New York at its Core: A Review of an Exhibition at the City Museum of New York (original) (raw)
Past, Present, and Future: History and Memory in New York City, 1800-1860
The first half of the nineteenth century saw New York City rise from a relatively small city to the largest metropolis in North America. The changes that affected the United States, from economic to demographic to cultural, first appeared in New York. New York City was a place of change and progress. At the same time, a new concern with the history of the City and concern with preservation arose. This study will examine how the need to balance preservation with change, the need to create an identity for New York, and the need to set New York's place in the nation, were explored in the early historical discourse surrounding New York, from formal chronicles to acts of preservation. I have examined the preservation and publication efforts of the New-York Historical Society, Washington Irving's Knickerbocker History and its affect on New York culture, local histories of New York City and State, and the controversies surrounding the removal of the City's burial grounds in order to explore these issues. Themes of civic memory, the relationship between public and private, ideas of a usable past, and the relationship between myth and history run throughout this material. The historical discourse surrounding the New York of today was shaped by the historical discourse of the early nineteenth century. (Unpublished dissertation, UCI 2002)
Cultural History of NYC, Part II. From the Jazz Age to Post-War Modernism. Spring 2023 Syllabus
2023
We begin with a look at NYC culture in the Progressive era, the 'Teens and the 20's, with a focus on the personalities of bohemian Greenwich Village, the Ashcan School of painters, the 1913 Armory Show, and the advent of Modernism. We look at F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age essays and the "strange bedfellows" of Fifth Avenue socialites and collectors and hard-core radical leftist intellectuals and labor leaders. We then move uptown for a look at the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's and 30's-when Harlem really was in vogue. We look at Harlem cultural debates in selected writings by James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes, and such artists as Richmond Barthé, Augusta Savage, and Aaron Douglas. This is the era when NYC architecture turned distinctly modernist and distinctly vertical, as we trace the evolution of NYC's early skyscraper movement. But after the Crash of '29 and during the "lean years" of the 1930's, the arts turned toward social realism, supported by the politics of Mayor LaGuardia and FDR's New Deal. We explore three iconic projects of the era: the creation of Rockefeller Center; Robert Moses' early parkway, beach, and bridge-and-tunnel projects; and the 1939 World's Fair, a "World of Tomorrow" ironically at odds with the true urban character of NYC. Our course moves on to an examination of two contrasting visions of the nature of the city: that of the Master Builder and Power Broker, Robert Moses, and the contrasting vision of Jane Jacobs, whose vision of urban neighborhood life countered the "tower in the park" vision of the professional urban planners. We conclude with an overview of NYC in the final decades of the 20th century-the Beatnik Village, Warhol's Factory, and "Fear City"-and the opening decades of the 21st Century, from 9/11 through the Bloomberg and de Blasio years: "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Vanishing New York.
Cultural History of NYC, Part I: From Mannahatta Through the Gilded Age. Fall 2022 Syllabus
2022
In this interdisciplinary course we will explore the transformations marking the cultural history of New York City from its beginnings through the Gilded Age. Starting out as "Mannahatta," a bountiful Native American hunting, fishing, and camping ground, the island at the mouth of the Hudson River has gone from the small commercial venture of Dutch New Amsterdam to the rough and tumble politics of British colonial New York, to a brief stint as Federal capital of the United States, to its more enduring role as cultural and economic engine of "The Empire State" and "the capital of capitalism." We trace NYC's cultural history through a look at the great public and private projects that helped to define its character: the grid plan of the city streets,
History of Architecture and Urbanism in New York City
2015
This course will explore the history of architecture and urbanism in New York City from the colonial period through the present day. We will study well-known monuments along with lesser-known but important works, and consider the political, cultural, and economic factors that fueled the development of New York's built environment. This course will situate the architecture of New York City within the broader discourse of American architectural history, and will examine the impact that New York had on nationwide architectural trends. Classroom lectures will be supplemented regularly with site visits across the city. Course Requirements Midterm (20%) Paper (35%) Final (30%) Presentations (10%) Attendance/Participation (5%)
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015
What is a city? Well we might ask, for today the city as we have known itparticularly New York City, which has long reflected the state of the nation at its best and its worst-is a disintegrating entity, a depleted idea, a diminished thing. The decline of the city, as emblem and actuality, is eroding the nation's stated commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For it is the gritty city, particularly New York City, rather than the fabled New England village that has stood as the last hope for American democracy. the place where "aliens"-the huddled masses from across the Atlantic and the internal emigrés from the heart of the country-have arrived with great expectations, and it is the city that has transformed them into committed members of the body politic. As America abandons its cities, while protecting its urban and suburban enclaves of wealth, commerce, and high-income residences, its poor citizens are sentenced to a life of diminished expectations, danger, disease, and despair that flares into occasional violence and self-destructiveness. Lewis Mumford, distinguished urban analyst, articulated his urban ideal in The Culture of Cities (1938). The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused: here, too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and selfconscious society. 1 Mumford stressed the goals of unity, cohesion, and coherence: for him the city should compose, out of its diverse residents and elements, one living and nurturing organism. However, he lived long enough to see his ideal vision crumble and his beloved Manhattan, the personification of that ideal, decline and fall from grace. Born in Flushing, Queens, in 1895, Mumford, who called himself "a child of the city," grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a "typical New York brownstone," though all of the city became his landscape of discovery: the streets were the leaves of grass through which he walked, and New England Journal of Public Policy the port of New York stood as his frontier, his Walden Pond. "Not merely was I a city boy but a New Yorker, indeed a son of Manhattan, who looked upon specimens from all other cities as provincial-especially Brooklynites," he confessed in Sketches from Life (1982). Despite its problems, deriving from vast inequities of wealth, the New York of Mumford's youth offered "a moral stability and security" which, by the 1970s, when New York City nearly went bankrupt, was long gone. As a distinguished elderly man, Mumford looked back on his old New York with wonder and ahead to an increasingly horrific New York with despair. "More than once lately in New York I have felt as Petrarch reports himself feeling in the fourteenth century, when he compared the desolate, wolfish, robber-infested Provence of his maturity, in the wake of the Black Plague, with the safe, prosperous region of his youth." 2 Mumford's memoir, so full of resonant remembrances of things past, traces his development from youth, before World War I, to coming of age as one of America's most influential cultural critics, between the wars, then to the alienated sense of a "displaced person" in modern, plague-ridden Manhattan. He is blunt, explicit, and denunciatory, like an Old Testament prophet, in his assessment of contemporary New York. "The city I once knew so intimately has been wrecked; most of what remains will soon vanish; and therewith scattered fragments of my own life will disappear in the rubble that is carried away." 3 Sunk also, like the fabled Atlantis, was Mumford's ideal vision of the city, "where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order." We now know that our cities-particularly New York City, America's Gotham or Metropolis, a city in desperate and perpetual need of rescue, as represented in popular culture by Batman, Superman, or even Ghostbusters!-have arrived at the point of the maximum diffusion of power and fragmentation of culture, a dissolving center of centrifugal forces that results in chaos and entropy. There, indeed, is where the issues and seemingly irresolvable problems of civilization are focused; there, too, are acted out the dramas of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society now in disarray and decay. In the cities the economic gap between rich and poor is dramatized. Since World War II, small manufacturing plants and sweatshops, which for more than a century have exploited but also sustained immigrants and other members of the underclass, have disappeared, like a receding tide (often to foreign shores), and these groups, composed largely of minorities, have been left behind, stranded on the beach, to fight one another over what little remains-as blacks attacked Koreans in south central Los Angeles during the riots of spring 1992. There, in the republic's center cities, things have fallen apart; the center has not held. (New York did not bum after the LA riots, to