Reading the Urban Form of Fire

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Big City ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The City

This chapter considers the big-city blaze as an “object” of interpretation. Given the disturbing frequency of fires that occurred there, New York in the nineteenth century became the home of a unique variety of city reader: the fire watcher. Readers of what were known in this earlier era as “conflagrations” faced a dilemma of formal proportions: whether to interpret the form of fire as a direct material threat to city peoples and property, or else as a captivating pyrotechnic display capable of delighting the senses. Compounding this formal conundrum was the question of how a reader responded to the working-class men who typically volunteered to fight these fires. It was not seldom the case that fire readers who belonged to the middle- and upper classes of society came to regard the improvised physicality and boisterous rowdyism of the amateur fireman as a threat nearly equal to that posed by the city fire.

Capitalism

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Scaff
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Political Machines ◽  
Big City ◽  
The Face ◽  
The City

This chapter examines how Max Weber's time in Chicago shaped his views on capitalism. Chicago in 1904 was the world's fifth largest urban center (behind London, New York, Paris, and Berlin). The city was a new industrial and commercial magnet and transportation hub, with a rapidly increasing working class and major labor, public health, and social issues. The chapter first considers Weber's impressions of Chicago before discussing his thoughts on political reform and the consequences of it in the face of corruption, rule by bosses, and the big city political machines. It then describes the Webers' visit to Hull House and their interest in the Women's Trade Union League, a chapter of the association founded by Jane Addams. It also analyzes Weber's opinion regarding the conditions of the working class in the stockyards, along with his notion of character as social capital.

International Opera in Nineteenth-century New York

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-269
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
World War ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The City

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”

Skyscrapers: The City and the Megacity

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 267-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Parker
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Short Note ◽  
Global South ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The City

This short note considers the migration of the skyscraper from New York and Chicago to Asia and its absence in the emerging megacities of the Global South. Following 9/11, many commentators assumed that the skyscraper was finished, but this was clearly not the case, with super-tall construction now accelerating. However, the distributions of contemporary skyscrapers show us that there are shifts in global power and also in urban form.

Urban Formalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The City

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

The Challenge Dance

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
April F. Masten
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Working Class ◽  
York City ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Blacks And Whites

This chapter examines the transnational origins of the challenge dance, a distinctly American tradition of brag dancing, and the ways in which Irish and African dance forms converged and collided in the taverns of New York City in the early nineteenth century. Part theater, part sport, challenge dances emerged in the antebellum era alongside boxing. Dance matches were the product of the intersecting diasporas and cultural exchange of Irish and African emigrants moving through the Atlantic world. The chapter first considers the compatibilities in African and Irish dance traditions before discussing the genealogy of challenge dancing. It then looks at challenge dance competitions held on streets and in taverns as part of white and blackface shows. It also describes a cultural space and moment in which working-class blacks and whites saw enough likeness in their dance traditions to frame a space of public, popular competition.

Photography and the Image of the City

2020 ◽  
pp. 96-123
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Prolonged Exposure ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Visual Form ◽  
Visual Survey ◽  
The City

This chapter examines the visual form of urban photography during the technology’s foundational stages of the mid-nineteenth century. Of special interest in this chapter is the photographic form of the daguerreotype. Because of its technical limitations and cumbersome requirements for prolonged exposure, the daguerreotype was never a literal window onto the city. The photographic process itself posed the practical and philosophical paradox of whether a city that could not and would not stand still might be interpreted by a mode of representation that required its objects of observation to be stationary. This new technology could offer up images of exquisite detail. It could also produce (unlike the alternative later technology of the stereoscope) pictures in which the pulsating life of the metropolis was more or less absent. Chapter 4 addresses this representational paradox, while presenting a selective visual survey of some of the early city views from New York and Paris that photography afforded the nineteenth-century reader.

Broadway Nights: John Reed and the City

Prospects ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 273-294
Author(s):  
Christopher P. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Big City ◽  
John Reed ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City ◽  
The Voice

Not so very long after John Butler Yeats prophesied that “fiddles” would be “tuning up” throughout American intellectual life in the years before World War I, the private musings of John Reed strike another, less hopeful set of notes. The lament emerges in an unpublished tale Reed wrote in 1913 entitled “Success,” about a poet named Alan Meredith, age twenty-two, who, like Reed, has just come from the country to New York to answer his vocation. “The whirling star of Literature revolves in the Big City,” Reed explains. “By force of gravitation the minor bards sooner or later fall within its orbit, and nine out of ten emit no sparks from that time forth.” Alan's project is an epic poem tentatively entitled New York, A Poem in Twelve Cantos-but he gets nowhere beyond his title. “You see,” Reed writes, “he was making the same mistake as you and I, when we heard the voice [of the city] for the first time and tried to translate it without knowing the language.” Reed elaborates:A poet writes about the things nearest to his heart-the things he does not actually know. As soon as he gains scientific knowledge of anything, the glamour is gone, and it is not mere stuff for the imagination. The bard of green fields and blossoms and running brooks is always a city man, and he who sings the Lobster Palaces and White Lights lives in Greenwich, Conn. Never do the stars seem so beautiful as to him who looks up between brownstone houses on a breathless night; all the magic of the city lies in the glow of lights on the sky seen thirty miles away.

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