Careless People (10 page)

Instead of traffic signs, most intersections had a speed limit for turning corners, which New York City had raised that April to 8 mph. Many roads outside the city were still unpaved and the city had only introduced signals for major thoroughfares over the last year: throughout 1922, twenty-three-foot-high ornamental bronze signal towers were being built on Fifth Avenue, and would be unveiled in December. Open at the granite base to allow
a clear view of traffic, each tower had a small room at the top in which a policeman sat, using a lever to open and close glass windows on all sides, displaying different colored signals.

The signals, however, were confusing. In the autumn of 1922 a letter was sent to the
New York Times
complaining that the railroads had long used signal colors consistently, and everyone knew the code: red for stop, yellow for caution, and green for proceed. So why, then, was it the case that on the new Fifth Avenue signal towers, the green light indicated “
a cross movement or a side-shoot of some kind,” whereas yellow seemed to mean proceed? They all knew that green should mean go: but when they got to New York, the meaning of the green light seemed mysteriously to change.

By 1924, New Yorkers were demanding that the city adopt “
traffic signal uniformity”: “At Broadway there was a green light on the tower, and for once I remembered that green in this city when displayed on a tower means stop, so I stopped, only to find that when green is displayed to the east and west it means ‘go.'” Another letter-writer interpreted the signals differently: “our signal system provides an orange light for go, a green signal really for stop . . . and a red signal which may mean stop, but is actually taken as a ‘getaway' signal.” No wonder they kept having accidents.

Fitzgerald very possibly saw these letters from the autumn of 1924. Although he and Zelda had been on the Riviera since May, they received the
New York Times
from Paris and read it religiously. In September 1924 Fitzgerald published a facetious article explaining expatriate American life in France: “
as he struck a Swedish match and lit an American cigarette, he remarked sonorously that the trouble with most Americans in France is that they won't lead a real French life. They hang around the big hotels and
exchange opinions fresh from the States. ‘I know,' his wife agreed. ‘That's exactly what it said in the
New York Times
this morning.'”

While New Yorkers were writing letters complaining that the meaning of green lights was eluding everyone, Fitzgerald was finishing a novel that is driven by Gatsby's faith in the green light and the promise of progress it seems to make: “He believed in the green light, in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . .” Jay Gatsby, the young man who misreads the green light when he moves to New York, is confused by it into thinking he has permission to proceed from west to east, when in reality it's telling him to stop. A collision becomes inevitable: if only America's signals were less mixed, their meanings more consistent.

New York City passed a law ensuring that green would forever mean go on April 27, 1925—two weeks after
The Great Gatsby
was published.

By 1929, the traffic towers had been dug up by the roots out of Fifth Avenue and disappeared without a trace. “
Life is slipping away, crumbling all around us,” wrote
The
New Yorker
, reporting on the towers' demolition. “There's no telling what could be removed from New York and not be missed.”

I
n 1922 Long Island remained a series of small villages deep in farmland, connected by country roads along which horse-drawn carriages clopped, slowing down the shiny new roadsters. The Long Island Expressway would not be constructed for decades: the red touring car took the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos along Jackson Avenue, Route 25A, now Northern Boulevard. Past cobbled slums presided over by the dark saloons of the previous century, they drove through rolling hills. The population of Queens gradually thinned as the land extended east, from the small working-class neighborhoods edging New York City just across the bridge, through large swaths
of land unburdened by buildings. Jackson Avenue carried them into Flushing, one of the first of the Dutch settlements on Long Island, after driving through
Astoria, where Nick and Gatsby would scatter light with fenders spread like wings.

About halfway between New York and Great Neck, just beneath Flushing Bay, stood the towering Corona Dumps, vast mountains of fuel ash that New York had been heaping on swampland beyond the city limits since 1895, in a landfill created by the construction of the Long Island Rail Road. By the time the ash dumps were leveled in the late 1930s (and eventually recycled to form the Long Island Expressway), the mounds of ash were nearly a hundred feet tall in places; the highest peak was locally given the ironic name Mount Corona. Created to protect the city's inhabitants from the constant grime of coal ash on the streets, the Corona Dumps were soon piled high with all manner of refuse including manure, and surrounded by stagnant water. By 1922 desolate, towering mountains of ashes and dust stretched four miles long and over a mile across, alongside the road that linked the glamor of Manhattan to the Gold Coast. In the distance could be seen the steel frames of new apartment buildings braced against the sky to the west.
Refuse stretched in all directions, with goats wandering through and old women searching among the litter for some redeemable object.

Past the
ash heaps, looming like a corner of the Inferno beside the Long Island Rail Road, emerging from the clinging grime, through the dry, fallow fields dotted with occasional white-frame Victorian farmhouses, past the outpost of an isolated garage planted along the side of the two-lane road, a red gas pump sprouting in front of it, they drove four miles north of where Charles Cary Rumsey had been killed in a car crash just a few days earlier.

They would also have driven past that new industrial object, the billboard. It was the age of advertising, but Americans were already beginning to resist the defacement of their countryside by these eyesores, reported the
New York Times
that autumn. “
With the general trend of opposition to billboards developing over the country . . . it can be but a question of time until the American public will take things into its own hands and find some means for the abatement of this nuisance.” Fitzgerald's guess was better: he put a billboard at the center of
Gatsby
's network of symbols, rightly predicting that the billboards would mushroom as fast as Americans' faith in what they sold.
Zelda wrote later that American advertising created dreams of infinite possibility, promising mail-order art and snake-oil beauty.

Queens Boulevard, Flushing, March 1922

 

And so Fitzgerald plants a billboard among his ash heaps, painting the giant eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg dominating the gray land and its spasms of
dust. Eckleburg's blue eyes look out of a pair of enormous yellow spectacles created by an oculist in Queens, who was trying to improve his business before he abandoned his sign to the ashes. By the end of the novel these colossal, bespectacled eyes will be mistaken for God: the false god of advertising, worshipped by sad, ghostly men like Myrtle Wilson's husband George, who runs an unlovely garage under those sightless eyes.

Zelda later observed, “
almost all the superfluous wealth of America goes into display. If this is decadence, make the most of it—but I should think the sign of decadence would be surfeit, and not a lust for more and more” in “this busy, careless land, whose every acre is littered with the waste of the day before yesterday.”
The Great Gatsby
emerges from a world strewn with wreckage and that debris is the novel's material—sullied, but with the hope of something redeemable glinting among the ash heaps.

A
week after the bodies of Hall and Mills had been discovered the breezes of rumor surrounding the murders abruptly shifted direction toward the couple that had done the discovering. “
Because of the carelessness with which the authorities handled the bodies,” reported the
World
, “they were forced to-day to begin their investigation all over” and the couple was brought “to the courthouse for exhaustive examination.”

First described as “children” who were mushroom picking, the couple was revealed to be a teenage girl and a young married man. Twenty-three-year-old Raymond Schneider was reportedly not living with his wife; his companion in the early hours of a Saturday morning, near a notorious lovers' lane, was fifteen-year-old Pearl Bahmer, who was arrested on charges of “incorrigibility” preferred by her father, Nicholas Bahmer, who was listed in the phone book as a confectioner, but whose shop was a blind for a saloon.
Bahmer was, in fact, a well-known local bootlegger.

Bahmer's Saloon