While I wasn’t looking, it seems Nickelodeon and Amazon released the first and second seasons of Hey Arnold! on dvd. I’m almost positive I became an urban reporter because of this cartoon. This show was on when my brothers and I were in elementary and middle school, and I really don’t know what three comfy private-school suburban kids related to in a tv show about hardscrabble street life in the New York boroughs.
Arnold's love/hate crush called him "football head."
I do know that every time Arnold, who was an ten-year-old white kid living in a Queens boarding house with his pretty poor and senile but awesome grandparents, chatted it up with Mr. Hyunh, a Vietnamese immigrant and waiter at a Mexican restaurant who had lost his baby daughter years ago during the Fall of Saigon (this show did not shy away from the heavy), I nearly bawled into my Ovaltine.
For a class on urban design, right now I’m reading Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air, in particular a chapter on monolithic New York city planner (and probable megalomaniac) Robert Moses, and another chapter on Jane Jacobs, a wholly different kind of urban thinker who preferred functioning small city streets to Moses’s passion for highways. Berman points to a lot of great writing on cities and urbanism in those chapters: the line in Ulysses about god = the sound of boys playing ball in a city street, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City.
It aired after Berman’s book was written, but I’d like to posit Hey Arnold! as an heir to the type of urban modernism that Berman and Jacobs love. That show was basically about people bumping into each other on the street and chatting a little, then moving along to their jobs and houses and personal problems. What Jacobs called the “intricate sidewalk ballet” of healthy city life. But Hey Arnold!, like Joyce and Jacobs, made that randomness feel so *important.*
Yes, I’m calling for the canonization of a Nicktoon. The real question is, what scary Nicktoon was little turn-of-the-century Robert Moses watching that made him all crazy for power?