Reshaping New York's Landscape (original) (raw)

Review of Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square by Stephen Petrus. "Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight," observes the narrator Julius in Teju Cole's meditative novel Open City (2011), largely set in New York. Cole reminds us that the city is a tapestry, made up of distinct yet intertwined localities, each a springboard for reflection, a world unto itself. In Open City, the built environment is a text with many layers of meaning and levels of complexity. New York City is at bottom a palimpsest. These three books echo Julius' views that New York neighborhoods are unique entities and that both the quotidian and the extraordinary are worthy of historical examination. Each writer probes a specific place to illuminate broader trends in urban history. In Design for the Crowd, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury analyzes the many incarnations of Union Square Park from its origins in the 1830s as the center of an elite residential enclave to its reemergence in the 1980s and 1990s as a shopping and entertainment destination. Merwood-Salisbury views the public-private relationships that remade the Square following the fiscal crisis of 1975 as but the latest chapter in its long history of civic-business alliances and is critical of commentary that decries the "privatization of public space." Jeffrey S. Gurock's Parkchester traces the history of a planned community established by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (Met Life) in 1940, from an ethnically mixed though racially segregated development to a diverse neighborhood reflective of the Bronx's demographics in the twenty-first century. Gurock focuses on harmonious relations among white ethnics in the 1940s and the 1950s and relative racial accord following the integration of Parkchester in the 1960s. And in Tudor City, Lawrence R. Samuel assesses the first residential skyscraper complex in the world, from its creation by real estate developer Fred F. French in the 1920s to the battles over the site between developers and preservationists in the 1970s and 1980s. Samuel depicts Tudor City as a largely self-sustaining community, marked by a strong identity and wariness to outside forces perceived as a threat. Union Square, Parkchester, and Tudor City all reshaped New York's landscape and at their origins represented a fresh set of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes about city living. Merwood-Salisbury 953401J UHXXX10.