Picturing the Dynamic City. On Changing New York (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
Introduction The contribution of Berenice Abbott in the photographic reconstitution of the urban environment is very important and can be summarized in two main parameters. The first is the preservation of a large part of the work of Eugene Atget and its spread in America. Her sustained efforts contributed in a decisive manner to the international recognition of this great creator (Sullivan, 2006). The second parameter is her own work. Intensively influenced by the extent and the importance of Atget’s task, she traveled from Paris to New York to find a publisher for his photos. At the same time, however, she realized that this city encompassed endless possibilities of photographic exploration and decided to abandon Paris and stay there permanently. The contrasts of a changed and changing city convinced her that a comprehensive portrait of New York was very interesting. She was particularly interested in the physical changes that the city had undergone, its changing neighborhoods wit...
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
First we take Manhattan: la destrucción creativa de las ciudades
2016
En los sesenta algunos barrios de Manhattan se habian convertido en paisajes desolados y, cincuenta anos mas tarde, los pisos construidos ahi son los mas caros del mundo. Aunque parezca sorprendente, este no es un fenomeno exclusivo de Nueva York. Uno tras otro, los centros urbanos de todo el mundo han ido cambiado. Donde habia comercios tradicionales ahora se amontonan tiendas alternativas y donde vivian las personas mas excluidas ahora se congregan artistas y ejecutivos. Ante estos cambios, algunos hablan de regeneracion urbana y otros, en cambio, lo llaman gentrificacion. Mientras los primeros celebran un renacer urbano, los segundos denuncian la venta de la ciudad. A traves de este paseo por barrios como Malasana, Belleville, El Raval, el Bronx o Lavapies se conoceran las claves para entender las ciudades y los principales argumentos para transformarlas. El libro toma su titulo del estribillo de una de las canciones mas famosas del cantante Leonard Cohen : �(I'm guided by th...
Brooklyn Revisited: An Illustrated View from the Street 1970 to the Present 1
Urban ethnographers must understand that while we look at things using close-up lenses, most policy-makers, on the other hand, employ wide-angle lens to describe what is going on at that very same street level. In this essay the authors attempt to provide a contrast between those views in the context of the radically changed public perception of the New York City Borough of Brooklyn. When the authors began their sociological research (and social activism) in the late Twentieth Century, the neighborhoods in which they were active suffered from the spread of middle-class (white) flight and urban blight. Today, in the first two decades of the Twenty-first, the fortunes of these same areas have been reversed, but longer-term residents face new 'problems' in the form of gentrification and displacement. It is suggested here that a view from the street can provide a better sociological understanding of the bigger picture. Brooklyn's Image Then and Now The image of Brooklyn as a whole, as well as its most well-known individual neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush, and Coney Island, has always been a powerful independent force in creating and maintaining its concrete reality. Forty years ago these place names were stigmatized. Today, in 2015, Brooklyn and these areas are by all accounts in the popular media decidedly 'in' places. The Borough of Brooklyn currently occupies an elevated status as a gem in the crown of New York City as a Global City, and it is fast becoming a popular tourist destination in its own right. By almost every measure the 'Borough of churches' has moved far beyond 'renaissance' and 'revival' to enjoy a hard-earned, successfully promoted, chic and hip image that is presented to the rest of the world. As opposed to the 'bad old days' in the 1960s and 1970s the major challenges likely to confront local community and political leaders in the Twenty-first Century arise from such 'problems' as the rising cost of housing resulting from upscale gentrification by which investors compete for any available development space. A few decades ago the problems were exactly the opposite. No one at that time could have ever imagined a hip travel guide, Lonely Planet, would name Brooklyn as one of the top world destinations for 2007 (Kuntzman 2007). In 2015 the travel guide giant Fodor's advertised the first guidebook devoted only to the borough with this as its teaser: Brooklyn is the most talked about, trendsetting destination in the world. Fodor's Brooklyn, the first comprehensive guidebook to New York City's most exciting borough, is unlike any we've ever published. Written and illustrated by locals, it's infused with authentic Brooklyn flavor throughout—making it the go-to guide for locals and visitors alike.
New York: A future Metropolis
This essay aims to compare the visual aspects of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film ‘Metropolis’ and the ever expanding skyward modernist city of New York in the 1920s, and asks whether or not Lang’s vision of the future depicted in Metropolis and its frightening forecast of a mechanical authoritarian future is a fair representation of the underlying social dynamic in New York at the time weather the gleaming spectacle of height was a mechanism used to mask or control the conflicting reality. The inspiration for Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis is thought to be based on his first impression of his view of The New York skyline on October 1924 from a ship’s deck approaching the harbour. Stating that, “the view of the new York at night is a beacon of beauty strong enough to be the centre piece of a film... There are flashes of red and blue, gleaming white, and screaming green... Streets full of moving turning spiralling lights and high above there are advertisements surpassing the stars with their light.”
Reshaping New York's Landscape
Journal of Urban History, 2021
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.
Brooklyn Revisited: An Illustrated View from the Street 1970 to the Present
2020
Urban ethnographers must understand that while we look at things using close-up lenses, most policy-makers, on the other hand, employ wide-angle lens to describe what is going on at that very same street level. In this chapter, the authors attempt to provide a contrast between those views in the context of the radically changed public perception of the New York City Borough of Brooklyn. When the authors began their sociological research (and social activism) in the late twentieth century, the neighborhoods in which they were active suffered from the spread of middle-class (white) flight and urban blight. Today, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the fortunes of these same areas have been reversed, but longer-term residents face new ‘problems’ in the form of gentrification and displacement. It is suggested here that a view from the street can provide a better sociological understanding of the bigger picture.