When asked if he attended his Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) reunions, the recently passed New York City real estate mogul and civic leader Marshall Rose said he did not, that he thought most of his classmates would have been in jail. In the New York Times obituary (written by Sam Roberts) from which the previous anecdote came, it was noted that despite starting at the bottom in New York, Rose died near the top. Brooke Astor (1902-2007), “the undisputed grand dame of New York’s social life,” was one of many boldfaced names in his prominent friend circle.
Rose’s life exists as yet another reminder that in the United States it doesn’t matter where you start. More than in any other country, your past and present don’t define you or your future.
The Brooklyn of old, one that included unruly classmates, surely didn’t write Rose’s story. Roberts wrote that Rose’s real estate company developed shopping centers all over the United States, including cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, D.C. And in the New York City that he prospered in so impressively, his company renovated Madison Square Garden, he joined other city fathers in reviving both Bryant Park and the New York City Public Library, not to mention his role in establishing various charter schools in the city.
In arguably the most competitive city on earth when it comes to real estate and finance, Roberts writes that Rose’s “advice on real estate and finance was highly valued.” In short, Rose was one of the most highly regarded New Yorkers in a city that’s long been the “final test” (Ken Auletta) for the world’s most ambitious and highly regarded people. Not only did Rose pass, he finished at or near the top of his class.
It’s not just that the best minds in real estate and finance consulted him on real estate and finance, it’s not just that his second wife was Candice Bergen, and it’s not that he was good friends with someone like Astor. It’s that where his life concluded was so at odds with where it began. Educated alongside people who figured to spend parts of their lives behind bars, Rose thought enough of himself to take his life in an entirely different direction.
Before Brooklyn became Brooklyn, it was said that the longest walk in the world was the one from the once tough outer borough to Manhattan. Which is a reminder that in the United States, some of the biggest, most uplifting “immigration” stories are the ones that involve Americans.
If progress is the most certain constant of American life, one of the biggest drivers of the latter is the happy fact that Americans are always and everywhere reinventing themselves. Rose’s leap from Brooklyn to Manhattan is a metaphor for the path of all manner of Americans who end life far from where it began.
It rates serious thought as Americans (established, and those on the way up) lament the arrival of newcomers from other countries. Supposedly we can’t assimilate them, they won’t assimilate, or a combination of both. The fears are overstated.
Think of Rose again, and let's assume not unrealistically that he exaggerated more than a bit the crime-ridden ways of his high-school classmates. That's precisely the point. Rose didn't attend the reunions because he wasn't looking back. Once he left Brooklyn, Rose left the ways of Brooklyn behind so that he could prosper in a Manhattan that was another country in too many ways to count.
If you love yourself enough to get to the United States, you’re doing so because you similarly don’t plan to turn around. What makes you American is what brings you here in the first place, and as Marshall Rose’s brilliant life reminds us, Americans invariably “immigrate” within a nation that never holds people’s past against them.
