For Ric Burns, New York Is All-America

So much of America, throughout its history, has been funneled through that harbor on the edge of the Atlantic that nurtures that majestic, horrible shining city called New York. From the earliest colonial days to the Internet-obsessed turn of the third millennium, New York has been the central cutting edge of commercial and cultural development for that upstart, polyglot brat of Western culture, the United States.

As disorienting today for someone arriving in the megalopolis at Penn Station or Grand Central as it must have been for the immigrant castaways from Europe's shores 100 years ago, New York is the heart of the ephemeral world culture beamed to all corners of the world on the latest technological breakthrough.

Documentarian Ric Burns explores the history of New York City in his new epic miniseries, "New York: A Documentary History," airing on PBS Sunday through Thursday at 9 p.m. nightly. These five episodes take New York through the early years of the Great Depression. An additional episode will air in the spring.

Historians, writers and thinkers helping Burns and his producers bring the history of the city to life include David McCullough, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, E.L. Doctorow, Ann Douglas, John Steele Gordon, Jean Strouse, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Pete Hamill, Allan Ginsberg, Marshall Berman, Robert A. Caro, Alfred Kazin, Caleb Carr, and architect Robert A.M. Stern.

Burns is particularly enraptured with the final episode's recounting of the commercial and cultural Renaissance that was New York in the 1920s. But he sees a symmetry to the city's history that works its way through all the episodes.

"I notice clearly that the first five episodes cover shorter and shorter periods of time as they go on," he says. "The first one covers 200 years, the next one 40 years, the next one 30 years and the next one 15 years. And then you get to the `20s, and it's the most condensed moment in the history of the city. Eleven years in the 1920s was worth 200 years from 1620 to 1825."

Starting with the original founding of the New Amsterdam trading colony by the Dutch, the series takes stock of how New York has dominated American life. In the early years of the Republic, Alexander Hamilton envisioned a national economy headquartered in New York. If it hadn't been for compromises with Southern leaders, New York would have been the new nation's capital. From then on, New York was a driving engine of the nation's commerce.

DeWitt Clinton's vision of a route to the Midwest at the turn of the 19th century led to the building of the Erie Canal and the sudden emergence of New York as the central hub for the new nation's burgeoning economy.

Abraham Lincoln acknowledged that a speech at New York's Cooper Union helped propel him to the presidency. American literature was born with the stories of James Fenimore Cooper and the visionary poems of Walt Whitman. New York's Gilded Age of Rockefeller and Morgan produced the industrialization of America. The industrialization, in turn, produced immense social problems which were countered by innovative political policies launched in New York, and which ultimately went to Washington with New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Historian Robert A. Caro, whose book on developer Robert Moses, "The Power Broker," stands as one of the major historical works on the development of New York, sees immigration as key to the city's success.

"If you ask what makes New York this incredible place, one of the things is immigration, bringing in new energies, new populations," says Caro. "They come in, and each brings its own distinctive qualities to the city, but somehow when they come together, it seems to create some sort of critical mass and what explodes out of it is far greater than the sum of its parts."

And key to the political developments that led to the social transformation of America is Alfred E. Smith, whom Caro thinks has been unfairly relegated to a secondary place in American history.

"The significance of Al Smith is that he represented the first political triumph of the Irish in New York," says Caro. "He was the first Irish Catholic to be elected governor of New York, and he rammed through the most revolutionary social welfare legislation - to help poor people generally - but in his view, to help his people, who were the great immigrant masses of this new city."

Burns notes that it was the profligacy of New York's capitalist classes that helped bring on the Great Depression, and thus he sees a fitting irony in the fact that New Yorkers wrought the national counterbalance that became the New Deal. "The New Deal, which you can think of as the great New York apotheosis, brings into existence the first rival to New York that New York ever had - the federal government.

"The story of New York from the Depression on is not the story of this commercial city going it alone. It's the story of this fascinating, complicated interrelationship between an immensely powerful federal government and New York City. What I love about New York's history is that is has a structure to its unfolding as beautiful as the spiral to the double helix of DNA."