tribune moved uptown in 1923, while the World shuttered in 1931. The Journal of Commerce, the last remaining newspaper to publish from Park Row, moved from its headquarters in the World Building in 1953. Today, a statue of Benjamin Franklin by Ernst Plassman stands in Printing House Square, in front of the One Pace Plaza and 41 Park Row buildings of Pace University, holding a copy of his Pennsylvania Gazette, a reminder of what Park Row once was.

Later years
After the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, Park Row was the site of the large Park Row Terminal for the elevated trains and cable-hauled shuttle cars which crossed the bridge. Service was gradually reduced from 1913 to 1940, and the terminal was demolished in 1944.

Until 1971, Park Row continued in a relatively straight path, except for a curved portion around the Brooklyn Bridge's ramps. Between 1971 and 1973, a pedestrian plaza was built as part of 1 Police Plaza, after which Park Row was rerouted underneath the plaza and its intersection with New Chambers Street and Duane Street was eliminated.

Structures

The New York Times was originally located at 113 Nassau Street in 1851. It moved to 138 Nassau Street in 1854, and in 1858 it moved a little more than one block away to 41 Park Row, possibly making it the first newspaper in New York City housed in a building built specifically for its use. The New York Times Building, which was designed by George B. Post, was designated a New York City landmark in 1999. The building is now used by Pace University.

The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung moved to its own building at 17 Chatham Street at almost the same time as the Times moved into its new building.

The Park Row Building (also known as 15 Park Row) is located at the western end of Park Row, opposite City Hall Park. Designed by noted architect R. H. Robertson, and built in 1896-99, It was designated a city landmark in 1999. At  tall it was the tallest building in the world from 1899 until 1908, when it was surpassed by the Singer Building.

The Potter Building at 38 Park Row (145 Nassau Street) was built in 1882-86 and designated a New York City landmark in 1996. It was built after the owner's previous building on the site burned down. The Potter Building was converted into apartments between 1979 and 1981.

The New York City Police Department is headquartered at 1 Police Plaza located on Park Row, across the street from the Manhattan Municipal Building and Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Two apartment buildings of significance on Park Row are the Chatham Towers at no. 170, built in 1965 and designed by Kelly & Gruzen, which, according to the AIA Guide to New York City, makes a "strong architectural statement...[which] rouses great admiration and great criticism," and Chatham Green at 185 Park Row, built in 1961 and also designed by Kelly & Gruzen.

Police Plaza closure

The segment of Park Row between Frankfort Street and Chatham Square is open only to MTA buses and government and emergency vehicles and has been closed to civilian traffic since the September 11, 2001, attacks. The NYPD asserts that this is necessary to protect its headquarters from a truck bomb attack. Nearby Chinatown residents were increasingly frustrated at the disruption caused by the closure of the thoroughfare, argue that the police department has placed a chokehold on an entire neighborhood and suggest One Police Plaza be moved from a residential area. Members of the Civic Center Residents Coalition fought the security perimeter around One Police Plaza for years. Park Row reopened for foot traffic and MTA buses in 2005, although only 200 buses per day were allowed on the street, and they had to pass through security checkpoints.

In 2007, the NYPD stated that it would not be moving despite the numerous complaints from residents, explaining that they had tried to alleviate the impact of the security measures by forbidding officers from parking in nearby public spaces and by reopening a stairway that skirts the headquarters' south side and leads down to street level near the Brooklyn Bridge. The department also planned to redesign its guard booths and security barriers to make them more attractive, and was involved in efforts to convert two lanes of Park Row into a cycling and pedestrian greenway, which opened in June 2018.

References
Notes

Bibliography

External links

 Park Row: A New York Songline – virtual walking tour

Streets in Manhattan
Financial District, Manhattan
Chinatown, Manhattan
Civic Center, Manhattan
Newspaper headquarters in the United States
Newspaper row

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