Zone One's Reanimation of 1970s New York

[New York's] present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. … The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding.

—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life¹

New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead. The dead, however, are a notoriously perverse and unmanageable lot. They tend not to remain safely buried, and in fact resist all efforts at obliterating their lives.

—Luc Sante, Low Life²

New York's mutability has long been one of its most recognizable features, as documented everywhere from Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" to Sante's Low Life. But the New York universe that de Certeau witnessed in the 1970s was particularly explosive: white flight, demanufacturing, containerization, and rapid building in the downtown center produced wide changes in the city's built environment, culminating in the city's 1975 fiscal crisis. After lenders stopped extending the city credit, the state government worked with a group of financial leaders to install the Municipal Assistance Corporation, a board that would direct city policy until 1985. As historians have observed, the interests of the MAC were oriented away from a group of socially dead citizens termed "the underclass," impoverished, under-employed, mostly African American and Puerto Rican New Yorkers. The line went that the city had overextended its finances by providing an overly rich welfare state, including everything from too-generous direct welfare benefits, to free tuition at CUNY, to overly cheap subway fares, to overpaid city workers.³ The "unproductive" occupants of neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and the South Bronx were framed, in this analysis, as holding the city back from a bright future of finance, insurance, and other globally-oriented sectors. De Certeau captures such tensions in The Practice of Everyday Life by setting the street-level life of "the walker" against the "geometrically defined" space of urban planning.⁴ In the long 1970s, that walker was more often than not described in terms of the underclass.⁵ In Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011), this walker is either a zombie or a "sweeper," a worker sent to clear buildings of zombies. Drawing inspiration from a Whitehead interview in which he notes how this era's "apocalyptic" New York shaped Zone One, this essay will suggest that Whitehead uses his zombie novel to reflect on post-fiscal-crisis divisions between city planners and the under- and working- classes whose lives they sought to order, divisions that continue to shape the city's social world, notably in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

In some sense, this observation shouldn't be surprising. Across his fiction and nonfiction projects, Whitehead depicts past and present as porous. A central device in The Intuitionist (1999) is the legacy of James Fulton; John Henry Days (2002) examines the kaleidoscopic materials that represent the legend of John Henry in the mid-1990s; and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) concerns race and the colonial era in the early Internet Age.⁶ Finally, one of the most prominent features of The Underground Railroad (2016) is its anachronisms, as with the subway-railroad at the novel's core.⁷ In this regard, Whitehead's essay collection The Colossus of New York (2003) provides an important precursor to Zone One.⁸ Like Zone One, Colossus walks its readers through the city, in and out of buildings, through subways and streets, always with an eye toward human relationships with the built environment. Each piece elegizes New York's quotidian life, in the same spirit as the many asides about the city in Zone One. In The Colossus of New York, memory is both human and inhuman, a place where Broadway knows "that every footfall is its heart beating, that we keep its heart beating, that it needs suckers and citizens to keep its blood flowing," and the Brooklyn Bridge is both "pack mule and palimpsest" whose crossers sense that "[t]he bones of their ancestors lie at the bottom among refrigerator doors and license plates."⁹ Written...