Overview

"""It'll be a great place if they ever finish it,"" O. Henry wrote about New York City. This laconic remark captures the relentlessly transitory character of New York, and it points toward Max Page's synthetic perspective. Against the prevailing motif of a naturally expanding metropolis, Page argues that the early-20th-century city was dominated by the politics of destruction and rebuilding that became the hallmark of modern urbanism. The oxymoron ""creative destruction"" suggests the tensions that are at the heart of urban life: between stability and change, between particular places and undifferentiated spaces, between market forces and planning controls, and between the ""natural"" and ""unnatural"" in city growth. Page investigates these cultural counterweights through case studies of Manhattan's development, with depictions ranging from private real estate development along Fifth Avenue to Jacob Riis's slum clearance efforts on the Lower East Side, from the elimination of street trees to the efforts to save City Hall from demolition. In these examples some New Yorkers celebrate planning by destruction or marvel at the domestication of the natural environment, while others decry the devastation of their homes and lament the passing of the city's architectural heritage. A central question in each case is the role of the past in the shaping of collective memory - which buildings are preserved? which trees are cut down? which fragments are enshrined in museums? Contrary to the popular sense of New York as an ahistorical city, the past - as recalled by powerful citizens - was, in fact, at the heart of defining how the city would be built."

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9780226644684

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A sober, humane explanation of how and why New York City became a place of continuous rebuilding. Neither lamenting the end of Old New York or positing one big bad root cause, historian Page (History/Georgia State Univ., Yale) instead explores the cultural meanings attached to the fundamental process of urbanization that he calls creative destmction - a process that established itself during the first third of the century. In character- and narrative-driven chapters, he highlights several elements of city planning - slum clearance, tree planting and removal, and historical preservation - and illustrates how they were tools for the powerful to define the city. Real estate developers were central in developing Fifth Avenue as the valuable spine of Gotham ; reformers like Jacob Riis fought for the wholesale removal of the leprous slums of the Lower East Side; the elites battled to preserve the structures they felt defined the true city amidst unprecedented change. Page reiterates throughout that even when government officials and social reformers clashed, they shared the same goal: To protect and perpetuate the best buildings and architectural values of the past. Concluding the survey are two chapters on how collective memory is attempted in art. Among the varied views are collector I.N. Phelps Stokes's massive but lifeless set of illustrations, The Iconography of Manhattan Island; Virginia Lee Burton's 1942 paean to threatened pastoral life, The Little House; and photography of the early 20th century (by Strand, Abbott, and others), which redefined New York in terms of movement rather than permanence. Readers wondering how the city can be captured in a single Stieglitz photo or why East Side tenement demolition faced widespread criticism will find answers as part of the larger truth of how capitalism, culture, and art shape collective memory. For real or armchair New Yorkers, the whole package is a treat. (Kirkus Reviews)

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