Ken Burns and I have just met at Bowling Green, the tiny park at the bottom tip of Manhattan, when he brings up “all the lives that have been through here.” He doesn’t mean the tourists lined up to take selfies with the bronze bull, or anyone in the last century or even the one before that. Although he lives in New Hampshire, he’s an on-and-off New Yorker with a place in Soho and a daughter in Brooklyn, and he’s walked downtown this morning to discuss his docuseries The American Revolution, co-directed with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, 12 hours of lofty ideals and bloody bayoneting and the contradictions underlying “all men are created equal.” (It will premiere on PBS on November 16.) Here, in the middle of British New York, and before that Dutch New Amsterdam, is where muskets were fired and the empire had its very last outpost in 1783, after the war ended. I had been hesitant to ask Burns if he felt the presence of all those ghosts as we walked the streets. It might sound a little woo-woo, I thought. Turns out I did not need to be concerned. Before I get my first question out, he zings right into a short travelogue about what (or should we say who) he sees when he walks around his own neighborhood.
“As you go west across the streets, you get Lafayette, a general in the Revolutionary War, and then Crosby is the 19th-century philanthropist, and then Broadway — that doesn’t count — and then Mercer, a general who is wounded and dies in the Battle of Princeton,” says Burns. He’s animated by his enthusiasm, talking very fast. “And then Nathaniel Greene, probably the most important general after Washington, and then David Wooster, a major officer. Then West Broadway — doesn’t count, again, though it used to be Laurens Street — and then Thompson, a general, and Sullivan, from New Hampshire, where I live, a very important general in the Battle of Long Island, the biggest of the war, but is also part of the extermination of the Indian villages in the Haudenosaunee and upstate. And then there’s Varick, also a general, and then Hudson and Washington.”
