Abstract
In the spring of 1900, at the dawn of a new century, New York City’s public image was about to begin a major refurbishment. Due in part to the architectural transformation that occurred in the city between the turn of the century and the end of World War I, during that 20-year period Americans saw reasons to question the late nineteenth-century image of New York as the prime example of the undesirability and un-Americanness of urban life and culture. Between the turn of the twentieth century and the end of World War I, boosters East and West promoted what they argued comprised the uniquely American characteristics of, respectively, New York City’s new buildings and the rocky landscapes of states such as Colorado and Arizona. Establishing each place’s status as a definitively American landscape, as judged by their promoters, confirmed a key selling point to their consumers in an era of growing cultural nationalism. The direct visual and metaphorical association made by local pundits, architectural critics, and tourism entrepreneurs between New York’s growing cluster of downtown skyscrapers and the dramatic mountainous landscapes of the West proved crucial to New York’s “branding” as a prime early twentieth-century tourist destination. This Americanization of New York via the representation and interpretation of landscape and commercial architecture moved forward boosters’ efforts, begun in the 1890s, to draw middle-class consumers’ attention away from the faces, bodies, and buildings of the Lower East Side.
This chapter is adapted from a chapter in my book How New York Became American, 1890–1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
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Notes
The clearest representation of this phrase and its meaning can be found in John C. Van Dyke, The New New York (New York: Macmillan, 1909).
Max Page has referred to this process, with reference to Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris, as a process of “creative destruction.” See Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Randall Blackshaw, “The New New York,” Century Magazine 64 (August 1902): 492–513
The literature on Paris as the capital of France is enormous; that on London less so. For Paris, see David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958)
David Jordan, Transforming Paris (New York: Free Press, 1995)
David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
Donald Olsen, Growth of Victorian London (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976)
Ken Young and Patricia Garside, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change, 1837–1981 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982).
Herbert Croly, “New York as the American Metropolis,” Architectural Record 13 (March 1903): 199–200
Hamilton Wright Mabie, “The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City,” The Outlook 76 (March 5, 1904): 577–593
Ibid., 588, 593. As historian John Higham has noted, 1906–1907 marked “a new phase in the history of American nativism.” Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns in American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 165.
Stephen J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 77.
The attraction of New York for the newly wealthy was not always popular with longer established New Yorkers, despite the wealth such individuals or their corporations brought to the city. Like the character Dryfoos in William Dean Howells’ novel about class and money in late nineteenth-century New York, A Hazard of New Fortunes, the new millionaires from the Midwest and West were frequently depicted as arrivistes, as flashy buffoons. Their new residences on Fifth Avenue were disparaged by the architectural press as “ridiculous” for their ostentation and poor taste. See Franz K. Winkler, “Architecture in the Billionaire District of New York City,” Architectural Record 11 (October 1901): 679–699.
For a discussion of the growth of white-collar work in New York’s financial sector during these years, see Angel Kwollek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 15–40.
Carol Willis argues for an economic interpretation of New York’s skyscrapers in her Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).
See William Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 23–33
Joseph B. Gilder, “The City of Dreadful Height,” Putnam’s Monthly 5 (November 1908): 131–143
Barr Ferree, “The High Building and Its Art,” Scribner’s Monthly 15 (March 1894): 297–318
English aesthetic theorists John Ruskin and William Morris initiated what became the Arts and Crafts movement in England. The ideas underpinned the American version of that movement in the early twentieth century. The leading figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement was Gustav Stickley. On the philosophy and cultural politics of the American movement, see Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986)
Robert Judson Clark, ed., The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987).
John Corbin, “The Twentieth Century City,” Scribner’s Magazine 33 (March 1903): 259–272
George Ethelbert Walsh, “Modern Towers of Babel in New York,” Harper’s Weekly 151 ( January 12, 1907): 68.
Herbert T. Wade, “Tall Buildings and Their Problems,” American Review of Reviews 38 (November 1908): 577
F.W. Fitzpatrick, “Building Against Fire,” Outlook 88 (April 25, 1908): 936–945
J.K. Freitag, “Fire Prevention in High Buildings,” Engineering Magazine 34 (February 1908): 735–740
T.K. Thomson, “Caisson Foundations of Skyscrapers,” Scientific American 65 (March 7, 1908): 152–154.
A.C. David, “The New Architecture: The First American Type of Real Value,” Architectural Record 28 (December 1910): 388–403.
Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5.
Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 7.
Harriet Monroe, “Arizona,” Atlantic Monthly 89 (June 1902): 780–781.
For histories of the railroad system and its effects on national culture, see Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996)
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“railroads” in Howard R. Lamar, ed., The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977).
For discussions of the role of the railroads in building Western tourism and developing National Parks, see Ann Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1890–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990)
Alfred Runte, Trains of Discovery: Western Railroads and the National Parks (Niwot, CO: Robert Rinehart, 1990).
Robert T. Hill, “The Wonders of the American Desert,” World’s Work 3 (March 1902): 1821–23.
For an example of the metaphorical muddle brought on by efforts to describe the unfamiliar landscapes of the West, see Arthur Inkersly, “The Grand Canyon of Arizona,” Overland Monthly 41 (June 1903): 423–432.
On the construction of national identities see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983)
John Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Pierre Loti, “Impressions of New York,” Century Magazine 85 (February 1913): 611.
Idem, “Impressions of New York” (second article in two-part series), Century Magazine 85 (March 1913): 758–759.
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James Duncan, “Sites of Representation: Place, Time and the Discourse of the Other,” in James Duncan and David Ley, eds., Place, Culture, Representation (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
See William H. Truettner, ed., The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art/Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)
Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, T.H. O’Sullivan: Photographer (Rochester: George Eastman House/Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1966)
David Margolis, To Delight the Eye: The Original Photographic Book Illustrations of the American West (Dallas: DeGolyer Library, 1994).
The most recent critical analysis of the role photography played in constructing the imagery and mythology of the American West is Martha Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers: A Novel (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1968).
Foster and Reynolds Company, New York: The Metropolis of the Western World (New York: Foster and Reynolds, 1902), 9.
Singer Manufacturing Company, Singer Souvenirs of New York City (New York: Singer Manufacturing Company, 1905).
Zoning, height restrictions and the requiring of “setbacks” to stagger the mass of tall buildings was not introduced until 1916 and then, more comprehensively, in the early 1920s following the Regional Plan for Greater New York. For more on the history of planning and building laws in New York City, see Richard Plunz, History of Housing in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)
Keith Revell, Marc Weiss, and Robert Fishman in David Ward and Olivier Zunz, eds., The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City (New York: Russell Sage, 1992).
The publication reviewed was Frederick Keppel, Mr. Pennell’s Etchings of New York “Sky Scrapers” (New York: Frederick Keppel, 1905).
Giles Edgerton, “How New York Has Redeemed Herself from Ugliness—An Artist’s Revelation of the Beauty of the Skyscraper,” Craftsman 11 (January 1907): 458.
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© 2009 Michael J. Thompson
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Blake, A.M. (2009). Antiurbanism, New York, and the Early Twentieth-Century American National Imagination. In: Thompson, M.J. (eds) Fleeing the City. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101050_7
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