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.

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.”

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.

Sunlight and Gaslight: Mapping Light in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City

2020 ◽  
pp. 009614422093987
Author(s):  
Rachel Eu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Morphological Characteristics ◽  
Gis Mapping ◽  
Natural Light ◽  
Artificial Light

This article evaluates the distribution of natural and artificial light in New York City during the mid-nineteenth century. Analysis centers on the interplay between social factors and morphological characteristics of the urban landscape in impacting New Yorkers’ access to light. The article employs built environment data and geographic information systems (GIS) mapping methodology as its main approach. First, the article makes an exploration into the distribution of natural light. By analyzing the distribution of built features, the article demonstrates that natural light and darkness dispersed along lines of wealth and poverty, as sunlight commodified into a highly coveted resource. The second section of this article draws from archival sources to construct an unprecedented visualization of the street gas main network in mid-century Manhattan. Analysis demonstrates that spatial patterns of artificial light correlated strongly with commerce, as the new technology was prioritized along commercial streets over residential thoroughfare.

Constructing Identity in Seneca Village

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-180
Author(s):  
Diana Dizerega Wall ◽  
Nan A. Rothschild ◽  
Meredith B. Linn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Black Community ◽  
York City ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Central Park ◽  
The City

This chapter explores the issue of identity in Seneca Village, a nineteenth-century, middle-class, black community located in what is now Central Park in New York City. The city evicted the residents in 1857, and until recently this important village was forgotten. Using information from historical documents and material culture (including landscaping and both the form and decoration of dishes) excavated from the site in 2011, this study examines the intersection of class, race, and nationality. The evidence suggests that the identity of at least one family there was made of many strands: they may have identified themselves as members of the black middle class, as Americans, as African Americans, and perhaps even as Africans, depending on the situation and the audience. Skillful use of these strands may have been one way in which this and other village families attempted to ameliorate oppression and to make a place for themselves.

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.

scholarly journals Uma tríade botânica na paisagem oitocentista portuense: jardins e hortos de excelência científica e económica

CEM ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 218-238
Author(s):  
Cristiana Vieira ◽  
Ana Catarina Antunes ◽  
Sónia Faria
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Other ◽  
City Center ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The present work explores the recognition of the past and present genius loci of three spaces of Porto city center as remaining and transformed representations of spaces with distinct, interconnected and pertinent botanical missions in the nineteenth century landscape of the city. Through the exploration of sources left by the interveners or graphic testimonies of the urban landscape from 1850 to the present day of these (ethno-)botanical spaces, we explore how the interveners and spaces of the Jardim Botânico da Academia Polythecnica do Porto, the Horto-pharmacêutico da Botica da Hospital Real de Santo António and the Horto das Virtudes mutually influenced. On the other hand, it is demonstrated how these spaces determined a time of special interest in botany that would not be repeated in the history of the city and its population.

Reforming the High Schools

1979 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nasaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Elementary Schools ◽  
High Schools ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
High Rate ◽  
School Systems ◽  
School Age ◽  
The City

The reformed boards, their superintendents, and their professional staffs had their work cut out for them. As we have seen, the city and some rural school systems had never been able to catch up with the expanding school-age population. Overcrowding was particularly a problem in the urban areas of the Northeast and the Midwest. In New York City alone, “at the turn of the century 1,100 willing children were refused admission to any school for lack of space.” The situation was as bad in other city school systems. The overcrowding was no doubt contributory to the high rate of failure and growing percentage of overage students in the city schools—over 40 percent of the total in the Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, and Minneapolis systems, according to Colin Greer. One might have expected that the major thrust of reform at the turn of the century would be these urban schools. But this was not the case. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the major concern of the public school reformers was not the overcrowded elementary schools, but the relatively underattended high schools. Though the elementary schools were not doing their job as well as might be hoped, they were at least keeping upwards of 70 percent of the school-age population off the streets and under proper supervision through their most tender years. The same could not be said of the secondary schools. As late as 1890, more than 90 percent of the fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds (those potentially dangerous adolescents) were free of any institutional supervision. Here was a potential “social problem” much more dangerous than overcrowding and failure in the elementary grades. The progressive reformers and their colleagues had succeeded through the closing decades of the nineteenth century in drawing attention to the “youth” and “class” problems. The problems, as they themselves had pointed out, were interconnected. Problem adolescents were not going to become model wageworkers; they were much more likely to become problem workers. The solution proposed to the youth and class problems was an institutional one.

Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Daggett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Language Barrier ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The City

The advent of Modern American Spiritualism took place in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Faubourgs Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of the city. This book focuses on Le Cercle Harmonique, the francophone séance circle of Henry Louis Rey, a Creole of color who was a key civil rights activist, author, and Civil War and Reconstruction leader. His life has remained largely in the shadows of New Orleans historiography owning, in part, to a language barrier. The book weaves an intriguing historical tale of the supernatural, chaotic postbellum politics, and the personal triumphs and tragedies of Henry Louis Rey. Besides Rey’s séance circle, there is also a discussion about the Anglo-American séance circles in New Orleans. The book places these séance circles within the context of the national scene, and the genesis of nineteenth-century Spiritualism is examined with a special emphasis placed on events in New York and Boston. The lifetime of Henry Rey and that of his father, Barthélemy Rey, spanned the nineteenth century, and mirror the social and political dilemmas of the black Creoles. The book concludes with a comparison of Spiritualism with the Spiritualist and Spiritual churches, as well as voodoo. The book’s narrative is accompanied by wonderful illustrations, reproductions of the original spiritual communications, and photographs.

Nineteenth-Century Stories and Columns

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurora Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
The World ◽  
News Industry ◽  
The City

This chapter sets Joseph Pulitzer's spectacular building for his paper, the New York World, against the moves uptown by the Herald and the Times that would begin the shift away from the nineteenth-century concentration on Park Row. Pulitzer's aim was to have the tallest building in the world and a shining beacon in New York City. At twenty-six stories and rising over three hundred feet from the sidewalk to the base of the lantern on top of the dome, the building achieved the height superiority and the notoriety that Pulitzer wanted. The chapter demonstrates how the taller structures signaled a new corporate presence in the city, as wealthy press barons with seemingly unlimited resources increasingly led the news industry. Publishers like Pulitzer built their offices on the uppermost floors from which they could survey the city, their readers, and their competitors.

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