The Urban Picturesque: Legitimizing the New York Skyscraper through Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Taylor
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Alfred Stieglitz ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
The Social

In the early twentieth century, debate concerning the social impact of skyscrapers in the modernizing city was widespread, and usually quite acrimonious. This paper will address how artists of this time-period, in their artistic representations of cities and skyscrapers created an urban metaphor of the picturesque as a means to influence a public, increasingly not in favour of the skyscraper. In effect, skyscrapers slowly crept into artistic representations, humbly appearing in late-nineteenth century architectural magazine illustrations or as accents in the skyline of American impressionist paintings. The prolific growth of the twentieth century brought the public debate over skyscrapers into the spotlight and artists took this as an opportunity to promote their views. Some artists, such as the Pictorialists took the opportunity to aestheticize their pictures of the buildings in a fashion that might convey a sense of sublime in the city. Much of the scholarship on the depiction of the skyscraper in the arts has been limited to the Pictorialist photographer’s advancement of modern art in New York City; however, these studies neglect the social significance of the Pictorialist’s use of nature metaphors to create an urban sublime reminiscent of the romantic, picturesque landscapes of the previous century. My paper examines the effect of this aestheticization and the significant promotion and support of the skyscraper from the visual arts, specifically from the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and his circle. I will investigate the development of this aesthetic and how familiarity with this style strengthened support for the skyscraper in the metropolis of New York City. I will further explore these ideas by examining the treatment paintings and photography, in the construction of a familiar sense of awe and, in other words, conjuring the picturesque as a device.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
LaShawn Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Informal Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Labor Patterns

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the less-familiar aspects of informal black women's work during the first three decades of the twentieth century—the labor patterns and economic activities of those that were part of the city's profitable yet illegal sexual economy, gambling enterprise, and supernatural consulting business. In doing so the chapter also tackles the problems of documenting informal labor and maps out a multidisciplinary approach for piecing together the oft-neglected lives of informal black female laborers. Finally, the chapter sets the scope of this study within New York City and describes the city's informal labor sector in order to set the social and economic backdrop within which these workers operate.

“Like a Cosmic, Invisible Umbilical Cord”

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 171-202
Author(s):  
Kavita Kulkarni
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Public Space ◽  
York City ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
The Social ◽  
Black Life ◽  
House Music

In summer 2002, New York City-based DJ Sadiq Bellamy and his two partners, DJs Tabu and Jeff Mendoza, organized the first Soul Summit Music Festival: a free, open-air, and open-to-the-public weekly series of house music dance parties set in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, during the summer season. The party ran every summer without incident for many years, and twenty years later, continues to receive global recognition among house heads for its success in bringing house music culture—and its legacy of liberation as a sensorial practice—to a broader and more intergenerational crowd than one would find in a club. Keeping in mind its rich genealogies, this article considers the social significance of open-air house music culture, and how various forms of participation within these house music topographies rearticulate the social in a way that refuses the spatiality of peripheralization and the temporality of extinction imposed on Black, brown, and queer of color life in New York City and beyond. In the case of Soul Summit, however, it is not just who participates, but also when and where that matter—in public space and in a historically Black neighborhood situated in a post-9/11, post-Bloomberg New York City—particularly as gentrification devastates the material and symbolic conditions that made possible house culture’s multi-faceted expression in the first place. This article proposes that in resistance to the “revanchist” urbanism of gentrification, the affects and arrangements cultivated on the open-air house music dance floor offer an alternate epistemology of, or way to re-imagine, the social. This lens of “house epistemology” illuminates how the gentrification of Fort Greene brought not only a shift in residential demographics, but also the displacement of a certain modality of public culture by foreclosing the social infrastructures that serve to remediate cultural memory and mobilize Black life.

The Folies Bergère in New York City in 1911

1983 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-156
Author(s):  
James S. Moy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Going Public ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Night Club

Nineteenth century American theatre managers generally sought to attract mass audiences. Toward this end they usually featured variety, novelty, and the spectacular in attempts to provide a little something for everyone on each evening's program. By the end of the century many managers had begun to alter this policy, choosing instead to offer entertainments which appealed to only a particular segment of the theatre-going public. Accordingly, the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century brought the development of many distinct strains of theatrical entertainment like vaudeville, the circus, the Little Theatre movement, and the beginnings of the night-club industry.

scholarly journals Nueva York 1916. La ciudad sin límites | New York 1916. Unlimited city

ZARCH ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
José Durán Fernández
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
York City ◽  
Planning System ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
The City

La Ciudad de Nueva York fue pionera en la aplicación de un sistema de planificación de control urbano que pusiera orden y concierto a una ciudad que rebasa los 5 millones de habitantes a principios del siglo XX. Tal complejo organismo urbano, inédito hasta ese momento, fue objeto del más ambicioso plan urbano sobre una ciudad construida.Este artículo se destina al estudio de este originario plan urbano de 1916, el cual sentaría las bases, unas ciertamente visionarias otras excesivas, de la construcción de la Ciudad de Nueva York en todo el siglo XX. La Building Zone Resolution se creó con dos fines: resolver los problemas de congestión humana en un espacio reducido, la ciudad del presente, y proponer una visión del espacio urbano en las décadas venideras, la ciudad del futuro.El artículo es un compendio de diez textos cortos y un epílogo, que junto a sus respectivos diez documentos gráficos, construyen el corpus de la investigación. El lector pues se enfrenta a un ensayo gráfico formado por pequeños capítulos que le sumergirán en los orígenes de la primera ciudad vertical de la historia.PALABRAS CLAVE: Nueva York; Planeamiento; Visión urbana.The city of New York was a pioneer in the implementation of an urban control planning system that set in order a city that exceeds five million people in the early twentieth century. Such complex urban organism – invaluable until that moment – was the target for the most ambitious urban planning on a built city.This paper focuses on the study of this initial urban planning from 1916, which would set the basis, certainly some visionary yet others excessive, for the building of New York City throughout the 20th century. The Building Zone Resolution was created with two purposes: to solve the issues related to the human bundle in a limited space, the city of the present, and to aim a vision of the urban space in the forthcoming decades, the city of the future.The article is a compendium of ten short texts and one epilogue, which in combination with ten graphic documents, frame the corpus of this investigation. Thus, the reader will face a graphic essay composed by a series of brief chapters that highlight the beginning of the first vertical city in history.KEYWORDS: New York; Planning; Urban vision.

scholarly journals A long way from New York City: Socially stratified contact-induced phonological convergence in Ganluo Ersu (Sichuan, China)

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katia Chirkova ◽  
James N. Stanford ◽  
Dehe Wang
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
York City ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Field Recordings ◽  
Endangered Language ◽  
World Languages ◽  
The Social ◽  
Phonological Change

AbstractLabov's classic study,The Social Stratification of English in New York City(1966), paved the way for generations of researchers to examine sociolinguistic patterns in many different communities (Bell, Sharma, & Britain, 2016). This research paradigm has traditionally tended to focus on Western industrialized communities and large world languages and dialects, leaving many unanswered questions about lesser-studied indigenous minority communities. In this study, we examine whether Labovian models for age, sex, and social stratification (Labov, 1966, 2001; Trudgill, 1972, 1974) may be effectively applied to a small, endangered Tibeto-Burman language in southwestern China: Ganluo Ersu. Using new field recordings with 97 speakers, we find evidence of phonological change in progress as Ganluo Ersu consonants are converging toward Chinese phonology. The results suggest that when an endangered language undergoes convergence toward a majority language due to intense contact, this convergence is manifested in a socially stratified way that is consistent with many of the predictions of the classic Labovian sociolinguistic principles.

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