Bitter-sweet Big Apple - Jazz Age review article

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.

2014

Journal of Urban Affairs, 2012

At one time the New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling looked somewhat down his editorial nose at Chicago, calling it "The Second City." The term stuck, for comedians and the rest of us. It really took until now for someone like political scientist Larry Bennett to turn the long-term sobriquet into part of a typology describing Chicago and its history less as a comparative second fiddle to global New York and more like what another New Yorker, the late New York Times writer, R. W. Apple called the city: "America's city." Apple was probably not the first to opine such representative logic-for a long time, and perhaps even still, social scientists have studied Chicago more than most, if not all other, American cities. Putting aside social science and the lasting impact of the "Chicago School," for the moment, Chicagoans of all types including Mike Royko and Elizabeth Taylor (newspaper columnists), Arnold Hirsch (political scientist), Milton Rakove (historian), Steven Cohen (lawyer and fundraiser), and both Sara Paretsky and Michael Harvey (crime writers) have taken important turns at describing the city. In perhaps the most trenchant recent addition to the academic study of Chicago, The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism, Larry Bennett blends experience and social science. On the one hand, Bennett is a longtime Chicagoan and writes in the tradition of one who has spent over three decades walking the streets and embedding himself in the neighborhoods of "America's city." In other words, like the literature he contributes to, he might not be a mystery writer/bar owner like Harvey or an essayist/news reporter like Royko, but Bennett is deep down a Chicagoan and it shows in this book. On the other hand, he is a clear-eyed and objective academic who uses the city not only as the object of his academic affections but also as a lens with which to assess a full range of the urban literature as both tool and critical subject. In short, The Third City is a rich and critical mix of urban study, academic literature, and Chicago experience that together produces another good urban book on R. W. Apple's representative city. Beyond his street-level experience, Bennett approaches his subject from two perspectivesalternating visions of urbanism from two scholars he believes to be the two most important interpreters of American urbanism in the twentieth century, Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford. Each chapter of the book, each turn of Chicago as "first, second or third city," is informed by either the panoramic metropolitan or regionalist view of Lewis Mumford and/or the fine-grained, street-level view of the city and its neighborhoods of Jane Jacobs. Even when they are not firmly written into the paragraph one can find either Mumford's geographic development of the city and its region or Jacobs's close experience of the street registering in Bennett's phased assessment of Chicago. He begins his account of Chicago and its representations with Chapter Two on the various "renditions" of the city-finding especially good ground in the "self conscious" production of the "city of broad shoulders" with its muscular rise to predominant "first city" status as an

Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, 2013

Inspired by a photograph, taken by James Van Der Zee in 1926, of a dead black girl lying in a decorated coffin, Morrison sets out to write a revisionist history of the Harlem Renaissance, or the Jazz Age, in the 1920s in her sixth novel and the second of her love trilogy, Jazz (1992). And, without mentioning, let alone celebrating, the cultural, artistic, social, and even political events and accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance, Morrison offers her own revisionist history of Harlem by depicting the experiences and traumas of migrant blacks from the South. But what is so unique about Morrison’s literary historiography of the life of Harlem in Jazz? What are the unspoken aspects of the urban experiences of African Americans in Harlem? What are the similarities and differences between the social life of the blacks of the rural South and that of migrant blacks from the South in the urban North? How do the urban experiences of the migrant blacks contest and destabilize the popular formulations of urban experiences observed and developed by certain white, male theorists? In other words, how does Morrison represent and conceptualize a distinctive form of urban modernity in the region of Harlem of New York in the context of the Northern Migration and Harlem Renaissance? In light of Jennifer Robinson’s “ordinary-city” approach to urban studies elaborated in her Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (2006), I argue that Morrison’s vision of urban modernity, derived from her observations of the black migrants of Harlem in the 1920s, differs partially from the understandings of urban modernity of white, middle-class, male theorists, such as Georg Simmel and his followers Robert Park and Louis Wirth. Robinson’s “ordinary city” approach seeks to dislocate the understanding of urban modernity from certain western theorizations on such metropolises as Berlin and Paris. Privileging certain western metropolises as the origins and sources of what constitutes the urban modern leads to a hierarchical, ethnocentric evaluation of cities without being able to appreciate and understand the urban phenomena and experiences of diverse social groups in different histories and geographies. The “ordinary city” approach does not dismiss the importance of the observations of the established western, male theorists, but aims to explore the particular form of urban modernity of every city by dislodging the privileged relationship of the West and modernity. Specifically, instead of focusing only on the possibility and development of a unique form of individuality in the urban milieu in the early twentieth century, Morrison in Jazz seeks to demonstrate that, as a racial minority in a white supremacist society, African Americans in Harlem develop a black urban modernity, a dialectical negotiation between individuality and community, which is represented through the narrator’s diverse and contradictory observations of the urban experiences of the blacks and also the struggles of the protagonists, Violet and Joe, who negotiate not only with the traumatic loss of their own mothers and families in their childhood in the South, but also with the unique kind of urban loneliness as well as their gradual detachment from the black communities both in the South and the City during their urban life in Harlem.

2002

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.”

A paper comparing and contrasting two literary renditions of Brooklyn's 1950's working class in order to trace the rise of urban authenticity in contemporary New York literature

The cinematic city, 1997

The noir city of Hollywood's thrillers of the 1940s and early 1950s is a shadow realm of crime and dislocation in which benighted individuals do battle with implacable threats and temptations. 1 Often a little too conveniently framed as a symptomatic response to the cultural and social upheavals besetting the US after the Second World War-the nuclear age, the Cold War and homefront anticommunism, the adjustment to a postwar economic order-film noir's resonant scenarios of fear, persecution, and disjunction actually began to appear before the US entered the war. Film noir also inherited many of its narrative and stylistic features, and much of its urban atmosphere, from the hard-boiled pulp fiction of the interwar period (Krutnik, 1991 33-44). Looking back from the vantage-point of 1950, Raymond Chandler suggested that the postwar climate was responsible for feeding, not breeding, the 'smell of fear' generated by the pulp crime stories:

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