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Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace Oxford University Press 1,383 pp., $49.95 |
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Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford's Writings on New York edited by Robert Wojtowicz Princeton Architectural Press 279 pp., $27.50 |
| Over several centuries and in one crucial decade, New Yorkers tell their city's story. by Barnet Schecter If any single figure epitomizes the spirit of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, it would seem to be Walt Whitman. "When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavements," the authors quote from Leaves of Grass, "I too arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge with the crowd, and gaze with them." Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, professors of history at Brooklyn College and John Jay College, respectively, have spent 20 years merging with the crowd, working on a teeming epic of which this nearly 1,400-page tome is only the first half (the second, covering the twentieth century, is due out next year). With Whitman, they seem to say: "Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, / The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate." Burrows and Wallace try to weave every aspect of the city's history--economic, social, political, military, architectural, and cultural--into a continuous, dramatic narrative, almost novelistic in feel, told from the point of view of every stratum of society. The authors quote so extensively from letters, documents, and firsthand accounts--in order to "adopt the perspective of contemporaries as we relate their experiences, remaining mostly in their 'now'"--that in the strongest passages the story seems to tell itself through the voices of its characters. (This immediacy is heightened by bringing the past into the reader's "now": Gotham consistently names the present-day streets and intersections where historical events took place.) The book devotes six pages to Whitman, whose Leaves was "an ode to New York," and whose poetry "finessed social and class tensions of which he was only too aware, which he himself embodied." But Gotham itself is no exercise in civic boosterism: From beginning to end, the simmering racial, sexual, and class tensions that marked New York's evolution as a commercial center erupt into scenes of graphic violence. Early on, Dutch traders savagely massacre Native Americans; one eyewitness recalls a Dutch commander laughing as soldiers took a prisoner and "stuck his private parts, which they had cut off, in his mouth while he was still alive, and after that placed him on a mill-stone and beat his head off." In the eighteenth century, indentured maidservants organize themselves against their British merchant masters, who have been beating and molesting them. In a sensational trial in the 1830s, an upper-class dandy is accused of hacking a prostitute to death and setting fire to her body in one of the city's fancy bawdy houses; despite overwhelming evidence, the jury takes less than 10 minutes to acquit him. Throughout Gotham, from the city's first slave rebellion in 1712 to the Civil War Draft Riots, African Americans are tortured, lynched, and burned alive. Such lurid portrayals of the conditions of daily life--as well as their economic causes--animate the larger saga of New York's rise from backwater of the Dutch mercantile empire to great "City of Capital," which is presented in five sections. These cover the geological record, Native Americans, and New Amsterdam up to 1664; the development of New York as a vital seaport in the British Empire (1664--1783); its emergence as a mercantile town pivotal in the global economy (1783--1843); the rise of manufacturing (1844--1879), including the city's expansion in the aftermath of the Civil War; and New York's consolidation as "Industrial Center and Corporate Command Post" (1880--1898), which coincided with the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York, "a municipal counterpart of the giant corporations busily being born." While Gotham's chronological structure and focus on economic growth seem conventional enough, both its organization and content defy certain norms of traditional history books. The consistently anecdotal narrative allows few of the summarizing and interpretive passages that usually punctuate such books, and that might help readers integrate the welter of quotes, statistics, and lore--even the broad outlines of the story. But perhaps that's the point. Like impassioned proletarians, all of the fine details in Gotham clamor for equal status, illuminating neglected facets of a collective history. Gotham leaves off in the late 1890s, when skyscrapers were giving both "shelter and symbolic expression" to the new economic order of modern American capitalism. A scant 30 years later, Lewis Mumford (1895--1990) was proclaiming the skyscraper an architectural dead end. Robert Wojtowicz, the literary executor of Mumford's estate, has fashioned a superb collection of the architecture critic's columns for the New Yorker during the 1930s. Unlike the International Style buildings Mumford critiques for their hackneyed cantilevers and their designers' dogmatic "faith in ferro-concrete as an absolute," his columns--drawn mostly from the series entitled "The Skyline" and "The Art Galleries"--are crisp, sardonic, and free of clichés. In scope and coherence, the writing embodies Mumford's ideal of what an "organic" modern architecture should do, which is "a matter of relating air, sunlight, space, gardens, outlook, social intercourse, economic activity, in such a fashion as to form a concrete whole." Sidewalk Critic covers the period from 1931 to 1940 (except for two autobiographical pieces about Mumford's childhood and adolescence in New York City). Each section is devoted to one fall-spring season and includes a summary of historical background: the Great Depression, the election of Roosevelt, the New Deal, the birth of public housing, the rise of Fiorello LaGuardia as mayor and Robert Moses as parks commissioner. Mumford keeps track of new housing projects, clinics, piers, stores, lunch counters, restaurants, office buildings, and even zoos, carefully considering the materials, colors, and proportions of facades, the clarity of plans, the appropriateness of height and bulk. With righteous indignation, Mumford defends the public interest against the skyscraper, which he calls "the businessman's toy, his plaything, his gewgaw." In "Frozen Music or Solidified Static? Reflections on Radio City," from 1931, Mumford excoriates Rockefeller and his architects for a design that shows "small evidence of any underlying unity of conception," and in which, he argues, intelligence and public spirit have been sacrificed in order to wring the last million out of the site. The construction of the Rockefeller Center complex spans the decade, and Mumford follows its progress. After a visit to the RCA Building, he decries the decision of unhappy sponsors to veil Diego Rivera's mural--which contained portraits of Lenin, Marx, and other Communist leaders--behind a wood-and-paper screen (the mural was later destroyed). Mumford recalls how "the Indian craftsmen who helped build the great churches of Mexico used to bury one of their favorite idols under the altars of their Spanish conquerors; and one wonders if Rivera should not have made it a condition of his painting that the work should be hidden behind a sheath of fine marble, to rest there in ironic splendor until the day of reckoning." Mumford's prose contains many such pleasures: erudition, sophistication, humor, and outrage elegantly joined in irreverent, evocative analogies. Returning by ship from Europe in 1932, Mumford sees Manhattan in the distance, "a shimmering silvery-blue mass, mountainous and buoyant, like a bundle of Zeppelins set on end." But the island is only magical from a distance: Up close, its skyscrapers "foster and reap a financial harvest from congestion," when instead they might "accentuate the clean and lonely qualities of a place," creating "a sense of space and clarity and order." This image of splendid isolation sounds more like Le Corbusier and his towers in a park than Mumford the contextualist, who famously insists that a truly modern building should directly express the conditions of the site--the needs and tastes of contemporary life. But the remark is one of many clues in Sidewalk Critic that for all his insistence on defining modernity in architecture, as an urbanist, Mumford is essentially a reactionary. He abhors the density that many city dwellers find energizing and exciting. He calls for shorter buildings and lower densities, for creating suburbs in the city with superblocks and fewer streets. As Wojtowicz points out in his skillful, concise introduction, Mumford's vision of the perfect city was derived from Ebenezer Howard's influential book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, a late-nineteenth--century response to England's industrial slums that proposes semirural cities with strict growth and zoning controls. Mumford's reaction to the landmark International Style show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 is reminiscent of this conception of a static and unified society. "Through modern architecture, certain common desires and methods have clarified themselves and have taken on concrete form throughout Western Civilization... Nothing like this fundamental unity has existed since the Middle Ages." Six decades later--when utopian Modernism has long since been coopted by the speculative office tower, and a generation of aging Postmodernists welcomes the unity (and commissions) offered by Disney's cultural hegemony--the essays in Sidewalk Critic are all the more resonant. BARNET SCHECTER is a freelance writer whose work includes essays and fiction about New York. |
Keywords:
Gotham: A History of New York city to 1898, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford's Writings on New York, Lewis Mumford, New York City