Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song

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Preface I grew up about half an hour outside New York, so I guess I was always going to be interested in exploring its pathways. I remember the first time I visited, en route to an orchestral residential weekend. The bus drove straight through, hordes of us on board with faces pressed to the windows, marveling at the metropolis through which we were passing. The road was straight, the view was expansive, and the experience was underwhelming. This was New York in Lincolnshire, England: population circa 150. Coming from the east coast of the UK, I’m surrounded by places that are recognizable on the East Coast of the United States: my mother taught in a school just outside Boston; one of my closest friends works in Newark. But I’m still in the UK and in my home county of Lincolnshire, living close to and working in the historic county town, Lincoln. But what about the real New York (the new New York, that is)? I didn’t visit that until my adulthood, with a pocketful of expectations and a suitcase full of images. Nothing can quite prepare you: I was taken aback by the tone of the immigration officers, but equally taken aback by the charm of everyone else; by the quiet of the streets throughout the whole of Manhattan and the broad, broad streets of Uptown. And by some of the things you see in the movies and hear about in songs that are true: there really are thousands of yellow taxi cabs, and steam really does come out of the sidewalk; Coney Island really is way out of town, and getting to the airports really is a challenge. I soon came to find my favorite places: Battery Park on an early spring evening; Morningside Park first thing in the morning; the breakfast cafГ©s on the Upper West Side; the vibrancy of the East Village. I’m not a New Yorker, of course; never will be—but I’m getting familiar with the language and the customs, the geography of the city and the rhythms of life. I know the difference between pants and pants and chips and chips, tomato and tomato—ah, you know the score. So it has partly been my long-term love affair with New York that has guided my writing, but partly also my love affair with musicals. There are many people responsible for that, and some won’t even realize that their Page x →subtle contribution had such a profound effect. First I’d like to thank Jane Hill, who started it all by recruiting me into Oliver! at the tender age of thirteen; my parents, for getting me hooked on instrumental lessons and letting me do all those amateur shows; and Michael, who has always encouraged me, ever since he bought me the LP of Man of La Mancha one Christmas. Then there are the many teachers I’ve had whose enthusiasm and passion has been so inspiring: in particular, mentors in my school and university years whose flair and momentum gave me wings. But in regard to this book specifically, I would like to acknowledge some very special people and very particular opportunities they have given. I’d really like to thank Stacy Wolf, whose infectious enthusiasm and wonderful support has been so vital. Quite apart from writing some of the most significant books in the field, Stacy is an ardent champion of new scholarship, generous with her time and comments, and wonderfully committed to her students. For the last few years I have been fortunate enough to be a part of a musical theater forum set up by Stacy and Carol Oja, and it has been through the support of that community of scholars that much of this material has developed and blossomed. Thanks, then, to all who have been involved, professors and students too numerous to mention, though I will thank for their helpful comments David Savran, Liz Wollman, Raymond Knapp, Liza Gennaro, Jeffrey Magee, and Lynn Garafola. I’ve also presented papers at Song, Stage and Screen and the International Federation for Theatre Research; my thanks go to all of the organizers who have made this possible and all of the delegates whose feedback has been so warm. Then I would like to thank the people whom I have met in my research: in particular, Michael Garber, whose warmth, generosity, and interest in New York songs has paralleled my own passion; Bruce Pomahac at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, whose energy and knowledge about musicals has been inspiring; and Patrick Carrajat at the New York Elevator Museum, in whose riveting company I spent several hours. I can recommend his company and expertise to anyone. The museum has sadly now closed, and it is a real loss to the city.

Back home I have shared my thoughts with many friends, though a few deserve particular recognition: George Burrows and I have had many conversations sharing an office over ten years; Millie Taylor and I have had stimulating chats collaborating on several projects; Colin Jagger has always encouraged me with the most steadfast support; and Karen Savage has been the most wonderful colleague, companion, and partner I could wish for. All have accompanied me from time to time on my trips to New York, Page xi →and in those shared experiences we have explored the city, trodden its pathways, and often enjoyed its songs. I’m deeply grateful to my publishers, the University of Michigan Press, and particularly to LeAnn Fields for her enthusiasm for this project. It was a playful project to pitch, but LeAnn caught on to its fun and potential. I’m also grateful to my research administrator, Rosalyn Casbard: it has been such a boon to have help with some of the more fiddly aspects of the process. Ros’s patience and organization have been a calming influence and a great help, and I am indebted to her painstaking processing of image rights and spreadsheets. But most of all—because it’s been a long process—I’d like to thank my family. They put up with me jetting off to New York (and not yet taking them with me); they listen to more showbiz songs than any family should have to face; and they bring me such a lot of joy and pleasure in the moments that we share. Karen, VeritГ©, Evelyn, Max, and—yes—Truffle: I love you all. And thanks. Dominic Symonds September 2016

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Pre-amble: The Great White Way I arrive by boat. I have never been here before, but I know this city. I have always known it. I ♥ NY in June and NY ♥ me. I know its streets and avenues: Christopher Street, Mulberry Street, Mott Street in July, old DelanceyВ .В .В . run to the Bronx, or Washington Square; no matter where I run, I find myself there. And I know the sights and sounds: Wanamaker’s and Saks and Klein’s, breakfast at Tiffany’s, the rumble of the subway train, the rattle of the taxis. As my boat sails into the bay, the city is before me. And there’s Liberty: she’s smaller than I imagined. But she holds up her torch and waves with the other hand: “Remember me to Herald Square,” she calls. “In our fantasies, Broadway is a kind of nostalgic generalization,” writes Brooks McNamara; “Runyonesque characters loiter in Shubert Alley, beneath a forest of neon signs.”1 Certainly that’s the image captured on stage in shows like Guys and Dolls (1950), set on Broadway and populated by the characters of Damon Runyon’s New York Stories. For Neil Harris, “The drumbeat of commerce never relents and the lights never go out.”2 It’s the city that never sleeps, we are told; the capital of the Western world. It’s where advertising is iconically art; and its nexus, Times Square, is the hub of Broadway’s theater industry, a temple to leisure economics. In the voice of George Benson: “They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway / They say there’s always magic in the air.” It’s a place of dreams, of mythologies and of excitement. And it’s a place that sings and dances that excitement—that magic—into our consciousness. This is a book exploring Broadway’s iconicity, and the way that this iconicity is synonymous with those songs and dances: Broadway the street, Broadway the theater industry, and most of all the Broadway of those songs. Broadway is a long street with a prodigious legacy, running thirteen miles from the tip of Manhattan at Bowling Green to the northern heights of the island; in fact, some say, running well beyond the island to the state capital Albany or even to the Canadian border. Its history documents the growth and development of the whole city of New York, and in more ways than this, Page 2 →Broadway in its iconicity seems to be a synecdoche of that city—or at least of Manhattan, the part of the city that so often claims the identity of “New York.” But to walk that street or trace its history is not to explore its iconicity. Sure, we could begin at the beginning, set out from the first arrival of the Dutch settlers at the foot of the island and work our way up Manhattan in time and space. That would make sense of the street, but only a particular kind of sense—one defined by chronology or linearity; one that seeks what might be called “competency,” a kind of completeness.3 To tell that sort of tale might be tempting, but it would not be complete: there are hidden corners; moments when concentration slips; times when the mind wanders; gaps in the narrative; “erasures” and “blind spots,” as Doreen Massey observes.4 The historical story is neither straight nor true. That sort of quest falls inevitably short. To really grasp the iconicity of Broadway is to play altogether a different game. It may be at times to walk its path, but it is also to zoom in and out, to fly above and burrow below, to move at different speeds through the arteries of the city—now in the bubble of the A train express, now in the stillness of Battery Park at twilight. It “requires a view,” suggest Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, “from the вЂoligopticon’—vantage points above, below and in between the surface.”5 Mark Kingwell says something similar: “The movement of people is just one layer or map, one trace of the flow, just as the grid is just one way to scan the fourdimensional psycho-geography of the city. Rise above, or go below, and the movement continues. The street is just the ground, merely grade one.”6 Broadway is neither linear nor chronological, so playing the game takes on multiple dimensions. It’s a game that has been played before: not least by the great New York urban theorists, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green—and by calling them urban theorists, I’m revealing my playful approach to this game. How sharply they crystallized the city in their shows, On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1953), musicals from the golden years of Broadway’s mid-twentieth-century boom.

On the Town tells the story of three sailors given shore leave in New York for twenty-four hours. They’ve never been to New York before, so they have high hopes of seeing the sights and exploring the city. In the end, they spend the whole day chasing love—an amiable narrative inside a much more powerful manifesto. At its most succinct, the manifesto stands in these words: “New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!”7 Of course, words marry music, plot marries action, girl marries boy, and imagination marries reality: the whole is more than the sum of its parts—you know the score. But On the Town is neither a linear walk up Broadway nor a chronological passage through time; in erratic switches from place to place and speed to speed, Bernstein, Comden, and Green present a chaotic tour of Page 3 →New York. Yet the rush, vibrancy, and energy of this show’s trajectory seem to grasp the iconicity of this city. To analyze the way they do this in their writing would be tremendously complex;8 after all, the iconicity is multidimensional, and here too we would need an oligopticon. But perhaps pointing to a single plane—the way the show maps New York in its perambulations—will give us a hint of the game at work. Picture a map, a diagram of the city, and on that map let’s chart the journey taken in the course of On the Town (see figure 1). Figure 1. Showing the trajectory of Chip’s planned journey in On the Town (1944). Joseph Rudolf Bien, City and County of New York (New York: Julius Bien & Co., 1893), courtesy of David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. At first the action starts off the island—in a street just off the Brooklyn naval yard, where the sailors’ ship has docked. Chip has his itinerary planned, intending to visit Bronx Park at 10:30 and the Statue of Liberty at 10:40, an impossible plan, but one that maps out an orbit around Manhattan. When they make their way onto the island the locations are at first rather generalized: “A subway train,” “A New York street,” “A taxicab,” various apartments. Then the orbit homes in on central Manhattan, so more specifically: the Natural History Museum, Carnegie Hall, Times Square. This is the center of a spiraling trajectory of action; also the center of the show and the center of its performativity in the “Times Square Ballet.” The second act unwinds: three clubs in central Manhattan, a subway train to Coney Island, then back to where we started at the Brooklyn naval yard. The geographical spiral spins into an expressive climax, then spins out again in a spatial approach with a particular energy and pattern. Page 4 →Within the trajectory of On the Town we can see other paths—other patterns—not least Chip’s itinerary in the song “Come Up to My Place” (figure 2). This pattern really is erratic, bouncing from one location to another, from a start and end point at the Hippodrome in Times Square,9 first to the Forrest Theatre, then the Aquarium at Battery Park, the Woolworth Tower, Cleopatra’s Needle, Wanamaker’s, Lindy’s, Luchow’s, Radio City, Herald Square, Reuben’s, Macy’s, the Roxy, The Cloisters, Gimbels, the Flatiron Building, and back to the Hippodrome. It’s an unconventional tour of Manhattan, to be sure, and tracing Chip’s geographical path on the map results in a messy, erratic zigzag with its center around Forty-Second Street. Viewed against the orbital trajectory of the whole show, it reminds us of the multiple possibilities there are for exploring the city’s space, its dimensions and its iconicity; the striking, sometimes contradictory patterns that describe the town. I’m interested in exploring this sort of pattern and others that have accumulated in the cultural archive of the Broadway show. In the patterns of their construction we can find correlations with patterns elsewhere in the city. And although the most obvious choice in navigating our way around the city might be to travel from A to B by the most direct route—to tell the chronological history of Broadway or to walk its length from the Battery to the Bronx—these are well-trodden paths, and they are just two possibilities. It might be more interesting to explore the paths offered by those patterns: to travel from A to B via C; to move in ever-decreasing circles, or to tack in zigzags between the sights (like Chip); to clamber over the billboards and use the rooftops rather than take the road (like parkour); to bide one’s time and breathe in the environment rather than hurry directly (like the flГўneur); to be drawn by the currents of the city and the spaces that it presents (like the dГ©rivist). All of these will offer different understandings, different “playings” of the iconicity of Broadway. Like the blind men and the elephant, though, all will be only partly in the right. In this, we realize the complexity of the task, the enormity of understanding the iconicity of New York and

Broadway in anything other than a reductive axiom (“There’s always magic in the air”). “The concept of the city can never get its full measure,” as James Donald puts it, unless you have “a sixdimensional recording machine.”10 For him, “It is vital to grasp the distinction between the way that the city is conceptualized and the way that the city is experienced,”11 and this seems to present us with the apparent paradox that there is more than one city; that the New York we conceptualize is not the New York in which we dwell. That makes a certain amount of sense; the iconic city is, after all, a construct. But if the city is not itself—if we have stumbled into a Baudrillardian Page 6 →world in which “New York” and “Broadway” are just iconic constructs, where does that leave us? What is the “real” city preceding the icon? And does it, indeed, exist? Page 5 → Figure 2. Showing the trajectory of Chip’s itinerary in “Come up to my place.” Joseph Rudolf Bien, City and County of New York (New York: Julius Bien & Co., 1893), courtesy of David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. For some, the authentic city is its people—the social dynamics, the communities, the ebb and flow of daily life; a city that takes on the impression of an organism with a beating heart. For some, it is the hub of an economic power-play, whose mechanics is made up of the invisible capital traded on Wall Street and reified in manifestations of hyperbole and excess in the towering concrete of the skyline. Indeed, cities are many things. “Cities are machines of consumption?” ask Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. “Yes, but never just that.” They continue: “Cities are artefacts of the state? Yes, but never just that. Cities are generators of patriarchy? Yes, but never just that.”12 Yes, cities are many things; and in each identity they tell their story in patterns. Some of the patterns inscribed by these flows will be explored later in this book—for example, the evocative idea of a “ballet” of the street formed by the social practice of its inhabitants as they go about their daily lives is discussed in later chapters;13 and the spatial practices through which we articulate our relationship with the city are fundamental to much of what I will be exploring. However, while the iconography of spatial practices—because of our embodied and remembered practice of them—is something relatively easy to conceptualize, there are many other patterns that are less visible as iconographic inscriptions of the city in our lives: the way our accents or our attitudes perform our relationship with the city, for example. Such patterns are all around us, and sometimes they can be glimpsed. But conventional, linear tellings of the tale distract us so we don’t see them; instead, we reduce our perspective of the city to the obvious, and ultimately to the axiom. If we look for them, the patterns become most evident in our cultural compositions—not the kitsch trinkets that deliberately regurgitate the city’s iconicity, but the cultural statements that the city and its dwellers articulate in image, writing, sound, gesture, and design. In particular, it is the compositions of Broadway that I want to explore in this book: the Tin Pan Alley song, whose considerable output is vividly related to New York; the Broadway show, whose mythology self-consciously magnifies the practice of the city; and the scenography of the street, whose articulation jostles with the sculptural patterns of Manhattan. These patterns allow us to understand Broadway and form a relationship with it, to “discourse” with it, to pick up on a term of Foucault’s. They are patterns that have been formulated in part deliberately (there is form to their composition), but in part through unconscious consensus and a shared cultural dynamic defined variously by ideas of progressive Page 7 →modernism, statements of cultural identity, and attempts to “territorialize” or fix the vagaries of existence.14 These patterns filter back into our subconscious to root aspects of behavior, cement mythologies, and define us as selves. They are patterns, then, that both articulate and embody complex networks of relations in the ecology of the perceived “place” of Broadway. In exploring these shared patterns I am interested in the connections and sympathies between, principally, city and song, speculating that our usual modes of enquiry—to speak of cause and effect, to consider art as a reflection of life, to suggest that we can put together a linear telling of the tale—may be delimiting and reductive. If there is a thesis in this book, I suppose this is it (though like any reflection, a thesis sets out to show something and flattens the world into contradiction and compromise). Instead, this really is an exploration of the city by unfamiliar

routes; and although each chapter will offer a proposition (a thesis by any other name?), the point of the book as a whole is to suggest that the city and its songs can be used like maps to explore the iconicity of Broadway, metaphorically to find our way around. These cultural compositions—song, show, and city—go particularly well together, it seems to me; perhaps this is why so much of the iconicity of New York seems to be imaged through its architecture, its theater, and its music, and why Broadway has come to be so prominent in the iconic narrative of the city. They go well together because they appear to share so many obvious qualities, which are easily identified using musical metaphors: rhythm, tempo, syncopation, form, composition, dynamics, performance. Indeed, much of the language that is used about the city trades on aural metaphors, just as the language used about song trades on directional metaphors of space (rising scales; lower notes). In these metaphorical qualities, city, show, and song appear to have a multidimensionality—a depth—that is useful in both “articulating” the city and “following” it. As maps, these compositions offer far more planes and textures to explore than a simple cartography. This book, then, sets up what I call a performance cartography, drawing on the idea that we exist in relation to the places we inhabit through both constructing and following the metaphorical map in the cultural forms we create. The city is one of those cultural forms, and the song is another; and for the place that “is” Broadway, I would argue, the city and song are its defining features. Many cities, I would suggest, can be seen in terms of a performance cartography, though it will become clear that my use of the word “performance” does not exclusively refer to performance-based forms (i.e., the performing arts): Paris performs through the novels of Г‰mile Zola, and later through the films of the French New Wave; London through Page 8 →the nineteenthcentury novel of Dickens and the gothic imagination of the penny dreadfuls. For New York, it is the song that articulates the city, most evidently during the golden age, but more widely from around 1860 to 1960 and even as far forward as the present day. In song and its singing, the map of Broadway is performed into being, and moment to moment, this continues to present the city in its iconic form. There is no such map, of course—not a literal map; but New York’s iconicity is a conceptual map neither given space nor set in time. It is a map made of constructs: patterns of articulation that in turn evoke images, moods, and memories—another hundred people getting off of the train; the smell of the rain-washed pavement; the arabesques of a city gang; the lonesome sound of a horn. For me, those patterns are most compellingly articulated in songs, and exploring the map of those songs is my way of understanding Broadway, Manhattan, and New York.

Performance Cartography: Here’s How It Works . . . Performance cartography uses the concept of mapping in a number of ways to explore how a place “performs” itself. I’m using a poststructural understanding of mapping, introduced by theorists such as Nigel Thrift, among others, and pursued in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, who explicitly identify the map as performative.15 Meanwhile, I am working with a broad understanding of performance from scholars such as Erving Goffman, J. L. Austin, and Richard Schechner (among others), whose expansion of the term has been seminal to performance studies and the “performative turn” of recent years.16 There are three ways in which I use the concept of the map in this book: as a stimulus, as a metaphor, and as a methodological tool. Through working with existing maps, following other images and expressions of New York as if they were maps, and exploring characteristic patterns in the city and its songs as routes through the maps, I will conduct in my writing a performance of the city. Here’s how it works. First, each chapter will develop from the impetus of a map, or at least a visual conceptualization, a representation of the city. At times these will be actual maps, such as the bird’s-eye view explored in Walk 1, or the grid in Walk 3; at other times they will be images suggesting more abstract spatial conceptualizations, capturing ideas such as density, for example (Walk 2) or verticality (Walk 4). I will relate these stimuli to a particular perspective from urban theory, so each chapter will outline and take its premise from a seminal discussion from geography, sociology, anthropology, or philosophy. In particular, I will use ideas

formulatedPage 9 → by Kevin Lynch (the image of the city), Michel de Certeau (walking in the city), Henri Lefebvre (rhythmanalysis), and Rem Koolhaas (Manhattanism); but I’ll also explore the work of other urban and spatial theorists such as Jane Jacobs, Le Corbusier, Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Doreen Massey, and Fiona Bannon. Second, each chapter will use features of the map as spatial metaphors to discuss features of the Broadway songs. Sometimes, these will pick up on existing spatial metaphors common in music (the idea of melodies going up and down, for example, or of there being a gap between notes); at other times I will recognize resemblances between aspects of the stimuli maps and features of the songs (such as a rhythm suggested by the metrical rigor of the grid, or melodies that can be traced in the patterns of the skyline). The idea of these associations being metaphorical (rather than representational) is important: this removes the impression that they are encoded in either the songs or images, while enabling our agency to sense correspondences that stimulate further thought. So when I suggest, for example, that melodic patterns resemble features in the skyline, I am not claiming that composers sought to emulate these patterns or deliberately shaped their music for this purpose, but I am interested that contiguities can be seen, and this provokes the development of each chapter’s discussion. Finally—and this is really the superobjective of my performance cartography—I will use the songs and shows themselves as maps, exploring the patterns of their byways and getting to know the city they articulate. In doing this, there is a similarity with the way in which aborigines use songlines, though I don’t seek to claim the Broadway songs as the songlines of New York. Nevertheless, we too dwell within dynamics of spirituality, inheritance, and tradition that have been built by New York and its songs; and in this respect, we can sing our paths through the city. Thus each chapter will metaphorically embark on a different walking tour around the map, and I will use the contours of those songs and shows—their rhythm, tempo, syncopation, form, composition, dynamics, performance—to explore the texture of the (preceding) city, the city through which we dwell. I am not claiming that the notion of performance cartography in itself is a new idea; the term has been used before in slightly different—and differing—ways.17 However, I am appropriating it now to define a particular methodology, and in so doing I would like to acknowledge previous iterations of this type of approach. I’d argue, for example, that Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) hews very close to what I mean by “performance cartography,” as do both Rem Koolhaas’s consideration of New York in Delirious New York (1978) and Paul Carter’s study of New South Wales in The Road to Botany Page 10 →Bay (1987).18 Each uses material from the cultural archive to show how the specific identity of a place has been performed into being, inscribed into the cartography of the location, and then followed by subsequent users of the place in navigating its terrain. The rhetorical accounts (cultural statements) Carter works from happen to be travel journals of explorers, settlers, and convicts encountering Australia; those Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour turn to are the signs and advertising constructions that established Las Vegas as an entertainment center in the desert. Although the language of neither study talks specifically of “performativity, ” Carter regularly invokes performance terms, as if history is a stage on which the dynamics of colonization are being enacted: “In a theatre of its own design, history’s drama unfolds,” he writes (xv); “This kind of historyВ .В .В . reduces space to a stage” (xvi); “This is exactly what chronology is, a stage which nullifies time’s cultural peculiarities” (xix); “a stage on which the explorer hero worked out his personal destiny” (88); “the imaginary theatre in which the imperial historian sets his narrative” (204); “part of an act which revealed the world as a stage” (318). A sense of performativity, then, is inherently a key dynamic of his spatial understanding. Meanwhile, while Learning from Las Vegas uses barely any terminology of performance, its call for a new methodology for understanding places is explicit: Las Vegas space is so different from the docile spaces for which our analytical and conceptual tools were evolved that we need new concepts and theories to handle it.В .В .В . The representation techniques learned from architecture and planning impede our understanding of Las Vegas. They are static where it is dynamic, contained where it is open, two-dimensional where it is threedimensional.В .В .В . What other methods are there for coming to an understanding of the city as an activity system?19

In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour seek an answer to that question, rehearsing their new methodology in the performative “language” of their discipline (architecture and planning). They use diagrammatic devices such as elevations, plans, maps, and photo montages, a strategy that presents its own kind of mapping of the city and requires a sort of interactive reading process. In so doing, they provide us with a virtual experience of the place and illuminate the particular patterns inherent to Las Vegas and the way in which we behave within it. My own study—focusing on Broadway, its songs, and its shows, explores material that is far more obviously performance based, though this in itself is not what I mean when I invoke the term “performance cartography”:Page 11 → it’s not just about performance. Rather, I use the Broadway songbook as a guide around New York because, just as Carter sees the travel journal as the most direct way of understanding New South Wales, and Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour see the advertising architecture as the best way of “learning from Las Vegas,” I view Broadway’s cultural statements as the most evocative way to understand the patterns of New York. These statements perform the identity of the city and allow us to perform our role(s) as actors on its “stage.” Like Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, and to a lesser extent Paul Carter, I introduce to my writing a series of diagrams. These images—musical examples, block diagrams, street plans—are in part used to illustrate some of the spatial patterns that I highlight, and in part offered as maps through which we can understand the town. In using such a wealth of visual imagery I am drawn to the ideas of Derek McCormack, who suggests that “diagrammatic interventions are generative, creative gestures, not programmatic or prefiguring ones.”20 He goes on to explain that “although it is abstract, the diagram can nevertheless be apprehended as a real organisation of forces through the way it gives the relations between these forces a kind of spatiotemporal consistency” (124). In particular, he writes, “The affective power of practice and performance can be given conceptual consistency by a diagrammatic style of thinking”; diagrams are thus “understood as unfolding fields of pragmatic potential” (125). Eventually, I extend this diagrammatic thinking until in my final chapter I use the songsheet of “New York, New York” to suggest three alternative walking routes around the city. The score becomes a map of sorts, though not a map that recognizably represents a terrain. Nevertheless, it invites an engagement with the city that is—in the manner of Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour—experiential, virtual, and embodied. In this, my performance cartography is both a provocation and a kind of dГ©rive, and I have structured the book as if it is a series of walking tours. Walking has always been important to urban theorists, as the practices of flГўnerie, dГ©rivism, and psychogeography attest. As a practice, it offers both a phenomenological encounter of the self with space and an embodied experience of being “in” a place (though as we shall see, that expression itself can be a problematic phrase). “The walker is both visceral presence and will-o’-the-wisp, ” as Hayden Lorimer puts it,21 always present experiencing the here and now, but then always (and also) gone. Yet as Merlin Coverley proposes, the experience of walking offers us a particular way of knowing the world: The act of walking takes on a highly significant, indeed pivotal role, becoming the means through which human beings learn to understandPage 12 → the world about them as they pass through it; and the trace they leave behind them is not merely recorded in the paths that are left in their wake but also in the oral histories and texts through which such actions are recorded.22 Accordingly, Coverley reminds us of a literary tradition documenting the embodied act. But he also reminds us of the countercultural potential of walking, which “allows one to challenge the official representation of the cityВ .В .В . by cutting across established routes and exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the city’s inhabitants.”23 In particular, suggests Lorimer, “Passages narrated in the first person singular about the experience of walking open up spaces for enquiries into the limits of the visual, the physical and the representational.”24 With such agency to challenge conventional viewings of the world, I bring the metaphorical device of the walking tour into play. I don’t expect my reader to actually walk around the city; though in using my playful diagrams and evoking idea of a series of walks around New York, I hope to marshal both the spatial awareness that a memory of walking

instils, and the sense of dimensionality that a recollection of sited experience awakes. The diagrams and virtual walks together, then, will be “generative, creative gestures,”25 and their effect, I hope, will be one that challenges “the limits of the visual, the physical and the representational.”26 To challenge the representational, though, we need to interrogate what “representation” means, so I would like first to consider a couple of explicit representations of New York in film and music. Then I’ll turn to discussing maps—often considered the representational form par excellence of space. Through a brief survey of recent cartographical scholarship I’ll consider what they are, what they do, and what their relationship is to the terrains they claim to represent.

Representing the City There are numerous representations of New York in pictures, films, songs, books, and even travel souvenirs. For the most part, we assume that these representations are trying to capture an aspect of the city and reify it: to capture a visual image of the cityscape, perhaps; or to capture a particular atmosphere of society life in a certain period. The opening sequence of Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) offers a good example, with its captivating montage of images of New York: towering skyscrapers; flashing neon signs; plumes of steam from vents in the street; silhouetted figures intimatelyPage 13 → strolling hand in hand. The sequence is mesmerizing. It forms a duet with the music of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, as if that music and those images somehow go together; as if the music and the pictures do represent “Manhattan.” And they seem to, from the moment the haunting clarinet trembles and then climbs brazenly upward, we are taken by the conceit: this imaging of the city seems to capture it authentically. This, we accept, is indeed Manhattan: there.27 The images in this sequence are edited to the music, creating a sort of choreography in which musical climaxes are matched by striking scenes: at one point, the dazzling lights of a sign say “Broadway”; at another, a majestic firework display echoes the cymbal clashes of the score. And Allen’s voiceover, cleverly rewriting the first chapter of a fictitious novel, overlays repeated assertions about the city that reinforce its iconicity: “This was a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin”; “He thrived on the hustle and bustle of the crowds and traffic”; “He adored New York City; to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture”; and finally, claiming ownership and identity within this city, within the images and within the music: “New York was his town; and it always would be.”28 With its images, its story line, its narration, its music, and its self-consciousness, Manhattan does not just seem to represent New York, but seems an excess of representation; and this film is not alone. There are many other examples that could be cited of films, books, plays, and especially songs that offer similar excessive tropes of selfconscious representation. Rhapsody in Blue itself—originally titled “An American Rhapsody”—was composed specifically for a 1924 contest at the Aeolian Hall, overseen by Paul Whiteman, at which some of the world’s celebrated composers “would determine what constituted American music.”29 Gershwin was clearly convinced that this piece did, labeling it “a musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our national pep, of our blues, of our metropolitan madness.”30 Even without Allen’s imprinting on our psyche the link between Manhattan and this music, it seems plausible that Rhapsody in Blue provides “a unique evocation of an American city.”31 Gershwin’s attempt to capture the city in music was just one example of a common pursuit—think of Aaron Copland’s Quiet City (1939), William Schuman’s American Festival Overture (1939), and Serge Lancen’s Manhattan Symphony (1962)—all of which created comparable musical attempts to “represent” New York. But whereas images seem to obviously represent the objects they have captured, music is more abstract, making it more difficult to understand how it can represent. One solution has been to “fix” a musical pattern to a lyric, so even more commonly, New York, and particularly Page 14 →Broadway, has been represented in the language of song. Yet the lure of the musical evocation is insistent. Even in those lyrics we find a surprising and compelling habit to capture the city in musical terms. Michael Garber has written in depth about this trope, noticing a “вЂcity as song’ convention,” typified by “вЂmusic as place—place as music’ songs.” Writers “musicalize their vision of the city [and] present the city as

music,”32 he observes. The examples are numerous: Irving Berlin wrote about the sound of its “restless song” in 1932;33 Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown referred to the “Broadway Melody” in 1929 and the “Broadway Rhythm” in 1936;34 Harry Warren and Al Dubin evoked “the lullaby of Broadway” in 1935, and then “the melody of 42nd Street” in 1942.35 These are all linguistic metaphors, of course; but in each of these examples the lyric is accompanied by the rhetorical sway of music and its performance—rhythm, melody, pitch, instrumentation, vocality, embodiment, and dance. And this “abstraction of music and dance”36 composes a lexicon of the city as a set of tropes. “Come and meet those dancing feet,” sings Ruby Keeler, invoking into being the music and dance of those feet as the music of the city: a particular set of sounds and energies that materialize the essence of New York as “naughty, bawdy, sporty, gaudy.” Broadway music for her is the sound of tap: American rather than European; urban rather than pastoral; contemporary rather than nostalgic; evoking the pace of industry and the energy of progress. Explicitly, the tap sounds (“those dancing feet”) are as much the “melody of 42nd Street” as the actual melody of the song. Meanwhile, the melody itself (the actual tune) is built of a distinctive pentatonic gapped scale with ambiguous modalities and forceful blues notes dislocating the anticipated diatonic scale. This is also an American sound, with its distinctive rhythms, harmonies, and melodic features, and it has become a staple modality of the Broadway style, as iconic as the Empire State Building is in exemplifying the staple modality of modernist Manhattan’s architectural style. Thus “42nd Street” (the song) performs Forty-Second Street (the street); “Broadway Melody” and “Broadway Rhythm” perform Broadway; and Rhapsody in Blue performs that “unique evocation” of Manhattan. These are obvious examples, but we can hear similar abstract constructions of the city in other even “simpler” musical gestures: the first “Ker-chung” of the West Side Story “Prologue,” for instance, seems to capture in abstract form all of the tension and dislocation of the Upper West Side without trying to emulate it sonically or provide verbal explanation; Jerome Robbins’s idiosyncratic choreography, familiar from the film, does exactly the same with the bodies on the palette of the street. With similar visual abstractions of the city, Allen’s imaging in Manhattan very deliberately exploits his own medium’s rhetorical modality, fashioned Page 15 →from building blocks stored in the cultural lexicon of previous tropes: a black-and-white skyscraper here, a barrage of honking horns there, a flashing neon light reflected in the rain-washed pavement.В .В .В . And these do more than simply “snapshot” the city; they seem to perform it in a certain way, to riff on its iconicity, and in so doing to build a particular character for the city. In representing the city, Gershwin and Allen construct it as much as they reveal. To represent, then, is not simply to “snapshot” something that already exists; it is contingent, partial, and constructed with purpose and intent.

Mapping the City I have suggested that I want to compare the city, the show, and the song to maps, and to use them—like the map—to explore Broadway. Maps themselves, of course, are also representational images, re-presenting the places they claim to depict—yet it is worth considering this in the light of my discussion of representation. If “representations” of a place in iconic imagery actually construct rather than reveal our sense of that place, what does it mean for a map to “represent”? To explore this question we must address two contiguous debates, both of which are poststructuralist in the sense that they stem from challenges to conventional thought. They interrogate the notion of representation, and specifically ask to what extent cartography can offer an accurate representation of the world. The first debate is situated in the field of human geography and reflects the changing approaches to thinking in recent years. It introduces a concept of “nonrepresentational theory,” and initiates a trend of applying scholarly approaches derived from performance studies to the critical consideration of cartography. The second debate is encountered in postmodern and phenomenological philosophy, where heavyweight thinkers like Baudrillard, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of the map as a metaphor. The map is seen as inaccurately reifying time and space into an abstraction; by exploiting that inaccuracy we can lay the map back on our objects of study to discover them anew.

Deconstructing the Map 1: Representation and the Performative Turn Traditionally, the role of the map as representational has been unquestioned, and the pursuit of accuracy, supported by scientific and mathematical processes for calculating measurements, has guided not only mapmakingPage 16 → but also map scholarship. From this traditional standpoint, the map appears to be (and appears to be used as) a representation of an a priori world, and is designed for engaging with that world—as a route planner, an ordnance survey, a graphic overview of the physical topography. The map, in other words, has been seen to come after the fact. Developments in mapmaking have been celebrated as maps become apparently more accurate representations of their subject, and in recent years increased possibilities for detailed surveying using computer, satellite, and digital technologies, and even using open-source communities, have aided such accuracy, compounding the rhetoric of accurate representation. However, an anxiety with this accuracy began with a series of essays in the late 1980s by J. B. Harley.37 In “Deconstructing the Map” (1989), Harley used Derridean and Foucauldian theories to show that maps, like other texts, establish, perpetuate, and entrench our view of the world and our cultural and ideological assumptions about it: “We begin to learn that cartographic facts are only facts within a specific cultural perspective,” he writes; “we start to understand how maps, like art, far from being вЂa transparent opening to the world,’ are but вЂa particular human wayВ .В .В . of looking at the world.’”38 In other words, maps too construct the world they are claiming to reveal. In another essay, “Maps, Knowledge and Power,” from 1988,39 he reminds us of the map’s historical use in “global empire building, .В .В .В the preservation of the nation state, .В .В .В [and] the local assertion of individual property rights.”40 Not only does the map construct the world, then, but it does so to an agenda of power. In recognizing these observations, Harley establishes three ways of seeing the map that theorize cartography from a poststructural perspective: he sees the map as a language that allows “appraisive, evaluative, persuasive, or rhetorical” discourse, as an iconographic and therefore symbolic tool communicating “not only a вЂsurface’ or literal level of meaning but also a вЂdeeper’ level,” and as a social product that “cannot escape involvement in the processes by which power is deployed.”41 This thinking exposes the rhetorical, constructed vision of the map. Harley’s contribution to the study of cartography marked a turning point, leading to a new kind of “critical cartography.” Indeed, so valued has his contribution been that in 2014 the journal Cartographica dedicated an entire special issue to his work, marking twenty-five years since the publication of “Deconstructing the Map.” Even so, thought has moved on since the late 1980s,42 and Harley’s theories have been challenged not least because of their limited grasp of what were then still nascent technologies: the Internet has enabled democratic mapping practices that confound hegemonic control (open-source mapping; the WorldMapper project), while Page 17 →increasing power has been seized from nation-states by the monopolistic mapping strategies of globalized corporations (Google Earth). Accordingly, the landscape of cartography practice has become more complex, and some of the arguments Harley made, though still valid, need to be considered in the context of later thought. Indeed, both of these developments (open source and globalization) point to the fact that the world is a dynamic and changing environment. This confounds any attempt to capture a stable representation of it, since what “it” is never stays the same. The notion that there is an a priori world swiftly becomes problematic and even nonsensical. Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, a new critical cartography recognized this problem, picking up on Harley’s ideas and acknowledging an anxiety about representation and about systems and structures in general. The effort was driven by scholars such as Denis Wood, Matthew Edney, Jeremy Crampton, and John Pickles, but it was above all Nigel Thrift who most thoroughly articulated Harley’s concerns. In a list of “dislikes” that could serve as a manifesto for poststructuralism, his main criticism was of “systematicity,” whose “allegiance to a textualistic model of the worldВ .В .В . insists on the primacy of representation.”43 Thrift’s contention is that theory (thought) attempts to represent the world and persuades itself that it can, even though this involves “building” simplistic, essentialist, and reductive

models to which we cling (constructing, as we have seen, representations of the world from the building blocks of established shorthand tropes). Instead of this, Thrift calls for a “nonrepresentational theory,” “a practical means of going on rather than something concerned with enabling us to seeВ .В .В . the supposedly true nature of what something is.”44 He explicitly sees such theorizing as performative, which has paved the way for critical cartography to embrace approaches and concepts from the field of performance studies. Many of his ideas are articulated as metaphors, so that the nonrepresentational approach remains “productive, embodied, mimetic, partial and contingent.”45 He defines these metaphors using words such as “dynamic,” “non-linear,” and “complex,” and invokes other thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. He resists the idea of “building” knowledge (out of ready-made blocks of thought) and instead—following Heidegger—prefers to think in terms of a “dwelling perspective,” whereby “the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings.”46 In this way, the (changing) world in which we live will make sense to us through our own (dynamic) experience, rather than through “it” being presented—or re-presented as a stable object. Page 18 →Elsewhere, as part of the performative turn that nonrepresentational theory enabled, Thrift’s editorial in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (cowritten with John-David Dewsbury, 2000) set the scene for a slew of publications that marked an important interdisciplinary point.47 It noted “four main apprehensions of performance” that had been introduced to cartographic scholarship, stemming from the work of Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, “the discipline of performance itself,” and “the reworking of academic practices as performative.”48 The issue itself proceeded to illustrate each of those apprehensions with interdisciplinary applications of the respective approaches. Three years later, in a concluding “envoi” to another special issue, Environment and Planning A: The Possibilities of Performance, Thrift identified three main reasons why the adoption of performance approaches might benefit the social sciences. He noted the affinity performance studies has for the body in motion, and the understanding it has of what we call “liveness” (“the immediacy of the new”), but it was in particular his acknowledgment of the notion of “affect” that became most influential to critical cartography as it developed. His final remarks defend performance studies as a scholarly approach, while acknowledging the anxieties geographers had about embracing unfamiliar methodologies from the arts. “The performative approach isВ .В .В . unsettling,” he writes, “because it is in search of new forms of responsibility which can be articulated only partially.” He recognizes sites of partial articulation “in things like bodily dispositions, off-centre spaces and flashes of other means of proceeding,” but he sees the value of mining those sites since they allow us to “hear beyond what we are able to hear.”49 In this enigmatic statement he asserts the value of tacit knowledge, something that has been central to developments in performance studies. Thrift’s postrepresentational stance chimes with other scholars we have encountered: Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay, for example, suggests that conventional explorer histories work with (in Thrift’s language) “built” knowledge, “tak[ing] it for granted that the newcomers travelled and settled a land which was already there.”50 These histories represent the lands in question as presupposed sites of civilization and settlement, for whom the establishment of a society with the rule of law and the hierarchy of authority was inevitable. By this measure, notions of right and wrong, good and bad, and so on, are de facto embedded in the representations of the places; and with such dualisms in operation, any sense of presenting a “transparent opening” onto the world inevitably falls short. These histories are not adequate understandings of how the explorers themselves experienced their discoveries, for “at the centre of the colonists’ minds,” Carter writes, “were not picturesque places, but what preceded them, horizons, possible Page 19 →tracks, bounding spaces.”51 From a perspective resistant to the conventional telling of history, therefore, Carter’s spatial history is sited (in Thrift’s term) “within the current”: It advances exploratively, even metaphorically, recognizing that the future is invented. Going back, it questions the assumption that the past has been settled once and for all. It undermines the empirical stability of roads and buildings. It runs the risk of becoming as intangible as distant views. Its objects are intentions and, suggesting the plurality of historical directions, it constantly risks escaping into

poetry, biography or a form of immaterialism positivists might think nihilistic.52

Carter’s book—which I have already suggested to be a performance cartography—is therefore a fine example of Thrift’s nonrepresentational theorizing, and akin in this sense to what I hope to present myself. Thrift’s stance also concurs with other postrepresentational cartographers: “Cartography does not simply describe and explain the world,” write Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge; “it is part of the interplay between the world and ourselves,”53 a world, we remember, that is constantly changing and adapting as we experience it in the moment. One concern that has therefore become prominent in the work of scholars in this area is the relation between space and time,54 and the notion that the world “unfolds” in these dimensions has been commonly invoked.55 This is not to suggest that cartographers avoid or deny the representational—after all, historically this may be all that we have been handed down as primary material, and I myself will be working with the constructed images of the cultural archive. However, it means that representations are not taken for granted as accurate, authentic, or impartial “truths” about “the” world. “Rather,” writes Derek McCormack, “they are reanimated as active and affective interventions in a world of relations and movements.”56 The editorial John-David Dewsbury, Paul Harrison, Mitch Rose, and John Wylie write for their 2002 special issue of Geoforum goes even further to champion the performative turn. These authors argue that not only are performative approaches valuable to cartography, but that—according to nonrepresentational theory—representations are in fact “performative in themselves”: [Nonrepresentational theory] does not approach representation as masks, gazes, reflections, veils, dreams, ideologies, as anything, in short, that is a covering which is laid over the ontic. NonrepresentationalPage 20 → theory takes representation seriously; representation not as a code to be broken or as a [sic] illusion to be dispelled[;] rather representations are apprehended as performative in themselves; as doings.57 They too reference the significance of affect (such as “the spiritualized pull or uplift of a chord of music, and the stillness struck by the colour of paint”), and suggest that “such affects and perceptsВ .В .В . extract from representation another way of judging, another way of reacting to the world about us.”58 Specifically, they call on art practices to enable that reaction to the world, “mobilising other sources of expression (literature, art, performance), and above allВ .В .В . rearticulating what counts as significant.”59 Accordingly, the approaches of performance studies have become central to the subsequent development of cartographic scholarship. Given this, many contemporary scholars recognize cartography as an active, performative practice, rather than as a means to an end (the production of a map). Kitchin and Dodge, for instance, like many poststructuralists, turn to Deleuzian terms to advance their view: “Mapping is a process of constant reterritorialization,” they write; “maps are constantly in a state of becoming: constantly being remade.”60 Such a view acknowledges the changing makeup of the world, and enables a number of possibilities to contemporary scholars. Not the least of these is the fact that mapping can be “recastВ .В .В . as a broad set of spatial practices, including gestural and performative mappings.” They list among these “Aboriginal songlines, along with sketch maps, counter maps, and participatory mapping,” though implicit to their argument is the fact that day-to-day practices with “ordinary” maps (i.e., practices “within the current”) also inform the changing personality of the world. “Maps are of-the-moment,” they write, “brought into being through practices (embodied, social, technical), always remade every time they are engaged with.”61 Vincent Del Casino and Stephen Hanna make a similar claim in their article “Beyond the вЂBinaries’” (2006), whose nuance is to merge the value of the representational with an understanding of the nonrepresentational. For despite the slippery positioning of the nonrepresentational, our understanding of places and our behavior within them, they suggest, is reliant on at least some faith in the representation (the form that has been built). They call up the notion of studying not “maps and spaces as somehow ontologically separate sites of inquiry,” but a “theoretical concept of

map space”62 in which the active practice takes place. In this relationship the map becomes a dynamic medium, the space becomes a charged environment, and we become players with agency over the whole. Maps, they write, “are tactile, olfactory, sensed objects/subjects Page 21 →mediated by the multiplicity of knowledges we bring to and take from them”;63 and mappings, in being “both representations and practices,” are in their explicit term “performances.”64 For Thrift the “world” in which these performances take place is not a closed ecosystem we observe from outside, but an ecology of which we are a part and with which we evolve. We are, after all, part of history, and we are ever present in our own performance. The idea of an a priori world (a world that might be represented) recedes in favor of one that is explored as we dwell “through” it. I use this phrasing because he moves beyond the idea of being “in” a space (“in” a conceptually predetermined world), seeking not to “clearВ .В .В . a space in an existing world” but instead to “tak[e] flight into different worlds,”65 where—following Wittgenstein—we might “open spaces,”66 “living rather than lived spaces.”67 And this ecology is multidimensional, at least in terms of its “spatial and temporal porosity.”68 It and we evolve through time, and sometimes through remembrance (a “world of вЂcinders’ which very often act like hauntings”; “reminders of remainders”;69 “numerous past associations” that depend upon “further associations to activate these associations”).70 If the map was formerly inculcated in a pervasive representational tendency, Thrift’s “metaphorical and substantive turn from вЂtext’ and representations, to performance and practices,”71 invited an energizing and exciting new paradigm. Thus, contrast his criticism of conventional thought, In the building perspective, space and time are neutral grids, or perhaps containers, over which and in which meaning is “placed.” They are not a part of the play, they are onlookers,72 with his alternative, Places, for example, are best thought of not so much as enduring sites, but as moments of encounter, not so much as “presents,” fixed in space and time, but as variable events; twists and fluxes of interrelation.73 Elsewhere, this is summed up in his wonderfully enigmatic assertion that “places are вЂpassings’ that вЂhaunt’ вЂus.’”74 Accordingly, nonrepresentational practice travels the pathways of the metaphysical as well as the physical, while also pausing for contemplation within the Heideggerian now/here.75 Sure enough, the performative turn in critical cartography showcased examples of applied performance theories from Butler and Deleuze,76 and introduced performance methodologies of embodied experience77 and practice as research.78 Similar cross-disciplinary methodologies also Page 22 →emerged in performance studies around the same time, leading to equally exciting performative explorations of space and place. The geography of landscape, for example, became fundamental to the site-specific work of performance practitioners such as Mike Pearson, Carl Lavery, and Fiona Wilkie, and theater companies such as Brith Gof and Lone Twin.79 Elsewhere, “located practices” such as hip-hop, skateboarding, hybrid reality game-play, and parkour have been studied for their “imaginative re-perception and appropriation of the environment.”80 “Sites have been used (not just passed through), creating interactions with the physicality of the surroundings,” writes Julie Angel.81 “ParkourВ .В .В . is itself a вЂgame map’ that provides new perceptions and experiences of the terrain.”82 The calls for new paradigms of interdisciplinary and performative engagement are beguiling, and the conceptualization of cartography as active, performative, and dynamic is an exciting proposition. Following developments in nonrepresentational theory and the performative turn, maps can be conceived as other than visual in form, and I will contend that songs can provide spatial mappings in their very sound (consider the songlines); dances create multidimensional expression in space-time (consider any dance); and maps themselves can serve as musical or theatrical stimuli (consider John Cage). In engaging with them, we (and they) perform the environment

in which they arise. In addition, as I will argue in the next section, scores can be read diagrammatically as maps; and the patterns of all of these things can be seen, heard, and felt in the terrain of a city so taken with performance as New York.

Deconstructing the Map 2: Representation and Metaphor Having considered how a metaphorical use of performance can help us to understand the mapping of place, let’s now consider how a metaphorical use of mapping can help us to understand the way place performs. This debate is initiated in a series of witty parables, first in a chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), then in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Del rigor en la ciencia” (1946), most famously in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), and finally in Umberto Eco’s “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1” (1982), whose title identifies the scenario’s conceit. Each of these authors proposes a story in which a map is drawn that is so detailed it represents every feature of the land; so detailed it can only be drawn on a scale of 1:1. In invoking this idea and its ridiculous impracticality, these writers take a slightly different Page 23 →slant on the subject of cartographical accuracy, querying not so much the ideology of an a priori world, but the practicality of being able to capture “it” in representational form. Through these parables we are made aware that the attempt to construct an accurate map (an accurate representation) is impossible, because it would have to be absolutely identical to the original in every detail. Eco’s essay proceeds to explore the various problems such a map would present. Carroll (whose other work has contributed significantly to the tenets of poststructuralism)83 concludes his characters’ conversation about their 1:1 map with the comment: “We now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”84 If complete accuracy is impractical and the map has to be altered in scale, the final product becomes the result of a slippage away from accuracy, and the mapmaker must make choices about “the infinite plasticity of movements, additions, deletions and stagings” that the project will perform.85 Each of those decisions—which details to leave out, and by extension which become emphasized—contributes to “rhetorical figures of speech that determine its meaning and effect for the reader.”86 Thus “important” buildings like churches, castles, and manor houses remain as features, but the hovels of common citizens are excised. As we have seen, the human agency in making these choices offers a space for rhetorical and ideological influence, which can lead to the sort of empire-building maps identified by Harley above. The map no longer represents the world, though it does construct an alternative; before long, we accept this alternative as the “real” depiction of the world, and the real world that did exist gets lost. Borges’s telling of the story concludes with a bleak vision: “In the deserts of the west, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.”87 Baudrillard (reversing the relationship) announces the famous words: “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”88 Although this may be bleak, and raises issues which we have discussed in the previous section, a way of turning the dilemma into a positive methodological tool has emerged from the recognition that maps are always metaphors—they stand in for the land they “represent,” as “an analogical doubling of reality.”89 In conventional ordnance survey maps, pictorial signs and often scripted words stand in for places, natural features, and landmarks; maps of rail networks and metro systems manipulate spatial and orientational relationships to create easily readable guides; and the mapping of the cosmos grossly distorts distances to telescope stars into constellations, fashioning these into beautifully detailed artistic impressions of animals and mythological beings in the night sky. Page 24 →No one would claim that a big dipper, a great bear, a plow, or even a frying pan existed in the sky above the Northern Hemisphere, though these are all commonly recognized metaphors that refer to the same arbitrary mapping of stars into a particular grouping. Thus the map makes extensive use of metaphor and thereby—like language—becomes an ideal prism for poststructuralist thought. It is worth picking up briefly on the subject of language, since this is a preoccupation of another poststructuralist, Jacques Derrida, and his commentary on language’s use of metaphor is useful. Indeed, even before language,

human expression involves metaphors. Already at the first utterance what the baby is trying to express becomes adapted into something that stands in for it: the cry is not fear, but it stands in for fear. Language moves further away from what Derrida calls “the originary metaphor,” the cry of passion, and in constructing a symbolic order, with its play of signifiers, it becomes increasingly dependent on metaphor: “Before it allows itself to be caught by verbal signs, metaphor is the relation between signifier and signified within the order of ideas and things, according to what links the idea with that of which it is the idea, that is to say, of which it is the representative sign.”90 As language is used, the pure essence of the thing is mediated through (at least) a metaphor of the idea and then a metaphor of the verbal sign for that idea; in constructing discourse the human being will construct phrases that also trade in metaphorical signification (syntactic linearity, paradigmatic choice), and will establish communication games (conversation) that exploit even more metaphorical transactions (giving and receiving, interrupting and conceding, etc.). Language’s efficacy is thus entirely dependent on metaphor, and—paradoxically—its sense will improve within a complex network of metaphorical relationships. The more—and more overtly—metaphor is used, the more vivid the sense generated becomes, and linguistic strategies such as the use of rhetoric and poetry have typically nurtured this use of metaphor. Indeed, as metaphor becomes increasingly poetic, language becomes more capable of meaning, through association, reference, implication, and so on. Wordsworth’s daffodils become richer in being “golden,” more human in being “a crowd,” more ethereal through being “a host.” The same can be said of maps: as mapmakers move away from the conceit of the 1:1 utopian map, their projects become more metaphorical—less “real,” but paradoxically more useful and “sense-able.” The asphalt of the road is not represented on the road map in asphalt, nor even in a proximate color. Guided by the functional intention of each map’s use, increasingly selective omissions will be made and increasingly “poetic” metaphors will Page 25 →be used. In commanding nature we invent deities and place them as human figures in the heavens. The map becomes ever more inaccurate. But if we see the world as more than just a topographical mass of land and water—if we see, in Thrift’s terms, the map as a tool for exploring the ecology of places (“вЂpassings’ that вЂhaunt’ вЂus’”), it might be useful to look at different possibilities for the map whose inevitably inaccurate selectivities privilege other aspects of that ecology. These will be no more accurate, of course, and will be skewed to their own agenda; however, they may reveal interesting dynamics and may help “open” space. Thus the map becomes usable as a metaphor in its own right; or rather, the map (as we know it)—through being one of the most obvious imagings with which we “represent” the world—can in explanation stand in for other possible imagings that may less obviously attempt to feign accuracy. Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the map helps us to understand this complex play of abstraction. They suggest that the map, “an experimentation in contact with the real” that “constructs the unconscious” and “fosters connections between fields,”91 can be seen as a metaphor for their concept of “rhizomatic thinking.” They contrast this with a tracing, which literally copies that which already exists, seeking the “competence” of accuracy (and therefore being doomed even in its aims). Unlike a tracing, the map offers “multiple entryways” and is “open and connectable in all of its dimensions.”92 It neither fixes dogmatically onto a preexistent world nor (in this interpretation) claims to offer a representation of that world; instead, it offers a way of exploring the multidimensional ecology of the world through which we dwell. And while actual maps might be delimiting in their potential, often restricting themselves as they do to twodimensional, graphic depictions of geography, it is certainly possible to use Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the map in a revisionist way (as I will) to see other depictions of the world in these rhizomatic terms, laying the map over the textures of landscape and song to explore them from “multiple entryways.” Thus I see both the construct of the city and the construct of the song as multidimensional affordances, not restricted to graphic depictions and visual reading strategies, but open to sensual exploration, resonant with “spatial and temporal porosity” and performed in the ongoing activities of “dwelling through.” Conceptualizing these constructs as maps—rather than as tracings—offers a field of possibilities

for the practical user: the citizen, or the performer of the world through which we dwell. Perhaps by way of a tiny persuasive gesture toward how we can reconceive the “mapping” of cities, I can point to Lawrence Halprin’s work on city planning, conceived under the influence of his choreographerPage 26 → wife Anna. “A city is a complex, many-dimensional elaboration of structures and spaces organized into rhythmical juxtapositions where events happen,” he writes; “and a city must be experienced through movement to come alive in its most unique sense.” Then, invoking the performative, he uses a metaphor of his own: the city can be experienced, he suggests, “as an environment for choreography.”93 Elsewhere, in a book dedicated to the creation of “motation,” he writes quite simply but inspiringly that “street configurations are scores.”94 By engaging with the city—walking, mapping, dancing, or singing—we play its score, and to whatever extent that represents, constructs or reveals, we are performing its cartography.

Onward It will be evident that it’s my aim to dismantle or at least move beyond some of the rigid dogmas of conventional structural thought: linear assumptions of historicity or cause and effect, universalizing concepts such as truth and origin, essentializing structures such as meaning and intention. Of course, like all poststructuralist projects, this book is sensitive to the fact that discourse itself is rooted in all of these assumptions, and that culture, society, and behaviors are (in Thrift’s terms) built one on top of another in a process of stratification. To think or express oneself beyond these building blocks is hard enough; to dismantle the edifice is challenging indeed. Instead, following Deleuze and Guattari, I aim to work with existing “tracings,” acknowledging rather than resisting them in order that they become useful tools, weaving them back in to my argument and laying the tracing back onto the map;95 following McCormack I also aim to work with existing representations, reanimating them as “active interventions” in order to explore their correspondences in the now/here. This strategy comes in to play throughout Broadway Rhythm—and “coming in to play” is an appropriate phrase, since it’s a technique that is playful, with the agenda: to explore. I hope throughout the book, in which I draw on the “.В .В .В andВ .В .В . andВ .В .В . andВ .В .В .” of the rhizome,96 that the various different discussions will collide with and bounce off one another, creating explosions, chipping particles off one another or changing consistency in the process. The first chapter (the first walking tour) finds itself in a bit of a double bind; because, as I have suggested, in order to dismantle existing perceptions of the world, we need to have a handle on what they are. So despite expressing a desire to move away from traditional competency and resist Page 27 →the simple paths through the map of New York, I start with a rather conventional route—a walk up the street called Broadway. From this preparatory stroll I embark on my performance cartography, exploring melodic patterns in the songs from the stimulus of one characteristic depiction of Manhattan, the nineteenth-century bird’s-eye view. I’ll consider Kevin Lynch’s theory of how we create an “imaging” of the city in order to comprehend it, and notice in the musical patterns how articulations of Broadway from the bird’s-eye view create, in a sense, an aural imaging. As the start of my narrative, this chapter inevitably both marks an inscription (a tracing) and makes use of several existing representations; but I hope that in the spirit of exploration these tracings will allow themselves to bend, to be folded (and unfolded) into the more freeing possibilities of the conceptual map. Of course, this need not be the first chapter; to read in a linear fashion is in a sense to miss the point. Dip in and out; pick and choose; fold the map back at the crease to expose just the useful bit; use the book as you would a tour guide. In Walk 2 I find an entryway into the map through one of the defining features of Manhattan: its density, both in terms of its people and in its architectural mass. I consider in particular the way New York composers have articulated the density of the city in their use of dissonance and repetition. Clusters of notes packed tightly against others huddle together in the music as if cramming as much as possible into the score. Negotiating this music—like the city—requires finding ways around the jagged structures or through gaps between their walls. Finding ways to understand its articulations of density and excess is one of the challenges taken on by new arrivals. This walk offers different beginnings as Manhattan is experienced from a variety of directions by some arriving in the city from across the Atlantic, others traveling northward to escape the oppression of the South, and

still more migrating to the city from the plains of the Midwest. I take a look at how one composer in particular—Leonard Bernstein—depicted the arrival of these newcomers, and in his music articulated their attempts to conquer the town. Walk 3’s journey takes as its stimulus the defining street plan of the grid, a rigid “straitjacket” superimposed on the natural topography of the island. Seeing this as a layer “fixed” historically onto a previous cartographical otherness, I lead into a discussion of the changing city as a palimpsest, beneath whose surface can be seen the etchings of previous incarnations: the west side prior to the Lincoln Center development; an earlier grid plan before the plan of 1811. I read these layerings as syncopations between one articulation of the city and another, and thus embark on a discussion of “Broadway Rhythm,” in which the rhythms of the songs articulate the syncopations of the city. Page 28 →In Walk 4 I will explore one of the most characteristic features of Manhattan—its upness—bringing into play various technologies of modernism that have enabled verticality, and performing a sort of parkour through the rooftops of the city. I’ll observe how our imaging of Manhattan’s development has created similar patterns in both visual images and the melodies of Broadway songs. I will link this with a discussion of the push toward modernism, which Rem Koolhaas articulately frames as “Manhattanism,” and I will see in the skyline of the city further patterns that resemble the melodies of Broadway. In Walk 5 I will be turning to the spatial considerations of Michel de Certeau and Fiona Bannon to consider how traces of journeys are inscribed on the environment of the city. I will consider contemporary theories of spatial practice from choreography, and I will apply them to the paths mapped out by some of the most celebrated New York musicals. I will discuss how the multidimensional expression of dance can inhabit the spatial metaphors of the city, and I will consider how that might affect our reading of the Broadway song in performance. Finally, I will consider the global perspective of New York, turning back to de Certeau again to understand how the “mythology” of the city exists beyond its articulations. In this respect, the songs of New York (by Bernstein, Kander, and Ebb, and latterly Alicia Keys) perpetuate a cycle of iconicity so that even travelers who have never visited Manhattan feel that they know the city that we universally inhabit. This final chapter in chronological terms brings us closest to the present day, recognizing also that the popular sound of New York has fundamentally changed. As a global city, Manhattan is a map not exclusively printed in the quintessential sound of a Broadway golden age; the popular sound and its imprint on the map is heard in the download and the MP3; and the mapmakers of today speak as much the language of rock, pop, and hip-hop as they do the sounds of the stage. It will be clear from this introduction that my journeys will explore New York through a variety of media and in a variety of ways. Already we have taken in the city on celluloid (Manhattan), and through theatrical staging (On the Town), not to mention music (Rhapsody in Blue). These maps of the city present their worlds differently and offer distinct phenomenological experiences in terms of presence and mediality. But more importantly for this discussion, they give us access to further perspectives of the oligopticon: “theatre as an organization of movement in three-dimensional space,” suggests Susan Sontag, “versus cinema as an organization of plane space (like painting).”97 In my wanderings, I will turn to both film and theater to explore my Page 29 →encounter with the city, acknowledging that our interaction with space is in a number of ways fundamentally different when we engage with their different mediations. For a start, the perspective is different, as Stanley Kauffmann observes, film “shifting the audience continually,” but theater “shifting it never.” “Film takes the audience to the event,” he remarks; “theater takes the event to the audience.”98 And it’s not only the jump cut of our perspective that differs: bodies on stage map a corporeal presence in front of us in the shared space we inhabit; bodies on film map a different spatial terrain, framed by the confines of a screen and flickering across its surface. Sometimes the very three-dimensionality of theater and the spliced-togetherness of film have each in their own way a particular spatial story to tell in the patterning of Manhattan. Accordingly, it is through a theatrical encounter that we explore the material restructuring of the city in Walk 3; on the other hand, the space created in the imagination of the edit offers us a different virtual city to explore choreographically in Walk 5. Sometimes

there is pragmatic purpose in exploring one medium or the other: I see a canonic film like West Side Story (1961) as inherently stable, and perhaps also a better-known text than its theatrical counterpart. Here and in other films the sense of space is preserved; we can all explore this space knowing the terrain will never change. Whichever medium we consult (and at times it is both), we are rewarded with a greater understanding of the ontological space(s) carved out. At still other times the conceptual possibilities of the paths created between the dimensions of stage space, film space, and our own lived space enable further journeys. On these journeys our paths through the city are not bounded by the perimeters of stage or screen, nor restricted to what has been captured or what has been staged. The membranes are porous. My wanderings will bleed between the conceptual differences of the theatrical, filmic, and real space, as if these phenomena coexist as parallel universes, which, in a way, for the musical they do. And in part it is because of the music that we can conceive space in this way. Music wraps around and enfolds yet also penetrates and seeps within. It is piped into our ears through technology, yet washes over our whole bodies live. More than this, in our imagination we hear—create—the music that is not even there. In this, music is the city, piped in yet washing over, inhabiting and engulfing, existing in multiple ways and multiple dimensions that we also listen to, experience, and create. Since the city is as much a creation of this musically constructed (or theatrically constructed, or cinematically constructed) space as it is a creation constructed by the lived experience of dwelling through its material structure, I will from time to time creep into the magical domains in which Page 30 →its articulations appear: the winter gardens and summer stocks, the nickelodeons and picture houses. In Walk 3 I sit for a while in the haze of a rapt auditorium to rest my weary legs, experiencing the liveness of the theatrical encounter with New York and the bodies inhabiting several planes of its space; in Walk 5 I fly with “the witness, the invisible spectator, the invulnerable voyeuristic eye”99 of an aerial camera over Times Square and the Upper West Side to zoom into and meander around other virtual spaces. Thus immersed in the phenomenological experience of New York and yet “lifted out of the city’s grasp”100 to observe it as an object, we’ll both perform the imagined city into life and read it into existence through our map. The performance cartography becomes the virtual oligopticon invoked by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift: a different way to see the city, and thereby a different way to understand it.101 Like other poststructuralists, my main influences, Deleuze and Guattari, have had their detractors. What I find useful about their “alternative metaphysics”102 is that they have offered a tool kit of metaphors that help turn abstract concepts into practical, methodological strategies for thought. The metaphor of a rhizome represents an organizational structure for our thought processes, the metaphor of the nomad suggests that these thought processes are ever-moving without seeking a “home,” metaphors of deterritorialization and “lines of flight” suggest a constant moving away from something rather than toward a goal, and metaphors of stratification provide geological comparisons with nature to suggest the evolutionary, ecological, and organic nature of the thought processes. All of these tools explain in a different way what is effectively the same premise—the idea that thought can be free to wander, to play, to explore around and beyond “the forms of theoretical capture that define the limits of the rationally acceptable and preclude the possibility of different objects, let alone different styles of thought.”103 This for me is liberating, and Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphors—along with my own—are enabling tools that I’ll take along on our walks. Indeed, metaphors are all we have to work with, and perhaps my thesis makes no further observation than to rehearse the truism that the city, its music, and its maps are all just metaphors we use to articulate our dwelling through the world. Still, I hope you will indulge me as I wander, play, and explore the city with my metaphors and maps. In the words of Cassie from A Chorus Line, “All I ever wanted was the music and the mirror and the chance to dance.”104 I have in my pocket a well folded and dog-eared map of Broadway. Its paths are the melodies, its landmarks the songsmiths; or perhaps its paths are Page 31 →the songsmiths and its landmarks the melodies. The map is old, so the reality it represents has moved on; but perhaps it was only ever a vague sketching to begin with. Sometimes the map beckons us down a certain alley-way: “Come on along and listen toВ .В .В .В ,” it tells us; “Come and meet those dancing feet.” But—who knows?—the alleyways may have been gutted and the blocks rezoned to make way for a state-of-the-art digital virtual interactive studio. Now I’m here I’m

going to go on a walking tour, with a number of excursions around the territory of this map. New York—already calcified, traced—will be plugged back into my map, and the tracing of Broadway remapped. These excursions have a common theme, and they are all wanderings within the conceptual map I have drawn; but they are just possibilities—there are many more journeys, and there are many alternative maps.

For now, grab your coat and get your hat; let’s take that walk. Page 32 → Figure 3. The first stimulus: the bird’s-eye view (1873). Historic Map Works LLC/Historic Map Works/Getty Images.

Page 33 →

Walk One: A Glance at New York From the Battery to Midtown by way of Broadway, taking in the dog-leg and the bird’s-eye view, the gapped scale and the image of the city. It is 1873. The picture is soundless. There is no noise. From this point in the sky all is silent. From here we hear no bells from the stretching steeples that idly catch the sun; from here the close companion clouds cast narrow streets in shadow. Sailboats and paddle steamers drift across the bay to the dockside, where a million matchstick masts patiently gather. “City of hurried and sparkling water! City of spires and masts! City nested in bays! My city!”1 exclaimed Walt Whitman, claiming New York as his own. On this first walking tour of my performance cartography, I want to take as a stimulus the popular nineteenthcentury image of the bird’s-eye view. I’ll use urban theorist Kevin Lynch’s idea of “imageability” to explore how vividly Broadway stands out in the perspective of these pictorial views. But I’ll also argue that the point at which these views were popular—around the end of the nineteenth century—marked a turning point, reflecting a move away from Europe, a push toward modernism, and the creation of a new American sensibility that was to be epitomized by the Broadway sound. Just as the path of Broadway dips away from view in these images as it veers in a dog-leg across the island, the sound of Broadway dips away from its Old World roots in a change of direction that is captured in the melody of the Broadway songs. We’ll hear in that Broadway melody a sonic enactment of the city’s visible shift. Bird’s-eye views were familiar nineteenth-century artist’s images of New York, gazing over lower Manhattan. They were produced regularly between the 1850s and the 1890s, when, from 1896, publisher Moses King continued the trend in his long-running series King’s New York Views.2 Most commonly, the images depict the island from more or less the perspective of the Statue of Liberty’s torch,3 foregrounding the most prominent and most developed areas of the city as it was then: Castle Garden and the Battery,Page 34 → the East River docks, the old city streets in the area of the Five Points and leading up to Wall Street, the impressive edifice of City Hall in the center of the island. Successive pictures document the development and construction of key landmarks: Castle Garden at first appears marooned offshore until in the early 1850s the Battery is filled in to create a promenade; the monumental Brooklyn Bridge is seen slowly being constructed throughout the late 1860s; the elevated railway system is seen gradually developing until finally in the 1870s it extends through the Battery to the ferry terminal. The images are populated with tiny figures strolling through Battery Park and a constant stream of carriages clogging up Broadway. The rivers and the bay teem with ships, boats, and ferries, showing a vibrant trading city reliant on its waterways. Often, the images are in color, showing the blues of the water, the greens of surrounding, undeveloped land, the browns of the built-up city streets, and—lending a romantic mystique to the city—the reds of glorious sunsets in the distance. From here, the distant mountains seem like gently rolling hills; the East River and Hudson River wind placidly into the distance; just before they disappear we can see the dense woodland overlooking the village of Manhattanville; and between that horizon and the foreground sprawls the landmass of New York. Yet for all the majesty and enormity of the city displayed in these bird’s-eye views, these are not images in which New York is daunting to the viewer. This is not yet that other iconic image of Manhattan,4 that of its skyline, whose modernist fascination with growth depicts the jagged buildings in starkly contrasting shades of black and white, often shrouded in mist and rendering the city a dehumanized metropolis. Those images are abstractions whose walls obscure the city as much as reveal it. Rather, the bird’s-eye images were views with an “appearance of genteel dignity and quiet repose, as though they had been sketched on a Sunday, with both the houses and the people freshly scrubbed and on their best behaviour.”5 The all-seeing perspective of the bird’s-eye image shows everything: the entirety of an island that we can perceive all at once; A Glance at New York, as both Asa Greene’s 1837 account and Benjamin Baker’s 1848 play are titled. This is not the image of an outsider: not the “lure of the city”—the immigrant’s view from sea level of an

impenetrable wall of high buildings; though perhaps it is the immigrant’s rose-tinted view of a city of opportunity, laid out before us and in which we might fulfil our dreams. This city may be great in the way it stretches into the distance, but it is not great beyond comprehension. In the phenomenon of the bird’s-eye image, we command New York: it is “mythologizing,” suggests Paul Carter; “the invention of a point of view, a panoramic eye before whose gaze the historical Page 35 →facts unfold again exactly as before.”6 The overview of the bird’s-eye picture, writes Douglas Tallack, “can signify a bid for total visual control.”7 It wasn’t just artists who attempted to capture the mythology of nineteenth-century New York in their representations. A veritable slew of publications, travel guides, and fictional accounts abounded, depicting the city with pride, fascination, self-promotion, and frothy wit, and leading the armchair traveler around the sights of New York. Asa Greene self-published A Glance at New York in 1837, George G. Foster’s New York in Slices appeared serialized in the New York Tribune in 1850, and in 1851 Joel H. Ross published What I Saw in New York, or A Bird’s Eye View of City Life; Frances Trollope wrote a number of books commenting on America in the 1830s, Charles Dickens visited in 1842 and wrote his own account of the metropolis, and some years later Bram Stoker also visited, recording his notes in a more general survey, A Glimpse of America (1884).8 Each of these describes typical sights, streets, personalities, and pastimes in the city, reporting on similar features of New York to give an impression of this vibrant mid-nineteenth-century metropolis: Broadway and the Bowery, the b’hoys and dandies, the Tombs and the oyster houses, the theaters and the squares. The trend for the New York “travelogue” hit theaters too. In 1848 Benjamin Baker scored a popular hit with his musical play, also called A Glance at New York. It tells the story of George Parsells, a “greenhorn” from upstate New York who is invited to visit the city by his friend Harry Gordon. From the minute he arrives, George falls prey to the many hustlers who hang around the steamboat pier to swindle naive visitors. In every scene they visit a different location, and at each he falls foul of another confidence scam. Audiences could be sure of recognizing the locations (and no doubt some of the scams)—the Steamboat Pier at Barclay Street, the corner of Front Street and Broadway where most of the action takes place; “Loafer’s Paradise,” a dirty barroom on the Bowery; Chrystie Street; Chatham Street; and Vauxhall Gardens. A Glance at New York also includes a number of recognizable songs: when Mose invites Lize to Vauxhall Gardens, she announces that she would prefer to go to Christy’s to see the Minstrels, which gives cue for her to sing “Lovely Mae.” Later they sing another Christy’s song, “Oh Lud, Galls”; elsewhere, the play includes traditional airs including “The Jolly Young Waterman” and “The Canadian Boat Song.” The main attraction of the show was a cameo character called Mose, a friend of Harry’s. Mose was a Bowery b’hoy, played by F. S. Chanfrau, a stock actor at Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre at 444 Broadway, where the show was staged. The b’hoys were notorious characters in nineteenth-century New York—cocksure, streetwise, and natty, they were often orphans who Page 36 →had grown up around the Five Points and who now formed teams as volunteer firemen. They dressed in a sort of uniform, “arrayed in outre vest and funnel-legged panties, and with an enormous crape band around the hat,”9 as Foster recalls. They drank a lot, fought a lot, and liked to show off to the Bowery g’hals by racing their horses and traps along the avenues “like Cyclops on a bender.”10 Chanfrau is reported to have modeled his character on the b’hoys who frequented Mitchell’s every night—specifically, Mose Humphrey, “the toughest street fighter on the Bowery until beaten by Chanfrau’s older brother.”11 In this sense, art very much mimicked life, with a vision of the young men in the audience depicted live on stage in front of them. “Chanfrau knew this type of character well, ” reports David L. Rinear, “for he had been one. He was born and raised on the Bowery and had even been a volunteer fireman forВ .В .В . the famous вЂOld Maid’ Company.”12 A Glance at New York offers a fond snapshot of the life of the b’hoys and the mischief they get up to: we see Mose encourage his friends to drag up so they can sneak into the ladies-only Bowling Saloon (they get thrown out when Mose forgets himself and tries to kiss the proprietress); then he starts a fight in which George gets a black eye; later we see him stick up for George against the swindlers Mike and Jake. Finally, as the action culminates in a shindig at the Vauxhall Gardens, Mose slips off to help out his friend Bill Sykes (the familiar villain from Dickens’s 1846 novel Oliver Twist); according to Mose, Sykes “runs wid our machine,”13 like brothers in arms, the cockney

bully and the Bowery b’hoy. New York’s fascination with telling its own story in fictional, journalistic, or theatrical accounts is central to the way that it has nurtured its self-image and in turn the way it has come to view itself. Shows like this projected characters from the streets in a way that both crystallized their behaviors and introduced them to a wider public. That these representations were influential and sometimes dangerous is evidenced by George Foster’s remarks about A Glance at New York: “A mirror so foul and distorted as the modern stage could not be expected to reflect any thing but the obvious faults, vices and barbarisms of whomsoever was brought before it, ” he wrote. “Many a half-timid young man, struggling between the dictates of his better nature and the promptings of a depraved appetite, has been confirmed in vicious courses by witnessing and contributing to the applauses with which the beastly exuberance of Mose was received from the stage.”14 Such was one snapshot of New York in 1848; but to better know the city, its culture, and the character of its most famous street, we must journey back in time to the days when New York was just beginning to become established.Page 37 → We’re going to take a stroll. We’ll head up Broadway, we’ll follow the map, and we’ll start in 1664, when New York first became known as New York.

Walking Up Broadway When the settlement of New Amsterdam was wrested from Dutch control (or rather, the governorship of the Dutch West India Company), the city was a fraction of its current size, and the extent of its urban development was defined by a wall at the northern end of town—now Wall Street. The main thoroughfare running north from the Fort and out through the main gateway of the walled town was known as “Heere Wegh Straet” (“Gentlemen’s Way”) or “Brede Weg” (“Broad Way”). The road made use of an ancient path, the Wickquasgeck Trail, which had traced the most accessible northerly route following the contours of the island. “The surface of Manhattan was naturally rolling,” explains Stephen Jenkins, “and this early Broadway followed the inequalities of the surface at the top of the ridge which sloped to both rivers.”15 The road would eventually depart from the ancient trail, and the push for progress would soon lead to leveling the land rather than following its natural paths. From the time of the English occupation in 1664, the city expanded. In the early days, though, the extent of Broadway was limited; maps of the period16 show it going no further than the Commons—the common grazing land out of town—around the vicinity of the current City Hall Park. The colony was formally given charter in 1683, and identified twelve counties covering what is now the greater New York area. Outlying villages like Greenwich Village and Marble Hill that had been established in the 1650s under Peter Stuyvesant’s jurisdiction were accessed by more substantial roads, like Greenwich Street and the Bloomingdale Road, named in 1703. But Broadway, which would later connect with the Bloomingdale Road, was not yet extended beyond the Commons. At that time, the most significant road out of the city led up Bouwerie Lane (the Bowery) and tracked the east side of the island, a post route to the strategically important town of Boston. Closer to the city the wall became engulfed by the developing streets. Those such as King Street, Queen Street, Little Queen Street, Crown Street, and George Street recognized the English monarchy. Between 1691 and 1707 parts of Broadway were paved with cobbles to aid traffic, and in 1696 the first church was built on the land where Trinity Church now stands, at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. In 1709 the Page 38 →street was leveled up to Maiden Lane, and three years later between there and the Commons. Above the wall it became known as Great George Street, named for the king of England (a good bet: there were four King Georges between 1714 and 1830). By the 1730s the city’s streets had spread to cover the land on the east side between Great George Street and the East River, and from the southern tip of the island up to about Chatham Square. It was in this Georgian New York that the first theaters began to appear.17 Even by the turn of the next century, the push north had barely begun. City Hall relocated to the ground of the Commons in 1803, to stand on the triangle of land at the intersection of Broadway and the old Bouwerie Road. Its elegant portico and neoclassical columns faced the city, but its rear walls were left in brownstone like the back of a film set. The committee of aldermen that had commissioned it had wanted to save money, and assumed that no one would ever see the back side.18 The city as they imagined it was planned between the Battery and City Hall:

it clearly had modest prospects and little sense of what lay ahead. The rest of Manhattan was developing as farmland, with a few small villages scattered here and there, and anecdotes reveal just how rural the middle of the island was. Like today, the affluent would head out of town to holiday, and one historian’s acquaintance “used to tell how as a girl she went with the rest of her family to their summer house near Broadway and Fourteenth Street, and of the preparations made for several weeks for this summer flitting into the country.”19 Turn-of-the-century New York was small, with just sixty thousand residents. Nevertheless, the city was growing, and a new theater, the Park Theatre, had been established in 1798 just a stone’s throw from City Hall. It would remain the principal theater in the city for half a century. Other theaters were located in various places around the foot of downtown Manhattan, but the link between Broadway and theater was soon established as the main cultural and commercial hub of the city began to move up the path of the street. Each year the swelling of its population meant that it required more amenities and more space in which to develop. That development followed the course of Broadway. No one could have anticipated in those turn-of-the-century years the exponential growth that was about to happen. At first, the projected expansion of the city was small: following the Revolution (1775–1783), and partly in order to raise money for municipal projects without raising taxes, a stretch of thirteen hundred acres of land in the Northern Commons (between what is now Third and Seventh Avenues) had been apportioned into five-acre lots, with Fifth Avenue (then known as Middle Road) providing Page 39 →access. In 1796 a further initiative had identified more lots of five acres on either side of these, and two more roads were created (now Park and Sixth Avenues) against which the narrow edge of the rectangular plots would be situated. “In 1805 Broadway was extended to Prince Street,” Lockwood writes, “in 1806 to Great Jones Street, and in 1807 to Astor Place, where it ended at a farmer’s picket fence.”20 It seems extraordinary that a mere picket fence should demarcate the boundary of urban expansion: flimsy protection when you have a growing metropolis in your area, you’d have thought. If only that farmer had heard the later words of Cole Porter: “Give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, / Don’t fence me in” (1934). Manhattan was never going to be fenced in—certainly not by a meager picket fence—but it’s interesting how the pastoral sentiments of that song belie, despite the same sort of phrase, the inexorable march of progress that Lockwood’s account records. When the city’s commissioners decided to lay out the future design of Manhattan in a grid formation (1811), progress was very definitely linked to ideas of order, containment, and social control; and by now, ambition was high. Care was taken to allow for recreational space in the grid, though with hindsight the provision was insufficient; this was partly remedied by doubling the size of Battery Park in the 1840s, and in the 1850s by slotting in Central Park further uptown. The committee also recognized that reclamation might fill in parts of the Hudson and East Rivers, so the plan was extended 400 feet beyond the low-water mark. This was a period of land reclamation (making the land usable) and property speculation (making it profitable). Already (from 1789), wealthy landowners such as Petrus Stuyvesant (great-grandson of the original) were carving up their family farms to create residences. Between 1809 and 1811 a vast area of marshland in what is now SoHo and Little Italy was drained. This boggy land—the Lispenard Meadows and the Collect Pond—had served a purpose while the city was still small; now it was increasingly preventing the city’s future growth and the execution of what was known as the Randel Plan—the layout of the grid. Once the area had been drained, the city could begin to build on it, and from 1820 some of the earliest speculators to exploit this opportunity built properties that the wealthiest citizens coveted on Bond Street, Bleeker Street, and Lafayette Place. John Jacob Astor in particular anticipated the northerly spread of the city. Recognizing the potential investment, he “preferred to buy land far beyond its outskirts,”21 and his rapidly escalating wealth enabled him to do this in abundance. Over the next few years a series of unfortunate disasters played into the Page 40 →hands of these speculators, and offered an unanticipated though effective program of urban regeneration in Lower Manhattan. In 1822, an epidemic of yellow fever caused “the city government [to declare] everything below City Hall вЂan infected district’ and [remove] those people from their homes who had not yet fled the city. Within a week, Greenwich Village was swarming with refugees,”22 and on the other side of the island, the east-side districts up to Bank Street were developed. In 1835, the next disaster struck—fire: “It was a nineteenth-century version of urban

renewal. Trade no longer had to remove residences one by one from the area along the East River. In one night the flames had completely cleared the area, so merchants could build warehouses as densely set and as up-to-date as they wished.”23 Finally, when a second major fire struck in 1845, “almost all the wealthy families deserted Bowling Green and lower Broadway.”24 Throughout this period—and equally responsible for the uptown migration of residents who could afford to move—New York’s population expanded significantly, doubling over the twenty years between 1810 and 1830,25 and establishing Manhattan as “America’s pre-eminent seaport, emporium and financial center.”26 The city had been blossoming as a commercial hub, exploiting its natural suitability as an accessible but sheltered port. As commerce developed and the population grew, demands for greater commercial and warehousing resources in the heavily populated downtown area were answered. One of the principal causes of the burgeoning expansion of the city’s mercantile trade was the completion of the Erie Canal. This project was a political maneuver to boost New York’s position as the leading trade center for wheat and cotton, threatened by the new settler communities in Ohio and Mississippi, with their readily available watercourse. The opening of the canal in 1825 reduced transportation costs to 6 percent of what they had been, making a passage between New York and the Great Lakes navigable, and turning it into a viable trade route. To put this in perspective, Burrows and Wallace report 324 ships being at anchor off Manhattan on one occasion in 1824—already trade was flourishing, and this was a record for the time; by 1836, accounts list 921 ships on the East River and another 320 on the Hudson in a single day.27 The impact on the city of this explosion in trade was enormous. Jobs were created, wealth was accumulated, and a huge number of warehouses and trade-related buildings were hastily erected around the jetties of downtown Manhattan. The role of Broadway in this narrative becomes increasingly complex. Of all the desirable areas, lower Broadway had been the prime location for people of standing to live, as this observer wrote in 1807: “A man who residesPage 41 → in Pearl Street, or Chatham Row, derives no kind of dignity from his domicil; but place him in a certain part of Broadway, anywhere between the Battery and Wall Street, and he straightway becomes entitled to figure in the beau monde and to strut as a person of prodigious consequence!”28 Lockwood concurs: “Broadway was the most desirable address in the city from its beginning among the secluded mansions of Bowling Green to the area around Canal Street, where the red brick row houses, slate sidewalks and poplars gave way to decaying farmhouses and neglected fields.”29 This was not just an aspirational residential address, though; because of its breadth, Broadway developed as the main artery for traffic in and out of the city. It also became the promenade of choice for the style-conscious men and women about town who wished to be seen and to flaunt their wealth: “It was, without challenge, the fashionable street of the nation, the place in democratic America for the successful to display their superior social status,” suggests Spann.30 The British diarist Mrs. Trollope, known for her prejudice against America, exclaimed, “This noble street may vie with any I ever saw, for its length and breadth, its handsome shops, neat awnings, excellent trottoir, and well-dressed pedestrians”;31 meanwhile, George Foster boasted that “Broadway narrowly escapes being the most magnificent street in the world.В .В .В . Altogether the most showy, the most crowded, and the richest fashionable thoroughfare on the continent, and surpassed by not more than three or four in Europe.”32 “Yet for all its charms,” report Burrows and Wallace, “lower Broadway was losing its exclusivity in these years.”33 Its surrounding streets responded to the influx of merchants, sailors, warehouse workers, and businessmen by providing brothels, restaurants, and alehouses for their entertainment. Broadway became ridden with filth, slops, and detritus from the merchants, not to mention mountains of construction material for the street’s ever-developing buildings. Joel H. Ross’s account is eloquent on the matter in his 1851 What I Saw in New York: Every thing in the streets and on the walks is untied, unpacked, unrolled, unboxed. Doors, windows, walls, roofs, brick. Stone, mortar, dust and splinters daily come tumbling down to make way for banks, stores, halls, hotels, shops, offices, &c. &c. Cart-loads of stone, and ship-loads of timber, boatloads of brick, and sloop-loads of lime, wagon-loads, wheelbarrow-loads, and back-loads of various other building materials are thrown together, piled up, heaped up, and stacked up, or scattered about

in wild confusion, hither and thither through the street, so that men, women, and children, horses, Page 42 →donkies [sic], and dogs have to look out for snags, and are pretty lucky if they do not sink.В .В .В . Moreover, the street is almost perpetually obstructed, from the first of January till the last of December, by pavers, at different points, and also by sewer-builders, vault-makers, &c., to say nothing of apple peddlers, cake venders, ash-boxes, and swill-tubs; together with hillocks of mortar, and mounds of mud; with now and then a broken cart, a dead horse, dog or cat, and various other obstructions that we can neither mention, avoid, nor remedy. After all, Broadway is a beautiful street.34

Gradually, pushed by these diverse influences, the affluent vacated their lower-Broadway townhouses, often converting them into hotels for traveling businessmen. As the rich moved north, the gap was filled. “Clerks, shopkeepers, and laborers trod its excellent trottoir on their way to and from work. Pigs wandered over from alltoo-near poor neighbourhoods. Commerce and the business district expanded rapidly northward.”35 It was, says Edward K. Spann, “the great thoroughfare for the march of business northward up Manhattan island.”36 Broadway was not yet synonymous with the theater, though. Asa Greene, writing his A Glance at New York in 1837, does not even mention the street in his chapter on the theater. “The number of theatres in all [in the city] is five,”37 he states: the Park Theatre (in Park Row), the American Theatre (on the Bowery), the National Theatre (at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets), the Franklin Theatre (in Chatham Square), and the Richmond Hill Theatre (toward Greenwich Village). He chooses not to mention a number of other performance venues, including Castle Garden (the future immigrant depot off the Battery that would host opera diva Jenny Lind in a celebrated concert in 1850) and Niblo’s Garden (which was on Broadway, and which would gain fame as the venue of the “first” musical, The Black Crook, in 1866). It would only be in later years, starting with a building boom in 1837, that Broadway would develop the beginnings of the theater industry for which it is now renowned. Perhaps this was in part because the theater itself was an institution rather frowned upon (as we have seen from George Foster’s remarks), though Asa Greene suggests that five thousand people a night were attending shows.38 In 1851, Joel H. Ross admits never having been inside a theater, stating that “he had better go down to his grave in his present ignorance, than to be enlightened by the performances within.”39 Meanwhile, Foster takes a bold step into the theater only to encounter upstairs its saloon,Page 43 → a “vast reservoir of immorality, looseness, blasphemy and obscenity.” His stance was unequivocal: “Let the rule be imperative, ” he demanded; banish utterly every facility for grog-drinking within the walls of the theater, and admit no woman unaccompanied by a gentleman. These simple reforms would do much to rescue the stage, by improving the character of the audience, and would be the hopeful forerunner of still better things.40 By the mid-1840s, thanks to shrewd urban planning and fortuitous circumstances, Broadway represented the backbone of New York’s economy, with its arrangement of activities well defined into three areas along the distinctive path of the street: The banks and counting-houses had taken over the blocks from Bowling Green to the beginning of City Hall Park. The shopping and hotel district now began around City Hall and continued a few blocks past Canal Street, and the residential portion of Broadway filled the next mile, leading to Union Square.41 By 1847, the aspirational migration north encouraged John Jacob Astor to establish the Astor Place Opera House even further up Broadway, and at the northern edge of this rapidly expanding city. At this stage, it was the shops that attracted people—not only the ladies, whose wardrobe “could easily cost over $100,000,”42 but also the “famed Broadway dandies, the street’s better-mannered answer to the вЂBowery B’hoys,’

[who] challenged the splendour of the ladies.”43 In Ross’s words, this was “the great fashionable promenade of Gotham, where all the belles, beaux, and babies—Knickerbockers and Yankees, are shown up to the best advantage.”44 The concentration of expensive shops and fashion houses between Eighth and Twenty-Third Streets caused that stretch of Broadway to become known as “The Ladies Mile.” It catered to affluent women of leisure, and in this sense offered not only commodities for sale, but also experiences to pass the time. In particular, the theater offered entertainment, and it is during this period (from the mid-nineteenth century) that the huge agglomeration of theaters in the Ladies Mile stretch of Broadway sprang up. Marlis Schweitzer notes a particular connection between the theater and shopping cultures,45 noting that both sides exploited the relationship by offering themed events (“Ladies’ Invitation Nights” in theaters;Page 44 → “vaudeville acts in commercial spaces”); she suggests that theater impresarios judiciously constructed their venues near department stores (and vice versa) “to ensure a steady stream of patrons”;46 she notes that the advent of the midweek matinee coincided with the opening of Stewart’s Marble Palace;47 and she even suggests that it was this close relationship that saved the New York theater industry from collapsing during the Panic of 1873.48 Most of all, she suggests that it was the glamor of Broadway’s fashion houses outshining the theaters that caused theaters to raise their game: “Buttressed by the visual spectacle of commerce, theater managers moved to create environments that could compete with the brilliance of Broadway’s other sites.”49 With all of its colorful street life, Broadway really did serve the city as its main artery: the separation of the city into residential and commercial zones urged a transport infrastructure to develop, and by the 1850s, reports Lockwood, “some fifteen thousand vehicles” rattled over the cobbles every day.50 These varied from the expensive hacks to the more modestly priced omnibuses (“all sorts of wagons, double and single; all sorts of stages, public and private; all sorts of hacks, ancient and modern; all sorts of carriages, curious and common; all sorts of horse-carts, hand-carts, dog-carts, goat-carts, meat-carts, bread-carts, wood-carts, ash-carts, swill-carts, and dirt-carts, together with cars, wheelbarrows, sleds, sleighs, jumpers, &c.”).51 The many New Yorkers who were unable to afford transportation would walk to and from work down the bustling thoroughfare of the street. The noise, dirt, and danger are remarked upon in numerous accounts of Broadway, and at one stage a bridge was erected over the street so that pedestrians could cross from one side to the other safely. Less obvious effects of the changing dynamics in the city, though, impacted the domestic arrangements of families, whose home life was “quarantined from the rough-and-tumble of commerce”52 in what were, effectively, dormitory villages out of town. Among these impacts were seemingly trivial affairs: family meal habits even changed as the daily activities of commuting interrupted traditional routines. George Foster’s description of the changing face of Broadway throughout a day draws on interesting metaphors: “In the early morning it is quite hushed and solitary,” he writes, “and wears that air of indescribable and hopeless desolation which is encountered on the stage of a theatre after the performance is over.В .В .В . In an hour or two the great thoroughfare will be alive, and the whole city will go surging and thundering through it—a human river in a freshet, roaring and foaming toward the sea.”53 Other descriptions paint vivid images of the street during the evening: “As night fell Page 45 →on the city, Broadway became a brilliantly lit, almost magical sight. Every carriage or omnibus on the street carried at least one pair of lamps.В .В .В . The store windows were fully illuminated, to lure the nighttime window shoppers, and the entrances and first-floor facades of all the hotels were always bright with light.”54 Broadway had been one of the first streets to enjoy gas lighting from the Battery to Grand Street in the late 1820s, and this allowed the shops to stay open into the evening. Both Dickens and Trollope compared Broadway, lit up like this, to some of the London and Paris streets, adding European cachet to the street’s growing reputation for commerce.55 In this sense, although Broadway was not yet predominantly recognized as a theatrical street, it was the street as a theater that struck onlookers. “There was a continuous interplay between its roles as a stage for the fashion-conscious and as the city’s leading retail street,” suggests Edward K. Spann.56 “It is a great sheet of glass,” writes Foster, “through which the whole world is visible as in a transparency.”57 The great retail emporia of the time—Tiffany’s, A. T. Stewart’s, Lord and Taylor—rode the wave as elegant Broadway moved further uptown. Tiffany’s, founded in 1837, moved to number 271 Broadway in

1847, then to number 550 in 1852. In 1846 Stewart opened the first department store in New York at 280 Broadway, then in 1859 he relocated (and enlarged) to occupy the whole block between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Stewart bucked every trend by erecting his store on the unfashionable side of the street. Courting controversy, his department store graced the “shilling side” out of the sun as opposed to the “dollar side” across the way. This was a curious distinction of the street, caused by its orientation and leading to the east side being cast in shade while the west side basked in sunlight, “lighting up the shops and making all things gay.” Women preferred to parade their elegant dresses and hats on the sunny side, so this is where “all the finest shops and hotels carefully stayed.”58 The distinction is made evident in Foster’s contemporaneous account, where he notes its particular importance during the habitual promenade of the elegantly dressed: In the morning, or at midday, if absolutely forced to go through Broadway, you may take the sidewalk most shady or convenient without positive loss of character. But at grand promenade hour, wo [sic] be to the unhappy wight or distressed damsel who should be seen plodding along the shilling pavement! 59 Had Stewart been given the chance to hear the 1930 Dorothy Fields song commenting on this ritual, he may not have eschewed the “sunny side of Page 46 →the street” for his flagship store. In the event though, his bold decision did him no harm: he died the richest man in America. Ironically, 280 Broadway later became home to the New York Sun, whose owner inscribed the front of the building with the newspaper’s motto, “The Sun Shines for All.”

The City in Song A typical song of this period suggests how important Broadway was to the public conceptualization of New York, and like other glances at the city, its narrative is framed as a travelogue. “вЂFarmer Stubbs’ Visit to New York City” is a comic song from 1860 by Mrs. Kidder (words) and Agustus [sic]Cull (music). It tells of the exploits of the country bumpkin Farmer Stubbs and his family. “On pleasure bent,” they make their way to the greatest attractions of the day: Central Park, City Hall by dark, Taylor’s Grand Saloon, the Crystal Palace with its airship dock, A. T. Stewart’s “Marble Palace,” and Barnum’s American Museum. Broadway’s sights are prominent in their itinerary, and the chorus sings of the “Dashing, crashing, night and day / Bustling rustling in Broadway.” At night it comes alive, with “Fine dashing belles and men of mark [who are] bright and lively as the lark.”60 The melody of the chorus is established in a jaunty iambic 6/8, with the feel of a traditional air, influenced by cadences from a rural world and idiomatic of Scottish or Irish music. Other songs from around the same period suggest a similar feel. In I. A. Gairdner’s pastoral “O What a Charming City!” (1831), for example, the god of song visits New York and is struck by its virtues: In Bowery, in Broadway, He rambl’d up and down, Took byway, and oddway, Resolv’d to see the town; And as he went, he sung this song, “Now, is it not a pity, I should have stayed away so long, From such a charming City.”61

This is strophic in form with a short, repeated four-measure refrain as the chorus. The verse tells the story, while the chorus simply offers thematic punctuation. Meanwhile, William Lingard’s “Walking Down Broadway” (1868) is one of his drag songs in which his character Nellie visits the TheatrePage 47 → Comique and Delmonico’s before parading down Broadway as was the fashion. “Walking Down Broadway” has a more strutting air than the previous songs but in very straight meter and simple strophic form whose chorus consists of two eight-measure phrases of the same material (AA).62 These songs, in style, manner, and influence all hark back to the Old World and to the music of the popular tradition (Ireland, Scotland). It is significant that the god of song in Gairdner’s air comes from across the Atlantic (i.e., from Europe), though the god resolves to stay henceforth in New York. The city is reflected as a charming place with Broadway as a focal point. Still, it does not yet have an identity we might call “American, ” and its music is not yet the kind that emerged in the ensuing years as that American identity developed. The shift might well be attributed to the transformative impact of the Civil War (1861–65). This rocked sensibilities, and undoubtedly affected New York’s reflection of itself. Not coincidentally, the story of musical theater’s genesis as an American art form is usually seen to coincide with the end of the war, with the production of The Black Crook at Niblo’s Garden in 1866.63 The timing is significant—the war was, of course, a major event in America’s political as well as historical journey, and it guides various narratives that document development around this time. The Black Crook fused a French corps de ballet with a German melodrama troupe to create a peculiar entertainment that purportedly kick-started American musical theatre. The fact that this coincided with the end of the Civil War has allowed the American musical a rhetorically and psychologically significant starting point. Whether we see this milestone as historical, political, or theatrical, we can accept that it is a point at which the city developed in key ways. For a start, Broadway the theatrical district moved further uptown. A cluster of new theaters around Union Square started the trend by relocating to the environs of the high-class Academy of Music, established in 1854 and “located near its fashionable audience,”64 as far north as Fourteenth Street. Although a handful of theaters continued to operate south of Union Square, only one new theater was opened: Jacob Aberle’s Germania Theatre (1879–1902). Otherwise, the trend was ever northwards, and was supported, as Mary Henderson notes, by the fact that Union Square was “the headquarters of most of the supporting activities of theatrical production”:65 it was becoming the hub of all the offshoots of the emerging theatrical industryВ .В .В . dramatic agencies, Seer’s theatrical printshop, Koehler’s costume shop, the publication offices of Byrne’s Dramatic News and Leslie’s Sporting and Dramatic Times, Sarony’s studio for Page 48 →stage photography, Samuel French’s play publishing house, and theatre bookshops.66 Whatever dynamics were at play in the New York of the mid-1860s, they certainly affected the theater industry: Broadway’s development literally turned a corner.

Changing Direction At Union Square the path of Broadway veers westward, forming a dog-leg in its trajectory (figure 4). The dog-leg is noticeable in the bird’s-eye views because it is more or less at this point that their imaging of Manhattan becomes indistinct. This suits the perspective of the images and reflects the less-developed section of the island above midtown, but it also reflects the perceptual understanding of the city held by painters and audiences: the future development of New York was unclear, and can hardly have been predicted on quite the scale (and at quite the rate) that it happened. If the bird’s-eye views are hazy beyond Union Square, we might view this as a reflection of the period (1873). The push was toward modernism, toward the technological developments that would lead America to become a world power, and toward the next milestone in various narratives—the turn of the century. But the intervening years are characterized by change, and a striking change of direction on the map suggests many

things: a forging of new identity; a departure from the past; uncertainty about the future; but, balancing that, the confidence to break with tradition and set out in innovative ways. Broadway now began to forge its path diagonally across the grid of Manhattan, and in wider terms the inexorable growth of the city—which had formerly been in one consistent direction—was now to sprawl in all directions as a network of transportation links fed in and out of the center. The first terminus of Grand Central Station, connected to the newly completed national railroad system, was constructed in 1871 and enlarged in the mid-1880s; overhead railroad lines enabled speedy commuting from 1876; a major artery to the East, the Brooklyn Bridge, opened in 1883, while the Harlem River was straddled by the Washington Bridge in 1889. The annexing of Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and Brooklyn into the conurbation of Greater New York in the consolidation of 1898 really did create a “megalopolis” to herald in the twentieth century. Meanwhile, immigration Page 49 →increased with a new generation of European refugees who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe but largely remained in the city once they arrived. This contributed to an already swelling population, which more than doubled in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. As Bayrd Still’s account of the city, Mirror for Gotham, reports, “the generation from 1870 to 1900 saw the advent of present-day New York.”67 It’s a sentiment echoed by Douglas Tallack in his article “New York, New York”: Figure 4. Note how clearly Broadway catches the eye in this image, guiding the viewer directly up the island in a perfectly straight line. At Union Square it veers off diagonally to the west, creating a crooked dog-leg on the map. Historic Map Works LLC/Historic Map Works/Getty Images. [It was in] the period from the 1870s to the 1910sВ .В .В . the less than familiar end-of-century period that the city was transformed from a poor copy of Victorian London at the tip of Manhattan and from a poor copy of Parisian modernity around Union and Madison Page 50 →Squares into the modernist city of the twentieth century. In that earlier period, we can see ways in which one aspect of New York—“Old New York,” as the novelist Edith Wharton frequently described it—functions as a “vanishing mediator” to ease and disguise the transition to another aspect of the city: “New New York,” as the city was regularly referred to by boosters and politicians at the turn of the century.68 All of these developments in one way or another assisted the consolidation and expansion of the theater industry as it travelled uptown to its newly located “Rialto,” which from 1866 became firmly entrenched above Union Square. The development of greater transportation links in particular, and especially the completion of a national railroad system which “made it possible, after the Civil War, for touring shows to challenge and largely displace resident stock companies outside New York,”69 also precipitated new operational paradigms. By the 1890s the theater industry and its booking systems were controlled by powerful conglomerates such as the Theatrical Syndicate, Klaw and Erlanger and the Shubert Brothers, a very different situation to the sort of “push-cart-type enterprise” that had operated previously.70 Likewise, construction of Grand Central Station at Forty-Second Street, the result of an 1857 ban on steam locomotion in the lower island, “had the effect, 40 or 50 years later, of making Forty-second Street the most important of mid-Manhattan’s wide cross streets,”71 and therefore the center of cultural tourism in New York. By the 1890s, with Union Square established as a theatrical center but with theater construction moving still further up the island, impresarios took the next bold step, and the new center of Broadway, which still exists in today’s nexus around Times Square (then Longacre Square), was fixed by the construction of Oscar Hammerstein’s Olympia in 1895. A huge theatrical enterprise and a huge gamble several blocks north of the existing theater center, a four-theater complex of the Olympia Music Hall, Concert Hall, Lyric Theatre and Roof Garden took up an entire city block and was the biggest theater complex in the world. This wasn’t Hammerstein’s first willful speculation: his whole career had involved bold entrepreneurial gestures, and not all had been successful. More than once he had flirted with bankruptcy, and his 1892 Manhattan Opera House on Thirty-Fourth Street—then at the center of the theater district—had cost him his reputation and most of his money. Moving even further north was a brash and cocky move, but his flamboyant maneuver—chiming with

the modern metropolis’s ambitious leaps in almost every direction in the last decades of the nineteenth century—is something that we might see as peculiarly fittingPage 51 → to a still fledgling theater industry that would in its maturity become so world renowned and iconic. The Olympia was built in what was then Longacre Square—by no means out of town,72 but reflecting the fact that high society was perennially relocating to escape the increasingly dirty industrial and slum-ridden environs downtown. That Hammerstein erected the Olympia in what was then a distant part of the city was a common practice for an entertainment impresario catering for the city’s elite. “The patronage of the well-to-do resulted in the theatres’ moving just in advance of the moment when an area became fashionable,” writes Henderson; “theatres remained in the vanguard of the northward movement of the population.”73 Indeed, it’s interesting to see how this has so often been the case with New York theaters and especially concert halls: the Astor Place Opera house was built in 1847 on Broadway and East Eighth Street, “convenient for the Astors and their friends in Lafayette Place and Washington Square, but [В .В .В .В ] somewhat out of the way for the rest of the city”;74 the Academy of Music was built in 1854 on Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, in an area that resisted the inevitable encroachment of commerce until 1866; in 1880, on Broadway and Forty-First Street, the Metropolitan Concert Hall “arose in splendid isolation away from the central city and the entertainment district”;75 and in 1891, Andrew Carnegie located his Music Hall at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, even further north. In time, shops and commercial enterprises moved into the new residential neighborhoods and the whole process of aspirational migration would begin again. That the surge uptown can be tracked by the locations of new opera and concert halls tells us how important (European) music was to the cultured elite, though that relationship is in itself complicated by the fact that most of these venues presented diverse types of entertainment, and by the fact that Hammerstein at least was intent on “bringing opera to the masses.”76 Hammerstein’s Olympia was not the last of these daring northerly gambles by the musical crowd—that would come in the 1960s, when the west side was regenerated and the Lincoln Center around Sixty-Second to Sixty-Fifth Streets became the new home of the Metropolitan Opera. But when the newspaper industry followed Hammerstein by erecting the showcase New York Times building in the same vicinity as his theater complex, and the new metropolitan transport system located a key station in its underground system at Times Square, the seeds were sown for the Broadway as we know it to be born. “Within ten years after Hammerstein began his prodigal ventures there,” writes Vincent Sheean, “twelve theatres were built in Forty-second Street and twenty-five within the neighbourhood of the first Hammerstein house.”77 So by the turn of the century there had already been two very distinct Page 52 →phases in the development, history and “imaging” of Broadway: the first leading up to the Civil War and embodied in the straight stretch of Broadway between the Battery and Union Square; the second beginning in the wake of the war, and articulated by the change in Broadway’s direction diagonally across the grid. The dog-leg on the bird’seye view correlates to a change in the mind-set between the romanticized past of pre-Civil War New York and the aspirational dynamic of roughly 1870–1910. Interestingly, this is a duality recognized by Raymond Knapp “as part of the American experience and psyche,” as if the experiences of development throughout this period have become fixed in the collective make-up of American identity. Knapp refers on the one hand to a “nostalgia [evoking] the sense both of a valuable past and a deeper interiority,” and on the other a “posturing [which] is basic to what it means to be American, which is something one may be born toВ .В .В . but more importantly what one aspires to become, in part through patriotic posing.”78 I’m going to suggest that, in numerous examples, we can sense this duality in the cultural products of New York, and especially in the patterns of Broadway song. The shift from looking backward to looking forward, from the Old World to the new, from the nostalgia for a European past to the posturing of an American future, is I think, ingrained in the cultural psyche. And if that shift happens between 1870–1910, during a period of uncertainty, it is exposed on the map of the bird’s-eye view as a hazily defined change of direction that is about to take place. Broadway appears to be the marker of this new direction, and its departure into new territory is evident yet veiled in mist. At the other end of this period emerge cultural products that more confidently express that new direction, with a knowledge of the change that has happened and a posturing more vividly marked into

their “maps.” The Broadway melody, I’ll suggest, emerges with the shift from old to new etched into its sound. In order to explore this we should look at how the Broadway song dramatically changed during that same period from around 1870–1910.

The Sound of New York By the end of the century the sound of New York songs was distinctly different to “Farmer Stubbs,” “O What a Charming City!” or “Walking Down Broadway.” Though still characterized by the lilting gait of European sensibilities, typical musical material was more confident and assertive. Interestingly, it was the Bowery that stole much of the attention away Page 53 →from Broadway, as if the two streets were jostling for attention as the century came to an end. “Chimmie Fadden der Bowery Boy” introduces Charles H. Hopper’s character from the show Chimmie Fadden (1895). He sings of his patch on the Bowery, from Houston Street to Worth Street, where he eats at Beefsteak John’s, goes dancing at Chermanie Hall (Germania Hall), outwits the cops, and filches from the market stalls on Mott Street. Another song, Gussie L. Davis and Charles B. Ward’s “Only a Bowery Boy” from the show A Bowery Boy (1894) purports to be “a true picture of Bowery life,”79 telling the story of a young man who squirrels some of his weekly earnings away to entertain his date at the weekend at Glen Island or Rockaway Park (alternatives to Coney). Now the songs are full of vernacular: the Bowery Boy in Davis and Ward’s verse “changes a five spot into ones and chucks an awful bluff”; while Chimmie Fadden claims “there’s not a вЂmug’ in al der вЂpush’ can shine your вЂskates’ like me.” Even in the written lyrics the characterization of these personalities as working-class Irish immigrants can be detected. And the form of the songs has modified too; these now have longer choruses of thirty-two bars, far more than the previous short refrains and more closely resembling the Tin Pan Alley songs that came to epitomize New York some twenty years later. Yet these don’t quite reveal consistent formalized structures; “Chimmie Fadden der Bowery Boy” has no repeated material within its ABCD refrain at all, which is almost unheard of during the golden age period; “Only a Bowery Boy” has got more of a structured form, in ABA1C. Characteristically, both are in waltz time—a sure sign of Old World influence and pre-twentieth-century musicality. New York’s musical culture continued to reflect its changing face, however, and it did not take long for the influences to change: George M. Cohan is celebrated as the leading composer of turn-of-the-century American (rather than European) Broadway song, and in examples of his material such as “Give My Regards to Broadway” from Little Johnny Jones (1904)80 and “All Aboard for Broadway” from George Washington Jr. (1906)81 any notion of the Old World has all but disappeared. These are both spirited marches showing the first signs of the dynamic Broadway two-step, an off-beat syncopation that drives the momentum of the song forward. When he does reference the Old World, as in “Broadway Tipperary” from Hello, Broadway (1915), it is to entice people to travel to America: “Oh you’ll find there’s quite / A bit of Tipperary, Mary, / Right here on old Broadway!”82 Before long, Cohan’s two-step connected with the influential rhythm of ragtime, ever-present in the Tin Pan Alley songs of “Ragtime King” Irving Berlin, and according to George Gershwin, representative of America (“The Page 54 →Real American Folk Song (Is a Rag),” 1918). Both Frances S. Seamans’s “Kindly Direct Me to Broadway” (1914)83 and Gene Buck and Dave Stamper’s “I’m Looking for Old Broadway” (Ziegfeld’s New 11.30 Midnight Frolic, 1918),84 for example, construct characteristic ragtime moods, syncopating across the bar lines the previously constrained rhythms of Cohan. Things were changing as the new century dawned and the influence of Europe gave way to American expression. Still, some things hadn’t changed since the days of A Glance at New York: in “Kindly Direct Me to Broadway,” slick businessman Billy McKoy is stopped by a demure young lady asking for directions to Broadway; flattered, he shows her the sights, only to find by the end of their excursion that she has picked his pocket. In all of these songs and many others Broadway is characterized as an alluring force at the heart of this modernizing city of New York; the sheet music to “Kindly Direct Me to Broadway” depicts its protagonists against an exaggerated electric lightbulb, as if they are moths attracted to the lure of Broadway’s flame. It

emphasizes the ultramodern technology of a street basking in neon and fondly called “The Great White Way.” Elsewhere songs of this name abound: one by Raymond Hubbell and Joseph Herbert in About Town (1906); another by Ludwig EnglГ¤nder, Sydney Rosenfeld, and J. Clarence Harvey in The Gay White Way (1907); “The Great White Easiest Way” by Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough in The Rose of Algeria (1909); “White Light Alley” by Alfred Baldwin Sloane and MacDonough in The Hen-Pecks (1910); and “White Light Lane” by Sloane and Edgar Smith in Tillie’s Nightmare (1910). As Michael Garber has suggested, “In this kind of imagery, urban nightlife becomes a song, and a synecdoche for the city’s life and rhythm is, especially, Broadway.”85 Shows about the street seem ubiquitous—The Girl from Broadway (1907), Up and Down Broadway (1910), A Glimpse of the Great White Way (1913), and Hello, Broadway! (1914) are typical of the trope. One show, Maid in America (1915), set at the Made in America Exhibition at Madison Square Garden, features the songs “Made in the U.S.A.,” “There’s a Little Bit of Everything on Broadway,” “Manhattan Mad,” and “Everyone’s Moving Up on Broadway.” In these songs the music and lyrics present a persistent image of the street: it’s exciting, dynamic, and modern; the place everyone wishes to be. Most importantly, in reflecting such attributes of Broadway, these songs were reflecting America, an identity statement that had become increasingly demanded as the country distanced herself from the Old World. If this meant moving away from idioms of the Old World in order to find a distinct cultural expression, it was a demand brought to a head in 1911 with a direct call from Theodore Roosevelt,86 leading to an outpouring of Page 55 →songs and shows that self-consciously announced themselves as expressions of America—shows like The American Maid (1913), America (1913), Maid in America (1915), and See America First (1916). As Raymond Knapp suggests, “American musicals became, in part and in some form, an enacted demonstration of Americanism, and often take on a formative, defining role in the construction of a collective sense of вЂAmerica’.”87 Indeed, suggests J. Ellen Gainor, “The very concept of America is a performed trope,”88 and from this point forward the self-conscious performance of America’s identity to itself and to the world has crystallized its image. Hackneyed in themselves, recurring images and idioms have become defining iconic statements of American-ness. Like centripetal circles within circles, these often self-referentially center around New York and Broadway: “I happen to like New York,”89 confided Cole Porter in the title of one song; “Gee, what a place to waste a day in,”90 he wrote in “Longing for Dear Old Broadway”. It’s a “helluva town, ”91 or if you like, a “wonderful town”92 to Bernstein, Comden, and Green; meanwhile to Rodgers and Hart it is—albeit ironically—an “isle of joy.”93 In performing the city, though, as we have seen Garber observe, golden age songs do more than simply offer descriptive accounts; they seem to hear as much as see the city, and in the songs this aural dimension becomes embodied. The songs regularly recognize the city in terms of its sounds, something that goes right back to the lyric of “Farmer Stubbs”: “Dashing, crashing, night and day / Bustling rustling in Broadway.” Interestingly, the “dashing” and “crashing” that are suggested in these lyrics are also implied in this report from the Evening Post from 1852: The more noise, the more confusion, the greater the crowd, the better the lookers on and crowders seem to like it, and the world from the match-boy to the gentleman of leisure, resort there to see the confusion, the uproar, and the sights while all enjoy it alike. The din, this driving, this omnibusthunder, this squeezing, this jamming, crowding and at times smashing, is the exhilarating music which charms the multitude and draws its thousands within the whirl. This is Broadway—this makes Broadway. Take from it those elements, the charm is gone.94 In time this aural dimension would become an abiding focus of Broadway songs. For the Gershwins, the “New York Serenade” was in its “Ten thousand steamboats hootin’— / A million taxis tootin’” (“New York Serenade” from Rosalie, 1928).95 For Harry Warren it was “the rumble of the subwayPage 56 → train, the rattle of the taxis” (“Lullaby of Broadway,” from Gold Diggers of 1935, 1935).96 But it is not just the lyrics that articulate these sounds; there are numerous examples of attempts to

emulate in the music the sounds of the city: Gershwin’s car horns in “An American in Paris” (1928); the sounds of construction in “Nobody Loves a Riveter” by Rodgers and Hart (The Hot Heiress, 1931); and in a different city but nevertheless evoking familiar urban sounds, the ringing of the trolley bell and the frenetic energy of its rattling journey in “The Trolley Song” by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane (Meet Me in St. Louis, 1944). Even away from the explicitly self-conscious musical metaphors of Broadway song, the city has continued to be conceived in musical terms. The 1931 “Spirit of the Age” costume ball celebrating the completion of the new Waldorf-Astoria hotel, as Koolhaas reports, included an orchestra complemented by the “sounds of a frantic Metropolis”: “nine riveting machines, a three-inch pipe for live-steam, four oceanliner whistles, three sledge hammers and a few rock drillers.”97 Such ideas are central to what Garber defines as the “вЂcity as song’ convention.” By the golden age of the 1930s, it was a tradition securely established, and the modernist sensibility that equated concrete sounds with music, and described moods, emotions, and environments in musical terminology (“the rhythm of life, ” “the sound of the city”) was standard in projections of New York. Yet even if it seems a little overdeterministic to read into the patterns of the music a sort of animation of the city, it’s a common compulsion. For Howard Pollack, Gershwin’s music is literal in its mimicry of “the sounds of New York”: “the hurdy-gurdies of the Lower East Side, the calliopes of Coney Island, the player pianos of Harlem, the chugging of trains leaving Grand Central Station, the noisy construction of midtown skyscrapers, and so forth. The broad range of these allusionsВ .В .В . goes far in explaining the music’s American profile.”98 But wait: American music can hardly be defined by the extent to which it incorporates “real world” sounds, can it? If a national identity can be identified—and I think it can, if the characteristic idiom of golden age Broadway is anything to go by—the American-ness must be found in a more abstract articulation of that identity. But what might that be? What is the Broadway melody?

Broadway Melody There is of course a song called “Broadway Melody” (1929), dating from the twenties and probably most familiar from Singin’ in the Rain (1952). It Page 57 →announces itself with no lack of assertion as being the “Broadway Melody” (“Broadway Rhythm” [1935] makes a similarly bold claim); and serendipitously or not, it picks up on exactly the device that subsequent commentators have recognized as being idiomatic of Broadway in melody—the “gapped scale.” The opening motif of this song (“Don’t bring a”) involves a three-note phrase spanning a fourth with intervals of a tone and then a tone and a half between them. The melody of the whole rising phrase (“Don’t bring a frown to”) goes on to expand each interval by increments: tone (major second), tone and a half (minor third), two tones (major third), and perfect fifth. This idiomatic motif is the core of what Raymond Knapp calls a “gapped scale,”99 and variations of it occur endlessly in golden age Broadway showtunes. Knapp discusses Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” (1930), Berlin’s “Always” (1925), and Porter’s “Anything Goes” (1934), which all include the characteristic features of the gapped scale in their melodies. So too do many other songs, some of which literally invoke the name of the street itself, including “Broadway Melody” and “Broadway Rhythm,” which uses both a rising and falling version of the motif (“Gotta dance! Gotta dance! Gotta dance!”) In discussing the gapped scale, Knapp focuses on “I Got Rhythm,” with its call-and-answer of the main motif: the rise and fall of a city melody. The simple symmetrical pattern, especially in repetition, creates an effect of elemental simplicity, stemming in part from how resolutely the pattern preserves itself across a conflicting metrical structure.В .В .В . In the four-note opening figure and its manipulation, Gershwin produced an emblem of elemental American energy powerful enough to serve as a generative motive within the classical tradition.100 The gapped scale is a typical feature of Broadway melodies from the “other side” of that period of change

(1870–1910). Where earlier melodies associated in their lyrics with Broadway or New York tended to maintain folk or European idioms and melodic patterns based around scales or triadic structures (alongside straight or lilting rhythms), Broadway songs from about 1920 onward increasingly featured the gapped scale (alongside quintessentially American rhythms). This created, as Knapp attests, “song types whose American profile is particularly striking.”101 There are some similarities between the gapped scale and the pentatonic scale, as Knapp discusses, though the prevalence of this arrangement of notes in the idiom of American popular song may have more to do with Page 58 →the piano-centered composition of the music, which in certain keys encourages this patterning of notes. Rising examples that scamper up the scale in increasing intervals have a particular suggestion of hurry, urgency, and excitement that can’t wait for the passing notes in between; descending examples trip down the scale with an air of confidence, lightness and breezy urban allure It’s as if the energy of the city is embodied in the melody, or as if the lure of Broadway is simply too exciting to fill in the missing gaps. The gapped scale is a melody consistent with the aspirational mythology of the rialto.102 It’s one of the motifs that recur in songs about Broadway, songs suggesting Broadway and songs from Broadway. But is this the melody of Broadway? Figure 5. the gapped scale: “Broadway Melody” (1929). BROADWAY MELODY Music by NACIO HERB BROWN Lyric by ARTHUR FREED. В© 1929 (Renewed) EMI ROBBINS CATALOG INC. All Rights Controlled by EMI UNART CATALOG INC. and ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC.

The Bird’s-Eye View In order to discuss this, let’s turn back to that image we encountered at the beginning of this walk, weaving in ideas from the urban theorist Kevin Lynch about what he calls “imageability.” We’ll try to identify the “imageability” of the Broadway melody, and we’ll do it by looking at the “map” of the bird’s-eye view. On the bird’s-eye view, the path of Broadway is very well defined as a clear path running up the center of the island from the gateway of the Battery at its tip (see figures 3 and 4). What is most remarkable about this stretch of the street is the fact that it is absolutely straight, despite the jumble of weaving side-streets that surround it. No doubt such definition in pictures like this is an exaggeration, but Broadway stands out so vividly in the bird’seye views that it supports Lynch’s assertion that the city is given “imageability” by its paths. Lynch’s argument is part of a bigger thesis, which he calls The Image of the City. He suggests that our relationship with cities is in part organized Page 59 →around our imaged understanding of them, “the apparent clarity or вЂlegibility’ of the cityscape,”103 which he sees as “a crucial condition for the enjoyment and use of the city.”104 What he refers to as the “imageability” of the city recognizes our conceptualization of key features: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. These help the urban dweller or visitor to form conceptual maps which “strengthen the image” of the city, “symbolic devices” for structuring and understanding its geography.105 Perhaps surprisingly a use of musical language is key to Lynch’s discussion. Although he emphasizes a visualization of the space, he recognizes how other senses play a part in imaging the city. In particular, he invokes aurality, suggesting that a well-designed city “would invite the eye and the ear to greater attention,”106 and seeing (though it’s interesting that he does not refer to “hearing”) in the paths of the urban conceptual map a “developing pattern of elements”107 that “might be organized as a melodic line.”108 The musical metaphors go on: in complex interrelations of city paths he talks of “contrapuntal techniques: moving patterns of opposing melodies or rhythms”;109 “one might compose in counterpoint along these lines, or from one line to another. One sequence of elements, or вЂmelody,’ might be played against a countersequence.”110 It’s obviously not difficult for us to accept that Broadway, as a major artery through Manhattan, is and has

been a crucial marker in conceptualizing New York. Given its status in commerce and entertainment, its role as a nodal point in imaging the city is even more defined. Still, this is not just the rhetoric of the bird’s-eye image: Broadway during this period was by far the most developed street in Manhattan, and its clearly defined path up the island—in Lynch’s terms a “melodic line” that offers geographical imageability to the city—had been instrumental to the growth of New York during the nineteenth century. In other respects too, the clearly defined path of Broadway offered a visible correlation to defining thoughts about the street, not least the suggestion that the path toward progress—which in socioeconomic terms was seen to be uptown—was in direct correlation to the straight line of Broadway. It is, I would suggest, partly for this reason—to entice the viewer up Broadway—that the bird’s-eye view so prominently guided the spectator’s eye toward and along its path. And in doing so, a “melodic line” is created for Broadway that is pronounced, assertive and compelling. Lynch’s thesis, to be sure, identifies our imaging of the city as a conceptual practice. Yet in generating representations of the city in cultural images like the bird’s-eye view, New York’s artists reify the significance of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks to guide a particular imaging of the Page 60 →city. And these are not the only cultural constructs that map the city in their design; others such as the Broadway song create comparable patterns; comparable “melodic lines” that consolidate that “imageability.” Take Irving Berlin’s “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” from the 1949 show Miss Liberty, for example, whose melody recollects the path of Broadway as it visibly carves a straight line up the island. The song provides music to the poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, penned for the construction of the Statue of Liberty in the 1880s, and celebrating America’s welcoming of millions of European immigrants fleeing from the Old World. The song exploits both a repeated single-note motif and a simple major scale to create what we might hear as a “straight line” that “rises” through the verse. The melody repeats the note E for its first two bars, then rises a semitone to F for the next two bars, continuing to move up the diatonic scale incrementally every two bars over its first twelve bars. These repeated single-pitch phrases climb with stirring effect, as if encapsulating the aspirational walk up the ladder of the island, from the “golden door” at which Miss Liberty stands, welcoming the immigrants. We might read into this a reflection of the new arrivals’ ambitions: the “tired” and “poor” “huddled masses,” with their collective “yearning to be free” move steadily toward their goal. Metaphorically, the newcomers land on American soil, where the path to success is clearly marked as a direct route forward (or upward) through the song. The journey from this point for them is straight ahead, a clear path “up” the island. And musically, the goal of the tonic note, C, is reached in the eleventh bar. In this song, Berlin (who arrived as a five-year-old immigrant in 1893) rewrites his own history, tracing his desired journey onto the map of his cultural legacy. The song itself is not particularly sophisticated, and fits Emma Lazarus’s poem rather clumsily to rather pedestrian music. Nevertheless, the tone of its lyrics, its regular rhythmic beat and its simple harmonic structure give it an anthemic quality. This consolidates the persona of Berlin as the quintessential “new” American—a new colossus himself, whose rags-to-riches personal narrative is the epitome of the immigrant’s fantasy. His success story spanning the twentieth century sees an impoverished immigrant prosper through the ideals and idioms of his adopted country. And just as the new immigrant might be seen as a new American trying to secure stability, permanent residency and identity in a new life, we might also suggest that the city of New York was likewise finding its footing as the straight path of Broadway ventured unequivocally up the island. The repeated single-pitch phrase that we have seen in relation to “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” is a significant recurring feature of the BroadwayPage 61 → songbook, sometimes repeating just a single note, sometimes tracing a journey up the scale. Time and again it seems to reflect on the route that has been travelled metaphorically up the path of the street. It is a recurring feature of “Lullaby of Broadway” from Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935), for example, which starts with six notes on a single pitch: “Come on a-long and list(en to”).111 And what about Leonard Bernstein’s “New York, New York” from On the Town

(1944), which includes five notes on a single pitch: “we’ve got one day here (and not another minuteВ .В .В .)”? This song picks up on the theme of visiting New York and its attractions, though the itinerary for On the Town’s sailors has expanded significantly from Farmer Stubbs’ visit in 1860. Their journey proposes to take them all over the island “from Yonkers on down to the Bay,”112 though once more a central feature of their visit will be Broadway, which they sum up in the pithy one-liner, “Sights! Lights! Nights!”113 Mischievously compromising the location at which they dock, we might see these sailors newly arrived at the foot of Manhattan with the straight path of Broadway stretching before them up the island. The single-note phrase offers an aural dimension to that journey. Is it fanciful to see in these connections repeating patterns that recall the collective experience of New York’s immigrant population—people like Berlin, Bernstein, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Kern, and the Gershwins, all of whom came from immigrant families journeying metaphorically up the path of the island? We can see similar patterns in the music of Richard Rodgers:114 the show Babes in Arms, from 1937, includes at least two examples, in the title song and in the hit “Johnny One Note.” The show tells the quintessential summer stock narrative: a bunch of kids desperate to avoid farm work for the summer decide to put on a show. The title song is their call to arms, in which they grab farm tools and storm the barn to start rehearsals. “Babes in Arms” foreshadows Berlin’s “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” with its graded rise up the scale. This sort of scalar rise is vintage Rodgers, though maintaining each step of the scale for several iterations is less usual. Above a pounding rhythmic bass-line the melody is stirring and captures the militant attitude of the kids and their ambition. Meanwhile, the eponymous Johnny, the opera star cursed by a fairy to sing just one note, is not a character in the show itself, but the subject of an entertaining anecdote told by one of the characters. It follows a long tradition of Faustian tales in which characters trade their voices as part of a bargain, but this one conjures up a particularly contemporary and unlikely image: Johnny’s response to losing his range is to go out into the street, belt out his one note, and stop the traffic on Broadway. It’s a stirring tale of the power of music, Page 62 →and it links Broadway the street with Broadway the sound. “Johnny One Note” remains on a single note (and its octave) throughout its initial short verse, with the accompanying orchestration conveying the lift of aspirational motivation. But at this point, the straight path shifts, to head off westerly, toward the American future, with a change of direction. It’s a shift anticipated on the map, as we have seen, but it is not just a tracing in the direction of the street. This is a shift mapped even more forcefully into the sound of Broadway song; strikingly, melodic parallels to Broadway’s change of direction appear in numerous golden age hits. Following the single-note opening phrases, the melody suddenly changes in all of these examples, as if recalling the change in direction of Broadway after the Civil War and the brash posturing of a city asserting itself. Despite the theme of “Johnny One Note,” for instance (“Johnny could only sing one note,” we are told), the chorus bursts into a melody that is anything but mono-tonous. Its first line bounds down the scale on alternate steps in a variation of the gapped scale we have encountered above.115 It’s as if the melody is now performing the turn-of-the-century energy of modernism, mapped visually on the bird’s-eye view as the second part of the dog-leg, the diagonal Broadway that cuts across the island, the newly flourishing Rialto which stands for success, and which offers the immigrant more than anyone else a chance of prosperity. Here Johnny’s voice can be heard, here his feet tap and his fingers click; and the bounce of the melody continues. In this example, Johnny’s one-note belt is just one of the “voices” characterized, an operatic voice, albeit one that can only sing one note. The song itself is a second, very different type of “voice,” far more conventionally a Broadway show tune, sung by the character Bunnie in the Broadway idiom.116 This is classic Rodgers and Hart from the height of their long career together: Broadway music with a Broadway sound, Broadway rhythms and Broadway orchestration. In a third voice the anecdote of “Johnny One Note” again evokes the concrete “music” of the street: “the train whistles, / Boat whistles, / Steam whistles, / Cop whistles”;117 the sounds that are halted by Johnny’s voice. The voice, the song, and the soundscape of the city: three things you could call a “Broadway melody” in one song, then.

The juxtaposition between a repeated single-pitch motif and a scampering gapped-scale phrase is a feature of other key songs of the 1930s-1940s. We have already noted the single-note phrase in On the Town’s “New York, New York” (“We’ve got one day hereВ .В .В .”); this pattern is followed musically by a sudden change of direction, a descending pentatonic motif (“and Page 63 →not anotherВ .В .В .”). Again, it mimics the periods of Broadway development, just like the dog-leg on the map. In its change in musical direction between the single-note phrase and the gapped scale we perhaps sense that the newly arrived—the immigrants, the sailors—have, through immersing themselves in the city, found an identity—their own language within America, New York, and Broadway. Almost exactly the same thing happens in “Broadway Rhythm,” a song that I shall be discussing further in Walk 3. Notice how, again, the initial single-note phrase is followed by a gapped scale, this time rising in almost exactly the same pattern as the “Broadway Melody”: tone (major second), tone-and-a-half (minor third), two tones (major third), and tone-and-a-half (minor third). And—I am being fanciful here, but—just spinning the axis of the bird’s-eye view to present the path of Broadway on the same plane as the musical notation reveals how closely the spatial metaphor of this particular notation “maps” onto the spatial metaphor of the dog-leg path of Broadway (figure 6). The imaging of Broadway that occurs in these songs happens on a variety of levels, and in ways that invoke a “Broadway melody” in recurrent themes and in describing sounds of the city. So is it possible to suggest that the map of the Broadway song articulates the same sort of ecology of aspiration and development that the city itself articulates in the map of its modernist project?

The Road to Success If there is a single defining message implied in the iconicity of Broadway, it is a siren-call persuading aspirational hopefuls that this route up the island is the road to success. Time and again Broadway has sung this mantra to us in its Broadway rhythms and its Broadway melodies, its lullabies of Broadway and its rhapsodies in blue: “You too can be that big ball of fire. / You too can have your name in Who’s Who. / You too can climb up higher and higher.В / Until you reach that rainbow room!”118 sang Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland; “Gee, I’d like to be / On some marquee, / All twinkling lights,”119 wrote Sondheim; “I’ll have fortune and fame / When I get my name in lights,”120 echoed Peter Allen; while “I can see my name in neon,” cried the heroine of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana (1994), Lola the showgirl, all the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma, “just arrived, two suitcases in hand and a dream in her heart.”121 Perhaps John Lahr summed up best the overwhelming mythology that Broadway, New York, and even America has peddled for over a century: Figure 6. “Broadway Rhythm”: is this the path of Broadway? BROADWAY RHYTHM. Lyrics by ARTHUR FREED. Music by NACI HERB BROWN В© 1935 (Renewed) METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER, INC. All Rights Controlled by EMI ROBBINS CATALOG, INC. and ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC. Historic Map Works LLC/Historic Map Works/Getty Images. Page 64 →Broadway marks the spot where the new momentum of America’s twentieth century found its first wonderful playground.В .В .В . On Broadway’s Golden Mile, prosperity and exhaustion, power and personality, dynamism and panic coalesced in their most vigorous and unrepentant forms. In its songs, Broadway provided a backbeat of promise; .В .В .В the commonest citizen could rise by pluck, luck and talent into the aristocracy of success. [В .В .В .В ] To the American, filled with the century’s sincere itch for progress and perfection, there was no more sensational signpost of identity than to “see your name in lights.” .В .В . Broadway’s frivolous entertainment, in its refusal to suffer, has itself become a metaphor, giving weight and dimension to that most mischievous and ambivalent of American guarantees—“the pursuit of happiness.”122 Page 65 →As Lahr implies, the mythology of success is a trope not only rehearsed in the material of Broadway and the stories of its backstage shows, but also routinely evoked in many other cultural pronouncements, and even embedded into the psychology of the nation. And in a number of ways, this trope is echoed and emphasized in the

various stories that have constructed the city. The path to success that Broadway offers is not just a mere step up the ladder; it’s a promise of genuine rags-to-riches scale, rhetoricized in the call of Lady Liberty at the southern end of the island (“Give me your tired, your poor!”) and the overwhelming excess of profit accumulated by the time you reach Times Square. Walking up the street is not only a metaphorical elevation, but a literal movement of social mobility, a journey from down(town) to up(town) in wherewithal, status and opportunity. But it is only after the long march up that straight path that you can reach the “rainbow room,” when the melodic line shifts, when the gapped scale trips away, when the sound of America—the Broadway melody—takes off. In this respect, the journey we have encountered on this walk has itself rehearsed a trajectory of progress over time and through space. To travel with me on that journey has been not only to follow the map but also to follow familiar footsteps, to inhabit the possibilities of being American, and to enact the melody of the songs. In this first example of my performance cartography at play I’ve suggested that the melodies of Broadway articulate through their patterning a map of the city as it has been “imaged” (Lynch), and a relationship with the cultural dynamics that have informed the city’s development. I’ve considered specifically a conceptualization of Broadway from a more or less cartographical perspective (the bird’s-eye view), and I’ve suggested that certain Broadway melodies literally map onto the perceived path of the street’s development and its conceptualization in visual images; finally I’ve proposed that the patterns of those melodies map a route for us to follow whose walking performs a quintessential aspect of the city’s identity: the road to success. Shortly I will turn to a second conceptualization of the city that shifts the perspective to view Manhattan as a vertical city. On our next walk, however, we’ll play another game of performance cartography, exploring the notion of New York in terms of its density. Follow me now, through the canyons of the streets, amidst the clusters of towers and into the jungle of the city. Page 66 → Figure 7. The second stimulus: “The Lure of the City” by Hugh Ferriss (1925)

Page 67 →

Walk Two: Another Hundred People Downtown to Greenwich Village, with brief stops at the Woolworth Building, Christopher Street, and the XYZ Towers on Sixth Avenue. I’ve mentioned the first “Ker-chung” of West Side Story before, with its unmistakable, lopsided signature. “Ker-chung”: the notes are clumsily packed; they sound discomfiting when heard, and look uncomfortably close on the score. Look at the right hand of the piano line (see figure 8): six notes are crammed in two groupings of three, each vying for position in its huddle around the bottom of the stave, all tied together across a bar line and surrounded by a clutter of accidentals, expression marks, and musical directions. These are organized, of course, but they also seem awkward, complex despite their simplicity. And these qualities of organization and awkwardness, complexity and simplicity are also heard when the notes are played. The dissonant minor second between the Dв™Ї and the E is so close it is jarring, the harmonics creating a sound that appears to be somehow more than just two notes, as if the friction between the two generates a sort of material heat. Then, a slightly larger interval of a minor third opens up between the E and the G, letting in a modicum of temperament, a reprieve from the dissonance, from the friction, from the closeness. This bigger interval—perhaps like a breath of air or a chink of light in the chord—offers a space that even in its release seems to compound the crunch of the cluster. Yet the chord is still crowded. When the delayed bass note C judders in to join the grouping of sounds, it completes the awkward effect. Now, two chords with two harmonies coexist in the palette: C major and C minor—incompatible and unresolved. The “Ker-chung” is an unnerving composite of sounds, which defies description: is it harsh? dense? brash? chaotic? However we describe it, variants are repeated again and again in Bernstein’s work and in much of the music associated with the city, from Gershwin to Sondheim. Throughout the West Side Story score this same sort of clustering recurs: here and Page 68 →there in the “Prologue,” all the way through the jerky accompaniment to “The Jet Song,” and in various patterns throughout “Something’s Coming,” “The Dance at the Gym,” “Tonight,” “Gee, Officer Krupke,” andВ .В .В . well, you get the picture. Such a bunching of notes is characteristic of Bernstein’s music, perhaps a result of his composing at the piano, where his clustered fingers would naturally find a clump of notes on the keyboard. Perhaps it’s a result of his being a New Yorker, deep within the city and smothered by its mass. The clustering of notes in these chords is certainly interesting for music that belongs to a city as densely packed as New York; and this relationship between the density of the city and the dissonance of its music is the focus of my walking tour in this chapter. We’ll explore how both the city and its music have come to reflect the density of its population and its urban infrastructure. What we see in the tightly packed jumble of its buildings and feel in the crowded environments of our experience, we hear in the crunch of its chord clusters and the dissonance of its music. On this walk I will interpret the dense stabs of sound and the dense clusters of buildings as coterminous symptoms of the modernist rush to produce and overproduce success. The particular qualities of that excess that are seen in the rapid construction of tightly packed buildings and heard in the crunching discords of the jazz sound have created the visual and aural texture that we recognize as characteristic of New York. In order to discuss the density of the city I will consider philosophies of densification, and I will look at the way this density is reiterated and duplicated in patterns of repetition that magnify its excess. Downtown, corporate skyscrapers jostle for attention; midtown, commuters spill from the subways; in Times Square a thousand tourist selfies snap; throughout the city the sounds and energies jumble together: ringtones and sirens and construction sites and billboards and people. A fixation of density looping repeatedly to excess. I’ll suggest that in the music we can hear the sounds of that looping too. While I’m on this walk, I’m going to consider some of Bernstein’s music further: the iconic “New York, New York” from On the Town (1944), which we have already been exploring; the music to his ballet Fancy Free (1944), which was On the Town’s inspiration; and the music to another of his classic New

York shows, Wonderful Town (1953), which he wrote with the same collaborators as On the Town. There are obvious connections between these shows, not only in their thematic focus on New York but also in their presentation of the city from an outsider’s point of view. Most important for Page 69 →my purposes is the way he characterizes this city and its particular qualities in sound throughout his shows. I’m going to look at ways in which, in all of these examples, Bernstein seems to articulate the city; and I’m going to try to consider that reflection from his perspective. But here’s an interesting complication: although he is “often perceived as the quintessential New Yorker,” Bernstein was actually born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, some 220 miles from Manhattan.1 My consideration of the city on this walk, then, will take the perspective of someone arriving in New York from the outside. The city is on the doorstep, so to speak, a mesmerizing place of opportunity, one that calls to the kids, but from afar. Figure 8. The first “Ker-chung” of West Side Story, clustering dissonances together in a jagged expression of density. “Prologue” by Leonard Bernstein / Stephen Sondheim. В© Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. Boosey & Hawkes, agent for rental. International copyright secured. Reproduced by Permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Leaving behind the pastoral world of rural America, thousands of dreamy-eyed Americans have made their way across the country, beckoned by the signature clusters of iconic New York. It’s that siren call. There’s something alluring in its excess, in the way so many millions have already been lured in, and in the way the opportunities of the city seem crystallized by its sheer mass. In New York, the implicit promise of so much density is intrinsically linked to the dream of success—as it is in Hugh Ferriss’s iconic sketch “Lure of the City” (fig. 7). So this is something else I will discuss, weaving the thoughts of Arthur Meier Schlesinger, who explored the attraction of the urban metropolis in his book The Rise of the City into the mythology of success that drives so many stories of New York like Wonderful Town. Finally, I will consider whether the reflections of urban density in the music of Leonard Bernstein find their polar opposite in the open landscapes of Aaron Copland, Bernstein’s mentor, whose conception of America offered another fundamental performance of place. Page 70 →

Density and the City There are a number of paradoxes associated with the density of Manhattan. On the face of it, the city seems like one of the densest in the world, a modernist megalopolis squeezed onto the limited space of a small island. Its 1.6 million residents seem plenty enough for the 22.8 square miles of its landmass; with this population swollen to over 3.9 million in the daily commute, the pressure on Manhattan’s infrastructure is extreme. Since 1951, when the city was entirely “built out”2—when the urbanization of the island had exhausted its landmass—the only direction in which to go was up. There are currently around 6,000 high-rise buildings in the city, over 230 of which exceed 150 meters in height.3 Yet urban planning throughout the period of its development successfully restricted overwhelming growth and made Manhattan a role model for demonstrating how other cities worldwide could operate in conditions of extreme density. In part, this success was caused by the relatively late growth of the city during an increasingly technological age, meaning that it could benefit from technological advances that enabled densification. In part, the success was due to the fact that much of Manhattan’s growth was anticipated, meaning that the densification was conceived in advance and city planners could—literally—make room for its growth. As a result, a sophisticated understanding of urban density control was able to inform well-considered infrastructural provisions: the planning of the city on the template of a grid; the relocation of residential communities uptown and off the island; the provision of transport links to bring commuters directly into midtown; the passing of zoning laws that controlled building height in relation to footprint; and the design of efficient systems for parking automobiles above and below the streets. These measures have not been without implication, and I will explore some of the consequences in my subsequent walks. For now, we will dwell through the density of the city itself.

Calculations of urban density typically take into account the population of an area and the floor area ratio of living space to land. One report on Manhattan, compiled by Solly Angel and Patrick Lamson-Hall of New York University, reveals that in 2010 the population density was 350 people per hectare, occupying 641 ft2 each. These figures suggest a densely packed environment, though they are nothing in comparison to the peak figures from one hundred years previously. The report shows in 1910 an average population of 575 people per hectare housed in an average floor area of 272 ft2 per person. Some areas of the city were even more densely packed, with tenements in the Lower East Side offering just 102 ft2 of space per person to Page 71 →give a density of 1,530 persons per hectare. Indeed, the New York Times of January 16, 1911, lamented this overcrowding: “Newcomers swarm in beehive blocks,” cried the headline, directly associating the rise in congestion with an influx of foreigners, mainly from Russia and Austria.4 “The present law requires that there shall not be less than 400 cubic feet of air space in every room for every adult and not less than 200 cubic feet of air space for every minor under 12 years of age,” the article reports. However, it also indicates a number of infringements where in some cases up to five adults were found sharing a room. Angel and Lamson-Hall attribute the increase in density to the fact that between 1840 and 1910, “the expansion of the built-up areaВ .В .В . could not keep pace with the growth of the island’s population.” As they report, thanks largely to immigration, “The island’s population grew by 7.4 times in these decadesВ .В .В .В , while its built-up area expanded only 2.9 times.”5 What made matters worse in the short term was that not only was Lower Manhattan the arrival point for thousands of incoming immigrants, but it was also the epicenter of the rapidly expanding commercial activity of the city. The success of New York as a port was creating significant employment for the incoming workforce, yet with no financial or infrastructural means to distance their residential accommodation from their jobs, the workers accumulated in quarters adjacent to the trade. Thus the population expanded and agglomerated in one area, while the port buildings, warehouses, and shipping headquarters proliferated. In addition to people, congestion was exacerbated by the very activity driving the industry of the port. In particular, the construction of substantial administrative provision added to the swelling mass of downtown Manhattan, as multiple individual markers of success contributed to the spiraling excess at the foot of the island. At forty stories in height, the massive form of the Equitable Building, one such edifice erected in 1915, dominated an entire city block. Like many of Manhattan’s biggest structures, it was not built for utilitarian purposes alone, but also for status. As commentator Max Page observes, this sort of building signified the success and productivity of New York and its major trades: “the prestige conveyed by the building’s visual image, which served as a powerful form of advertising for the corporate owners and occupants.”6 Downtown Manhattan had become “the вЂfront office’ for America’s industrial giants,”7 and it was the flamboyant demonstration of their commercial success that was a major factor in turning the island into such a densely built-up environment (and symbolically another iconic lure for the aspirational). When another of the corporate giants, Frank Woolworth, was questioned in 1913 about Page 72 →how necessary or even economically viable it was to build his colossal new skyscraper, at that time the tallest building in the world, his response was that “the Woolworth Building was going to be like a giant signboard to advertise around the world his spreading chain of five- and ten-cent stores.”8 Such promotional posturing by individual organizations demonstrated New York as an international leader of commerce and industry; but it also had the knock-on effect of transforming the landscape of the island. With its “cloud-touching edifices”9 and “pin-cushion profile”10 Manhattan would physically impress itself on the horizon as a densely packed chaos of verticality. Eventually the overcrowding situation improved as the port expanded its reach to New Jersey and Brooklyn, the transport infrastructure developed, and a general residential movement was enabled away from the congested lower island. Even today, though, a trip across the bay on the Staten Island Ferry reveals the legacy of Manhattan as an epicenter of trade: a jungle of buildings clamors for space on the tip of the island, symbolic of the city’s productivity, growth, and success. Like the sound of the chord cluster in the Bernstein “Ker-chung,” the city seems to revel in the iconicity of its density. Bernstein’s invocation of the city, articulated throughout his Broadway repertoire, seems to map onto the contours, patterns, and dissonances of New York, as the city emerged through the modernist period as an emblem of promise, delight, and awe. That progressive modernity, to my mind, is articulated in assertive stabs of tightly clustered expression in the architecture and the music, then repeated and repeated in reiterated form. It is as if the

notes or buildings compete with one another in energy, force, and volume to register most prominently; in the act of doing this, their individual personalities cede to the agglomerate identity of the cluster, and it is the jumble of those clusters—half a dozen tightly packed notes stamped into a moment of the score; a fistful of looming tower blocks crammed on a tiny patch of land; five adult immigrants packed into the confines of a room—that characterizes the city. Such assertive expression is a feature not only articulated in form, but also subscribed to in the assignation of its materials. The buildings of the city are bold statements in the modernist substances of steel, concrete, and glass; the instruments voicing the music create the new textural sounds of jazz. Percussive chords and stride patterns make the piano a central voice; meanwhile, the crunching composite of “three trumpets, three trombones, and five reeds”11 orchestrates the sound of the pit. Hammers, whistles, and machinery are mimicked concretely in these sounds, confounding diatonic expectations as the soundtrack of progress finds a new musical expression. Figure 9. Multiple ker-chungs in On the Town repeat like clusters of densely packed skyscrapers throughout the city. “New York, New York” by Adolph Green / Leonard Bernstein / Betty Comden. В© Copyright 1977 by The Estate of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Page 73 →Take one example from a song we have already been discussing, Bernstein’s “New York, New York” from On the Town. This is a song with many articulations of density in its music, lyrics, harmonies, and rhythms. It is explicitly “a visitors’ place,” the sailors tell us, and very much an encounter with the city: “No one lives on account of the pace, but seven million are screaming for space,” they sing. We’ve already explored the striking “straight line” motif of the main refrain with its series of notes answered by a scampering reply down the gapped scale, and I’ve interpreted those patterns by focusing on the melody in Walk 1. But think now of the texture of this straight-line pattern, of the chordal balance created by its harmonies and orchestration. “We’ve just one day here,” sing the sailors on a D; but they front five dense structures of sound, clumps of notes including the jarring Cв™Ї, an A, and, in the bass an F-natural. By the end of the phrase, the chord cluster includes D, Cв™Ї, Bв™-, Aв™-, and F, the left hand of the piano offsetting the right throughout the sequence with more “ker-chungs” (see figure 9). In the orchestral score the effect is magnified as multiple instruments contribute each of the notes, all jabbing their short staccatos into the mix. These chord clusters might easily be read as if the music is voicing the city the boys see. Crowded stabs of close-knit brass and woodwind metaphorically articulate the crowded architecture of the city. Stabs of sound repeat and repeat, like towers receding toward the horizon of opportunity. For the newcomer to the city—whether docking in a boat, migrating from overseas,Page 74 → or upscaling from Lawrence, Massachusetts—the prospects of that opportunity seem stated in excess not only in the powerful stabs of the city’s structures, but also in the way those structures recur and recur into the distance of the densening new world.

The Rise of the City Migrants came in droves throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Between 1820 and 1860, the most prominent arrivals were immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Britain. Later, from the 1880s, a constant stream of refugees from Eastern Europe—Russia, Poland, and Hungary—began to establish a large Jewish population in the city. From around 1910 to 1950, the African American population increased, attracted from the South by greater freedoms and available laboring jobs. Meanwhile, migration to the city from all around America reflected a shift in the national psyche explored by social historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger in the 1930s. In a series of assertions, Schlesinger demonstrated “the influence of immigration upon American life and institutions” and “the influence of the American environment . . . upon the ever-changing composite population.”12 The city, he claimed, had taken over from the frontier as the figurative reference point for the American sense of progress. Where the nation’s conquest in the nineteenth century had been in its taming of the Wild West, that of the twentieth century would be “the momentous shift of the center of national equilibrium from the countryside to the city.”13 As if testifying to Schlesinger’s thesis, between 1880 and 1920 the population of Manhattan doubled.14

There are many accounts of the immigrants who came from Europe, drawn by the beacon hand of Liberty that called the “tired” and “poor” to a new life; there are also accounts of the influx to New York of former slaves and liberated African Americans for whom the northern city represented a new start. For the immigrants and freemen the accounts seem real enough and vital—stories of persecution and salvation documented in journal, photograph, and report. Yet the third group of newcomers to the city is depicted in an altogether different way: the middle-American migrants seeking the city are seen as characters; their journey is stated as myth, and their dreams are presented as a nation’s mythology. For Middle America the city had long presented an ambiguous allure. “The city was repellent to rural folk because of its вЂsinfulness’ and strangeness,” wrote Carl N. Degler; “yet at the same time its lights, its noises, its gaiety, its variety, its mystery were irresistible.”15 At first, the lure for thousandsPage 75 → of Middle Americans was not New York but Chicago: “How much do you suppose people in Iowa and Kansas and Minnesota think about Down East?” asked Henry Blake Fuller in his novel The Cliff-Dwellers (1893); “Not a great deal. It’s Chicago they’re looking to. This town looms up before them and shuts out Boston and New York and the whole seaboard from the sight and the thoughts of the West and the Northwest and the New Northwest and the Far West and all the other Wests yet to be invented.”16 The 1893 World’s Fair marked the zenith of Chicago’s urban allure, but as great engineering developments like the New York Central Lines Railroad made access to the Eastern seaboard ever easier, New York emerged by the early twentieth century as the more powerful metropolitan pull: “a magnet luring young men and womenВ .В .В . from rural America,”17 “a place of unrivalled opportunity, compared to the relative placidity of the Midwest.”18 With cities such as New York at the center of industries like publishing, manufacturing, and commerce (not to mention theater), the metropolis must have seemed the inevitable destination for any young American wishing to break free from the “drudgery and monotony which attended much of the daily toil” on the farmstead.19 For sure, the attraction of the city was something particularly potent to the aspirations of the young. “The young are called to the city because only the new city is large enough to accommodate their heightened sense of self,”20 suggests Richard Lehan. As developing technology also scaled back the opportunities for labor in rural communities, a genuine cultural shift took place in which America turned its focus toward the city. “The loss of the frontier, the limiting nature of the provincial town, and the desire to fulfill oneself, which the megalopolis promised to offer, all played a role in the creation of a new America,”21 writes Lehan. The trope of the enchanting city as “the mecca where personal dreams can be realized”22 was entrenched in the U.S. psyche by another nineteenth-century novelist, Horatio Alger. This was an “overworked metaphor,”23 as Wiley Lee Umphlett puts it, yet one that “lay at the heart of the American experience.”24 That dream was repeatedly pronounced in American literature, voicing the latent desire of a nation of prospectors bent on chasing opportunity. In defining the musical as quintessentially an American phenomenon, this rhetoric of opportunity and success has also been enthusiastically pursued. Nevertheless, though narratives of aspiration fueled the many images of urban migration, they were accompanied by the concomitant impression of the city as an impenetrable fortress, a foreboding wall. Such is the impression of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), which portrayed New York as a “walled city.” “Men were posted at the gates. You could not get Page 76 →in,” he wrote. “Those inside did not care to come out to see who you are. They were so merry inside that all those outside were forgotten.”25 Likewise, the great urban architect Hugh Ferriss presented his bold vision of New York in “Lure of the City” (ca. 1929), sketched in the brooding charcoal of his idiosyncratic style: against a towering wall of dense buildings a tiny figure stands, utterly overwhelmed yet in awe of the monstrous metropolis (figure 7). In the musical, too, we see this trait recurring again and again. In one of the most iconic versions of this myth (The Wizard of Oz, 1939), a young girl called Dorothy migrates from rural America to the glorious technicolor city (whose letters are one step removed alphabetically from NY). The densely packed cluster of towers is seen iconically across the plains, but when she and her fellow travelers reach the city they find themselves locked out. In Bernstein’s Wonderful Town (1953), Ruth and Eileen Sherwood arrive in the big city from Columbus, Ohio, aspirational migrants with a dream in their hearts. Greeting them, a recurring recitative figure establishes itself as the voice of the city. It unfolds over one of Bernstein’s characteristic dissonant chord clusters,

sustained in the brass, and in its first iteration is voiced by the first literary agent to whom Ruth touts her wishes: “Go home! Go west! Go back where you came from!” it yells. “A million kids just like you / Come to town every day / With stars in their eyes / They’re going to conquer the city . . . [But] they’re in for a bitter surprise.”26 The flip side of success promised by the attraction of the city is an underbelly that is just as mythologized in depictions of New York: beneath the facade of the lights and the excess and the growth are the casualties of the city, emblemized by failure, loneliness, deprivation, and urban decay.

Future Cities Criticism about the densification of the city has always been rife, expressing concern about social problems likely to ensue as the city swelled. There were “excessive increases in disease, crime, disorder, vice, insanity and suicide,”27 according to Ernest W. Burgess, issues that “the physical growth and expansion of cities”28 was seen to create. The problem as he saw it was characteristically an American phenomenon: as the nation grew, the cities grew, and greater, taller buildings were required to house the population. Viewing the densification of the city as a driver of social concerns may seem to present the obvious reading of Manhattan and other packed cities, and supports attitudes about urban overcrowding in the developing world Page 77 →of today. Certainly this was—on the face of it—the inference of urban theorists such as Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect Charles-Г‰douard Jeanneret-Gris, who in 1929 turned his focus on to major world metropolises including New York.29 “New York has increased its density to too great an extent, without proper provision for the necessary approaches,”30 he wrote in 1929. In his judgment, the skyscraper as it had been designed was one of the key weaknesses of the city: “The truth is that the sky-scraper, as we have it in New York, will not do,” he concluded; on exiting the building, “20,000 people invade a narrow street at practically one moment, and the result is complete chaos.” This image may be somewhat exaggerated, though it finds corollaries in musical theater, especially in Sondheim’s vision of “Another Hundred People” spilling out of the commuter trains onto the streets in Company (“Another hundred people just got off of the train and came up through the ground / While another hundred people just got off of the bus and are looking around / At another hundred people who got off of the plane and are looking at us”).31 To Le Corbusier the modernist skyscraper—like the other infrastructural mechanisms managing urban capacity in these songs—was in itself a contributor to inefficiency and blight in the city. For Sondheim this inefficiency—marked literally in the overflow of people expressed in “Another Hundred People,” but intimated symbolically in the social inarticulacy of Company’s contemporary life—is repetitive and relentless, qualities that are reflected in the music itself and in the repetition of this image throughout the song. At the end of the song, five repetitions of the same line (“And another hundred people just got off of the train”) build to a climax that almost screams in protest, as if the city itself is about to burst apart. Le Corbusier’s final words brought judgment on this unsustainable state: “The great city of to-day as it exists in actuality is an absurdity.”32 Paradoxically, in his book City of Tomorrow (1929) Le Corbusier recommends that “we must increase the densities of our cities.”33 This seems to confound not only his own thoughts, but also the assumptions of early theorists of the densified city. Yet it preempts the attitudes of contemporary theorists who claim that “cities become more efficient as they get bigger.”34 They suggest that creating more compact cities maximizes efficiency and lowers pollution, because transportation is easier. With greater populations to provide critical mass, more amenities can be offered locally; therefore there is less call to travel. With less distance to be traveled, fewer vehicles use the roads and more people are inclined to walk, cycle, or take public transport. The theories seem to be borne out in the statistics: “As city size increases,” write physicists Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West, “per Page 78 →capita socio-economic quantities such as wages, GDP, number of patents produced and number of educational and research institutions all increase by approximately 15% more than the expected linear growth.”35 These thoughts have spawned contemporary concepts such as “new urbanism” and “smart cities.” According to Le Corbusier, high-rise buildings housing population densities of up to twelve hundred people per acre would create the optimum efficiency for urban living.36 That would create roughly twice the population density of the recently built Battery City Park buildings erected on reclaimed land at the foot of Manhattan. But to

avoid the chaos of twenty thousand people spilling into the street from his newly modeled skyscraper designs, Le Corbusier conceptualized an environment around each building that would balance the use of space. Space should be created between these high-density skyscrapers so that “strictly speaking the city is an immense park.”37 In his designs for this alternative vision of the city it is not so much the sense of a park space (with connotations of the rural countryside) that comes across, but instead a sense of repetition and relentlessness in the way his plan duplicates almost clone-like iterations of near-identical skyscrapers within their spacious settings.38 Design, planning, and careful urban management are very much at the forefront of Le Corbusier’s thinking. Of course, Le Corbusier’s projection of this utopian city was, as he admitted, conceptualized from a blank canvas and never ultimately realized. In reality, few cities have the privilege of being designed into being, instead growing organically as they usually do. Although New York was to some extent designed by plan—as we will explore in the following walking tour—a significant part of the city (notably, the mechanics of its economic and political apparatus) had tumbled into life. And even decades after the city plans had organized the streets, the inadequate infrastructure and proliferation of downtown trade reflected organic evolution rather than carefully managed development. In the clumsy nature of organic growth the density of that haphazard groundswell created dark and narrow streets that were criticized by urban commentators. “One side effect of building upward was the phenomenon of the canyon street in which the straight vertical walls of tall buildings created a claustrophobic canyon-like effect blocking out sunlight and sky,”39 writes Christoph Lindner. Critics “feared that these buildings” (such as the Woolworth Building and the Equitable), “covering most or all of their building lots and rising straight up to considerable heights, would eliminate all the sunlight and views from the major commercial areas.”40 The concern was not only about light deprivation, but also about fire, health risks, and even moral decay. “Is New York becoming Page 79 →a city of canyons and ravines?” asked architect Ernest Flagg in the New York Times in 1907. He warned of “a general conflagration raging through the upper stories of these monstrous structures”;41 according to him, this “city of dismal ravines” was not dissimilar to the dangerous state of the uncivilized Wild West.42 Interestingly, Rodgers and Hart pick up on exactly this metaphor in “Manhattan Melodrama” (1934): “The rows of skyscrapers are like a canyon, / The sun is hidden ’neath a stony shroud,” go Hart’s lyrics. Supporting this idea, Angela M. Blake writes, “Guidebooks, postcards, and stereographs proudly associated New York’s new urban forms with western landscape features and thus shored up New York’s claims as an вЂAmerican’ place.”43 The association is an odd one to make, though it does remind us of the cultural obsession America had with its landscape and its opportunity, something entrenched in the rhetoric of the frontier but something that was beginning to transform into an obsession with the city.44 This obsession, as Blake asserts, was one becoming increasingly captured in the imagery associated with the city. “The visual trend for photographing the lower part of the city from the roof of a skyscraper or in horizontal format contributed to the perception of New York as an American вЂlandscape’ that echoed the West’s vertiginous canyons.”45 The rhetoric of these accounts triangulates a number of interesting impressions: the density of built-up Manhattan contrasts with the space of rural America; the American-ness of the urban environment complements the American-ness of the land; and the personal stories of individual opportunity are distinguished from the dehumanization of modernist progress. In coming together (as they do so often in Broadway lore), these dynamics coalesce to present a quintessential mythology of New York as a city of density, excess, and success. At the end of one of the characteristic rags-to-riches stories from the repertoire, Peggy Sawyer’s journey from the sticks to “naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty” Forty-Second Street (42nd Street, 1933), these affordances come together, celebrating the excess of density and repetition that has been etched into the Manhattan psyche. Rows and rows of chorus girls tap onto the soundstage, each dressed identically and each followed by partners also indistinguishable from one another. Behind them shimmy on further rows of chorus girls with their backs to us, gradually moving up a flight of stairs until the image is completely filled. As the final sung chorus begins, the ensemble turns around to face us, each holding a cut-out skyscraper: more than ninety in all. The effect is clever: it creates a picture of New York—not a New York recognizable through any particular building or feature, but a New York implied in the denseness and repetition of these skyscraper rows. As a coup de grГўce, the chorus Page 80 →girls sidestep

away and the camera tilts down to reveal a final, enormous tower block reaching up to a starlit sky. It’s a clever moment of camera trickery, topped when the romantic couple, played by Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, lean out over the parapet in each other’s arms and wave to the city below. If images of density and American identity are tied in with the rhetoric of success, as this triangulation implies (with its tensions between opportunity and rejection, the rural and the urban, space and congestion—success, excess, and density), it is interesting to consider some of the instances that articulate this imagery. In this chapter’s performance cartography I will consider examples from New York musicals that express this in sound.

Wonderful Town (1953) Wonderful Town is a 1953 show, another collaboration by the On the Town team of Bernstein, Comden, and Green. It is based on the autobiographical writings of journalist Ruth McKenney, which were serialized in the New Yorker in the late 1930s and then published as the book My Sister Eileen (1938). Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields adapted the book into a very successful stage play in 1940, and thirteen years later it was they who provided the libretto for the Bernstein musical. Wonderful Town tells the story of Ruth and Eileen Sherwood, who are arriving in the big city to make their fame and fortune, Ruth as a writer, and Eileen in the theater. The show reveals at first a discouraging experience in New York (as we have seen: “Go back where you came from! ”), though eventually they both find luck in their chosen professions, and Ruth finds the man of her dreams. It’s a show that capitalizes on the abiding mythology of New York as the city of aspiration (in Comden and Green’s own words: “This show celebrates New York as the magnet for young people from all fields of endeavor who, like Ruth and Eileen, still come here to fulfill their aspirations in this Wonderful Town”).46 Ruth McKenney’s original series of short stories was such a success that although there was a hiatus of over a decade before the story was musicalized, rival producers created two different musical versions within the space of two years. The more celebrated Wonderful Town (1953) reunited Bernstein, Comden, and Green, while the movie musical My Sister Eileen (1955) brought a different set of New York’s urban theorists together: Blake Edwards, who would go on to direct the classic Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Jule Styne, composer of countless Broadway classics including Gypsy (1959) and Funny Girl (1964), and Bob Fosse, the Page 81 →choreographer and director whose idiosyncratic style has been immortalized by shows such as Sweet Charity (1966).47 It is interesting to compare the similarities between Wonderful Town and My Sister Eileen, particularly in the way that they depict in images, words, and music that first impression of New York to the outsider.48 Given what we have been exploring, the Manhattan that Ruth and Eileen first come to know is rather unexpected: “My, what trees, smell that air,”49 sings their tour guide, emphasizing qualities that we would expect not in the city but out in the sticks. In My Sister Eileen the sentiment is the same: “Oh what a pleasure it is to see Washington Square where the air is purest; it’s a haven for the tourist.”50 Yet we soon realize that life on the street is rather more urban and chaotic than it first appears. The peace is shattered by construction work for the new subway; the basement flat let to Ruth and Eileen is a thoroughfare for clients of the hooker upstairs; and the area itself is populated by the same character types and banter we see and hear in similar New York framing sequences such as those of 42nd Street (1933) or Guys and Dolls (1950). The 1958 telecast gives a good snapshot of this scene. As the tour guide introduces “Christopher Street,” the camera hovers and pans over a frozen tableau of the Greenwich Village Art Show, 1935. Painters are caught midstroke, passers-by look on, two men feud with fists raised, a street cleaner passes, an Irish cop keeps the beat, and the characters Wreck the footballer and Violet the hooker are introduced. In musical-theater-land, local residents always flock out to meet the newly arrived, offering community to the outsiders, and extending hospitality, even if always at a price. Picturesque and tree-lined though Greenwich Village may appear, New York always challenges the outsider to handle the city on its own terms. But it is in the music that the energy of the city is most clearly articulated. Throughout this opening number, Bernstein weaves “increasing dissonance and growing rhythmic impatience to create the sonic equivalent of gridlock at the intersection of urban thoroughfares,”51 as Raymond Knapp puts it. And that sound—that

chord cluster so pervasive in Bernstein’s music—is central to this dissonance, evoking the city as it does throughout the show, and in particular, turning the purity to which we are introduced at the song’s beginning (“My, what trees, smell that air”) into a sonic clamor of urban “edginess,”52 to use Knapp’s term: a tightly packed collection of close-pitched notes for deliberate effect. The dissonance captured in this sort of cluster is a sound redolent of a particular period and a particular place: Manhattan, during the formative years of the 1930s–1950s. It’s difficult to identify quite how it evokes the Page 82 →density of the city, the crowdedness of the streets, the energy of modernity, and the thrust of progress, though in his article “The Sound of Broadway’s Mean Streets,” Knapp identifies a number of musical features that seem to do that. He calls these “emblems of edginess,” and, specifically, he mentions the “вЂstinger chord’—a sharply attacked, usually dissonant chord”; the “вЂbroken-record’ effect,” a “repeated melodic figure, both rhythmically and metrically set off from the basic pulse”; and “a more composerly technique, akin to the вЂbitonality’ or вЂpolytonality’ described by music theorists as a recurring feature of modernist harmonic practices.”53 He draws attention to the use of these devices in a number of Broadway shows about New York—Guys and Dolls, Wonderful Town, Saturday Night, West Side Story, Gypsy, Sweet Charity, Company, Follies—and focuses specifically on the writers of these shows. To Knapp, these writers—Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Cy Coleman, and Jule Styne—“all made their mark with shows that take on the glitter and grit of the city, in approaches that, in different ways, mix affection and cynicism within an edgy counterpoint.”54 Knapp’s analysis of this material is astute and he draws attention to numerous examples of the “emblems of edginess” that create dynamics of unease: “problematic grooves,” he suggests, “a kind of threatening emphasis” or “pervasive harshness” connoting “unpleasant realities,” “clashes of sensibilities,” “alienation.”55 Perhaps these qualities of unease are qualities of the city that the density of its environments and its rhythms inform: the pressures of overcrowding; the relentless pace of city life; the constructed environment of the built-up streets; the push for progress; the rhythms of modernism; the beat of technology. What epitomizes that sound in all of these emblems (the stab, the “broken record” motif, and the bitonality) is an assertive performance of syncopation and dissonance (the “Ker-chung”), one that Bernstein captures evocatively in the opening riff of Wonderful Town, as the introduction to the song “Christopher Street.” Lyricists Comden and Green were delighted when they heard in Bernstein’s ideas for the music a motif recognizable from the style of band leader Eddie Duchin. “[We] knew we were on our way when Lenny exuberantly banged out on the piano the Eddie Duchin vamp, a characteristic sound of the 1930’s,” they wrote.56 Duchin had created a very distinctive rhythmical and instrumental sound, “a very specific timemarker, and one associated with the city of New York”57 (see figure 10). The score marking indicates that this should be played “molto вЂDuchino,’”58 establishing a repeated pattern of jerky chord clusters across alternating 6/8 measures of swung and straight meter. In Knapp’s terms, Page 83 →this is an example of the syncopated “broken record” effect. It is a real piano player’s pattern in the way it simplistically alternates hands, but the fact that it does this across the meter with the sort of rhythmic dissonance of that brokenrecord effect creates an impression of collapsing something into a tighter sonic space than that in which it should belong. The parallel number to this in the score to My Sister Eileen also uses a broken-record motif. Here, the syncopation is caused by notes of equal length alternating between different pitches stressed in a 3/3/2 pattern within the measure. The repetition of this pattern over four measures at a time (see figure 11) creates another broken-record effect. And just as in “Christopher Street”—picking up on McKenney’s dry New Yorker wit—the attitude toward New York is laced with wry humor: “They lived in dusty rooms / Dark and musty rooms / Still, in Greenwich Village / People call it вЂatmosphere.’” Knapp goes on to consider how the broken-record device appears throughout the scores of New York musicals, including Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, and Company. It’s worth exploring in a little more detail the way that Bernstein habitually introduces this sort of effect, and how in so doing he captures patterns of duplication and

repetition that can be read in the streets of New York. To be clear: I am suggesting that it is idiomatic of Bernstein’s music (and more widely of Broadway’s New York music in general) to introduce figures of repetition and dissonance that seem to correlate with urban patterns of repetition and dissonance in the densely built-up streets of the city.

Fancy Free (1944) Chronologically, the first overt use of this in Bernstein’s music can be found in another show entirely, the 1944 ballet Fancy Free. Just a few months before the arrival of On the Town’s Chip, Ozzie, and Gabey at Brooklyn Naval Yard, another trio of sailors danced onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, keen to see the attractions of the city. This threesome remained nameless, but the ballet in which they appeared, Fancy Free, would be the precursor and inspiration for On the Town. As with the subsequent show, Fancy Free featured a score by Bernstein, choreography by Jerome Robbins, and a set—a dense crush of buildings looming over the action of the ballet—designed by Oliver Smith. It was Smith who suggested that the ballet could be adapted into a musical comedy and who went on to produce the adaptation, featuring designs characteristic of a style I will be exploring in a later Page 84 →chapter. Bernstein and Robbins were just twenty-six, and Fancy Free would be their first collaboration. Already, though, their careers were blossoming: Bernstein had been made assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra the previous year, and had conducted the premiere of his own Jeremiah Symphony in Pittsburgh; meanwhile, Robbins had quickly become a soloist for the Ballet Theatre and was regularly performing at the Met. Figure 10. The “broken record” syncopation of Bernstein’s “Christopher Street” vamp from Wonderful Town (1953). Christopher Street (from “Wonderful Town”). Words by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Music by Leonard Bernstein. В© (Renewed) 1953 Chappell & Co Inc and Polygram International Music Publishing. Warner/Chappell North America Ltd, London, W8 5DA. Reproduced by permission of Faber Music Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Figure 11. The “broken record” syncopation of Jule Styne’s “Atmosphere” vamp from My Sister Eileen (1955). “Atmosphere” (from the motion picture “My Sister Eileen”). Written by Jule Styne, Leo Robin and George During. Used by Permission of Shapiro Bernstein & Co. Limited (PRS). At this early stage, as Paul Laird notes,59 Bernstein’s music was in some ways derivative of his influences, not least George Gershwin. Nevertheless, his own style comes through in moments that prefigure the more familiar Broadway Bernstein of West Side Story (with its “ker-chungs”): “young, urban and unabashedly tied to contemporary popular music,”60 as Carol Oja puts it. In her description, Oja implicitly recognizes the patterns and cadences of jazz and modernism that are so inscribed in and by Bernstein’s oeuvre; patterns and cadences that are themselves Page 85 →sonic accompaniments to the modernist fascination with the triangulation of success, excess, and density. Two sequences in Fancy Free stand out particularly for their use of repetition and dissonance: the first occurs in “Enter Two Girls,” in which the sailors, having been at the bar, meet a couple of young ladies with whom they begin to flirt. The overwhelming feature of this piece is a repeated piano motif that first occurs at measure 257 and from that point recurs incessantly throughout the number. Oja refers to this as “a static piano riff [that] injects a segment of protominimalist frenzy.”61 Layered over a heavy, timpani-dominated bass line alternating C and A, the high-pitched piano motif plays a repeated dotted rhythm alternating the unconnected and dissonant notes Aв™-and G, with a recurring Eв™-a fifth higher. The effect is rather eerie, and evocative of the lustful haze of a drunken encounter. To be truthful, it’s hard to imagine this motif commenting on the urban landscape of New York; it seems too dreamlike and distant for that. Nevertheless, the repetition of the motif is so insistent that, if nothing else, it imprints in the listener’s mind the expectation of further patterns of repetition and dissonance, which appear shortly afterward. The dance variations of the “Competition Scene,” however, employ exactly what we have been anticipating: three repetitious motifs that readily evoke the city. The first begins the number at measure 398, a variation of the material from “Enter Three Sailors.” Straightaway a notion of repetition is evident, since

the opening cell is repeated, dislocating the meter of the measure. The whole sequence is then repeated twice in slight variations, creating three repetitions misaligned across eight measures (figure 12). The effect is to sound as if the music is attempting to progress but being stopped in its tracks; the sense of a “broken record” is very clear, aided by an insistent but sporadic bass stab, yet there is also the sense that an ongoing melody is waiting to burst through. The second motif begins from measure 423. Here the wind, doubling the piano, begins a descending figure with internal repeated notes that itself repeats a number of times (figure 13). The impression the recurring pattern gives is of something receding into the distance. Moreover, a sustained tremolo bass suggests a quality of stillness, as if we are contemplating the distance evoked. Finally, the third motif begins from measure 445, a galloping feature in 6/8 time played by the strings and woodwind (figure 14). This seems to be building toward something, and we sense the actual melody finally emerging at measure 462 in the clarinets. From time to time other motifs recur from previous scenes of the ballet: a reminder of the repeated pattern of “Enter Two Girls” around Page 86 →measure 481; a sequence from “Enter Three Sailors” in the strings at measure 486 and on ragtime piano at measure 514. To me, the effect of all this repetition begins to hint at Bernstein’s capturing of the city in his music. In this number, the broken-record stabs of the first motif (figure 12) evoke the disruption of progress caused by the very act of development: a building is thrown up, seemingly in your tracks (chordal stab), causing you to reel and reassess your situation (repeated motif). The receding descending passages of the second motif (figure 13) evoke the view into the distance up an island whose urban sprawl has proliferated as the machine takes hold without anyone really being aware. Now though, it is the visitor to New York who takes stock of the iterative proliferations and sees in the city that relentless pursuit of what Kracauer calls “businessВ .В .В . business.”62 The third motif (figure 14), with its sprightly gallop, evokes a sense of coming to terms with the city and embracing that progress even as it stalls and overwhelms. Of course these are all subjective readings of music that may be evocative or expressive of other things to other listeners. For me, though, pursuing my notion of performance cartography, I see in the repetition of notes and phrases in the music a parallel to the repetitious duplication of buildings, urban blocks, and junctions that in multiple near-identical iterations epitomize the repetitious excess of Manhattan. For the city is nothing if not repetitious. As we zoom in to the streets, the clustered density of the view from outside is replaced by a sense of relentless repetition. Walk up Sixth Avenue around the midforties. Here on the west side of the street you will pass block after block of structural siblings: each tower about the same height; each tower about the same form; each tower fashioned in modernist verticals reaching for the sky.63 This goes on for twelve blocks or so (between Forty-Third and Fifty-Fifth) before any hint of real variation occurs in the streamlined sweep of the Bank of America Tower to the south and the squat stores and apartment buildings to the north. In its most vivid iteration this repetition is evident in the “XYZ” towers of the Rockefeller complex (the Exxon Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, and the Celanese Building), three virtually indistinguishable structures set on wide plazas, “the closest approximation of what Le Corbusier’s proposed City of Towers would look like in the context of Manhattan,”64 suggest Eric Nash and Norman Mcgrath, though perhaps the towers of Alphabet City run a close second. Nash and McGrath explain how the design of these buildings emphasizes the repetition: “Supernumerary piers, twice as many as are structurally necessary, splinter the facades into thin vertical strips,” they write; “Continuous bands of opaque glass spandrels and bronzedglass windowsPage 88 → provide no indication of floor levels.”65 Just as the towers play their part in the repetitive iteration of the whole avenue (and the avenue its own part in the repetitive iteration of the grid), these piers and spandrels provide a repetitive iteration in the very aesthetic of the buildings. The city is indeed repetitive and relentless; and patterns of repetition imprint that pathology on the psyche of the New Yorker: in the rectilinear monotony of the grid; in the multiple iterations of the city’s towers; in story after story of near-identical floors duplicating ground plans; in the rows of Citi Bikes parked in docks all over the city; in the phalanxes of taxicabs that fill the streets; in the interminable repetitions of day-to-day routine. Page 87 → Figure 12. Repetition and dissonance-creating figures of density in Bernstein’s “Competition Scene” from Fancy Free (1944): The sense of a “broken record,” mm. 398–405. Fancy Free (“Competition Scene”) by Leonard Bernstein. В© Copyright 1950, 1968 by Harms, Inc. Copyright Renewed. Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., Sole Agent. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Figure 13. Repetition and dissonance creating figures of density in Bernstein’s “Competition Scene” from Fancy Free (1944): the sense of the city receding into the distance, mm. 423–27. Fancy Free (“Competition Scene”) by Leonard Bernstein. В© Copyright 1950, 1968 by Harms, Inc. Copyright Renewed. Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., Sole Agent. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Figure 14. Repetition and dissonance-creating figures of density in Bernstein’s “Competition Scene” from Fancy Free (1944): coming to terms with the city, mm. 445–59. Fancy Free (“Competition Scene”) by Leonard Bernstein. В© Copyright 1950, 1968 by Harms, Inc. Copyright Renewed. Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., Sole Agent. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. The broken-record passages Knapp observes recur throughout the Broadway repertoire, forming the basis of such idiosyncratic yet defining numbers as “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” but also featuring as stylistic motifs Knapp picks up on in shows like Guys and Dolls (“Why, it’s good old, reliable Nathan, / Nathan, Nathan, Nathan Detroit”). Here, he remarks, “The device seems to capture, in musical terms, both the compulsive nature of the gamblers who sing it and the cocky Runyonesque ethos that sustains them.”66 He also observes an idiomatic use of this motif in Company, in which it is “based variously on the busy signal, the doorbell, the car horn, and (in vocal terms) the press of the central character’s coterie of married friends, who bombard him throughout the show with choruses of вЂBobby, bubi’ and its many variants.”67 In this, he argues, the feature is used both to characterize “the inhospitality of the urban landscape” and to “test the вЂlife-competency’” of protagonists forced to negotiate it.68 “The singers’ mastery of such difficult material,” he writes, “often seems to be part of their assimilation to the complex rhythms of New York City.”69 If melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic dissonance is a feature of the music, it is also an expression in other elements of New York. Throughout the city, the forceful chords of constructed urbanization jar with those of Manahatta, creating in their incongruity with the terrain the vibrant resonances that make New York the hyperbolic triumph of America over Amerika. Here in the subway metal girders hold back the collapse of the earth; here round the island’s periphery hulking piers stand firm against the natural power of the tides and river flows; here in Central Park humpbacked mounds of rock remind us of the land that came before (though these have been artificially landscaped after the fact; the city is never what it seems). Consider also the people—famously a melting pot, though not so much a seamless “melting” as an interesting juxtaposition of multicultural expression: different dissonant notes in the chordal cluster of the population.70 Here the Poles and there the Italians, here Puerto Ricans, Russians, and Page 89 →Lats: the coming together of different people metaphorically enacts the dissonant music of modernism: “Like humans in an increasingly diverse social network, pitches considered dissonant could evolve new alignments to retain their essential difference yet achieve compatible coexistence. There was no better place to achieve such a multicultural soundВ .В .В . than in the United States with its rich mix of races and ethnicities.”71 Perhaps it is not surprising that the music of people like Berlin, Gershwin, and Bernstein, with its varying influences from classical Europe, Jewish heritage, and African American obsession, should create these dissonant textures in both its harmonies and its rhythms. Crunching these diverse influences together, the sound becomes endemic of its multicultural roots. In New York, even neighborhoods respond, taking on names that express the composite identity of differences juxtaposed, or of complete statements collapsed into elision: Soho (SO-uth of HO-uston Street), Noho (NO-rth of HO-uston Street), Nolita (NO-rth of L-ittle ITA-ly), Tribeca (the TRI-angle BE-low CA-nal Street). The dissonance and the density of excess is all around.

The Urban and the Rural I’ve been suggesting that the dissonance of the chord cluster with its tightly packed intervals mimics the way in which buildings in Manhattan are clustered tightly together. I’ve also suggested that this impression of the city is one that has particular resonance for those who come from outside, where the patterns that perform rurality are extremely different from the urban cartography. Interestingly, Bernstein sets this distinction up explicitly by building on a trope of American music that has itself captured the landscape in sound.

Most obviously, he does this in Wonderful Town in two songs that balance the country and the city at either end of the musical. Close to the beginning, Ruth and Eileen recollect their memories of Ohio, with its parochial attitudes and provincial ways. “Why, oh why, oh why, oh?” sing the girls, rhyming this lament in the next line with “Ohio.” The line barely makes sense, though alongside the sentiments of the lyrics, the song cleverly brings the music and words together to sound like a plaintive moan, to suggest the inarticulacy of country folk, and to capture the rurality of the countryside. By voicing the girls harmonically in thirds, the motif explicitly creates nondissonance and space in the refrain, suggesting countryside terrain that is open rather than dense. More than this, the thirds also connote a harmonic trait of middle Europe, another culture alien to New York, and Page 90 →one endemic of the Old World sound that the New York composers and the modernist city were trying to contrast with their American music. Aurally, the refrain of the song casts the mind back to a place and time that is distinctly nonurban, evoking the spatial and cultural opposites against which the definition of the city is being constructed. At the other end of the musical, the song “Wrong Note Rag” reverses this effect. Here, the girls harmonize in close seconds, creating a dissonant clash of notes throughout the chorus of the song that sounds wrong, but which trades to excess on the dissonant traits of Bernstein’s music and urban music more generally. This is a clever characterizing feature: a clumsy attempt by two country girls to mimic the sounds of the city. But some things they do get right. Like the infectious qualities often alluded to and musically articulated in New York songs through repeated melodic and lyric motifs (“Fascinating rhythm,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz”), the dissonances and syncopations of the “Wrong Note Rag” work acoustically to “drive you insane, drive you insane, drive you insane” because you can’t get them “out of your brain, out of your brain, out of your brain.” Connecting this song with ragtime, as the title does, picks up on a musical style that is itself associated with a specific cultural expression evocative of urban (African American) music, which made its way into the Broadway sound via Tin Pan Alley. The song evokes the style through its syncopation, its melodic patterning, and its lyrics, which pay homage to countless Irving Berlin rags from the teen years that are formative building blocks in the development of Broadway music: “Please play that lovely wrong note / Because that wrong note / Just makes me doo doo doo doot, doo doo doot, wah!” go the lyrics of the bridge in this fond pastiche of the “Ragtime King.” In contrast to the invocation of the countryside in “Ohio,” “Wrong Note Rag” explicitly locates itself in the city, “sweepin’ the town” along with other dance hall crazes such as the Bunny Hug and the Turkey Trot. Thus in a very explicit way, Bernstein confirms in these two songs musical traits that he understands as expressions of rural and urban America. In these instances, the exploitation of such association is overblown, to be sure: here he is trading deliberately on the motifs for comical dramatic effect. However, we can extrapolate to other instances of musical patterning throughout his work that in more subtle ways evoke dynamics of the rural and urban landscape and the contemplation of those spaces by characters migrating from one place to the next. These traits, we can assume, are developed from the influence of Bernstein’s close friend, American composer Aaron Copland. Both Paul Laird, in his guide to Bernstein’s composition, and Carol Oja, Page 91 →in her monograph Bernstein Meets Broadway, acknowledge Copland’s influence.72 It is hardly surprising, since Copland was one of Bernstein’s “most revered mentors and lovers,” according to Oja;73 “In the years leading up to Fancy Free, Bernstein’s relationship with Copland was central to his romantic life.”74 The Copland traits that Oja traces throughout the score of Fancy Free are in part a nod to the older man’s influence on Bernstein, and in part a way of “valorizing their relationship in sound,” she suggests.75 The Copland influences that can be heard in Bernstein’s work are not just subconscious copyings, then, but deliberate samplings by way of homage. But if Bernstein’s work was to characterize the sound of the city, Copland’s was completely different. His expression of America was not in dissonance and repetition, but in the “spare voicings and spacious construction”76 of his music, which many commentators have associated with the land. “Nothing is more characteristically American than the celebration of open space,” suggests musicologist Larry Starr, recognizing in Copland’s distinctive music that its sense of space is partly what summons up so evocatively its American sound. “It is unsurprising that Copland’s music readily evokes this sense of space, since his compositional style itself is so frequently a celebration, in musical terms, of wide spacing,”77 Starr continues. In analyzing

Copland’s scores, he points to “the bare fifths that paint вЂThe Open Prairie’ in Billy the Kid,” “the gradual unfolding of simple triads at the beginning and at the end of Appalachian Spring,” and “the open intervals in the stringsВ .В .В . that introduce Quiet City.”78 It need hardly be said, given the association of this music with the pastoral landscapes of the Appalachians and the open prairies in the titles of many of his works (Quiet City notwithstanding), that Copland associates such spacing with the landscapes of the country.79 The sense of space achieved by the wide intervals in Copland’s music is magnified by the rhythmically parallel but open contrapuntal lines of his melodic writing: the steps of the melody and its counterpoint change simultaneously, though the distance between voices creates space, with the voices often tending in different directions to open significant intervals between the lines of the harmony. Take, for example, the concluding andante section of Appalachian Spring, where the main theme is reprised in the strings to bring the ballet to a close. For me, and especially if I imagine the pattern of this theme visually, it calls to mind the vista of the rural landscapes Copland is trying to evoke: one range of mountain crests is set in relief against another more distant range (see figure 15). The landscape is given a musical visuality, framed as the viewer might experience it and depicted as a manifestation of the great American wilderness’s impression Page 92 →on the psyche. It’s a striking characteristic of music that a feeling of the landscape—its emptiness, its majesty, its power, its authority—emerges in both the “visual” patterns (the shape) and the sound created, and this, I think, goes some way toward capturing the music’s “American-ness.” The trait is borrowed for comedy by Bernstein in “Ohio”; in an early work such as Fancy Free a more earnest use of the effect can be heard distinctly. The opening measures of “Scene at the Bar,” for example, set two clarinets in counterpoint in a way that emphasizes the separation between the melodic lines (see figure 16). Here the music, I would argue, directly evokes the rural landscapes recalled by the sailors in their unfamiliar urban surroundings; in the setting of the ballet the bar space offers an intimate cocoon that can remind them of home, while outside the density of Oliver Smith’s city looms, reflected variously as intimidating, enticing, and exciting elsewhere in the music. Again, these qualities in Bernstein’s writing follow a trajectory through his New York shows, so there is little surprise to find them built into the score of Wonderful Town. These references allude to Copland’s wide intervals and therefore to the constant presence of the rural, but now they imply the pull of the city. Throughout the show recurs a sting that captures the sort of harmonic openness of this device yet pulls it toward the more urban encoding of the chord cluster. The recitative introducing “A Quiet Girl” first prepares us for this recurrence (nodding in the name to Copland’s Quiet City?); then, in “Ballet at the Village Vortex” that very motif morphs audibly into a more urban sound as a jazz trumpet slides up to begin the sultry dissonance of the number. Here the counterpoint calls on the same element of parallel rhythm as in Copland’s work while reducing the open spaces of the intervals to close and discordant harmonies of seconds, thirds, and fourths. The impact of this subtle alteration to a city sound works on a number of levels: first, the dissonance of the contrapuntal lines becomes more urgent, no longer evoking audibly the space of the rural landscape but now calling up the pressured intensity of the urban cityscape; second, in association with the brasher sound of Bernstein’s brass, the dissonance creates a far more angular, modernist, and even concrete texture than Copland’s smooth instrumentation; third, the visual implication of these harmonic lines in proximity to one another suggests not the rolling hills of the Appalachians but the harsh, packed contours created by the vista of buildings. Here the scenery evoked by this shift recognizes the terrain of the constructed environment. In this simple effect Bernstein confirms the move of Page 93 →Eileen and Ruth into the urban landscape, creating a stylistic signature for the patterns of the city that, in appropriating Copland, makes that sound quintessentially American. Just as Copland’s contours seem to mimic the patterns of the Appalachians, Bernstein’s mimic the patterns of New York (see figure 17). Figure 15. The contrapuntal planes of the Appalachian Mountains suggesting space and tranquility as the vista recedes. В© Calin Tatu | Dreamstime.com. Figure 16. Recalling Aaron Copland’s evocative sounds of rural America, Bernstein captures a sense of open space in the opening of “Scene at the Bar” from Fancy Free (1944,) mm. 164–69. Fancy Free (“Scene at the Bar”) by Leonard Bernstein. В© Copyright 1950, 1968 by Harms, Inc. Copyright Renewed. Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., Sole Agent. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

In accumulating musical devices that articulate the sound of the city, Bernstein (and others, as I will suggest throughout this book) constructs a lexicon of urban American-ness that comes to define New York in sound. Page 94 →And in appropriating Copland’s stylistic sound of American-ness, Bernstein seems to parallel the shift from rural America to the city that Arthur Meier Schlesinger explored in his writing. Figure 17. The contrapuntal planes of the skyline suggesting pressure and intensity as the city recedes. В© Chris Sargent | Dreamstime.com.

Conquering the City Nine years after On the Town and Fancy Free, when Ruth and Eileen Sherwood encounter that repetitious Manhattan in Wonderful Town—by now the Manhattan that is not Greenwich Village, not that “bit of Paree” with its bohemian charm—their encounter is forceful and determined. More than this, the patterns of the city (dissonance, density, repetition) are consolidated as expressions of the urban landscape because Bernstein deliberately contrasts them with the patterns he proposes as rural expressions. In two numbers in particular we experience this contrast: I’ve already mentioned “Ohio,” in which the girls lament leaving the homestead of their youth; now consider “Conquering New York,” an instrumental number in which they set out to take on the town. In “Conquering New York,” we hear precisely the sort of duplicated iterationsPage 95 → that we have been exploring in Fancy Free—indeed, some of the sequences in this piece are so similar to Fancy Free that they could have come from the same material; even more than in that ballet, the motifs here seem to articulate the strangers’ encounters with one daunting skyscraper after another. “Conquering New York” begins with a brassy fanfare that introduces two themes and then repeats them. This motif will be a central building block of the piece throughout, and is equivalent to the opening sequence of Fancy Free’s “Competition Scene.” It is repeated several times in variation before the next theme is introduced, a jerky arpeggio on piano and xylophone that ends in a cluster chord, suggesting the sudden erection of another building, another and another. Different orchestrations of the motif perhaps suggest different locations in the city in which the buildings are flung up. After a number of these chordal stabs, a pacy piano figure reminiscent of the “Enter Two Girls” motif from Fancy Free begins, before launching into a catchy jazz refrain that sounds like the ragtime motif from “Competition Scene.” My aim in comparing the elements of this number with those of the previous score is not to suggest that Bernstein is rifling material from his earlier work, but more to suggest that his compositional process and his thematic material are constructed in consistent ways throughout his New York scores. He writes these in modular blocks, using distinctive patterns of dissonance and repetition in reiterated chordal clusters to evoke qualities of density in the city. In this number it is very easy to imagine Ruth and Eileen setting out with chutzpah to “conquer” the city only to find their confidence thwarted as the relentless march of progress and development throws yet another building (chordal cluster) in their path. Such is the pace of development and energy in “the city that never sleeps.” It’s time to move on, and take in a different picture. You can’t stand around for too long on street corners in this town before they bring in the heavy machinery and start to demolish you like yesterday’s news. Come with me over to the Winter Garden—there’s a show on I want us to catch. Page 96 → Figure 18. The third stimulus: the Manhattan grid, shown on the Randel Plan of 1811. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library (1811). Plan of Manhattan Island Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/26e27e80-be8a-0131-bf1a-58d385a7bbd0

Page 97 →

Walk Three: Broadway Rhythm The Upper West Side, taking in Sondheim; en route, a grid, a street ballet, a chorus, and an opera. Boris Aronson’s set design for the original 1971 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the Winter Garden depicted a theater in a state of demolition: “The brick wall at the back is only partly there, vast chunks of the proscenium are missing. Along the sides are platforms made of metal scaffolding with floors of wooden planks.”1 Inspired by a Life magazine photograph of Gloria Swanson in the ruins of the Roxy movie palace (one of the stops on Chip’s itinerary, pulled down in 1961 to make way for office buildings), Aronson’s set invoked both glamor and decay, fitting polarities for a show that itself dealt with the bittersweet remembrances of former glory. In the final scene, the middle of the back wall gave way (“Far, far upstage, the back wall of the theater has gone”)2 to reveal a gaping hole looking onto the equally decrepit vista of West Fiftieth Street—or at least, an artist’s impression of the street (figure 19). Nothing’s what it seems in the Follies. Follies is set in the present, its location the stage of this theater that is being torn down to make way for a parking lot. In a final nostalgic gesture—a glorious swan song, you might say—aging impresario Dimitri Weismann summons back to the theater a group of chorus girls, survivors of the theater’s former successful days when it hosted, thirty years previously, a long-running series of “Follies.” The reunion brings powerful memories back to the cast of principals, now in their dotage, and awakens the figurative ghosts of their earlier lives, represented on stage by ethereal and befeathered showgirls, and in the music by pastiches of golden age show songs. Ghosts, of course, haunt the world of Follies: six-foot tall showgirls, the younger, former selves of the reuniting principals. One story (the present) is laid over another (the past), its cinders emerging through the porous membrane of the characters’ lives. The show offers in its concept multiple layerings of time, memory, and reality, a deliberate attempt by the production team to create ambiguity: “Is the theater torn down? Will it be Page 98 →torn down tomorrow? Or was it torn down yesterday?”3 asks Hal Prince. Boris Aronson’s set design evokes these different perceptual layers by stacking them as frames within one another: in the back wall an apparently open, gaping hole letting onto the street; on stage, the characters, lost in the world of their drama; to the sides, further characters observing this world; within it, ethereal ghosts summoned by memories of the past; in the pit, a band that plays both in its world and in ours; and finally, in the audience a contemporary consciousness, temporarily offsetting the multiple dimensions of the play. The final scene suggests that the wrecking ball has already begun demolition, and this tantalizing glimpse onto the “real” world, letting in the daylight of “tomorrow,” throws the dreamlike world of the Follies into relief. The staging of this Broadway demolition is fascinating, since it remarks on the idiosyncratic growth of Broadway (and Manhattan), which has developed not in a simplistic, linear way—not just up the island—but instead in a process of reconstruction, forever knocking down a building it had just erected and putting up the next in its place. Although today the preservation of New York’s classic modernist architecture is evident in the vista of Manhattan, the modernist period itself was marked by a continual recycling of the city that was yesterday’s state of the art. As Bayrd Still suggested in 1956, “New York is the only city in the world rich enough in money, vitality and men to build itself anew in the last twenty years.”4 It “systematically destroyed its relics and monuments of the past in the name of progress [and] embarked upon a vigorous accumulation of new monuments, new institutions and an imposing new architecture,” reports Mary Henderson.5 “New York was in a вЂchronic state of pulling down and rebuilding,’” writes another observer.6 Nowadays, the detritus of this perennial recycling characterizes a city whose own ghosts stand on top of one another, as Rem Koolhaas observes: Each block is covered with several layers of phantom architecture in the form of past occupancies, aborted projects and popular fantasies that provide alternative images to the New York that exists.7 Even in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a trend that was noted: “Broadway is like a boy who grows so fast

that he can’t tie up his shoes,” remarked Adrian Ross in 1851.8 Years later, Michel de Certeau would still see the city as a youthful boy: “New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future”;9 “the note of New York,” de Certeau concludes, “is impermanence.”10 Figure 19. The final scene of Follies (1971) at the Winter Garden Theater, New York. Photo: Robert Galbraith. Page 99 →The constant reinvention of New York may not be so clear-cut today, in a city whose historical architecture (the Flatiron Building, 1902; the Chrysler Building, 1928; the Empire State Building, 1930, etc.) represents a part of its very iconicity. Even so, New York has maintained a casual attitude to posterity. Indeed, the neoclassical Roxy movie palace mourned by Gloria Swanson in that Life photograph of 1961 had only been constructed thirty-four years prior to its demolition, capitalizing at the time on the new trend in talking pictures. Far from being able to claim a legacy of centuries (or even decades), as the image and its narrative suggested, this monument was simply a passing product of progressive modernity, redolent with all the attendant capitalist ideology that such progress might imply: “infinite development, perpetual creation and renewal in every sphere of life,” according to Marshall Berman; “and its radical antithesisВ .В .В . nihilism, insatiable destruction, the shattering and swallowing up of life, the heart of darkness, the horrorВ .В .В . infused into the heart of every modern man by the drives and pressures of the bourgeois economy.”11 Nowadays, Manhattan may be more protective of its historicity; even so, great swathes of the city are regularly (and controversially) reinvented when transport infrastructure is developed, when parts of the city are rezoned, when the shoreline is extended to in-fill land from the sea, or when devastating events transform a part of the island. Page 100 →Aronson’s design for Follies was thus inspired: “In this country things become old-fashioned within half an hour.В .В .В . Cities have no time to develop a patina. As soon as a building goes up, they make plans to tear it down.”12 And the mirror of Broadway theater has reflected this constant regeneration not just in Follies. More recently Rent (1996) locates itself in a story line of progressive development, this time not situated on Broadway itself, but located a mile or two to the southeast in downtown Alphabet City. Here a bohemian community of artists and street-dwellers is petitioning the rezoning of a vacant Eleventh Street lot, scheduled to become a “state of the art digital virtual interactive studio.”13 As in Follies, the lamenting of this development is expressed in performance terms. While Sondheim and Goldman revel in the pastiche of 1930s Broadway songs, Larson pastiches a more contemporary performance art in “Over the Moon.” Performance (and performance framed within performance, at that) acts as a sort of fulcrum between one “building” of the city and another. On this walk, I am going to explore some of the ways in which New York has layered new articulations of itself on top of existing ones, creating syncopations between one articulation and the next. My focus is on the many strata that make up the city in time and space, and the images of that final scene in Follies give examples of how we can see the palimpsest at work in one iconic cultural reading of the city. On our previous walk we saw the planes receding into the distance to create a melodic counterpoint; now I am reading the layering of the strata as rhythmical syncopations giving energy to the urban landscape; and we will see on this walk how the strata really do carve those syncopations into the very terrain of the city as it is rebuilt over time, creating palimpsests and ghosted recollections. I will suggest that the rhythm of the city (the Broadway rhythm) is a discourse between the various articulations that this syncopation allows, which creates a texture and energy. I will use this metaphorical exploration of the city as a refractive way of looking at the distinctive rhythmic features of Broadway song, and I will suggest that a striking synergy can be seen—or perhaps heard—between the rhythm of the city and the rhythm of the song. The resonances of this planar perspective are many—I think of Deleuze and Guattari’s stratification, for example, or Manuel deLanda’s A Thousand Years of Non-linear History, both of which play with this idea. By contrast, Doreen Massey worries about such an approach: “To picture this argument through the figure of the palimpsest,” she writes, “is to stay within the imagination of surfaces—it fails to bring alive the trajectories which co-form this space.”14 She prefers to move away “from a concern with horizontalities to a focus on coeval trajectories.”15 This I will do in due course; but for now, the fascinating rhythm of the syncopation calls. Let’s dance to its beat.

Page 101 →As well as Follies I will explore the rhythmic syncopation of Bernstein’s West Side Story and Nacio Herb Brown’s song “Broadway Rhythm,” and I will consider the performativity of Gene Kelly in the ballet version of the latter song in Singin’ in the Rain. I will turn to a number of urban theorists and theorists of modernity to explore this discussion: Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis offers a conceptual understanding of the “musical” flows of the urban organism, and together with writings by Jane Jacobs and Michel de Certeau, it will enable me to explore the idea of rhythm’s perspective. Meanwhile, a dialogue between the actual architects of New York growth (the Randel Plan in the nineteenth century; Robert Moses in the twentieth century) and subsequent theorists such as Jacobs and Berman will offer a way of framing this musicality as a symptom of modernity.

West Side Regenerated As the 1950s ended and a new decade began, the regeneration of Manhattan’s Upper West Side around SixtyThird Street was also beginning, its centerpiece the flagship Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which was to become home to the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Library for the Performing Arts, Juilliard School of Music, and a number of performance venues. The opening of the building would be celebrated by the performance of a specially commissioned work by Aaron Copland, conducted by the music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein had already made his mark as a Broadway composer following On the Town (1941), Wonderful Town (1950), and West Side Story (1957), though he was also highly respected as a classical musician and as conductor of the New York Philharmonic throughout the 1960s. With perfect irony, it was the filming of Bernstein’s West Side Story around the streets of the Upper West Side that delayed the construction of the Lincoln Center. During February 1960, the streets became home to gangs of lithe dancers swooping and breaking in the characteristic choreography of Jerome Robbins, mimicking in graceful steps the nervy pacing of the city gangs of hoodlums so commonly reported in real life around the area. Chillingly, the locations filmed in those early scenes of West Side Story—the real tenement buildings and barren streets—now no longer exist, having been bulldozed almost as soon as the movie wrapped. One page of life in the city was consigned to memory and celluloid; another clean sheet was laid over the top to start afresh. Gang problems across the whole of Greater New York had caused increasing concern throughout the 1950s. Even at the beginning of the decade Page 102 →police had identified twenty-two individual gangs in Brooklyn, twenty in Manhattan, fifteen in the Bronx, and three in Queens. West of Central Park—the area depicted in West Side Story and the area of the Lincoln Center redevelopment—was identified as one of the eleven major trouble spots.16 By 1959, the number of gangs was estimated at 150 with a membership of between sixty-five to seventyfive hundred youths. “An unofficial estimate is that about 100 young persons have died as a result of gang warfare here in the last ten years,” claimed one report.17 Although gang violence was not considered to be driven primarily by race issues, as it is in the plot of West Side Story, tensions were undoubtedly exacerbated by “the unbalances that are caused by any large migration into an area.”18 In particular, the migration of black and Puerto Rican communities into the Italian neighborhoods of the East Bronx is pinpointed by Nigel Simeone as being a key inspiration for Bernstein’s morality tale, written collaboratively with playwright Arthur Laurents, choreographer Jerome Robbins, and young librettist Stephen Sondheim.19 The Puerto Ricans, as a generic cultural group, also feature heavily in Jane Jacobs’s seminal study on what she calls “the failure of town planning,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs is not critical of the communities who dwell on these streets; rather, her hostility is targeted elsewhere, as she points to a plethora of town-planning problems causing the sort of community dislocation that was engendering violence and delinquency: “super-block projects,” “under-used sidewalks [and] parks,” “stagnant, long, backwater blocks,” and “border vacuums,”20 all of which, she suggests, challenge the development of neighborly communities. “Population turnover” is prevalent as residents come and go, forced out by either a push or a pull effect—overcrowding, rezoning, or inflating costs on the one hand, or providing desirable suburbs, community development, social housing, and amenities on the other.21 In this scenario, of course, certain citizens benefit, while other less visible communities become rezoned. Jacobs’s lament about the “death” of (formerly) “great American cities” and the “failure of

town planning” is a direct attack on urban developers such as Robert Moses, the influential mastermind behind significant planning projects between the 1910s and 1960s, including the Lincoln Center development. Although Moses remains nameless in Jacobs’s attack, his fingerprints are all over the planning documents she condemns. The two are linked in Marshall Berman’s later manifesto on modernism, in which he more explicitly targets Moses himself: “He deployed every form of force and fraud, intrigue and mystification, at his command, obsessively determined to grind this little world into dust.”22 At this stage, one such “little world” was the west side, an enclave for the immigrant Puerto Rican population.Page 103 → Reports of the Lincoln Center development focus on the disruption to the Puerto Rican communities in the area. In particular, Victoria Newhouse points to Moses’s Slum Clearance Committee as being responsible for “the inhuman practice of removing slum dwellers before adequate housing was developed.”23 Meanwhile, Wesley Janz sees the cleansing of the area and the replacement of slum tenants with centers of culture (the Lincoln Center) and learning (Fordham University) as an ideological maneuver in power politics.24 In this case—as with previous redevelopment in New York City—the rebuilding of the city involved erasing one story to write another in its place. Ironically, it was to be Leonard Bernstein’s baton that would lead the sound of this cultural cleansing at the Lincoln Center’s opening night celebration; but rather than the distinctive syncopation of his own writing for West Side Story, opening night showcased the ultramodernist serialism of Aaron Copland’s “Connotations for Orchestra.”

Cleansed That the West Side Story team chose at the eleventh hour to use the Puerto Rican immigrant community as protagonists reveals the topicality of their project.25 But while the instinct of the cultural planners was to build over the problem and erect in its place a shiny new arts center, the old city “erased” is not forgotten: its ghost lives on in the haunting street-scenes of West Side Story; its problems still speak out in the musical’s theme. The west side is a palimpsest, beneath which the traces of a different city can still be made out. The clean facade of the Lincoln Center cannot completely conceal the jarring memory of its slum past. The story of the west side’s regeneration and the Lincoln Center’s development is just one example of New York rebuilding itself. The development of the city had begun in earnest during the early part of the nineteenth century, and was largely guided by a municipal planning directive known as the Randel Plan. With impressive foresight, the New York authorities anticipated the city’s exponential growth. As the population expanded and the city began to spread northward, the city’s ordinance established the physical pattern that would shape its spread: New York City was to be defined by a grid-like pattern of streets (figure 18). According to one account, most New Yorkers “wanted straight streets and easy grades to speed the flow of horse-drawn traffic; and they wanted rectangular surveys and rectangular lots to provide easily developed and saleable parcels of land.”26 In order to restrict the ability of private landowners to lay out arbitrary boundaries that might Page 104 →confuse the development of logical, direct thoroughfares, a commission was set up in 1807 to plan the design of the city “in such a manner as to unite regularity and order with the public convenience and benefit and in particular to promote the health of the city.”27 This commission—made up of Simeon de Witt, Governor Morris, and John Rutherford, with John Randel Jr. as the chief surveyor—worked over the next four years to develop the plan of 1811, which “outlined New York’s future spatial growth”28 in a grid system of 155 east-west streets and sixteen north-south avenues. Aside from the already existing tangle of higgledy-piggledy streets at the lower end of the island, Manhattan developed inside the constraints of its regular grid system. “It’s as if the city wandered around for a while,” writes Mark Kingwell, “loitered and strolled and messed about, before finding its stride and taking off northward into the uncharted expanse of the island with a regular gait.”29 In fact, this grid system is just another example of the planner’s page being laid over a previously inscribed city: in 1789 Petrus Stuyvesant (great-grandson of the more famous governor of New Amsterdam) had carved out his family’s land into a similar grid system on the east side. Stuyvesant’s Bowery Village was oriented in “a true north-to-south and east-to-west basis,” while the Randel Plan mapped onto the slightly “skewed

axis” of the island. “When the city began opening streets and avenues in the areaВ .В .В . the old roads were closed and the houses on them demolished or moved,”30 report Burrows and Wallace. All that remains of the Bowery Village today is the off-kilter Stuyvesant Street, a visible trace on this palimpsest of the city. There is no doubt that the foresight of the city planners assisted the management of population growth on Manhattan island, and that the plan of 1811 was integral to New York’s successful and exponential growth during the nineteenth century. Yet this corralling of the people into a gridiron system, and the methodical development of the city gradually northward, had the effect of contributing to both the segregation of ethnic groups and the consolidation of wealthy and impoverished communities ever more distanced by an agenda. The principles of urban planners, as we have seen, catered to those who were both geographically and socially “upwardly mobile.” Even in this simple account of the plan we can see the project being one of urban and population control with economic advantage at its heart: “Despite some provision for public well-being, the plan mirrored the guiding spirit of the city, one which emphasized convenience for commerce and for property owners,” writes Spann. Subsequent criticism of the plan would label it “a major cause of New York’s problems,” “the cause for the crowding and monotony that afflicted extended areas of the city,” a system that “destroyed the island’s topographical advantages,” and “a ruthless, expensive, and destructive confrontation with nature which obliterated the natural beauty of most of Manhattan.”31 Page 105 →Such criticism is supported by Jacobs. Throughout her book, her thesis is consistent: a city’s quality cannot be designed by planners, she suggests; instead, it is determined by the way the city is used and then evolves.32 To approach a city, or even a city neighbourhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life.33 Jacobs goes on to compare the artificial process of managing urban development with taxidermy, drawing attention to the way in which human processes manipulate and re-form nature. Certainly, the striking uniformity of the New York grid system—at once arbitrary and ordered—is evidence of this. So here we have two scenarios whose tensions resonate in the ongoing life of the city. First, an attempt to sanitize the city through urban regeneration and cultural provision papers over the problems of social control but does not conceal them; second, an attempt to design efficiency and order into the city seems to be at odds with certain dynamics in the environment. I have suggested already that these scenarios both resemble a palimpsest, whose previous inscriptions can be seen beneath the visible writing on the page. I’d like to develop this idea by suggesting that the layers are not only evident, but that they also generate energy through a sort of friction between their differences. I would like to explore this idea in terms of rhythm, and in particular, I will focus on the use of syncopation in the songs of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, songs whose rhythms deliberately and effectively cut across the metrical order of the bar line and beat. I am interested in how this syncopation might be seen as a metaphor for the way in which the dynamics of the previous urban layer cut across the artificial construct of the new city. To use the idea of rhythm offers a beguiling parallel, because like the city’s multiple incarnations, the staggered impulses of rhythm work both temporally and spatially: rhythm is clearly heard in the dimension of time, but it is also scored on the page using spatial coding. Thus the concept of rhythm offers a multidimensionality that seems to fit with the sort of rhizomatic thinking that I am exploring throughout this book.

Play of Dimensions One way of conceptualizing all of this is to pick up on the terminology used by some observers to discuss the city’s life as a three-dimensional game played out against the two dimensions of the city plan: Page 106 →The Grid’s two-dimensional discipline creates undreamt-of freedom for threedimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and decontrolВ .В .В . the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.34

In this report, by Rem Koolhaas, the life of the city is seen as chaotic, anarchic, against the order and control of the city’s design, in one sense a dichotomy of nature and culture. Criticism of the grid—however much it may have enabled the possibility of progress—is common enough; “it was the rational and equal division of land into purchasable blocks that was the essential precondition of capitalist settlement,” suggests Paul Carter;35 “it belongs to the progress of the West as quintessentially as the discourse of history itself.”36 Yet if the grid is so constraining, it is also the foundation from which liberation can spring. Beneath the grid, straining to break out, can be seen the trace of the unordered city; beneath one layout, the Randel grid, can be seen the former layout, the Stuyvesant grid, slightly offset, syncopating the regularity of the plan; beneath the Lincoln Center is the old community, bulldozed and bullied in the name of progress. Before moving on to discuss rhythm in terms of the songs, however, I would like to introduce one further interesting example of this rhythmical syncopation in the city: for a crude diagonal cuts across the grid, confounding the simplicity of the city’s design and seeming at odds with the modernist structure of Manhattan. This is Broadway, cutting flagrantly across the grid. While the grid system, in its order, characterizes the organizational control of the urban capitalist project, the diagonal scar of Broadway—“gashing the city like a lava stream”37—is strikingly resistant to its surroundings, defining the path of progress up the island yet running counter to the “normative” organization of the general street system, reflecting, perhaps, that anarchy in the midst of control. And this anarchy, it might be said, is also evident in the form that has made Broadway its home: “If the real Manhattan insists upon the superficial order of gridded streets and the instrumental reason of commerce,” writes Scott Bukatman, “the urban musical, armed with montage and mobility and freed from the strait jacket of narrative plausibility, can cut, glide, or fly across it.”38 Broadway stands out with striking distinction against the hundreds of other nameless streets in the grid. It was an old Indian trail, and this legacy is palpable in the resistant affirmation of its impure directness: an aged route that works with the land, finding a path, seeking its river course. This rude path is authentic, etched into the topography of Manhattan rather than laid onto it, a line that is traced like a rubbing from the bedrock of the Page 107 →island. By contrast, the other streets are mere upstarts: the first guidelines of the draftsman’s project, constructed for the playful modern edifice of the city, given only numbers instead of names. Where Broadway was lived into being by unthinking hundreds whose feet wore a course from water to land, the grid streets were designed into being in the austerity of offices by men in white shirtsleeves. It’s a distinction that is present in many ways: Broadway speaks the presence that has always been, while the grid announces the city that is to come; the plan bows to the inevitability of Broadway39 while presenting to us the way we will define our lives. Broadway ruins the purity of the plan like spilt ink on the draftsman’s paper; but it also precedes and enables the plan: the forethought of the men in shirtsleeves was to let beat its telltale heart. Although it is tempting to read Broadway’s syncopation to the grid as either libidinous, aspirational, or libertarian, we should reflect on the fact that, in Marxist terms, defining it in these ways would be a particularly effective consolidation of established metanarratives, for despite the clear resistance to the grid system by the slashing diagonal of Broadway, the flagrant abuse of the metrical system by this errant syncopation, the grid (the metrical system) nevertheless remains and is in fact the sine qua non that makes the offbeat of Broadway appear freeing, aspirational, and exciting. The grid is still “the matrix where time and spaceВ .В .В . acquire significance as history and geography,” Carter reminds us.40 So this is where the chaos/order or nature/culture dichotomy begins to make sense in Deleuzian terms: the grid, the meter, the city is a machine; the flow of the natural dynamic is cut off by an arrest: “Far from being the opposite of continuity, the break or interruption conditions this continuity: it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity.”41

When You’re a Jet I’m struck by how effectively this maps onto the world of West Side Story and the way the gangs express themselves through the syncopated rhythms of the score. From the start of the “Prologue” the music unsettles us with its “persistent dislocation,” reflecting not only the animosity between the gangs but also the jarring incompatibility of the individuals with their landscape: Ker-chung (gap), Ker-chung (gap), Ker-chung

Ker-chung (gap). This is “at once emotional and physical: this is how they walk and talk, prance and dance, ” writes Wilfrid Mellers; it is as if the rigor of the meter articulates the order of the grid, while the crossrhythms in the music articulate how the youths are out of sync. Mellers goes further: “Recurrent Page 108 →bitonality—or rather two-part writing in which the upper part is unresolved appoggiatura to the lower—suggests their disconnectedness,”42 he writes. Here Mellers’s invocation of the appoggiatura is interesting. It’s a rhythmical device that delays the main note of the phrase; by association it also reminds us of its shorter cousin, the acciaccatura. Both of these musical characters are ornaments—notes that do not belong in the bar, but that are nevertheless there; ghost notes that both hint at what might have been and that bring a stress to what is, almost by causing the music to stumble—very conscious antagonisms to the metrical order of the music. In the first main song, “The Jet Song,” in which the second-generation immigrant Americans claim their turf, the dislocation of the accompaniment that we have already heard in the “Prologue” is cross-hatched with a triplet motif in the vocal line (“When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way”). The rhythms are all unsettling and so piled on top of one another that it is difficult to find the beat of the bar (see figure 20); yet the disorder is itself ordered in relentless and repeated rhythmic offbeats that overlay their own grid onto the formality of the meter. In terms of characterization, the syncopation of “The Jet Song” is both fitting and surprising. These are dropout kids, running counter to convention and deliberately conflicting with authority, and the offset music reflects this awkward societal status very appropriately; on the other hand, powerful musical moments—which might adequately represent the power and impact of the gangs on the area—are constantly brought into question: the downbeats of bars are disturbed by the appoggiatura effect; the surety of harmonic order is challenged by the discords. These, it seems to imply, are troubled kids, not yet in control of the environment they claim to own, stumbling awkwardly even as they seem to glide, swish, and fly in their dance. What is underneath is always visible; Broadway is always there. We meet a new character, the more mature Tony, in process, between the dislocation and the order: a youth who is consciously deterritorializing from the gang world into the world of responsible adulthood. In “Something’s Coming” he looks toward this future: “Who knows?” he sings. “There’s something due any day / I will know right away / soon as it shows.”43 In the music, uncertainty still dominates as a series of rhythmic patterns is laid over one another: first the 3/4 meter of the bass line, conforming to the meter of the bar lines but offering the ambiguous tonality of two perfect fourth intervals culminating on the supertonic (D-A-E); above that and working against it as a hemiola, the duple-time stabs of the accompaniment; then a syncopated counterpoint that provides the appoggiatura Mellers recognizes, each refrain sweeping up as if skipping into the air before landing on either a B or an Fв™Ї; finally, the vocal line Page 109 →joins variously the different rhythmic cross-currents of the instruments, and sometimes just glides against the buffeting rhythmic underlay. This is how it begins: “Could be,” the voice sings, floating over the rhythms for almost four measures. “Who knows?” again hanging in the air for the next four measures. Then he joins the counterpoint—“something due any day / I will know right away”—before clashing with all of the rhythms in a triplet motif: “soon as it shows.” If we lay this particular bar out as a graphic diagram, we can see how the rhythmic splattering of notes resists any sort of easy (linear) decoding (see figure 21): it is multilayered, like the planes of the city. These effects are described musicologically by Joseph P. Swain, for whom the “gentle sort of syncopationВ .В .В . lends this song its effect of anticipation, almost breathlessness.”44 Tony’s rhythms still conflict, but less aggressively; he is moving toward something that is more ordered—toward adulthood, toward conformity. He is becoming-adult. As Tony matures further, reaching out to another human being and crossing the divide, his melody finds the meter of the music, and in a series of powerful synchronous statements—“The Balcony Scene,” “Tonight, ” “One Hand, One Heart”—he becomes an adult, at one with the city, reterritorializing. Adulthood halts the flow, and the disturbing dislocation of the gang rhythms recede to a ripple in the background (see figure 22).

But the Broadway rhythm never quite disappears; becoming formalized instead in a “two-four,” “a very driving kind of showbiz song.”45 Sondheim is explicit about the way this particular beat was deliberately used. “We needed something to give our hero some early strength in the piece,” he says. “I explained what a showbiz two-four was.”46 In this particular instance the vocal melody from the verse, which is already syncopated over a 3/4 beat (the bass line), is stretched to fit over two measures of 2/4. The effect of the syncopation in the melody remains strong, perhaps even becoming more pronounced since it now compromises the downbeat (of the second measure) rather than occurring internally within the 3/4 block. Meanwhile, the bass line turns into a strong downbeat vamp on the tonic and dominant, with an off-beat response in the accompaniment providing an “um-cha” feel. This regular metrical strength emphasizes the syncopation of the melody. What holds the two rhythms together is the “thumb-line” (a piano player’s term) or cello line (in the orchestration), an internal legato refrain in four-measure phrases that seeks a resolution and therefore provides forward momentum. In combination, these three components (syncopated melody, um-cha accompaniment, legato thumb-line) provide the “driving” quality to which Sondheim refers (see figure 23). “The ideaВ .В .В . was standard showbiz writing.В .В .В . It was what we were all writing Page 110 →at that time,” he says.47 “It gives Tony balls,” claimed Bernstein, “so that he doesn’t emerge as just a euphoric dreamer.”48 Figure 20. Syncopation in “The Jet Song” from West Side Story. Each stave suggests a different meter. “Jet Song” by Leonard Bernstein / Stephen Sondheim. В© Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. Boosey & Hawkes, agent for rental. International copyright secured. Reproduced by Permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

Broadway Rhythm And so we come to the real Broadway rhythm. Other examples abound and have become synonymous with the Broadway musical—even musicals that ostensibly locate themselves away from Broadway: Sondheim refers to “Hallelujah” from Hit the Deck (1927), and “One Wonderful Day” and “Saturday Night” from Saturday Night (1955), and elsewhere we can see a similar effect used throughout the golden age: “Give My Regards to Broadway” Page 111 →from Little Johnny Jones (1904), “Swanee” from Demi-Tasse (1919), “Hooray for Hollywood” from Hollywood Hotel (1937), “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), “There’s No Business Like Show Business” from Annie Get Your Gun (1946), “Luck be a Lady” from Guys and Dolls (1950), “All I Need Now Is The Girl” from Gypsy (1959). The list goes on, though despite the ubiquity of this particular rhythmic feel in the Broadway repertoire, this type of song has resisted being defined or labeled. Even in his close analysis of Broadway showtunes, Alec Wilder struggles to describe the style, though he repeatedly recognizes its theatrical (Broadway) quality, referring to such songs as “theater set pieces,” “come-to-meeting song[s],” or “cut-time theater rhythm songs.”49 He identifies them as being characteristic of Vincent Youmans’ writing: Figure 21. A graphic depiction of “Something’s Coming,” showing the complex rhythmic crunching of notes in m. 17 (“.В .В .В soon as it showsВ .В .В .”). Figure 22. “Tonight” from West Side Story. The gang leader grows up and becomes responsible: metric order in the vocal line, though the rhythmic hint of subversion remains underneath. “Tonight” by Leonard Bernstein / Stephen Sondheim. В© Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. Boosey & Hawkes, agent for rental. International copyright secured. Reproduced by Permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. I Know that You Know [is] a rousing rhythm song, using throughout verse and chorus a device by no means exclusively Youmans’ but one he was fascinated by and handles very skilfully. In alla breve time it has the accented fourth beat tied to at least a half note in the Page 112 →following measure. It is likely that his success with this device brought it into such popularity that other writers continued to employ it.В .В .В . Hallelujah, Rise вЂN’ Shine, Great Day and I Know That You Know are distinctly theatrical in flavor and not just because they are in alla breve rhythm or

syncopate the fourth beat, though those factors help. It’s because the canvas is larger, the line broader, the intensity greater.50

Figure 23. “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story. The showbiz two-four. “Something’s Coming” by Leonard Bernstein / Stephen Sondheim. В© Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. Boosey & Hawkes, agent for rental. International copyright secured. Reproduced by Permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. The effect of the syncopation drives the momentum of the song forward, and it is no surprise that all of these songs in their lyrics are songs of anticipation or celebration (“Will it be? / Yes, it will!”)—the characters singing them are in some way transcending normal, conventional experiences, are “on a high,” are in a process of deterritorializing. Syncopation—a tension that pitches “rhythmic surprise against metrical regularity”51—is seen as stemming from the appropriation of black rhythms by (white) urban Americans. Music historian Maud CuneyHare, writing in the 1930s, puts it thus: “Black musicВ .В .В . вЂignores any division of time that follows the natural pulse of a regular metrical beat’ and anticipates or holds over accents beyond their expected time.”52 In this reading, the “black” syncopation (or “ragged” time, as it came to be called) abuses the stability of the “white” (or European) setup, bringing with it all manner of corrupting influences.53 But the black/white tension in popular music is an easy binary to slip into, particularly given the dominant mythologies of Page 113 →race relations in the United States and the various musical territories that have been claimed as either white (folk/country) or black (blues/gospel). In truth, musical theater has never been a space ceded to African America or its strategies of expression; ragtime itself had been late to arrive as a New York sound and was then swiftly expropriated from the black musicians. That the Broadway showtune owes a lot to ragtime is doubtless, though as Raymond Knapp suggests, the syncopated beat of Broadway owes as much to the subtle syncopation of the quickstep march. We must see this tension as more complex: “The music itself seemed to capture the pace of modern American life,” suggests Philip Furia.54 Although we might use by way of example any number of “New York” songs—“Manhattan Madness” and “Lullaby of Broadway” are particularly good examples—it is “Broadway Rhythm” that really seems to embody this tension most explicitly.

“Broadway Rhythm” (1935) “Broadway Rhythm,” both in its lyrics and—I will argue—in its music, announces city life as dynamic, exciting, aspirational; but more than this, it seems to voice rhythmically the configuration of urban organization and its “cultural negotiation and renegotiation” by the people themselves, so distinctly abstracted on the plan of New York. The main dynamic of the music is rhythmical: the dialectic of a rigorous and ordered beat rudely cross-cut by the syncopations of the offbeat. Like Broadway (the street), which seems to acknowledge but deviate from the pattern of the grid, this song’s syncopation recognizes the order of the metric beat, but then moves deliberately, provocatively, even playfully away from it. Implicitly, this is an announcement of nonconformity, and in this respect it fits in with many other period songs about Broadway and the surrounding area (think of “naughty, sporty, gaudy, bawdy 42nd Street,”55 for instance—another example of the rhetoricizing of anarchy amid order). From the very first bar of the refrain, syncopation is the defining characteristic of this song, most obviously offsetting the vocal line from the metric beat. Lyrically, this is announced as the “Broadway rhythm,” associated with an infectious energy (“it’s got me”), and used to summon “everybody” into a physical and corporeal “dance” with the syncopation. The syncopated phrase itself is lyrically comprised of seven syllables, each given a half-note beat offset to the main rhythm. Were the phrase placed “straight”—on the beat—the seven syllables would fit comfortably into the first seven half-note beats, following which the rhythm of “everybody,” colloquially phrased, would take up the eighth half note (as it

does), allowingPage 114 → “dance” to “land” on the first beat of the third bar of the refrain. This would be the expected “straight” phrasing; but the fact that the vocal line has been offset has several notable effects. In their colloquial phrasing, the lyrics challenge both the regularity of the meter and the relentless offbeat of their placement. The relationship between music, lyrics, and performance in these two bars establishes an effective dialectic, in which contrasting signifiers of vigor and langor, freedom and restraint, deferral and rubato clash. The exuberance of the previous cry, “Gotta dance!” and the invitation to partake is contrasted by the steady pace of the words and the casual melody, which at the beginning of the phrase remains at the same comfortable pitch; the freedom of the sentiment and anticipated speech pattern are resisted by the formality of the regular minim rhythm; and the delayed relaxation of the first few notes slips inconspicuously into a rushed panic of eighth-note syllables tumbling toward their destination, “dance.” After repeating the A material, the release theme pitches a 3/4 half note / quarter note pattern against the straight duple time of the meter for over seven bars (ten motifs of a descending phrase; see figure 28) This pattern goes on far longer than would be expected, and the result creates a disorienting whorl of rhythm—repetitive and in that sense regular, but dislocated from the metrical beat and therefore chronically irregular—causing us to lose sight of the actual meter of the song. It’s reminiscent of so many of those comments about the “music” of New York and Broadway, such as this one by an Evening Post writer, who could almost be describing this particular song: “[an] exhilarating music which charms the multitude and draws its thousands within the whirl. This is Broadway—this makes Broadway. Take from it those elements, the charm is gone.”56 As we can see, the relationship between the song and Broadway itself is far more complex, particularly in abstract ways, than it simply being about Broadway. The rhythm of the song is just one layer of the song itself, and yet it is also and at the same time one layer of the rhythm of the city, another layer of which is the defining grid system, and yet another the social organizations within which daily life is enacted.

Layering the City’s Streets From the perspective of the audience, the layers of the Winter Garden Follies performance stand out: the pit band’s energized business; the work of performers walking their craft; the diegesis of the reunion; the dream space of the showgirls; and the street life through the back wall. Each has its own Page 115 →identity, each its own rhythm, each syncopated against the other. And so a further nuance comes into this discussion. For these layers, which up to now we have only considered as simple and planar (one grid laid over one city), are much more polyvalent. Like music (in several ways), the dimensionality of the syncopation can be seen in both time and space and can be seen as multivoiced. In order to discuss this, I’d like to introduce a series of observations by Jane Jacobs, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre. Each has written about the city, and specifically about street scenes, in performative terms: Jacobs with reference to a ballet,57 de Certeau a chorus,58 and Henri Lefebvre, as part of his project of “rhythmanalysis,” in terms of “a symphony or an opera.”59 It is Lefebvre who comes closest to invoking the sort of polyvalency I am referring to, and it is interesting that he does this through recognizing the discourse between space and time (which, as I have already hinted, is a crucial metaphysical property of music, not least in performance): Space is nothing but the inscription of time in the world, spaces are the realizations, inscriptions in the simultaneity of the external world of a series of times, the rhythms of the city, the rhythms of the urban population.60 Jacobs, de Certeau, and Lefebvre articulate those rhythms as they describe the street scenes of various communities. Jane Jacobs first: “Under the seeming disorder of the city,” she writes, “is a complex orderВ .В .В . composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the

city and liken it to the dance.”61 Jacobs goes on to describe the daily “ballet of the city sidewalk” outside her home: the rituals of the morning with shopkeepers setting up their business, children heading off to school, businessmen and women heading to the subway, and housewives chatting; then the “heart-of-the-day ballet,” with off-work longshoremen gathering at a bar, executives taking lunch at coffee houses, and “character dancers” in the form of tramps, bikers, teenagers, and toddlers going about their midday lives; after work, she reports, “the ballet is reaching its crescendo.” This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lea of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drugstore to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s; this is the time when teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of Page 116 →M.G.s; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know around Hudson Street will go by.62 She continues to describe the evening ballet, now illuminated by the “bright spotlight pools” of streetlamps and shop doorways; then the “deep night ballet,” with its less obvious events and its fractious characters. “The ballet is never at a halt,” she says; “The individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”63 This is a similar sentiment to Lefebvre’s—“Gatherings of bodies are polyrhythmical, .В .В .В each organ or function having its own [rhythm] in a perpetual interaction which constitute[s] an ensemble or whole.” He qualifies the use of this word, however, which “does not signify a closed totality, but on the contrary, an open totality.”64 These rhythms are ongoing flows, and to take snapshots of them as Jacobs, de Certeau, and Lefebvre do—to fix them in the frozen temporality of the written account—is to slice into the salami, to use a Deleuzian metaphor.65 Next, Michel de Certeau: he situates his gaze not on the sidewalk but way up on the roof of the World Trade Center. From that vantage point, which he compares to the position of Icarus in flight, the position of a “solar Eye, looking down like a god,” he can separate himself from the person in the street on whom he looks down. “The ordinary practitioners of the city live вЂdown below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walkВ .В .В . an urban вЂtext’ they write without being able to read it.”66 By contrast, his position allows him to read, “makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.”67 Again, the flow (“its agitation”) is “momentarily arrested by vision.”68 I will consider the particular paths made by the perambulations of the walkers through that city—like the itinerary of the sailors in On the Town—in Walk 5. Here, it is the different planes (and therefore rhythms) of de Certeau’s account that interest me. These emerge through his discussion of “practices of space,” as he recognizes “an opaque and blind mobility” that allows citizens, through their handling of the city’s geography, to perceive “вЂanother spatiality’ (an вЂanthropological,’ poetic and mythic experience of space).”69 De Certeau’s discussion of the citizens’ spatial practice reminds us of Jacobs’s discussion of the street scene: “Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps.В .В .В . Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together.”70 Like Jacobs, he considers this as a whole, comprised of individual rhythms as each different practitioner “gambols, goes on all fours, dances, and walks about, with a light or heavy step.” Page 117 →All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity.71 Such spatial practice formulates what de Certeau refers to as a “mythic” experience of space. He likens the way citizens use the city to the way we use language, aware of its code (its urban and architectural form), but deviating from the strict usage of that “proper meaning” through the poetry of “вЂfigurative’ language.”72 He picks up on two rhetorical devices, asyndeton and synecdoche, suggesting that there are ways

in which we walk the city that are analogous to ways in which we manipulate language, and in so doing, he argues, we build a distorted city (“make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others”): The figures of pedestrian rhetoric substitute trajectories that have a mythical structure, at least if one understands by “myth” a discourse relative to the place/nowhere (or origin) of concrete existence, a story jerry-built out of elements taken from common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story whose gaps mesh with the social practices it symbolizes.73 Indeed, de Certeau argues, this distortion of the “real” city only serves to remind us that the city itself does not exist; it is only an “identity” we have assigned to our collective social experience. The “relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine” are just a “shuffling among pretenses of the proper,” and the “urban fabric” that they create—which can be “placed under the sign of what ought to be”74—is the myth of the city. For de Certeau, it is “an opaque and blind mobility” that enables the mythical city to be formulated. The citizens’ blindness is the opposite of de Certeau’s godlike omniscience, “These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen,” and in “escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye,” they are able to project “a migrational, or metaphorical, cityВ .В .В . into the clear text of the planned and readable city.”75 The planned city, of course, is the city of the authorities that control us—the city of the grid, or in West Side Story’s terms, the city of adulthood into which Tony is developing. Crucially, the way in which citizens use and construct the city through their spatial practice “permits the re-emergence” of something “that the urbanistic project excluded.” The citizens thus keep “outside the reach of [the] panoptic power” of the “Concept-city.”76 Thus de Certeau’s account distinguishes layers of practice that are Page 118 →themselves rhythmically very different (his own stillness, the “bustling city”), but also distinguishes different cities (the readable, the mythical, the metaphorical, the concept-city) that we perceive as having different dimensions (different rhythms); finally, within these cities exist different exaggerated or eliminated spaces whose difference can be sensed only metaphysically (rhythmically?). I have stressed the metaphor of rhythm in this reading of de Certeau for my own obvious reasons, though Henri Lefebvre’s work in rhythmanalysis offers a strong support for the way I have invoked this idea. Lefebvre, like Jacobs and de Certeau, also describes an observation of the city; the character he plays in his narration is the rhythmanalyst. His particular account is hypothetical, so the city itself is fictitious and his vantage point imagined. Ideally, he claims, the city should be viewed from a balcony, which provides precisely the right perspective from which the street’s rhythm might be analyzed. For Lefebvre, the understanding of rhythm is both an objective and an embodied skill: “There is a certain externality which allows the analytical intellect to function. Yet, to capture a rhythm one needs to have been captured by it.”77 In this way he likens the practice of rhythmanalysis to learning a language or engaging with music. In the absence of a balcony overlooking but in close proximity to the street, he suggests, “You can always be content with a window”; so it is from the window that he draws his account. From his vantage point, Lefebvre overlooks a street scene, a busy junction whose flow of traffic and pedestrians is controlled by traffic lights. Like de Certeau’s pedestrians, Lefebvre’s are “immersed into the multiplicity of noises, rumours, rhythms” and are therefore unaware of the nuances of flow, of rhythm in the street; but from his distance, “noises are distinguishable, fluxes separate themselves, rhythms answer each other.”78 Lefebvre’s hypothetical observation, like Jacobs’s, extends over the period of a day, allowing him to see the subtle shifts between the different rhythms of temporality; like de Certeau’s, he observes a number of different flows within a moment, allowing him to see rhythm in spatial terms. Some of the rhythms Lefebvre notices from his window are rather obvious: the alternating rhythms dictated by the traffic lights; the cyclical rhythm of the daily routine; the different rhythmic intensity of day and night. However, it is the finer details in which he is more interested: he urges the listener to “go deeper, dig below the surface,

listen closely instead of simply looking, reflecting the effects of a mirror.” He notices that “each plant, each tree, has its rhythms, made of several: leaves and flowers, seeds or fruit, each has its own time.”79 For Lefebvre, the rhythmanalyst “вЂkeeps his ears open,’ but he does not only hear words, speeches, noises and sounds for he is able to listen to a house, a street, a city, as one listens to a symphony or opera.”80 Page 119 →What is at stake for Lefebvre in this heightening of our sensory capacity through rhythmanalysis is the fact that we have lost our sense of self amid the noise of commodification. Accordingly, his rhythmanalysis is a tool for unlocking dialectical thought through greater awareness: “Here is found that old speculative question (the subject and object and their relationships) posed in non-speculative terms, close to practice.”81 For Lefebvre, the different rhythms are perceivable nuances whose definition enables greater acuity. In particular, the recognition of subjective time works as a metaphor to alert us to the difference, rather than the sameness, of all things: “The observer at the window knows that he takes as first reference his time, but that the first impression displaces itself and includes the most diverse rhythms.В .В .В . The passage from the subject to the object requires neither a leap over an abyss, nor the crossing of the desert.”82 All three of these street observations follow a long history of the journalistic and anecdotal description of New York (Greene, Ross, Foster, Stoker, Dickens, etc.), many excerpts of which are collected in Bayrd Still’s Mirror for Gotham. While most of those remain journalistic, the accounts I have introduced here are all part of wider theoretical discussions that themselves share a similar ideological stance. Jane Jacobs’s account illustrates the triumph of a working neighborhood over the soullessness of authoritative town-planning systems. Michel de Certeau’s observation undermines the cynical forces of capitalism by reclaiming the autonomy of the suppressed individual. Henri Lefebvre’s aim is to awaken our senses and empower our ability to see (hear) beyond ideology. My aim in rehearsing these accounts is not so ideologically loaded, though I have suggested that most poststructuralism situates itself in a broadly post-Marxist arena. Instead, I am using these accounts to try to illustrate the dimensionality (which seems far more than tridimensionality) of the rhizomatic, looking to recognize rhythm in the city and in the song as plural, multivalent, and open. Thus the notion of syncopation that I have suggested can be taken to apply to many modalities: just as the different rhythms of these accounts intertwine, play with one another, and create texture, song syncopates not only with its constituent parts but also with associative connotations—the blackness of Gershwin’s music, the sexuality of jazz, and (especially) the iconicity (the “Broadwayness”) of Broadway.

The Performativity of Rhythm The “Broadway Melody” ballet from Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is probably the most famous incarnation of “Broadway rhythm,” a classic piece of filmmakingPage 120 → from 1950s Hollywood. Featuring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, it is absolutely of its era in staging a very theatrical sequence for the camera to further the plot of the movie through dance. It follows the huge success of An American in Paris (1951), also starring Gene Kelly and built around a similarly theatrical ballet sequence, and sits alongside other similar ballets such as Fred Astaire’s “Girl Hunt” from The Band Wagon (1953). It’s worth considering this ballet because of the way its performance creates another sense of syncopation in the song. In one way, and like the other ballets I have mentioned, the sequence constructs a mininarrative that is tenuously linked to the subject of the film. A man (Kelly) introduces the sequence dressed formally in dinner jacket, bow tie, and straw hat: “Don’t bring a frown to old Broadway,” he croons, the opening refrain of “Broadway Melody.” Over this chorus, the camera pulls up and out and leaves him isolated in a tiny spot center screen. As the music suddenly launches into an introduction to “Broadway Rhythm,” the screen is filled with neon signs, a simulacrum of Times Square. A crowd of people rush into the space before the film cuts to reveal Kelly in a different guise, the wannabe hoofer seeking employment from the New York theatrical agents. He is smart in his yellow waistcoat and checkered slacks, but his sleeves are too short and his spectacles are heavy; his hat is pulled up at the brim. It is five o’clock when he arrives at Penn Station against the flow: the out-of-towner, perhaps from Lawrence,

Massachusetts, with a suitcase in his hand and a dream in his heart. He’s out of place in this busy street of busboys, hat-check girls, city suits, and servicemen; few notice him, though he’s mesmerized by the sights and the rush. If he stands still for just a minute, he gets swept away by the tide. But the man does not wish to stand still. He asks a policeman: down the street. Down the street a signpost puts him right, pointing to Seventh Avenue, Thirty-Eighth Street, and Forty-Second Street: Times Square. The man arrives. There are three doors. He gives three knocks, dances three times. “Gotta dance,” he sings. On the third audition the man lands a job. The agent spruces him up, ditches the glasses, and sets him straight to work. First he leads the dancing crowd, then taps solo until he is bewitched by the gangster’s moll (Charisse). Gangster’s moll—all legs, smoke, and Louise Brooks bob, tempts him with her dance, goading him to breathe the intoxicating fumes of her cigarette. But he has enough, and with an assertive, masculine flick, he whisks her into his arms for the clinch. Now he is in control, and he leads her in a pas de deux. But just as they are about to embrace, the gangster and his two heavies muscle in, flaunting diamonds and spinning their menacing coins. The girl falls for Page 121 →the wealth, and ditches the man for the might of the gangster. The theatrical agent steps in, with a series of jobs lined up to take the man up the ladder of success: first, clowning at the Columbia Burlesque; then, stepping out at the Palace Vaudeville; finally, headlining at the Ziegfeld Follies. The man is a success, his life a whirl of casinos, balls, and female admirers, until he meets again the gangster’s moll, now in resplendent white silk and feathers. The surroundings fade away to leave the couple alone on a bare soundstage, where their dancing entwines them in her billowing China silk scarf. It’s a delicious, expressive moment, but back in reality she is too cool. Tossing a carefree coin of her own into his outstretched palm, she hooks up once more with the gangster, and the man is handed his boater and cane: he is back where we started. He wanders out into the lights of Times Square, disconsolate until he bumps into a wannabe hoofer, the spitting image of himself at the bottom of the ladder. Perhaps things aren’t so bad after all: “Gotta dance!” he cries, summoning back the crowds. They all dance exuberantly amid a sea of neon letters and a whirl of sparkling colors. “That’s the Broadway melody!” he concludes triumphantly, and this time, as the camera pulls up and out, he rides with it as Times Square and its mass of dancers recedes into the distance, just the backdrop to his own success.

Although I have demonstrated the sequence of this ballet through describing its narrative, it is not the narrative dimension that most appeals to us: that, like Times Square to Kelly at the end of the number, is just the iconic, mythological backdrop to the play of the dance—the rags-to-riches narrative of aspirant success on Broadway. As with all of the MGM ballets, like the dream ballets of the stage shows before them, the story is a conceit for the display of dance: flair, charisma, and technique trump all in a display whose virtuosity is evident even to nondancers. In part, it is the confident handling of the body in extraordinary positions and dynamic tap steps that impresses us; but in part it is also the dialogue Kelly enacts with the song, a physical counterpoint to the already infectious music. Kelly is not alone, to be sure; the ensemble effects the same sense of energy in its syncopation with the music, even if their steps are less complex and their rhythmic meter easier to discern. Kelly is mesmerizing, though, as he scats around the formal dance-steps of the ballet and the formal rhythm of the music. This syncopation, though, is not “clean,” cannot be inscribed on a formal score or conducted in a simple gesture. Kelly’s anticipation and delay is a playful encounter with both the expected beat and the subversive manipulation of the already syncopated song. In this—if we use a sort of rhythmanalysis to discern the nuances—we Page 122 →understand the complexity of the performative affect to be a “whole” made up of different and often differently rhythmed elements. The aurality of the song itself is the main backbone of this rhythm, with which all other rhythms are in dialogue. However, in performance, the physicality of the performer, the choreography, the mise-en-scГЁne and the proxemics (the list is not exhaustive) all interweave. So if we slice into Kelly’s dance, for example, we sense the nuances: his headlining moves against the rhythm of the ensemble; cyclical patterns in his choreography alternate energy and repose; his lateral bounce augmenting the music is juxtaposed with rubato tap steps that pull and distort the order of the meter. Also in articulation we hear the different rhythms of the orchestra: the metered percussion, the steady bass, the scrabbling and at times swirling strings, the “thumb-line” of the middle brass. Listen closely, for in Lefebvre’s words, “instead of congealed things, you will follow each being, each body, as having above all, its time.”83

A similar effect can be sensed in another articulation of this song, by Judy Garland and Betty Jaynes in the film Babes in Arms (1939). Garland performs “Broadway Rhythm” as part of the “I Like Opera, I Like Swing” routine in which the virtues of opera and jazz are debated in a classical versus popular sing-off between her and the soprano Jaynes. Garland concludes the medley with a version of “Broadway Rhythm” layered against Jaynes’s aria. The effect is extraordinary, two starkly contrasting musical idioms, voices, and songs pitted savagely against one another to create an incongruous babel of sound. At this level the simplistic counterpoint really is analogous to the disjointed grid systems of Stuyvesant and Randel. Betty Jaynes competes bravely in her own idiom for a whole verse of the aria, but at the end of the sequence the opera singer slips into the popular song. Here, the syncopation of the song and of these two styles and singers is heard very plainly, as Jaynes’s vocal line “restores” an on-the-beat articulation of the lyric to Garland’s still syncopated line. The result is an echo of the lyrics: “Broad- (Broad-) way (way) rhy- (rhy-) thm (thm), it’s (it’s) got (got) me (me).” At this point, as Jane Feuer notes, the singers move physically together, swinging their arms in sync (while Mickey Rooney slaps his bass on-beat but with an extravagantly physical syncopation to Garland and Jaynes’s movement). However, a more nuanced rhythmanalysis, which Feuer approaches in her 1978 reading of the scene,84 allows us to see the complexity of the rhythmic performance of the song. Although the “constructed order”85 of the score dictates a tempo, energy, and groove, Feuer observes different rhythmic variations between the performers: during the routine, “Judy and Mickey dance while the opera singer remains stiff and stationary”; “Dynamism is added by the camera moving on its axis to accommodate Garland’s Page 123 →movement.”86 Here then are three distinct energies and rhythms; further nuances can be sensed in the background of the shot, where peripheral characters, positioned as audience, play their own individual rhythms. In proxemic terms, the pattern of Mickey and Judy’s swirling polka around the stationary Jaynes creates yet another rhythmic nuance. At one point, the texture becomes so chaotic that order threatens to break down completely, and our only way of reconciling the rhythmic noise is to read the visual chain of events: the manic Rooney rushes to grab the piano stool, almost knocking Jaynes over in the process; Garland assists him while he picks up a cello; the stool is positioned, and the choreography can resume with the singers now standing on the stool and Rooney alongside them. Here the various layers also become intersected by the flow of reality, as the performers slip out of character to share smirks, letting in the plane of their nonperformance lives. Accordingly, my use of the concept of syncopation—a rhythmic dislocation—takes in a far broader set of modalities than just the rhythm of the song; indeed, I think it is possible to argue that syncopation can be created in planes that aren’t even defined temporally. West Side Story, for example, would not sound nearly as syncopated rhythmically if it weren’t for the melodic stretches and snatches of intervals, first stealing pitch (in the whistle, figure 24), then overreaching it (the laconic swing motif, figure 24). These are melodic syncopations in which the melody metaphorically syncopates the expected intervals; the melody is like a harmonic map of the rhythm. Perhaps this is why the gapped scale discussed in Walk 1 sounds so American—it syncopates the do-remi, just as Garland’s swing (American) syncopates Jaynes’s opera (European).

The Performance of the City Can we, after Barthes, speak of these many layers and the syncopations as the “rustle” of performance?87 By extension, can we speak of the “rustle” of music, the “rustle” of the city? Certainly we can speak of the multiplicity of dimensions into which the performance of the city proliferates: not just physical growths upward or tunnels into the landmass, but also the perambulatory articulations of citizens that carve conceptual crenellations into the material of time-space, and the cancerous growth of telecommunications into the virtual domain of cyberspace. In this way the city is a dance itself, syncopating—at times wildly, though with flair, charisma, and technique—with the meter of its “constructed order,” which in this discussion is the “concept-city” of the grid. We have seen how that two-dimensional plan can be interpreted as corrallingPage 124 → the three dimensions of the city, whose dynamic energies flow in myriad ways—in constructed verticalities, in moving dynamics, in embodied actions; thanks to Aronson’s Follies set we can see the different frames of performance syncopating with one another, creating more textures and dimensions; and if we conceptualize each of these

planes as a palimpsest beneath which the historical inscription of previous traces, patterns, and dynamics can be glimpsed (notwithstanding Massey), we can see that the time-space dimension forms another plane; and so the rhizome goes on and on. How can we speak about the texture of this syncopation? For undoubtedly it is a perceptual texture that is created by the dialogue between one energy and the next (and the next and the next). Syncopation relies on meter as much as it breaks away from it, but what is found between the beat and the syncopation, between the planes of the palimpsest, between the frames of Follies? It is, in a sense, the friction between the elements that generates the energy of the encounter. Thereby a dialectic emerges in which dimensions (syntheses) spring into sight, creating a substance of something, a materiality in which the song is given body, both literally and metaphysically. This is the texture that gives multidimensionality to the formerly planar, that somehow creates the tensions and energies of the music, that (in the Follies analogy, in Babes in Arms) causes the performativity and the real of the (onstage / real life) act to emerge. But is this texture itself a positive or negative element in a further dialectic (or, in Hegelian terms, abstract or negative)? In the texture created do we find the rebuilt contours of the leveled topography (in other words, is Manhattan the reterritorialization of the mythical city?), or do we find a still widening gap (further deterritorialization)? Do we simply build another Babel on the rubble of the dismantled city?

Redrafting Follies lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in its initial Broadway production, and although it transferred to St. Louis and Los Angeles as planned, it closed on October 1, 1972, to gather dust for almost fifteen years. When it resurfaced in 198788 it was thanks to the British producer Cameron Mackintosh, who first requested that Sondheim and Goldman rewrite the show to combat some of its excess. The 1987 version of Follies is markedly different from the original. New songs were written, old songs cut, some of the largesse reduced. “I was reluctantly happy to comply,” writes Sondheim. “The axiom that вЂIf it isn’t broke, don’t fix it’ is a valuable truism in the Page 125 →theatre, but Follies is a show that’s a bit crippled by its size, ambition and mysteriousness and thus always worth the effort of experimentation.”89 In particular, its selfreflexive framing device, the way the show flips from the world of the present to the world of the past, is tampered with, and in the context of this discussion about the syncopation of different planes with one another, this is fascinating. Figure 24. Syncopating pitch by stealing it (mm. 41–43) and stretching it (mm. 11–13) in the “Prologue” of West Side Story. “Prologue” by Leonard Bernstein / Stephen Sondheim. В© Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. Boosey & Hawkes, agent for rental. International copyright secured. Reproduced by Permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Follies is a show that invokes several planes: the world of the reunion in 1971, the world of the original Weismann Follies in 1941, the “real” characters at the reunion and the “ghost” characters from the past. The world of 1971 is deliberately offset and distinguished from the world of 1941 in a variety of ways, not least in the different musical styles that “constantly comment on each other,” writes Frank Rich in his review of the 1985 concert version—“clever period pastiche numbers (in which the author re-creates the songwriting styles of vintage Broadway) and excessively brittle contemporary arias (in which the characters sing of their present-day bitterness).”90 “Each principal player was shadowed by an on-stage alter ego,” Rich continues, “a ghost representing the character’s younger self.” Thus “tiers” of perspective interweave inside the journey of the show, and this self-reflexive dialogue, as it happens, has continued beyond the life of the original production, as Banfield observes: “It seems tiers can continue to be added, mirrors can contribute further reflections,” he remarks, suggesting that Follies in Concert (1985) was “almost as nostalgic and triumphant a celebration of the era of 1971 as was the original production of 1940, or 1940 of 1908.”91 Here each subsequent production commented on and resonated with its previous incarnations. While we assume the traffic of this commentary to head in one direction (chronologically), our expectations are

unsettled by the fact that the musical has been rewritten to produce a different ordering of those perspectives.Page 126 → In both 1971 and 1987 versions, the curtain rises to introduce a figure standing motionless in the center of the stage. By 1987, it is Weismann, “flashlight in hand, surveying the remnants of his once famous theater.”92 But in 1971 it was “a gorgeous Amazonian showgirl ghost who posed while a thunderbolt crashed and the curtain rose”:93 Alone and motionless onstage we see a showgirl. She is tall and slim and beautiful. Her skin is unnaturally pale, her dress is black and white and clinging, simple yet extravagant.94 This is such a subtle difference, and in both versions the premise is the same: the theater is derelict, it echoes with the “eerie sound of footstepsВ .В .В . the ghostly sound of audience applauseВ .В .В . the muffled sound of an argument.”95 But in 1987 we meet Weismann before hearing the sounds and before seeing the showgirl ghost. In the original, we met the showgirl ghost first—a different perspective. (“The observer at the window knows that he takes as first reference his time.”)96 Redrafting has been a feature of several Sondheim shows and has clearly been embraced as a part of his practice: Merrily We Roll Along’s troubled original version (1981) was rewritten for a 1985 production at the La Jolla Playhouse, then revised again for a UK production at the Leicester Haymarket in 1992; a similar repositioning of perspectives has occurred, moving the show away from the flashback perspective of Franklin Shepard to show the events of his life in “real time” (albeit backward). The later show Wise Guys (1999) was not only revised but also retitled, becoming Gold! in 2001, Bounce in 2003, and then Road Show in 2008, “the repeated title changes reflect[ing] the creatives’ struggle to hone the show’s story and themes. Ideally the title is connected to what we hope the show is about,” reports Gordon Cox in an interview with librettist John Weidman.97 As Bruce Kirle argues in his book Unfinished Show Business, “New interpretations inevitably struggle with a phantom memory.”98 He calls Follies “the Rebecca of musicals,” comparing this show to the character of Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel whose personality dominates the De Winter family even after death.99 And although the idea of such a haunting is particularly resonant to this show given the subject nature and mythology that has built up around it, it is not just Follies whose subsequent iterations syncopate with the meter of past productions. Indeed, John Freeman considers this a fundamental element of the process of practice. He compares it to pentimento, an Italian term in which “an underlying image in a painting shows through as the top layer of paint”; for him, “A performance text is Page 127 →nothing but footprints on the ground left by performers who have subsequently disappeared.”100 This chimes with the ideas of recent scholars in performance practice and research who acknowledge a “disposition towards poststructuralist approaches, ”101 and for whom the event of performance is, like the Deleuzian machine, capturing a moment in the flow, not a fixed definitive. Like Freeman, many others write of “cycles” of practice,102 and posit the rhizomatic idea of an “iterative cyclic web,”103 which “combines the cycle (alternations between practice and research), the web (numerous points of entry, exit, cross-referencing and cross-transit within the practice-research cycle), and iteration (many sub-cycles in which creative practice or research processes are repeated with variation).”104 In the case of Follies, the show’s redrafting is explicit, as we have seen: an ongoing practice as research project. Indeed, even for the original version, Sondheim admits, there were eleven redrafts of the script; popular lore, suggests Scott Ross in The Sondheim Review, suggests there were twenty-five.105 “The вЂPrologue’ was to change three times before the New York opening,” recollects Ted Chapin,106 though Michael Bennett recalled restaging the opening six times.107 What is the truth? And what is the real Follies? “Follies ushered in a new paradigm in the American musical theatre,” writes Ann Marie McEntee: “the stripping away of the illusions and fantasies about love that for most of the current century the American musical theatre has sustained”;108 “attack[ing]”—in Kirle’s words—“the postwar mythologization of America that was so endemic to the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon.”109 Like each newly constructed layer of the city, “the вЂBroadway legend,’ as London subtitled it in 1987,”110 wrote the past anew,

in what McEntee calls “the Razing of American Musical Theater.”111 As Ross remarks, the show itself is “about the lure—and the lie—of nostalgia”; perhaps “lie” is putting too fine a point on it, but whether this is the case or not, Follies is a palimpsest of itself, not only in story line but also in its revisions. And like New York, the friction, the dynamic, the dialectic that is created by the syncopation between its different incarnations is what creates the texture that I have defined as Broadway rhythm. Let’s step back outside into the sunlight—maybe we can get a breath of fresh air. Page 128 → Figure 25. The fourth stimulus: the Manhattan Skyline (1936). The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. (1936). Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane, Manhattan. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org /items/510d47d9–4ee5-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

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Walk Four: Stairway to Paradise From the A train to the Empire State, calling off in Central Park and the High Line; a route riding in subway carriages and elevator cars and finally taking the fire escape up to a space of retreat. If the city is in one sense a flat plan on the map, it is in another sense an emphatic articulation of sweeping verticality, exploiting space both above and below it for accommodation, commerce, communication, and transport. Towers reach high into the stratosphere, while cables and tunnels burrow into the ground. Everything about Manhattan tends up, not just the constructed edifices of midtown. In spaces left between buildings rise cars, stacked for the day in their vertical dormitories, a clever solution to the perennial parking problem of any big metropolis squeezed onto a tiny landmass. In its own way, verticality was an escape: upward to double the real estate of the city with every story, downward to shoot around the underbelly of the city like postal capsules through a tube. In New York the spaces above and below have become enablers, freeing the urbanites and promising regrowth. And the imaging of these technologized spaces has become just as much a part of the cultural representation of New York as anything else. Leaving the street to scale the city’s height, this walking tour will consider how Manhattan’s riposte to the limitations of island dwelling has been to colonize layers of space above and below its obvious terrain. This surge upward and plunge below—the mirrored conquests of sky and soil—have become fundamental statements of the city’s identity, performative acts that on the one hand assert a sort of mastery and on the other admit defeat. In confounding the limitations of the island, the city shows strength, even if in the enforced articulation of resistance to its confines, the city bows to the island’s natural power. I will explore a number of ideas that seem encapsulated by the virtual topography the constructed city has created, and the role that its iconic skyscrapers and their enabling technologiesPage 130 → (subways, elevators, fire escapes) have had in New York’s industrial efficiency. I will read into various negotiations of the city with space a sort of selfconscious and superconfident whimsy, an articulation of that strength that is also characterized in its music and dance. Throughout my discussion I will focus on the way that much of this ongoing performative conversation—the play of power between human and environment—has been enabled and provoked by the city’s technologies.1 Before scaling the heights of this new route into Manhattan, let’s consider how our experience of the city is mediated through such technologies. By this I don’t just mean that it is increasingly mediatized through televisual and digital images; rather, I mean that our day-to-day experience of passing through the city is fundamentally affected by the technologies of engineering, infrastructure, and mechanics, even if these encounters become so mundane that we tend to overlook them. I am thinking of the subways and elevators we ride in our dayto-day interaction with the city, of the way that these have shaped the course of our paths and continue to shape our lives. Such is the effect on our urban lives of this technology that our phenomenological existence with it (our dwelling through it) comes to shape the way we behave, the way we self-identify and the way we think. Bonnie Nardi and Vickie O’Day’s writing is useful on this matter. They observe a number of different ways in which we perceive technology, noting that “the very language we use to describe our relationship to technology tends to colour our perception of it.”2 They offer four specific metaphors we use to think of our relationship with technology: some view it as a tool, some as a text, some as a system, and some as an ecology. And they suggest that each of these metaphorical readings of technology encourages us to think in different ways: “People who see technology as a tool see themselves controlling it. People who see technology as a system see themselves caught up inside it,”3 they suggest. Rather than a tool or a system, Nardi and O’Day prefer to imagine our interaction with technology as an ecology, a metaphor that enables the sort of adaptive and performative affordances between us and our environment that I have been exploring. Following this mind-set, then, my performance cartography through the technologies of the city in this chapter will explore its real and conceptual spaces as part of that ecology. As we walk (or in this chapter, perhaps more appropriately, climb,

swoosh, or glide), we will explore the way in which the city’s negotiation with space becomes self-reflexive, a hyperaware and witty commentary on that very negotiation; and through the music, song, and dance we will see that same negotiation and self-reflexivity played out in some of the most interesting dimensions of space that the city finds. Page 131 →

The Skyline Nowhere is the scale of Manhattan more conspicuously articulated than in its familiar image of the skyline (figure 25). Unlike the bird’s-eye view, which tends to pictorialize Manhattan from either the south or the southwest, images of the skyline exist from any number of perspectives: the view north from Staten Island is common, but so too is the southerly view from Central Park, the easterly perspective from Brooklyn, or the panoramic view put together in composite images or slow shots on film. Very often, the “transformation of the horizontal city of 1870 into the skyward-thrusting community of later years”4 is seen as a transition that took New York away from earlier Europeanizing instincts and toward modernist, American newness. By the turn of the century, according to British journalist William Archer, “Americans had practically вЂadded a new dimension’ to space. вЂThey move almost as much on the perpendicular as on the horizontal plane.В .В .В . When they find themselves a little crowded, they simply tilt a street on end and call it a skyscraper.’”5 There were two main technologies responsible for allowing Manhattan to rise in multiple towers into the sky. First, gaining access to the upper floors would have been problematic had it not been for the evolution of the modern elevator, from around 1852, when Elisha Graves Otis patented his new invention, the safety brake. This device deployed in the event of an elevator cable snapping, and held the elevator car securely in the lift shaft by means of a ratchet system. When Otis demonstrated his invention dramatically to the crowds at the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York in 1854, it had an overwhelming effect. Safety elevators presented far less likelihood of plunging to earth, and could now be considered far less risky. But it wasn’t until simple masonry structures were replaced with first cast iron and wrought iron, and then steel structures in the 1880s, that the modern skyscraper could be developed.6 The move away from masonry to steel frame skeletons enabled construction to extend beyond about five stories. The walls were no longer load-bearing, and the building would therefore not collapse under its own weight. As Still reports, The Tower Building, at 50 Broadway, erected during 1888 and 1889, was the earliest example of the use in New York City of this revolutionary architectural technique, when the first seven of its thirteen stories were supported by a steel frame.7 Thanks to the elevator and the steel frame building, New York was able to rise meteorically from the 1890s through to the 1930s—during the very periodPage 132 → in which it was also forging an identity in the performance of song. “By the close of the century, New York could boast of half a dozen structures whose over-all height exceeded 300 feet and of many others almost their equal in altitude.”8 As many writers have recognized, technologies such as the elevator “made habitable quite a portion of the upper air,”9 not only enlarging the living space of the city, but also presenting New Yorkers with a completely different outlook on life: Those who have already had the opportunity of seeing the whole of New York and the surrounding country for a radius of 35 or 40 miles spread at their feet, should bear in mind the fact that to the elevator more than to any other one device are due the structures which give them this lofty outlook.10 The tone of these reports and the typical vocabulary used to discuss the high-rise buildings is redolent of competition, evocative of a fast-paced rush for the city to climb higher. This is the breathless surge of modernism:

the race to the end of the century, to conquer nature, to go faster, further, bigger in a performance of excess. Typically, we interpret the skyscrapers as jostling for status in a kind of “competitive verticality,”11 and the inexorable “rise of the city” as a societal organism—to borrow a phrase from Schlesinger—has been paralleled by the literal rise of its structures, each subsequent tower outdoing the last, and climaxing with the rise—and subsequent fall—of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. “The social imagination had definitively exchanged the symbols of the agricultural economy,” suggests Eric Darton, “for a new visual language of wealth and abundance.”12 If this reads a textuality into the city, it is one that has been commonly invoked. The skyline particularly is seen as a graphic abstraction: “Its hypermediated silhouette contains what has become the most graphic emblematic expression of the vertical city,”13 writes Lindner; meanwhile, Tallack reports that “in the 1890s and 1900s, the dynamic of the skyline was frequently represented through block diagrams, in which we perceive [an] interchange between representational and abstract thinking.”14 It is specifically this sort of block diagram representation of the skyline that I would like to consider first, both in graphic depictions and in what I see as melodic reflections of these iconic patterns. Of course, the abstractions to which Tallack is referring are mainly pictorial, and we can find examples of these patterns on plenty of images associated with Broadway and Tin Pan Alley:15 the cover of “When New York Sleeps” by W. T. Bryant, for example, from as early as 1900, shows the skylinePage 133 → against a starlit sky (figure 26). The Brooklyn Bridge is distinguishable, though other buildings are less easy to identify. The image has been abstracted, particularly in the way that the skyline has a strong white border around it that recognizes it as a homogenous entity rather than acknowledging the buildings from which it is constituted. This chimes with Tallack’s observation that “the energy given off by [depictions of the] skyline is more than the sum of the individual buildings.”16 Similar crenelated silhouettes are seen on film posters for Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), and On the Town (1949); and the whole opening sequence of the film of West Side Story (1961) abstracts the image of the city against a musical soundscape, first with disjointed images shot from directly above, and later with more of a bird’s-eye view that itself turns into abstracted lines against a colored background for the rest of the overture. In fact, these abstractions of the skyline are quite often so abstracted that they may or may not be positioned against the sky. The cover to Earle Hagen’s “Harlem Nocturne” counterpoints a dark silhouette against a light one, and sets that off against a background that we read as the night sky because it contains a moon with a cloud scudding across it; on the other hand, the cover of “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet” (Don Raye and Gene de Paul) from Broadway Rhythm (1944) shows a similar silhouette against a picture of Nancy Walker and Tommy Dorsey; neither the sky nor the buildings are defined, and so it is really only the pattern of crenellations, and to a degree, the silhouette itself, that allows us to “read” in this image the signifier “New York skyline.” The abstraction of the skyline is even more pronounced in the cover to “Underneath the Harlem Moon” by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel (1932). Although the features of the image conspire to depict an outdoor street scene—the title, the figure dancing in the street, the oversized stars against a black background, the rectangular patches of light suggesting windows in the orange block of “buildings”—the pattern of the crenellations is simply abstract and angular, no more than a simplistic representation of the steps of the built-up urban skyline. Finally, in the cover to Joe Young and J. Fred Coots’s “The Sidewalk Waltz” (1933) (figure 27) the silhouette (dark blue) is defined against the background (light blue) with the aid of a halo suggesting sunset, though there is no attempt to make the crenellations resemble the pattern of particular buildings or even imagined buildings. Figures and street furniture in the foreground suggest a street scene, which undoubtedly adds to our reading of the pattern as a skyline; in addition, they humanize the abstraction to make the picture more intimate, an effect also achieved by having the skyline fall away gradually to street level. Page 134 → Figure 26. abstracting the New York skyline: “When New York Sleeps” by W. T. Bryant (1900.) Public domain. Page 135 →The steps noticeable in both of these images are worth considering in more detail, because they are a

key feature of the Manhattan skyline, and not simply representative of the different heights of adjacent buildings. In fact, they also suggest one distinctive peculiarity of Manhattan skyscrapers—the wide base and lower floors that are gradually stepped up into a narrow high-rise tower—a feature that was brought about by the zoning law of 1916. The zoning law imposed certain restrictions on the size of building that could be constructed on any given plot; a formula was proposed with which a maximum mass for the lower floors of the building could be determined relative to the dimensions of the plot size and the width of surrounding streets. Above a certain height—dictated by the formula—buildings had to be stepped back in stages, until a tower occupying just 25 percent of the original plot area could be built to an unlimited height. The law was ostensibly a health and safety initiative, and a response to the sudden surge in constructing high-rise buildings, as Ferriss explains: Public safety was a primary concern; by limiting the bulk of a building, the number of occupants was limited; fewer people required access and egress; traffic on adjoining streets was lightened. The limitation in mass had also of course the effect of permitting more light and air into the streets as well as into the buildings themselves. The law as a whole was directed to securing an increase in public safety, convenience, efficiency and health.17 Since the impulse to build these edifices ever higher was one driven by economic factors—the attempt to gain as much rental revenue as possible from a given plot of land—the zoning law effectively prescribed a definitive shape for all subsequent high rise constructions, one which maximized rental potential within the bounds of the law. As Koolhaas suggests, the law “encourages the tendency of single structures to conquer the vastest possible area, i.e., a whole block, in order to make the 25 percent that can be Tower as large (profitable) as possible.”18 The law also had an effect, however, on the way that buildings inevitably looked: a new aesthetic determined by the logic of a formula. This was evident even in 1929, when Ferriss published The Metropolis of Tomorrow. The zoning law, he says, was “not at all inspired by concern for its possible effects on Architectural design”; nevertheless “the actual effect of the law was to introduce what is often spoken of as no less than a new era in American Architecture.”19 The new aesthetic of the Manhattan skyscraper is “a form which results from Page 137 →legal specificationsВ .В .В . a shape which the Law puts into the architect’s hands.”20 Ferriss’s pictorial is fascinating, because he experiments on paper with the architectural shapes that are imposed by the law, suggesting four progressions from the maximum mass permissible to the optimum practical build. The first two of these pictures present futuristic, rocket-shaped towers that gradually slope toward their point. These are GaudГ--esque and not at all reflective of Manhattan’s architecture: Koolhaas describes them evocatively as “gigantic enlargement[s] of the original Dutch gable houseВ .В .В . a fantastic enlargement of the original New Amsterdam.”21 Of this shape only vestiges can be glimpsed—in the distinctive vertex of the Chrysler Tower, for instance. Pictures 3 and 4, however, are virtual prototypes for most of the skyscrapers constructed during the prewar period: the Barclay-Vesey Building (1923), the Chanin Building (1927–29), the Empire State Building (1930–31), the Rockefeller Tower (1931–33), One Wall Street (1931), or 120 Wall Street (1931). These are the unmistakable icons of New York architecture, and it is their stepped features that consolidate the distinctive pattern of the Manhattan skyline. Page 136 → Figure 27. Increasing abstraction: “The Sidewalk Waltz” by Joe Young and J. Fred Coots (1933). In much the same way that we have seen the dynamic of Broadway’s dog-leg to be imaged in both the bird’s-eye view and the melodies of Broadway song, I would like to suggest that the dynamic of Manhattan’s skyline is imaged not only in the abstractions of songsheet covers, but also in further features of the melody. Take “Broadway Rhythm.” We have already discussed the first phrase of the chorus, “Broadway rhythm, it’s got me, everybody dance,” and noticed how its melodic pattern “maps” directly onto the path of Broadway as it appears in the bird’s-eye view. After repeating this material, the melody then begins a cascading motif over seven bars, in which a rhythmically dotted figure in thirds descends incrementally

down the whole scale in nine repetitions (figure 28). The lyrics accompanying this feature are again invoking the idea of music, this time not the concrete sounds of the city but the rather romantic if unlikely idea of orchestral music coming from pavement cafГ©s along Broadway. As this melody is notated in traditional manuscript form, it is perhaps difficult to see the pattern replicating the crenellations of the skyline. However, if the melody is itself abstracted into a block diagram (figure 29),22 we can see how closely the pattern of this motif matches the abstraction of the skyline as depicted on the cover of “The Sidewalk Waltz” (figure 27): clearly defined towers descend in steps toward “street level.” It is at once the skyline of accumulated tower blocks and the steps of the individual edifice. Patterns similar to this occur relentlessly in Broadway songs, and particularlyPage 138 → those featuring the city or those that operate (in Garber’s words) as “a synecdoche” of the city.23 Again, their block diagrams reveal uncanny similarities with abstractions of the skyline—not just those of iconic photographs like figure 25 but also of images on the songsheet covers in figures 26 and 27. So when Bernstein’s sailors from On the Town sing, “Gotta see the whole town / Right from Yonkers on down to the bay,”24 it is to a similar pattern (figure 30)—and one that particularly seems to feature the distinctive steps enacted by the zoning law; Berlin’s “Manhattan Madness” from Face the Music (1932), which creates an almost identical crenellation, even situates the singer up among the towers of the skyline: “I’m like a fly upon a steeple watching seven million people do a rhythm that draws me with ’em” (figure 31). This song’s links with the pattern of the skyline are even more consolidated when a later cascading melodic pattern explicitly depicts in its lyrics the construction and demolition of the skyline: “Buildings go up with wrecking crews waiting to tear them down again” (figure 32). Figure 28. Cascading melodic motif in “Broadway Rhythm.” BROADWAY RHYTHM. Lyrics by ARTHUR FREED Music by NACIO HERB BROWN В© 1935 (Renewed) METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER, INC. All Rights Controlled by EMI ROBBINS CATALOG, INC and ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC. I’d like to consider these various melodic patterns in terms of those I discussed earlier, and particularly in regard to the gapped scale. All of these motifs, it seems to me, make use of the same musical vocabulary as the gapped scale, even if the scale itself rises or descends in waves. And although my particular perspective on the relations between melody, geography, architecture, and identity is not making definitive claims, it is worth taking a look at some of the connections in a little more detail. For example, we have seen how the zoning law of 1916 had an impact on the architecture of the early 1930s; and it is during precisely that period that most of these song examples were written. Prior to 1916, the architecture of Manhattan was not constructed to the stepped aesthetic—and it is intriguing to note that earlier songs on the theme of New York make far less use of the gapped scale. George M. Cohan’s hit “Give My Regards to Broadway” (1904), for example, employs a much more conventional diatonic scale. “All Aboard for Broadway” and “You Can Have Broadway, ” both from George Washington Jr. (1906), use scalar motifs and arpeggio patterns that cling to the triads Page 139 →of the major scale. Even “Hello Broadway,” from the 1915 revue of the same name, incorporates these same features (rather than the gapped scale features), beginning its chorus with a descending first inversion of the Eв™-major triad. Cohan seems rooted in a different musical aesthetic. Yet just fifteen years later, the Tin Pan Alley songsters—Berlin, Gershwin—are writing simple tunes that “look” just like the buildings around them. What do we make, for instance, of the fact that the two most famous “New York, New York” songs (Bernstein 1944, Kander and Ebb 1979) seem to answer one another melodically? The first bounds expectantly up in couplets of fourths, exploring, discovering, wide-eyed and eager; the second—its response—is more authoritative, closing the pattern, a definitive statement of terms (figure 34). Can we make claims like this? Are the patterns in the Broadway songs really so expressive of the same drives that carved the city and its patterns? To answer this, we might turn to the observation of Douglas Tallack, who writes about the human qualities of the abstract skyline of New York:

Abstraction, in these skyline pictures, is not an autonomous pattern on a canvas or even a tendency towards autonomy. It is the sign of a search for a point of view and for urban knowledge in new circumstances and, as such, isВ .В .В . a part of the human dimension.25 Such a human dimension may seem something of a paradox in relation to the “artificial mountain ranges”26 of Manhattan’s profile, but Tallack’s comment reminds us that such patterns in the skyline do not spring unguided into the world. Nor are they made by chance. Skyscrapers function very often as dehumanizing or commoditizing spaces of capitalism, whose scale is so far beyond anything that can be grasped, except for by the eye from a distance, and whose aesthetic maintains a sleekly impersonal countenance. Yet their human dimension is regularly invoked by writers through the characters of their architects or financiers. Neil Bascomb, for example, turns the 1930s rivalry between the architects and former partners William Van Alen (the Chrysler Building) and Craig Severance (the Bank of Manhattan Tower, now the Trump Building) into a thrilling “chase into the sky,” with all the intrigue and personal drama of a novelization.27 Rem Koolhaas structures his retroactive manifesto for Manhattan around accounts of prominent Manhattanists’ personal quests, triumphs, and failures. In this account, the city is an expression of its people, their vision, and enormous cooperative collaborations.28 Hugh Ferriss begins his modernist pictorial The Metropolis of Tomorrow with an impressionistic “familiar morningPage 142 → scene,” the misty view from his studio window, establishing himself as the musing artist who works not at brush-distance, but in the tactile medium of charcoal.29 The final plate in his collection displays a poster that reads, “The City (its sciences, its arts, its business) could be made in the image of Man (his thoughts, his feelings, his senses) who is made in the image ofВ .В .В .”;30 the bottom corner is ripped away, leaving both a humanizing description of Man and a provocative Nietzschean claim to power. Humanity—or at least, the human—is everywhere in these narratives of modernity. Koolhaas even cites the human instinct of the Regional Plan Association of New York: “Our role is not to retreat back to the catacombs, but to become more human in skyscrapers.”31 Tallack’s assertion of the humanPage 143 → dimension involved in abstracting the skyline may seem paradoxical, but it at least offers us a way to imagine how music—perhaps the quintessential abstraction of human expression—may find a relationship with this image of New York. Page 140 → Figure 29. “Out on the gay white way in each merry cafГ© orchestras play taking our breath away.” Block diagram of the melody to “Broadway Rhythm.” Figure 30. “Gotta see the whole town / Right from Yonkers on down to the bay.” Block diagram of the melody to “New York, New York.” Page 141 → Figure 31. “I’m like a fly upon a steeple watching seven million people.” Block diagram of the melody to “Manhattan Madness.” Figure 32. “Buildings go up with wrecking crews waiting to tear them down again.” Block diagram of the melody to “Manhattan Madness.” Figure 33. “I got rhythm, I got music”: the melodic architecture of the city. Note how the shape recalls that of buildings such as 120 Wall Street, the white building seen on the right-hand side of figure 25. Figure 34. (a) “New York, New York” by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green (1944); (b) “New York, New York” by Joe Kander and Fred Ebb (1979). “New York, New York” by Adolph Green / Leonard Bernstein / Betty Comden. В© Copyright 1977 by The Estate of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. THEME FROM “NEW YORK, NEW YORK” Music by JOHN KANDER Words by FRED EBB. В© 1977 (Renewed) UNITED ARTISTS CORPORATION. All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI UNART CATALOG INC. (Publishing) and ALFRED MUSIC (Print). All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC.

Sky Boys One of the most interesting human dimensions of this mythology is the story of the people who constructed it, the sky boys. These were the construction workers of New York and its environs who daily scaled the growing towers, “strolling on the thin edge of nothingness”32 to bring them into being, “the men who, outlined against the sky on dizzy heights, fuse the iron of their nerves with the steel of the girders they build into modern cities”; “who вЂride the ball’ to the ninetieth floor or higher and defy death to the staccato chattering of riveting-hammers.”33

The pursuits of these workers have been mythologized in a number of ways. Some of the most iconic images of New York are from a series taken by photographer Lewis Wickes Hine to celebrate the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930. Together with the shots of fellow documentary photographers Margaret Bourke White (the Chrysler Building, 1931) and Charles Ebbets (the Rockefeller Center, 1932), these images became “immediately mythic,”34 testimonials to the surge of modernist progress and to the labor that went into the construction as something heroic. In perhaps the most famous example, Ebbets’s Lunch atop a Skyscraper (New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam) (1932), the most mundane activity takes place in the unlikeliest of situations. In the foreground, eleven construction workers sit, casually enjoying their lunch break. They chat and smoke, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are sitting hundreds of feet above the gridiron of Manhattan. Below and behind them the city stretches away to the north, with Central Park and the Upper West Side clearly visible. It’s an awe-inspiring—and nowadays, very pastiched—image. On the one hand, the rigid girder of construction so high above the city signifies everything that is superior, excessive, and extraordinary about New York: an emblem of man’s triumph over nature. On the other hand, the everyday routine of the lunch break emphasizes the ordinariness of these average Joes and the toil of their labor. Countless other photographs in this infectious series attest to that labor: here, a worker clings to the great hook and ball of a crane as it swings into position; there, a team throws red hot rivets to securePage 144 → the girders in place. They are part of the majestic city, constructing its very majesty; and in these photos their work seems magnified as the city itself provides merely the backdrop, making heroic the exploits of these sky boys, and casting the city as a miniature below. Elsewhere, the pursuits of the workers are documented musically. The first sound film made by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, for example, The Hot Heiress (1931), tells the story of sky boy Hap Harrigan, who inadvertently throws a red-hot rivet through the open window of a penthouse only to fall in love with wealthy Juliette Hunter, who lives within. The film opens with a montage of construction work, showing figures clambering over the steel skeleton of a skyscraper way above the traffic on the streets below. Rodgers and Hart used this premise as an opportunity to explore the possibilities of music on film, picking up on the noises of construction and using them as raw material for their score. The first song in particular, “Nobody Loves a Riveter,” views the process of construction as musical, and creates a sort of Sprechstimme in mimicking the rhythms of labor. As Hap and his buddy Bill throw and catch the rivets, their exchange emphasizes the musicality of their work: Bill: Get me? Hap: Gotcha! Bill: Get me? Hap: Gotcha!35 Behind the vocals, the energy of the music is evocative of this whole period of “delirious” construction in its frenetic pace and jarring excess. In The Hot Heiress, Rodgers and Hart turn the rapid growth of Manhattan’s skyline into a musical aesthetic, and not for the first time. Two years previously they had written another song, “Sky City,” which displayed a similar musical intensity in glorifying New York’s meteoric rise: We build it, Rebuild it; Steel cannot bend! More glories, More stories,

Where will it end?36 These examples are period documents, archiving what was the contemporary construction of Manhattan and revealing real-time attitudes Page 145 →to the sky boys. Many years later the figure of the New York construction worker has become itself an iconic emblem of everything the city stands for, mythologized in Disney’s Fantasia 2000 to the music of George Gershwin.

Fantasia 2000 (2000) Fantasia 2000 was a sequel to the popular 1940s animated film from the Disney studios. Like the original movie, this film creates animated sequences to celebrated works from the classical repertoire, some of the sequences rather more abstract than others. Rhapsody in Blue occupies the third segment of the movie, and constructs a narrative based around the lives and aspirations of four New Yorkers in 1930s Manhattan: construction worker Duke harbors dreams of being a jazz drummer; penniless businessman Joe, hit by the crash, yearns for a job; little Rachel, minded by her Nasty Nanny while her parents are at work, simply wants to spend some time with them; and Flying John, an upper-class husband henpecked by his wife Killjoy Margaret, dreams of headlining in a glittering revue. In the end, all the characters find their dreams coming true, and to the final majestic refrain of Gershwin’s music the animation shows them all delighting in their success and finally reveals an iconic image of the bright lights of Times Square. Times Square is not the only recognizable icon in this sequence; Gershwin himself features at one point, several of the other characters are reportedly based on real people, and even the style of the animation is modeled on the familiar caricatures of period cartoonist Al Hirschfeld. But it is the city that is most iconically presented, from the very first glissando of the clarinet solo, to which an abstract pencil line swoops up the screen to sketch the outline of a skyscraper. Over a first ritornello and stride motif, a line drawing of Manhattan appears, crushing the looming towers of buildings into a compact abstraction that suggests the view of midtown from the Battery. The sun rises, and we zoom into one of these buildings to find Duke cradling his drumsticks as he sleeps. It is Duke’s story line that most evidently captures the patterns of the city in construction. By the second cadenza of the music, he has rushed to work at the building site in which he toils, and as the music rises in one iteration of a repeated turn feature, we see him take the elevator up through the skeleton of the skyscraper he is helping to construct. Here, the rising motifs of the music are very clearly being associated with the upward trajectory of Duke in the elevator, and Page 146 →with the iconic upness of Manhattan in general. The following downward trajectory of the music is animated to a similarly literal spatial movement: Duke works his jackhammer along a ledge of the building, and it shakes him down, story by story, to the ground, tracing the stepped articulation of the New York high-rise until he reaches ground level, where the whole cycle begins again. The connection between Duke’s story line and the music is not simply one of spatial metaphor; it is interesting also that his aspirations are related to music (indeed, two of the four protagonists of the Fantasia 2000 sequence dream of being performers). With this characterization, the thematic elements of the music are able to contribute another layer to the musicodramatic coloring. David Schiff’s analysis of Rhapsody in Blue identifies five main themes that recur throughout the piece:37 the main ritornello, familiar from the opening bars; a “train” theme; a “stride” motif; a “shuffle”; and the “love” theme from the slow section. There is also a recurring tag with which Gershwin regularly concludes sections or phrases. As Schiff suggests, the themes themselves are all interrelated, particularly in the rhythmic ragtime pattern that binds them all together. He also notes a shared melodic feature that is characteristic of Gershwin’s wider oeuvre, which he labels “the three-note вЂMan I Love’ cell.”38 In fact, he suggests, this motif was “a blues clichГ© by 1923,”39 used insistently by Gershwin and other composers during this period. Beyond these characteristic features of the score we can also pick out a prolific use of the Americanizing gapped scale discussed in Walk 1, and another recurring pattern that is germane to this discussion: a turn feature, in which the melody first asserts a base note, then drops down and returns before rising up (or vice versa). The most obvious articulation of this feature in the score is in the melody of the “stride” sequence, whose repeated notes emphasize this turn. Together, the reiteration of these motifs

builds a distinctive tonal shape to the piece, whose rhythmic and melodic habits provide irresistible accompaniment to the patterning of New York and—my focus in this chapter—the abstractions of technology that allowed it to embrace upness. In Fantasia 2000, the slow section of the Rhapsody introduces a dream sequence on Central Park’s skating rink, in which all the characters play out their fantasies; the snare drum rolls and cymbal crashes in the music are illustrated as if Duke actually plays them; later, back in “real” life, he becomes inspired by the fabric of the building he is constructing, and begins to use his sticks on the girders themselves. Musically, this begins the Page 147 →denouement of the piece, as Gershwin uses a rapid repeat-key motif on the piano to energize his final section. This motif—a variation of the turn discussed above—moves through increasing extensions in duration and pitch, and represents for the animation the more and more inspired paradiddles of Duke’s drumming as he masters the instrument of the building. Eventually, he casts aside his jackhammer and races out of work to appear (along with Flying John) at the Harlem Jazz Talent Nite. In Fantasia 2000 at least, then, the patterns of the city, the spatial experiences of its inhabitants, and the quintessential technologies of modernism are all associated with the music (and the lure of success). As Kingwell reminds us, the buildings Duke is involved in constructing—unlike other constructions such as the Eiffel Tower—are far more than just tall edifices, particularly when they come themselves to be as iconic as the Empire State Building. What we celebrate and iconicize in most of our encounters with the building is simply its outer shell, the wrapping that makes possible the many internal goings-on of this vertical city in the clouds. True, this is no simple functional structure, guided into the particular aesthetic of its period by the zoning laws and then seen to inherit the majesty, dignity, and even beauty of the modernist American vision; as early as 1908 the New York Times was celebrating the grace of the Manhattan skyscrapers, which showed a “growing tendency to accentuate the vertical lines of a building, obliterating as far as possible the horizontal lines, thereby giving a sense of great stability with great simplicity, which usually results in an impression of considerable dignity.”40 The newspaper’s call, of course, was for American architecture to wrest itself away from the styles of Europe, to find its own form of unique, American expressionism. Like the music of the early twentieth century, the architecture that would epitomize New York became that expression, celebrated and glorified for its American nature. Kingwell’s description of the Empire State Building sees in its patterns this link: Like the unsurpassed popular music of the American Songbook with which it is coeval, the Empire State is a pleasing mix of flowing harmonies, jittery syncopation, and the smart wittiness of lyrics by Lorenz Hart or Cole Porter.41 But there is also a further dimension to the building, one that easily becomes forgotten, though it is its whole raison d’être: “the greedy logic of the grid: more rental space, and the faster, the better.”42 This is an officePage 148 → building, and its primary purpose is to provide office space, “sky-borne square footage.”43 As such, it is not only born out of the rhythms, energy, and patterns of New York’s frantic economy but it (like the music) actually duplicates them. As Koolhaas writes, “Manhattan’s architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion” (his emphasis), “the creation of congestion on all levels, ” “a perpetual rush hour in three dimensions.”44 The demands of the working city that each day send millions of commuters into, out of, and around Manhattan are thus reflected in these high-rise architectural enactments of containment and segregation, just as they are in the compartmentalizing logic of the gridiron plan. As these commuters are first propelled into the city in packed subway cars, “another hundred people” at a time; then catapulted skyward in elevators to reach the top stories of towering office blocks high above the street, the personal experience is fractured into the dislocated cabins of carriages, elevators, and offices. Here the workers will spend their day in purpose-built boxes without having set foot on the soil of Manhattan. In another short sequence from Fantasia 2000, we see the morning commute animated to the “train motif” from Rhapsody in Blue. First a packed subway train arrives at Grand Central Station. The commuters get out en masse. Next they take an escalator. Then they pile into an elevator, seen in its upward trajectory by showing the floor indicator whose arrow swings left to right. Finally they are decanted into a second elevator, this one seen from the outside of the building, where a square of light rises up the grid of the tower block’s windows before

the workers disperse into individual offices. Thus the commute is seen as a journey in stages using one form of technology after another; and in this sequence, iconicizing not only that experience but also the mechanisms of travel around the city, the confidence of America in its technology is evidenced. Just as the railroad was intrinsic to the imperial development of the United States in colonizing the landmass, the technologies of the subway and the elevator have been fundamental to the colonization of the space above and below the city, as Darton implies.45 In appropriating the ineffable, expanding finite real estate and thereby triumphing over nature, America has not only rhetoricized but also embodied a powerful self-identity of success and power over capital. Iconic images of technology at work in people’s lives serve to consolidate that self-image. The various experiences depicted in this short sequence have themselves become familiar tropes in the representation of city life, not least on the musical stage. One early incarnation of Rodgers and Hart’s Page 149 →“Blue Moon,” written for but never used in the Hollywood film Manhattan Melodrama (1934), offers typical imagery of the subway experience framed as a performance: Act One: You gulp your coffee and run; Into the subway you crowd. Don’t breathe—it isn’t allowed.46 As we shall see, the concept of being able to breathe in this ultra-modernist city is one that also recurs in the imagery of the city. Yet there is a paradoxical other face to the entrapment that is insinuated in images of the modernist rush to progress and its meteoric climb skyward; a face of calm, quiet, and release. Kingwell alludes to this in an anecdote in his book Concrete Reveries: “Just the other day walking down Fifth Avenue, I noticed people looking up at the sky behind me, in defiance of the unwritten rule,” he writes; “they were unabashedly gazing up at the Empire State Building.” I was walking south and so should have ignored it all, but could not.В .В .В . In quick stolen glances I saw the awesome shaft of the Empire StateВ .В .В . burnished gold in a bath of late-afternoon, early March sunshine. It was 5.30 and the base of the building was covered in slanting shadows thrown by the surrounding buildings, and out of the dark pedestal the high tower soared and floated in a way I have never seen before.47 This vision clearly captivates Kingwell, and another of his books, Nearest Thing to Heaven—a self-proclaimed “expression of love” to the Empire State Building48—captures something similar on its front cover. The tip of the tower seems to float, this time over a sea of cloud, an impression that at once emphasizes the mighty height of the building and dislocates it from the rest of the city. This is undoubtedly an image redolent with the idea of release, and Kingwell goes on to note in particular the disused mooring dock for dirigibles that was provided at the top of the Empire State Building, emphasizing the idea of flight and escape from the city that ensnares us. “Skyscrapers, as we all recognize, also express an aspiration towards freedom, a rising above. They may be filled with abominable enterprises, but they do transmit an idea of transcendence,” he remarks.49 Page 150 →Interestingly this is an idea that pervades the iconography of the skyscrapers and therefore, by extension, New York. Many of Lewis Hine’s photographs of the sky boys, for example—like Lunch atop a Skyscraper—show these men not caught up in the actual graft of work, but instead at rest, napping idly in the sunlight on a girder, or casually relaxing on a skeletal outcrop in midair. Here in the heart of the bustling metropolis, on top of the most iconic technology of the rush of progress, is where the worker can find escape.

Escape Plans

The idea of escape is surprisingly insistent in the psyche of New York, and has been formative in the shaping of the city as an organism. One of the most abiding tropes of New York expression—perhaps ironically, given its mythological allure—has been to fetishize that escape away from the city. We see this in countless songs in which characters yearn for a release from the “city that never sleeps”; seeking “somewhere that’s green” (Little Shop of Horrors),50 or somewhere they might find “peace and quiet and open air” (West Side Story).51 If this sort of release from the demands of the city reflects a human need, it certainly preyed on the minds of city planners when they designed into the grid the great landscaping project of Central Park. “Central Park was the product of a flawed metropolis and metropolitan way of life, of a society which served to encourage many of its citizens to dream of escape to better places beyond the limits of the city.”52 This was an afterthought; barely any open, public spaces had featured in the original plan, since the island was so slim they were considered unnecessary: “Certainly if the city of New York was destined to stand on the side of a small stream such as the Seine or the Thames, a great number of ample places might be needful. But those large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan Island render its situation, in regard to health and pleasure, as well as to the convenience of commerce, peculiarly felicitous,” wrote the commissioners.53 In the plan of 1811, the 240-acre Grand Parade, between Twenty-Third and Thirty-Fourth Streets, was the biggest provision of space, intended for military exercise and gathering troops in the event of attack; a 54-acre plot between Seventh and Tenth Streets would provide for a market; an area of raised salt marsh between Eighty-Ninth and Ninety-Fourth Streets, named Observatory Place, was to become a reservoir servicing the city; and a handful of smaller squares including Page 151 →Bloomingdale (between Fifty-Third and Fifty-Seventh Streets), Hamilton (Sixty-Sixth and Sixty-Eighth), Manhattan (Seventy-Seventh and Eighty-First), and Harlem (117th and 121st) were the only concessions breaking up the grid’s “rectilinear monotony.”54 But these were “door-yards of space—mere grassplots of verdure,” according to some,55 and with a city and population growing as rapidly as Manhattan’s, they were nowhere near sufficient. The concern to create a greater provision of open space in New York was threefold. First, the authorities were justifiably worried about the sanitation and hygiene of such a densely packed city, and keen to provide at least some gesture toward fresh air;56 second, the city’s noise, dirt, and congestion were making living conditions unpleasant for the middle classes, who kept moving further north and therefore dividing the city up into socially distinct areas;57 third, increasing transatlantic travel was allowing city officials to see the civilized conditions of European cities like Paris and London, all of which boasted impressive park spaces.58 Which of these motivators was the deciding factor is unclear, but by 1848, a landscaper named Andrew Jackson Downing proposed the creation of a “People’s Park,” whose “material as well as moral environment would be beneficial: the open space would serve as the вЂlungs of the city.’”59 The first proposed location for the “People’s Park” was on the Upper East Side of the island between Sixty-Sixth and Seventy-Fifth Streets, around an area known as Jones’ Wood. This region of the island was beginning to become industrialized and was attracting immigrant “squatters.” Creating a park here would protect the area, attract a better class of resident, and force out the unsavory lowlife. But with some resistance from landowners wanting to capitalize on commercial interests, the park eventually found its location slightly to the west, in a midtown area that would otherwise have been too costly to level for housing. In any case, there were also “squatters” here—or rather, legitimate but undesirable Irish, German, and African American communities—who could be moved on for a small incentive. Sixteen hundred people were evicted, and the area now known as Central Park was given over as “a pastoral space cleansed of commercial excess and social disorder for the genteel.”60 Before mass transit and industrialization really infiltrated the city’s boundaries, and thus before the pollution of modernism made fresh air a scarcity in Manhattan, this was a space that could indulge the luxury of a city that still conceptualized itself in horizontal terms. Following a competitive tendering process, the team of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux was selected to landscape their idea known as the “Greensward Page 152 →Plan.” This was a design fundamentally based on principles of the pastoral, and incorporating serpentine pathways, green pastures, and still waters. And it was very much a designed landscape, stemming from

Olmsted’s careful study of the English landscaping tradition, and in particular the work of Lancelot “Capability” Brown. Rather than the geometrical Baroque patterning of European gardens like Versailles (Paris), Hampton Court (London), and the Mirabell Palace (Salzburg), however, they drew on romantic and transcendental beliefs “that wilderness provided the sharpest contrast with civilization”: Pastoral Transcendental scenery combined the open, gently sloping, manicured and domesticated spaces of the pastoral style with the wilder, untamed, more irregular look of the picturesque. Pastoral spaces produced a sense of great openness and freedom and had a quiet, soothing effect, while picturesque spaces hinted at nature’s bounty, mystique and uncertainty.61 As Dorceta Taylor discusses, Olmsted and Vaux believed that “pastoral scenery not only calms and tranquilizes the mind, but has a divine power of its own.”62 Thus the design of Central Park was not only seen as a palliative to the relentless order and energy of the city, but it was also modeled fundamentally on a nineteenth-century understanding of nature, aesthetics, and art as expressions of the divine. “The most moral, spiritual thing art could achieve was simply to convey beauty.В .В .В . God so infused his creation with His divine attributes that those qualities of nature and painting that produced beauty symbolized the deity—and that simple enjoyment of the beauties produced by proportion, balance and moderation proved more spiritual than moralizing art.”63 It is clear that New York’s mid-nineteenth-century attitude toward civilizing came directly from the stilldominant influence of the Old World. At this point, “It was common belief that the metropolis was at least vaguely un-American, that the real America was somewhere else in the midst of a glorified Nature and a sentimentalized rural life,”64 as Spann puts it. However, as I have suggested already in discussing Broadway’s dog-leg and the change of direction around the turn of the century, New York’s own identity was to transform as it gained a sense of its own aesthetic expression, and an independence both from the maternal roots of the Old World and from the nineteenth-century ideologies of the divine. Though space, release, and escape were clearly significant to nineteenth-century city fathers, Page 153 →and though the legacy of nineteenthcentury thought is still imprinted in the spatial layout of Central Park, creating a quintessential and iconic urban space, it has been a very different logic of release that has guided subsequent developments: the release of steam into the street from stout metal pipes emerging from the subway, for instance; or the creation of park space hundreds of feet in the air on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 230 Fifth, or the Rockefeller Center. One example of high-rise park space—just the most recent urban park project in New York City—developed at precisely the point when “for the first time in history—there were more people living in the world’s cities than in its rural areas.”65 The High Line, conceived and championed by New Yorkers Robert Hammond and Joshua David, is a one-mile section of elevated railway, disused since the 1980s and now reclaimed as a city park thirty feet in the air, a promenade extending for over twenty blocks on the West Side of Manhattan. It represents, in the words of Elke Mertens, “the revival of a post-industrial site as a place for recreation, life and growth,”66 showing not only an innovative appropriation of industrial space, but also environmental and conservationist concerns to regenerate wasted real estate in the city. Even the original function of the High Line as an elevated freight railway was testament to this progressive way of thinking: built as part of the West Side Improvement Project and opening in 1934, this stretch of track was not only lifted above street level to alleviate congestion and limit the dangers of street-level crossings, but was also—unlike previous elevated railways—channeled through the middle of city blocks to facilitate access to warehouses and to avoid the problems associated with railways hanging over the streets. Thus in its characteristic way, New York reinvents space, creating in the seemingly unlikeliest of places and in the most congested of frames a possibility to escape. Nowhere is that—another paradox—more eloquently articulated than in the quintessential technology of the New York fire escape. To discuss this, I will turn to two other classic examples from the golden age of Broadway’s expression, both caught in their most enduring statements on film: in the “Girl Hunt” ballet from the MGM film The Band Wagon (1953) and in the romance of Tony and Maria in West Side Story (1961).

Stairways to Paradise MGM’s The Band Wagon is one of a slew of Hollywood musicals—including Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris—that really fetishizes the theatricalityPage 154 → of the Broadway musical. Its crowning achievement is the thirteen-minute long “Girl Hunt” ballet, a pastiche of a Mickey Spillane detective novel. Like many of the dance sequences in The Band Wagon, “Girl Hunt” announces its theatricality as it begins. We see a pit orchestra playing a short overture, and the camera then cuts to the view of the theater audience. Stage curtains part to reveal a drop on which are painted a number of book covers, all in a pulp fiction style and all ostensibly by the same writer, Mickey Starr: “Dames Kill Me,” “Kill Me Cutie,” and “Stab Me Sugar” surround the featured book, “Girl Hunt.” The covers depict scenes from the novels that sum up their narratives in one image loaded with the gender politics of the genre: every cover features an attractive woman in wispy clothing, all cleavage and legs; in one of the pictures the woman is tied and gagged; in all the others she cowers from a threatening male figure attacking her with a weapon. In the image for “Girl Hunt, ” the attacker wears the gray flannel suit and hat of the period, and points a gun at her. “She had to die!” reads a caption banner at the top of the cover. Before we really have time to take in the detail of this introductory image, a machine gun rips the stage drop apart in a clean line of bullet holes. As private investigator Rod Riley, Fred Astaire plays “the antithesis of Astaire in top hat, white tie and tails, ”67 kicking off the sequence with a baffling murder to solve: late one night he encounters a beguiling blonde in Times Square, when a mysterious man sidles up. Before he can pass on a message, the man is killed outright in a sudden puff of smoke, leaving a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair. Riley resolves to unravel the mystery, and his investigation leads him through a number of iconic Manhattan locations: “the empty, deserted city streets, .В .В .В the lonely subway platform late at night, and the popular bop joints with their joyless, menacing tension.”68 With a nod to the taut atmospheres and unexpected intricacies of postwar thriller writers like Spillane, Raymond Chandler, and Patricia Highsmith, “Girl Hunt” is both episodic and cyclical, allowing musical, rhythmical, and narrative motifs to reappear provocatively before staging its denouement back in Times Square. One of the most striking images in the ballet is a shot of Astaire glancing back at his pursuers as he flees up a bright red fire escape (see figure 35). The camera angle captures him from below, taking in the yawning, vertiginous treads of the fire escape, a structure that seems to plunge inexorably into an abyss above his head. The perspective seems wrong: a jagged pattern of erratic metalwork spiraling skyward, but given such momentum by the pace of the action and the abstracted two-dimensional trompe l’oeil Page 155 →painted on the soundstage wall, it reflects perfectly a characteristic feature of the city streets. Look up from any pavement—Mott Street, Broome—and see these crazy abstractions zigzagging up the buildings like webs left by some geometric spider. Oliver Smith’s design for “Girl Hunt” fondly pastiches their construction, though unattached to any building in this image, and seemingly never-ending, the structure takes on a curious Kafkaesque dimension: episodic; cyclical.69 And in the familiar narrative of this thriller, the fire escape seems to fit the paradoxical tension at play. In “Girl Hunt,” Riley is the dominant figure whose virtue and diligence will win out over the faceless threat of the hoods; yet he is also throughout that journey a figure of vulnerability, a frail human caught in the flytrap of the city. We don’t so much see him fight as flee—at least until he works out the complexities of the case; and in this image of flight up the fire escape we see him at his most haunted, with nowhere to go but up. Figure 35. Fred Astaire as Rod Riley in the “Girl Hunt” Ballet (The Band Wagon, 1953.) Screen grab. Fire escapes were a product of the Tenement House Act, published by Commissioner Robert W. De Forest and First Deputy Commissioner Lawrence Veiller in 1901, which laid out strict codes of practice for fire safety Page 156 →throughout the city. Although the construction of emergency escapes on tenement dwellings had become increasingly common in the latter half of the nineteenth century, there had been no standard design, and the escapes often complicated egress from burning buildings for two main reasons: first, they were often no more than vertical ladders attached to the walls of buildings—passages to safety no doubt, but precarious and difficult to negotiate for anyone save the most able; second, the escapes often exited to the rear of the properties, which in tenement housing often meant a tiny yard hemmed in on all sides, or even an inaccessible airshaft. The act of

190170 enforced the erection of fire escapes on the front and back of buildings, and insisted that the escape routes be constructed with “open iron balconies and stairways” rather than ladders. “Stairways will be angled at not more than sixty degrees,” instructs the act, and “balconies should be at least three feet wide, taking in at least one window of each apartment at each floor above ground level.” Further requirements of the act stated that “a gooseneck ladder should extend from upper balcony to roof,” and that “drop ladders are required from lowest balcony.” So detailed were these instructions that although the act allowed minor style variations, it effectively designed the iconic fire escape still common today, developing in the process a new aesthetic for New York streets. Now, very visibly, these iron escapes became an iconic feature on the facades of buildings throughout the city. The fire escape certainly has a distinctive pattern, fixed as we have seen by planning regulations: the horizontal platforms of balconies, stacked one on top of another; the angled slope of stairs, cutting diagonally from each to the next. Its composition is likewise distinctive: identical iterations of coarse iron against hard brick; skeletal slats against open sky. Even the pattern of its use (down or up) is settled: a flow that judders down and whirls round, folding in on itself in an insistent spiral. Flattened out onto paper, as it is in Oliver Smith’s design sketches for both the West Side Story stage set (figure 36) and the “Girl Hunt” film set, these qualities are strikingly similar to other patterns we have encountered time and again in our walks around New York: straight against diagonal, three dimensions compressed into two. These designs look as if a sheet of manuscript paper with its straight-line staves has been folded at angles. And such qualities are those we have noted of New York’s composition both on the island and in the music: the diagonal against the straight; the melodic and rhythmical syncopation of iterations. In the fire escape is another whirling exclamation of the same Page 157 →vortex pattern from “Broadway Rhythm”: “Out on the gay white way in each merry cafГ© orchestras play taking our breath away.” And in Rhapsody in Blue—an orchestral piece, remember, that was originally titled “An American Rhapsody” and which Gershwin considered “a musical kaleidoscope of AmericaВ .В .В .В , of our metropolitan madness”71—patterns of melodic and rhythmic syncopation abound. In particular, when Gershwin constructs a sequence repeating the cells of his turn feature, both ascending and descending, the connection to the fire escape’s characteristic geometry is tantalizing. Here the music judders and turns at one pitch—a clumsy frenzy of (stylized) physical exertion—before moving down—or up—to repeat the pattern at the next (see figure 37). Of course, despite the image in “Girl Hunt” and Astaire’s flight upward, fire escapes don’t really head up—these are escape routes down to the street, precious afterthoughts in the meteoric quest for height in New York’s rapid development. Perhaps this is why, in the film, Astaire’s first instinct to escape up the erratic structure is hesitant. Like a giant game of snakes and ladders in reverse, the fire escape brings us back down to earth in a clumsy frenzy of physical exertion; inside the buildings are the swooshing, silent snakes—the elevators, conquering gravity and pushing directly skyward. Nevertheless, part of the iconicity of the fire escape—and certainly the way that this has transferred to its cultural representation—is that it maintains a directional ambivalence. Like everything else in New York City, we see these constructions going up, and—perhaps because we only ever see them put to other purposes rather than fleeing from fires—they become divested of their very functionality. Although they are called “fire escapes” and although we recognize escape as their purpose, these iron abstractions become differently meaningful: on the one hand, they are ubiquitous architectural features of “New York–ness”; on the other hand, they are enchanting ciphers of Manhattan’s upness, technological commentaries on the city’s negotiation with space. For communities trapped in the packed and dimly lit conditions of the tenements, the fire escape did represent escape of a kind, however; though not simply as an emergency exit, as New York Times writer David Chen remarks: “For many working-class residents in older tenement buildings without balconies or rooftop access, the humble fire escape has always been the next best thing. It is their makeshift stoop in the sky.”72 In the interaction of man with environment, this functional technology grafted onto the side of a building could be transformed into a place of retreat. If not used as an actual escape route, nor even representing a symbolic escape

Page 160 →from poverty, the fire escape at least offered a brief respite from the cramped conditions of home. It was a place to gather, to find a breeze in the sweltering summer heat, a place to while away the time, and perhaps even a place to fall in love.73 Page 158 → Figure 36. Oliver Smith’s stage design for the balcony in West Side Story, flattening the image to become an angular abstraction. Smith also designed the fire escape set in “Girl Hunt” (The Band Wagon, 1953), showing a remarkably similar obsession with the vortices of this urban architecture. Page 159 → Figure 37. Both descending and ascending cells of Gershwin’s turn feature throughout the cadenzas of Rhapsody in Blue, mm. 33–35. RHAPSODY IN BLUE by GEORGE GERSHWIN. В© 1924 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of ALFRED MUSIC. Figure 38. Both descending and ascending cells of Gershwin’s turn feature throughout the cadenzas of Rhapsody in Blue, mm. 71. RHAPSODY IN BLUE by GEORGE GERSHWIN. В© 1924 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of ALFRED MUSIC. One abiding image of the fire escape is from West Side Story’s balcony scene, and I’d like to consider how the spatial domain of the fire escape in this show sets up a fascinating tension between entrapment and escape. In doing this, I’ll observe these dynamics in both the film and stage versions of the musical, sometimes slipping between the two. I do this without apology—for reasons suggested in my introduction—though it’s worth acknowledging this slippage and the blurred boundaries I’m establishing between the different mediations of the text. Indeed, in some ways it is important that the space of New York inhabited by this musical should be allowed the additional opportunities of extension that cinematic and theatrical space afford; in turn, the modalities of the musical’s expression—choreographic, musical, vocal, and thematic—afford other extensions of space, other flights of escape, and other dialogues with the symbolic cartography of New York that this show so iconically presents. As Thomas Van Leeuwen notes, the show was “identified with the architectural environment in which it was set” to such an extent “that a few schematic flights of stairs from a fire escape became its unmistakable logo.”74 Loosely modeled on the equivalent scene from Romeo and Juliet, the balcony scene has Tony (Romeo) visit Maria (Juliet) late at night following their first meeting in a dance hall. Maria lives with her Puerto Rican family in an upper floor of a west-side tenement building, and when Tony calls from the yard below, she emerges onto the balcony of the fire escape, where he climbs up to meet her. The setting in the 1961 film exploits both the urban significance and dramatic potential of the fire escape: in addition to the standard fire escapes attached to individual buildings, these tenement escapes have walkways between buildings and at height across the alley, suggesting a close-knit community that lives at some detachment from the actual streets of the city. Despite this context, however, Maria’s balcony does not serve as her means to escape. Although she can access the outside space of the fire escape for her trysts with Tony, she seems unable to use it to leave. When Tony urges her to come down—to escape—she refuses: Tony: Just for a minute. Maria: A minute is not enough. Tony: For an hour, then. Page 161 →Maria: I cannot. Tony: Then for ever! Maria: Sshh!75 That final entreaty, “Sshh!” seems to capture the sense of entrapment Maria feels, guarded as she is by the never-seen omniscience of her parental warders, and unable even to articulate that predicament except through a

literal silencing. It is of course significant that Maria’s route to emotional freedom will envoice her, only minutes later allowing her to sing forth in a beautiful high soprano. Yet before the end of the drama that voice will once again be silenced, her final eulogy to Tony and arraignment of the gangs faltering into the stuttering reality of speech. Rather than a real escape, the fire escape in this show can only be a symbolic space of emotional escape offering a flight of fancy: “I’ll take you away, take you far, far away out of here,” sings Tony in a later number; “Somewhere there must be a place we can feel we’re free.”76 Yet he never does, and it is interesting to consider how in this scene the use of space and physicality works to magnify the irony of freedom. Although Tony and Maria move liberally around the various walkways, their encounter is made symbolically more awkward in the way they have to duck and weave under and around railings. Their body language is also interesting: Tony’s “for ever!” in the passage quoted above is accompanied by a wide-open arm gesture, expressing a sense of carefree release; once he reaches Maria, however, their bodies get closer until they embrace—intimately together but symbolically trapping one another. The physicality of entrapment and escape is also a motif in other aspects of the film, whose design and choreography emphasize the idea of escaping upward from the city. In Saul Bass’s classic poster design for the film, the block-stenciled lettering of the title is decorated with the angular abstraction of a fire escape, on which two dancing figures are silhouetted. And in their dance is another physical expression of release: the arabesque. Limbs spread and bodies open, they reach to the sky, the male figure leaping with one leg, as if to escape from the platform to which his feet root him. It’s a dance move familiar from the film’s choreography: throughout the “Prologue,” the “natural” behavior of the street hoodlums is interjected with stylized spurts of danced movement. Keith Garebian reads these as “mock-airplane flight[s],”77 expressing “an innate confidenceВ .В .В . the thrill of ownership of the street”78—or again, escape from the asphalt playground with its territorial wire fencing. Such physical expressions of release were by the mid-twentieth century Page 162 →a staple part of dance vocabulary, thanks to the innovations of two generations of American modern dance, in particular the work of Martha Graham. She had pioneered an approach to dance that—unlike European ballet—was expressive of the natural momentum of the body, and guided by the way the skeleton, muscles, and energies of the body responded to the breath. Thus the vocabulary of “contraction and release” came to be idiomatic of an assertive American dance tradition, described in one review of Graham’s American Document in revival as epitomizing “muscular, angled attack, with lunging forward thrusts and arching leaps conjuring ideas of American space and speed.”79 West Side Story’s choreographic palette, branded by Robbins as “American ballet,” is recognizably a fusion of this modern dance aesthetic with the style of formal ballet; one might argue that one of his fundamental principles was to take the dualism of modern dance (comprising binaries like contraction and release, or fall and recovery) and turn it into a dualism between formal and vernacular aesthetics. Thus in the film’s “Prologue,” the Jets walking tall move with a fundamentally different energy, and with a casual but balletic dance vocabulary, than they do under pressure, when their style owes more to modern dance.80 A different though comparable dualism is seen in the “Girl Hunt” ballet between Astaire’s lyrical dance with Cyd Charisse in the subway, and his entrance into the Dem Bones CafГ©.81 In the first of these scenes he and Charisse as “The Blonde” dance a graceful pas de deux as the gunfight ensues. She wears a floaty, pastel dress and their movement vocabulary borrows if not from ballet then at least from the elegance of the ballroom, giving over to the romanticism of their mutual attraction. The impression (exaggerated to the point of parody, to be sure) is that the affinity of these virtuous characters transcends the chaos of the mean city streets. The later scene, in which by contrast Riley adopts gestural codes of the underworld, connotes the dangers of urban, modernist hedonism. The café—one of those “popular bop joints with their joyless, menacing tension”82 that Fordin describes—is a smoky den of dehumanized dancing, degenerate jazz, and (literally) explosive liquor. Various hoods enter with sharp, angular movements, their bodies releasing or holding tension in unusual ways; Astaire mimics the style of their movement, entering with an uncharacteristically stiff-limbed strut that differs markedly from the earlier scene. Ironically, the floaty, pastel blonde turns out to be the killer.

Though this uncomfortable movement style—the work of choreographer Michael Kidd—might appear to be idiosyncratic, it foreshadows the expression of the body in Bob Fosse’s urban vernacular, some of whose Page 163 →essential principles Amanda Card identifies as “broken angular limbs, a hunched upper body, collapsed isolated joints and staccato foot movements which all rotated around a lifted, articulated centre.”83 In the “Rich Man’s Frug” from Sweet Charity, Charity encounters high society in the Pompeii Club. The movement of the Frug incorporates trademark elements of Fosse’s style to create an atmosphere of detachment, aloofness, and alienation, characterizing urban sophistication as lifeless and soulless. The Pompeii Club has “an aura of stylised snobbery that Charity could never take part in,” suggests Raymond Knapp,84 though for that matter, Charity’s own Fandango Ballroom has similar traits. The girls in the working habitat of “Big Spender” appear more like mannequins than humans, staring lifelessly, their limbs awkwardly splayed or flopping inertly over the bar that symbolically traps them. Escape from that existence is the stuff of dreams, though when those dreams are articulated, as they are in “There’s Gotta be Something Better Than This,” they have very precise encoding: up on the roof (outside, in the open air), Helene and Nickie sing of wanting to “go right to the top,” of having an office “on the forty-first floor.”85 With obvious references to West Side Story’s “America”—in which the Puerto Rican characters likewise express their need to escape, this time to America—the setting is once again one of roof space and fire escapes, and although Helene sings her verse from inside the iron cage of a rooftop water tower, the physical expressions of the dance are exuberant, joyous, open, and released. According to the logic of Graham’s theory of “contraction and release,” this body-openness is quite literally the articulation of breath in the body;86 and in these terms, Fosse’s later signature stance, with hunched back and pendulous arms, is the contraction of breathlessness. Accordingly, motifs of breath and breathlessness recur throughout Sweet Charity and other shows, and thematize a binary of claustrophobia and openness that is fundamental not only to the city’s identity but also to America’s.87 As Tony and Maria consummate their love in the symbolism of song, the fire escape becomes a liminal portal, especially in the stage version of the show: “Now the buildings, the world fade away,” reveal the stage directions, “leaving them suspended in space,” free. The articulation of song enacts a vision: “As he sings,” the script tells us, “the walls of the apartment begin to move off [until] they do break through, and suddenly—they are in a world of space and air and sun,”88 suspended like the sky boys above the city in that space of freedom, escape, and release. The use of the fire escape in West Side Story, then, is both a literal imagingPage 164 → of the technology and a symbolic reference to the social world of the musical. Emphasizing how closely connected its iconicity is to popular understandings of the city environment, the fire escape seems to connote both entrapment and escape, as it also does in other appearances, such as in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944). For him, the fire escape is “a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.”89 Williams’s play is set in St. Louis rather than New York, and therefore of course has a far different mood, tempo, and social context; in the much more recent In the Heights (2008) we are back in Manhattan. Here, in a social world of tenements, immigrants, and desperation, the fire escape symbolizes for Nina Rosario an aspirational escape from her life: When I was a child I stayed Wide awake, climbed to the Highest place, on every fire Escape, restless to climb.90 Again, the image perverts the intended direction of the technology: just as Tony climbs to reach Maria in West Side Story, the Wingfield family climbs to enter their apartment in The Glass Menagerie, and Astaire climbs to escape pursuers in The Band Wagon, Nina climbs here to voice her ambition: “I am the one who made it out!

” Now she returns, her ambition thwarted: “Just breathe,” she sings. Breathing for her is a release, an escape; like the “peace and quiet and open air” for Tony and Maria. And upward, skyward, exists the fresh and open air promising that escape.

Just Breathe Sliding majestically upward, in a seemingly impossible musical maneuver, the opening clarinet glissando of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue seems to mimic the very scale of Manhattan’s height. Perhaps it mimics the elevator rising silently inside the lift shaft; perhaps it mimics the gaze as our eyes rise to admire the enormity of the construction; perhaps it is just an abstract musical gesture—but it certainly evokes the upness at the core of Manhattan’s self-image. This was of course deliberate—the Rhapsody was intended as a piece that evoked America, and at that time nothing evoked America more than the “delirious”91 rise of Manhattan’s modernist metropolis into the sky. Page 165 →This opening note—though played by Gershwin in his piano variations of Rhapsody in Blue on the piano—is very definitely not a pianist’s expression. That glissando glide up the scale is awkward and cumbersome on a piano, and to make the first real note of a piano piece an extended single-pitch fermata is simply counterintuitive: the sound disappears, the hammer’s vibration of the piano strings dissipating as soon as the note has been struck. No, this is the opening of a wind instrument, bending the glissando through its chromaticisms and then sustaining that top note through breath control and lip pressure. And it was written for a clarinetist after all, for Ross Gorman, the virtuoso clarinetist of the Paul Whiteman band, who “impulsively вЂsmeared’ the clarinet to the top,”92 an effect that Gershwin kept in. How striking that this most captivating expression of upness in New York music of the period should be articulated as an expression of breath. Interesting too that urban parks with their social exigency have been referred to as “the lungs of the city,” and that metaphorical feelings of release from the strains of contemporary life come with the instruction to “just breathe” (In the Heights), or a dance vernacular based on the contraction and release of the breathing body (West Side Story). Perhaps in this light it is not so surprising that both the elevator and subway industries have turned themselves to breath (air) as a technology, giving it a functional multitasking reminiscent of the layered multifunctioning of urban regeneration. One of the first subway concepts, shown at the American Institute Fair by Alfred Ely Beach in 1867, involved a cylindrical subway car being blown through a tube by an enormous fan, the Roots Patent Force Blast Blower, or “Western Tornado.” Between 1870 and 1873 the pneumatic subway even operated—long before any other underground network in New York City—between Warren and Murray Streets, a distance of one block. Later, this idea was taken up by an even more ambitious plan to blow elevated trains through pipes above street level. Dr. Rufus Gilbert’s 1872 plan “envisioned one long Gothic arch straddling Broadway with dual tubes through which circular streetcars would be propelled.”93 The idea was seriously entertained but ultimately rejected in favor of the underground railway. Meanwhile, one of the first elevator inventions, Albert Betteley’s 1860s Air Cushion Safety Device, involved an air-tight pit beneath the elevator shaft and a parachute-shaped lower casing to the car. Should the elevator plummet, the trapped air in the pit would cause a cushion that would brake the elevator gently.94 Many years later, Charity Hope Valentine shares an elevator up a fairly modest-height building, the YMCA on Ninety-Second Street. The elevator stops, and—while it does not plummet—her companion Oscar descends Page 166 →into a state of panic. His biggest concern is that he will use up all of the air in the elevator: “Look how quickly I’m breathing. You notice how quickly I’m breathing? What is that? What is that quick breathing? .В .В .В I gotta stop breathing so much. I’m gonna use up all the air.В .В .В . Oh, boy, that’s very quick breathing.В .В .В . It’s not fair. You should breathe some of the air.”95 In an ironic twist, the very technology that enables the vertical rise to space and air is in this comedy the technology that delimits it. Later they will go to Coney Island and get stuck again on the Parachute Jump, causing concern for the crowd below them, and this time causing Charity to panic, her entrapment and isolation up in the sky symbolically alluding to her psychological claustrophobia about the relationship. Such recurring appearances of technology in New York narratives work as metaphors for the phenomenological experiences of compartmentalization and

entrapment that typify New York life. But the idea of air and breath being a part of the technology of entrapment and release in the city is one that is pervasive: from the idea of parkland representing “the lungs of the city” to Oscar’s struggling for breath in the elevator, from the “peace and quiet and open air” evoked in West Side Story to the recommendation to “just breathe” in In the Heights. I’m struck by how the characteristic expression of this city at the point it introduces the technologies of modernism becomes likewise guided by expressions of the breath: instrumentation that turns from the orchestral sounds of Europe to the jazz age sounds of the wind instruments like saxophone, trumpet, and clarinet. If the architectures of Manhattan’s technology discourse metaphorically with the stylistic expression of song and dance, it underlines how intricately our phenomenological existence with our environment relates to intangible vectors of identity, such as our sense of value or emotional mood. In other words, it underlines the relationship between self, environment, and technology as an ecology. The fact that certain iconic inscriptions of the city (like the fire escape) gain currency as shared expressions of these intangible qualities is interesting, and in terms of this performance cartography, I would argue that it is because these iconic inscriptions are simply articulations by similar mind-sets of similar things (though establishing “meaning” or “intention” behind these articulations is not necessarily my aim). It is interesting to see once again how, in this city, space is accumulated through proliferation and reiteration, each articulation of new real estate an expression of both exponential growth and hyperbole. A tower rises to create multiple iterations of the same square footage; multiple towers rise to reiterate that yield; the fire escape cycles to create the same patterned Page 167 →structure on every floor; the words, the painting, the photograph colonize different canvases and media; the song plays and plays again, not only reproduced a hundredfold like the magical, insistent, regurgitative space of Manhattan, but also reiterating that space, conceptually growing the city through its repeated performance. Of course, this suggestion plays into a number of appropriate corollaries: the accumulating presence of the city mimics the accumulation of profit on Wall Street; the mass production of real and imagined space confirms the city as the quintessential commodity of popular culture; the rhythm of these repeated iterations mocks the urban drone, itself insistent in the beat of music, the pulse of tapping feet, and the obsessive relentlessness of the grid. But the notion of escaping from the grid is complex, as I have previously suggested: without the grid, one would have no conception of the need to escape. And as Kingwell explores in Concrete Reveries, the alternative, suburbia, is an infantile illusion: “not the freedom-within control of the inner city grid, but a pervasive dullness within apparent freedom.”96 In fact, the story of the city’s growth in itself, so often explained as progressive modernist development, hides the reality that the move ever northward was always by way of escape from the increasing pressures of Lower Manhattan. The social reality is that this release was only available to the monied classes, and that it was the living conditions of the impoverished and immigrant hordes at the lower end of the island that spawned the technologies giving rise—literally—to the excess of New York. We’re on the move again. I want to take you up in the heights of the city to gaze down on it from above. A bird’s-eye view, if you like, to look at the patterns down below. Page 168 → Figure 39. The fifth stimulus: the aerial view. Google Earth’s image of Manhattan from above Map data. Google Earth.

Page 169 →

Walk Five: Time Steps From the Upper West Side to Times Square, via a busy central concourse at Grand Central Station. The opening of Robert Wise’s film of West Side Story (1961) shows a sequence of aerial shots taken from almost directly overhead. Long before Google Earth made such a perspective commonplace, they revealed the city in an unfamiliar way. We see the exit slip of Triborough Bridge, snaking in an elegant coil; Columbia University, with its ordered grounds that seem to claim prestige; the H-block tenements of Alphabet City, squatting together in the sun; and the Empire State Building, almost reaching us, reduced from this angle to abstraction. Finally the camera homes in on the Upper West Side, where the film and the show are set. It’s an unnerving opening to a film infused with tension. To Luria, the sequence shows “the twentieth-century disconnect” between “the cool planner’s rational aerial eye and the ground bound, hot-headed savage boys” that we go on to meet in the ensuing drama.1 Zoom in on the playground. A rectangular tarmac patch marked out by the boundary of wire fences (figure 40). Figures move, playing basketball. Three boys relax by the fence. A young girl sits in the middle of a chalk circle she is drawing. At the top of the picture huddles a group of seven Jets, “ground bound, hot-headed savage boys.” Jump cuts bring us closer. They move menacingly across the tarmac, skirting the young girl’s circle but confronting the older boys with the ball. A brief altercation asserts their power over the turf. Then they leave the playground and move to the neighborhood streets. I’m interested on this walking tour in exploring the ways those bodies move through the streets, constructing their relationship with the space, and molding its identity. Throughout this book I have been evoking the idea of walking around the city, though in none of the walks so far have I turned to such a literal example of the actual paths trodden. On this walk, I will be considering such paths. Page 170 →One example of a path trodden through the streets is featured in Paul Auster’s novella City of Glass from The New York Trilogy (1987). Here, the character Quinn takes on private detective duties, and follows a man called Stillman to record his apparently random walks through Manhattan. Stillman starts off from a hotel on Broadway, and each day heads in a different direction in apparently aimless wanderings. Quinn traces the routes of these walks in a notebook, and to his surprise, finds that the shapes the paths make graphically on the paper spell out a phrase: “The Tower of Babel.” The city has become a giant message pad, and Stillman “seems to be using his steps for ink and the streets of New York for paper.”2 Mapping the route on paper is Quinn’s approach to capturing Stillman’s paths, and for him it reveals an otherwise unnoticed complexity to the activity of walking. The fact is that when we walk we carve a route or follow a path, and that such paths, if we enable them to leave their trace, create patterns on the landscape. True, the actual patterns of the paths cannot usually be discerned:3 tangible tracks are rarely left behind (except, perhaps, in snow), or are so imperceptible to the untrained eye and so quickly overwhelmed by the white noise of other pedestrian traffic that they become illegible. Quinn’s methodology is to draw the paths of Stillman’s walks in a little red notebook as he follows his subject throughout the city, though he concedes that the process of mapping in real time is not easy: “Walking and writing were not easily compatible activities.”4 Furthermore, although he is able to construct a graphical enactment of Stillman’s walk on paper, it lacks the holistic overview of the journey made by Stillman, and particularly the way that other people and their paths intersect with and weave in and out of his presence. Following his subject close behind, Quinn is within the pattern he is mapping, absorbed in the world of the path and unable fully to take stock. De Certeau’s answer to the dilemma met by Quinn is to position himself on top of the World Trade Center, where he can command an overview that is otherwise impossible. From here, as we have seen, he feels that he is “looking down like a God.”5 In starting this walk from a perspective overhead, therefore, I too am conceptualizing those paths as if they can be seen from on high, traced on the flat image of the city plan like

footprints in the snow. This is a walk that takes in the Broadway of film, captured by the oligoptical camera that jump-cuts from place to place around the city. We’ve already sat in the theater, after all; now let’s join the camera crews on two iconic films of the 1950s. Of course, as before, my discussion will freely pass between media—you’ll find me again nodding to the stage scripts even as I focus on the films. Just like the New York of West Side Story, which is once again one of the musicals under discussion, the New York of Guys and Dolls exists comfortably and iconically on both celluloid and stage.6 Figure 40. The Jets’ path through the playground at the beginning of the “Prologue” to West Side Story (1961). Page 171 →In this walk, my understanding of the city returns once more to the idea of a map, though not one made by cartographers to capture the city as an object already present and to be fixed; rather, the map I have in mind is a two-dimensional plan made by the passage of people in and through the city as they weave their way. People walk, Kingwell writes, “carving the city’s narrative arcs across concrete surfaces, negotiating the urban scene’s fluid but essential boundaries between public and private anonymity and identity, possibility and limit.”7 Like other maps, mine will have its boundaries (its possibility and limit), though my imposed boundaries will not be measured by the size of the material on which I draw, nor by a geographical coverage of what I seek to represent; rather, that geographical coverage (that footprint) will be defined in the process of the making of the map by the footprints that paint its dimensions. The boundaries will be defined as the beginning and end of a narrative, a musical show, maybe a song. Nor will these maps offer us tools for navigation; we will enjoy not the use of the map but the witnessing of its creation; its beauty will not be in the journey it allows us to follow, but in the aesthetic of the thing itself. In painting this footprint picture, these shows will themselves paint a part of New York, rehearsing or twice-behaving, to use Richard Schechner’s phrase, the character of the city.8

Guys and Dolls (1950) So what is it one sees from this vantage point in the sky? Let’s cast our gaze a little closer than the Upper West Side and flash back to another opening Page 172 →sequence from just a few years before that of West Side Story. The Empire State Building has come of age; it has survived the 1945 impact of a B-25 Mitchell bomber, striking a haunting precursor to events of fifty-six years later; and just a stone’s throw away, Times Square is teeming with life. Frank Loesser’s 1950 musical Guys and Dolls, with its array of vibrant gangsters, showgirls, and mission dolls, has become an enduring classic. Its script, by Frank Swerling and Abe Burrows, is based on several of Damon Runyon’s short stories, and the title of its opening number pays homage to that provenance. In “Runyonland,” we meet the folk who populate this musical fable; and there is no better portrait of those people than in its gloriously technicolor film. “Runyonland” establishes the primary setting of Guys and Dolls as Times Square. The action begins with “two shady Broadway characters” discovered center stage. As the instrumental scene unfolds we meet further folk going about their affairs. These are not principal characters in the musical, but rather characterizing denizens of the environment: “minor league crooks and showgirls and an assortment of other urban types,” as Thomas L. Riis puts it.9 We meet a city guide with some sightseers, an actor and actress chased by autograph hunters, some streetwalkers, some bobby-soxers, a photographer, and some chorus girls; these types are named specifically, and the instructions for their perambulations around the area are made very clear, creating a ballet of sorts enacted physically (if not choreographically) to a medley of the show’s memorable tunes. As Riis points out, “These turns taken together resemble the kaleidoscopic cinematic street scenes of earlier decades, such as those Busby Berkeley created in 42nd Street (1933).”10 Accordingly, Times Square is confirmed in the popular imagination as an area with an “anti-character” of “charming seediness.”11 In the stable cinematic iteration of this performative space, the scene is given respectful treatment (even if its stage directions are followed with some license and its music remodeled for the screen). First, an establishing shot at the end of the credits shows the northern end of the square, recognizable from the conspicuous statue of Francis P.

Duffy, the advertising hoardings towering above the streets, and the island of buildings formed by the divergent paths of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The scene is already populated with a crowd of people crossing the road; among them are a number of individuals we will soon meet more closely—two bobby-soxers, a photographer, and a street vendor and his partner. As “Runyonland” begins properly, the camera picks up the entrance to a movie theater; we see sightseers being shown around as the same bobby-soxers come out of a screening and the same photographer in the foreground stops some of the sightseers for a photo. Various bits of business take place: the bobby-soxersPage 173 → pick up two guys fixated by a movie star on a poster; a pair of girls get autographs from a boxer in training; and the vendors set up some street entertainment before being chased away by a cop. The action travels down the street and finds the subway exit, from which a shady hood with a racing form emerges. The hood is looking for small change, and makes his way into the drugstore on the corner to check the phone kiosks. Rusty Charley sits at the bar, engrossed in the racing news. Four guys enter and sit down to make phone bets, wary of a passing cop. When Rusty leaves the store, still engrossed, the camera follows him across the street. He is oblivious to everything except the racing odds, though manages to avoid his pocket being picked as the other hood gets accosted for stealing a tourist’s watch. As the tourists give chase in one direction, Rusty continues south, still distracted by the racing news. The crowd of tourists chases by, joined by various other characters and nearly bowling Rusty over. Once they have gone, he leans on a newspaper kiosk, and we become aware of Benny Southstreet and Nicely-Nicely Johnson, who are doing the same. They start to sing the “Fugue for Tinhorns.” Explaining the movements of these characters results in quite a wordy description; the stage directions in the script are equally dry. Although each serves a purpose—one offering instructions for events to be enacted; one describing events already enacted—these verbose accounts of traffic through a scene abstract the spatial characteristics of what they describe. Neither really articulates the physicality of bodies journeying through space, or adequately maps the geographical footprint of the terrain covered by their paths. This is a common dilemma faced by anyone trying to reflect movement. But there are other ways. Mapping a visual representation of this story offers a rather different performative articulation of the scene (see figure 41). Here, though not yet enabling movement in the representation, we at least reflect a sense of the physical dimensions of the “ballet” at play in “Runyonland.” The sightseers head north (1); the camera follows action down the street south (2); the hood emerges from the subway and enters the drugstore (3); Rusty leaves the store (4); the hood tries to pick his pocket (5), then steals a tourist’s watch (6) and they give chase; Rusty continues south and the sightseers chase by (7) as he continues his path toward Nicely and Benny at the newspaper stand. Here, although the complete paths of the characters are impossible to discern from the way the film is cut, we get a sense of other dynamics in the ballet—the way patterns are created by various trajectories; the way streets and buildings are used as performance spaces for the goings-on; the way the characters intersect with one another; the general busyness of the street. Delightfully, the movement of the characters at times seems spatially illogical: the sightseers chase the hood off in one Page 174 →direction but then in the next shot continue their chase in the other direction; we can only speculate what path has led them to this position on the map, but in that speculation we create further whirls and patterns (8). Recording these patterns in the map is a sort of pressing or re-presentation—a fixing, since it is deliberate—of what is otherwise a transient, ephemeral act, “the absence of what has passed by,” as de Certeau puts it.12 He worries about such a fixing, suggesting that what makes the movement of people through space what it is—its dynamism—“is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map.” “Surveys of routes,” he suggests, “allow us to grasp only a relic set in a nowhen of a surface of projection.” In transforming action into legibility, the fixing of the re-presentation also destroys, or in his words, “causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.” And he sums up his thoughts: “Itself visible, [the map] has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible.”13 There are of course other criticisms that could be leveled at this two-dimensional, not-to-scale, flat plan of a musical number. Though in no way providing a perfect representation, such a map of this ballet offers us an interesting cartographical picture of its narrative, showing both the paths of characters through it and the geographical footprint of its territory. I’ve used the word “footprint” to conceptualize the geographical

area literally and imaginatively trodden, though—as will become clear—it may end up being rather a confusing word, since it will be used in a number of ways. And this is not the only word with several roles; in this discussion, words like “walk” and “way” also perform multiple tasks. If nothing else, this draws attention to the complexities and confusions of metaphor, not least in the use of language—something Lewis Carroll remarked upon in Alice Through the Looking Glass: “вЂWhen I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, вЂI always pay it extra.’”14 Well, fine. But Humpty’s negotiation of space was somewhat limited. Not so this term: as Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift suggest, “The metaphor of footprint overcomes an idea of the city as a contained space.В .В .В . The spatial and temporal porosity of the city also opens it to footprints from the past and contemporary links elsewhere.”15 Let’s explore for a while the potential of this virtuoso word. Guys and Dolls is a show whose geographical footprint is fascinating. The set used in the film allows us to piece together a composite of the geographical area represented and of the characters’ paths throughout. The path of the song “Guys and Dolls,” for example, heads north up Seventh Avenue and turns left into one of the eastwest streets to finish at Mindy’s (Damon Runyon’s well-known homage to the actual restaurant Lindy’s, at 1626 Broadway between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth). The film also gestures to Page 176 →further New York landmarks such as the Roxy at Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth Street, the Palace Theatre at Seventh and Forty-Seventh, and the Bond Clothing store (here called “Don Clothes”), taking up the whole block between Forty-Fourth and Forty-Fifth Streets. In this respect, the film’s set, which appears to take up only one block, is a condensed impression of the northerly end of Times Square from Forty-Fourth Street to Fifty-First Street. Within the logic of that manipulated space, the film’s action remains fairly coherent, and while there are anomalies (the Save-A-Soul Mission’s location, for instance, which the script tells us is at 409 West Forty-Ninth Street, but which appears to be right around the corner), this geographical stage space stands in for an acceptable piece of New York. However, there are other layerings of territory that could be seen as further footprints, not least the wider world encompassed by Sky and Sarah’s trip to Havana, which widens the geographical area considerably. Third, an extended geography is opened up by including places associated with the characters: locally, the Biltmore Garage and the stockroom behind McCloskey’s bar, for instance; further afield, Adelaide repeatedly refers to her mother “back in Rhode Island”; Sky has recently returned from “two wonderful weeks out in Nevada”; Big Jule has come to town from Chicago. Finally, there is an imaginative geography conjured by characters who mention exotic or far-flung places: Adelaide enacts perhaps the most obsessive collection of fantasies to free herself virtually from the island, dreaming up a honeymoon in Niagara, and distinctly foreign worlds in the vegetable markets of Borneo and Nome. Such perambulations—literal and witnessed in the case of Sky and Sarah to Havana, but very often just imaginative—expand the world of the show and create a further footprint. Page 175 → Figure 41. Visual map of the characters on their journey through “Runyonland” in the film version of Guys and Dolls (1955). Of course, the same can be said for other shows, many of which also have multiple and far-ranging geographical footprints (Santa Fe in Rent, Barcelona in Company). Each of these shows marks out a similar footprint, the territory it might describe as its home turf, and within that—just as Jane Jacobs described in her depiction of the daily ballet in Hudson Street—the characters move, treading their stories into the ground of the footprint with their own literal steps.

Songlines Throughout this book I have been making the argument that our musical theater texts and performances are themselves maps of the city, whose particular features are simply expressions of the city different from the buildings and streets, though equally quantifiable; and that their patterns—rhythms,Page 177 → melodies, energies, and dimensions can be seen as very similar to the patterns in what seem more tangible articulations of the city (streets, buildings, technologies). For obvious reasons the tangible articulation of the body through space that this particular walking tour evokes is one whose metaphor seems closer to performance—at least in terms of dance—than those of my previous walks. I am not exploring in this chapter the patterns of streets, the

correlations of architecture, or the affordances of technology; here I am exploring a movement of bodies through space and the way in which we map those paths. It is something that many writers have discussed; Kingwell’s observation of the concourse at Grand Central Station, for example, is worth reading: Stand above the Grand Concourse of Grand Central at rush hour and watch the way the people move across the floor. The nearly anarchic yet still somehow functional mass of undulating vectors—all those people are moving in subtly different directions, around and in front and behind their fellow citizens, sliding and dodging and negotiating the blocks and reverses and interference coming toward them at video-game speed. The pressure of movement is valved by small releases, little quick-step rushes and raised-eyebrow warnings, so that the number of actual collisions falls to an implausible minimum. Standing up above it, looking down from street level, reveals something of a cross between a massive group dance number and a human acting-out of some mad scientist’s chemical experiment, molecules rolling over, combining, repelling, ricocheting off one another.16 Not surprisingly, choreographic practice and theory show a fascination for this engagement with the city, seeing both the everyday weaving of bodies through space as a kind of dance, and the “twice-performed behavior” of dance performance as a sort of stylistic magnification of that enlivening dynamic to the crucible of the stage. In fact, dance becomes a regular metaphor for the behavior of Broadway and its practices, as Scott Bukatman writes: Musicals organize the clamor of the streets into rhythm and rhymes, what Comden and Green called “The Throb of Manhattan.” The genius of the form, however, is that it never over-organizes the city, respecting rather than repressing its manic, randomizing energies. Only a semblance of control could ever be superimposed on the life of the street, and here the musical has danced far ahead of modernist urban planners.17 Page 178 →This is something explored by the choreographer and academic Fiona Bannon, who writes about her own walk to work at the University of Leeds in such terms. Bannon has become fascinated with the phenomenology of what is conventionally a functional practice, and has made of her daily walk a practical exploration in dance. She calls her practice “walking with attention,”18 a state of “creative suspension”19 in which she is hyperaware: “An on-going dialogue between human interaction, sensation and the rhythms of location has become apparent,” she writes. With the suggestion that her experience of the walk becomes magnified through her “methodical engagement with the flow of this daily practice and the movement of moments each walk entails,” she evokes the idea of mapping each journey in a performance “score”—not so much a tangible pressing of the walk but a simultaneous enunciation, “in the present moment.”20 I’d like to lean on Bannon’s discussion to pick up on three elements that I think are of particular significance in reading the city through the paths that have been trodden. First, she suggests that this ballet can be conceptualized as a communal expression: “This choreographic practice does not take place in isolation, instead its features interrelate: from the singularity of my contact with the ground to the weaving of a mass of converging ideas that together constitute its identity.”21 I will therefore turn my attention to the way in which—as was evident from our discussion of “Runyonland”—the paths of the various characters in a street ballet interweave to form ensemble patterns. Second, I am interested in the fact that, for Bannon, the dynamic of these bodies in space is something formative of the city itself. Like others, she is hesitant to recognize the city as the city without its being brought into life by the lives that dwell “through.” She writes of “the sense of the city as a complex interplay, where layers of narrative contribute to an evolving collective sense of вЂplace’”;22 in this sense, the ballet forges the shape of space itself, which I will discuss in relation to Lefebvre and de Certeau. Third, it is interesting that in her account Bannon uses a number of words more familiar from musical vocabulary: the idea of a “score,” the acknowledgment of a “voice,” and the notion of “counterpoint.” I will therefore explore this in more detail, seeing the paths and perambulations of the individuals through the city as what we might call “songlines” (though not in the aboriginal sense) in the ensemble voicing of the space. As it happens, Bannon’s practice—like Quinn’s—takes place very much inside the patterns she is observing. Again, though, I will choose to step back from this immersive engagement to gain a sense of

perspective and, if possible, a more holistic view. “The significance of space,” writes Steven Alford, “emerges not from the one who moves through space, the pedestrian,Page 179 → but from the one who observes he who moves through space.”23 In Mark Dorrian’s words, “The sense of removal and distance from the city—of being in a separate world—becomes the condition of possibility within mass society for the transformation of the visual field of the city.”24 Like de Certeau on the World Trade Center and Lefebvre in his window, I will therefore maintain my position of distance and look down on Bannon and her performance from above.

Sharing Space As Rusty Charley crosses the road, cars and pedestrians maneuver around him, forced to change pace or direction because of his unswerving path. He is so engrossed in his newspaper that he is oblivious to everything else, and although on two occasions we see him change direction to negotiate the street architecture of Duffy Square, he tracks a constant (if distracted) route from the drugstore to the newspaper stand. In this sense we can see that the path of his journey—which is very much prioritized in telling this tale and in the previous description and mapping of the number—is just one of many interweaving strands in this section of the “Runyonland” ballet. We can also see that his trajectory has particular qualities that are different from those of other trajectories: those of the cars that have to avoid hitting him have a far more jerky dynamic; those of the sightseers chasing the watch thief are far more assertive and energized. The sightseers might also be considered as individuals or as a group moving along the same path (at least at this stage). In short, it is clear that the spatial activity of this scene is not just defined by a single path or individual, or indeed a handful of “main” paths or characters, as our earlier descriptions have inferred. Instead, as Jane Jacobs’s account of the activity on her street suggests, the spatial practice of cities is communal, dialogic and multi-layered. Bannon’s account of her walk acknowledges this. She is self-consciously “passing through spaceВ .В .В . sharedВ .В .В . with others,” and for a number of reasons her negotiation of the space requires “noticing relationships with other early morning вЂstreet dancers’”:25 I meet successive waves of choreographic possibility each plotted by a changing cast. I sense multiple impositions on my choreographic voice as each individual crosses my path. They create diagonal lines that, for me, build a rhythmic counterpoint that suddenly flocks in an unexpected turn to the right and opens the space for another unruly cast.26 Page 180 →What is significant about this is that such dialogism gives to the space texture, a quality that, on its own, it would not possess. With texture comes a sense of dimensionality: the pull and pace of time; the ebb and flow of dynamics. And in making sense of these, as we can see from Bannon’s report, we read into that texture a host of metaphors, drama, and form. Bannon’s description of her encounter with other bodies in this passage constructs a narrative: her way is blocked by “impositions”; she changes course “in an unexpected turn”; and then—discovery!—another open space and “another unruly cast.” In the same way, the dialogic paths of “Runyonland” are textured and dramatic; these are not faceless neutrons bouncing off one another to form abstract patterns. Patterns can be changed with chance encounters: when the watch is stolen, the sightseers chase after the hood. With the added detail of character, further layers of drama are built into these simple urban perambulations: when Rusty collides with someone else and knocks him out, it is not just anyone, but a prizefighter; when he has his watch pinched, it is not by the guy but by the doll. Accordingly, a street scene is built through the affordances of movement in space. The city itself just happens to be a location in which these paths intersect. But in generating texture, metaphor, and drama, the abstract space takes on form, so the city itself is also a location brought into being by the uses of its space. In the words of Henri Lefebvre, “It is by means of the body that space is perceived, lived—and produced.”27

De Certeau, Lefebvre, and the Lived City

This last comment requires us to return to some of the theories, explored earlier, by Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jane Jacobs, and Kevin Lynch—writings that have been central to our understanding that space is socially produced. Elsewhere in the book I have discussed these writers in terms of Lefebvre’s “rhythmanalysis” and the way that different energies of the bodies moving in the streets create a sort of syncopation. On this walking tour, I am more interested in the interrelationships of those bodies in terms of the patterns they create, which in turn give a sort of substance to the city. Lefebvre distinguishes between three different types of space. The first, conceived space, he suggests, is the abstract plan of a space (let us say a city), articulated by its designers; in terms of this discussion, the conceived space is one that is modeled on a grid but also given vertical dimension through the modernist push upward, and afforded access through the network of Page 181 →underground and overground roads and rail lines that service New York. In its conception it is a city waiting to be inhabited, though already it has encoded into its logic the idea that the space is to be used for (economic) production efficiency—it is designed to encourage a world in which the workplace is central and in which travel to and from work is the defining infrastructure (such was Lefebvre’s post-Marxist take on the city). This is an idea similar to de Certeau’s notion of the conceptcity, and we can see that the power balance of this conceptualization of the city is very top-heavy. The second type of space, perceived space, is the city that becomes known to its inhabitants through their spatial practice, their daily use of the city and their journeys through its landscape. This is the city we know—or think we know—because we see it and interact with it, though, like Quinn, we are absorbed in our surroundings and can’t see it all. Recall de Certeau’s way of describing this: we are “below the thresholds at which visibility begins”; we walk “an urban вЂtext’ .В .В . without being able to read it.”28 De Certeau, as we have seen, therefore evokes a “mythic city,” which is constructed through various manifestations and representations that we embrace. Lefebvre has a similar idea. To him, our vision of the city is informed by a lot of things we take for granted; we make assumptions about the landscape with which we are only partially familiar. Thus a third type of space emerges, lived space, the city that we enact in our practices and perform into reality; the city we represent to ourselves as the real city. Lefebvre’s three types of space, seen independently like this, appear mutually exclusive, though this is not his point. Rather, he recognizes that our relationship with the city is one forged by a coalescence of all three: the conceptualization, the phenomenology, and the representation. In this abstraction of the city (an abstraction not dissimilar to Lynch’s), the city springs into life. Like Lefebvre—though implying rather more agency to the dynamics of living within space—commentators like de Certeau and Bannon suggest that the city itself is something that is not simply conceived, perceived, or lived, but something that that very living brings into being. It is given shape only partly through the topography and architecture that provide its structures; more importantly, it is the bodies and the dynamic trajectories that those bodies weave in their perambulatory paths that create the space—and the city—as we know it. This is in some ways a mathematical argument: “Space only exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities and line variables,” writes de Certeau.29 Simplistically, the conceptual means of perspectivizing dimensions or triangulating locations can only take place (and therefore can only constitute space as space) when it is filled with movement. To de Certeau, therefore, space is an assemblage constituted in process, Page 182 → which he sees as performative. Elsewhere, as we have seen, Jacobs and Bannon—and like them Sarah Rubidge—see in such emergence a parallel to the performativity of dance: “a complex interweaving of trajectories, vectors, rhythms and the multidirectional dispersal of dancers across the stage.”30 Here, she suggests, “Content (expression) does not precede the form, nor form content, but rather the two coevolve.”31 In the relationship of bodies within their environment that is this evolving ecology, “bodies can вЂproduce’ or generate spaces.”32 Thereby the city we know and understand is born: the city with personality, the city of which we are a part.

Scores of the City As mentioned, it is noticeable that Bannon’s account of her practice turns on several occasions to the vocabulary of music: like Halprin, she talks of her “choreographic voice,”33 of writing a “score,”34 and of the “rhythmic counterpoint” of other dancers.35 And as we have seen, she is not alone: the urban

planner Lawrence Halprin, heavily influenced by his choreographer wife Anna, viewed the city as a “score”; and as Amin and Thrift have suggested, “People and places script each other.”36 While it is fair to say that this sort of vocabulary is often used metaphorically, it carries for me a particular resonance in this scenario since I want to explore the idea that these perambulations—and especially the interweaving perambulations of the dialogic ballet—can be seen in musical terms, as the melodies of different voices in an ensemble that sings together the song of the city. While I am not suggesting that the patterns that I have drawn on those earlier maps somehow notate the vocal lines of Guys and Dolls, I am suggesting (as I have throughout the book) that the very paradigm of how we conceptualize music is an expression that parallels the paradigms of other expressive activities. Having read into the ebb and flow of pedestrian traffic the textures of drama, we can observe how expressive articulations can be seen in parallel; and having suggested that the space and the city are in effect constituted by the forms and textures of that dynamic flow, we can therefore reasonably continue this parallel to suggest that the songs parallel the city. With this train of thought (to use a tantalizing vehicular metaphor), it is interesting to consider how Thomas L. Riis reads the music of the first scene in Guys and Dolls. This consists of four numbers: “Runyonland,” “Fugue for Tinhorns,” “Follow the Fold,” and “The Oldest Established.” Together, he suggests, they reveal “a complete, miniature world in itself,”37 implying, if not explicitly asserting, that the songs—the music—somehow Page 183 →physicalize that landscape. Each of these numbers, as he notes, deftly characterizes the people of that world in a particular musical style. “Runyonland” stages the ballet of the street and in its chattering music introduces individuals with signature motifs that skip from one snapshot to the next. The “Fugue for Tinhorns,” which Riis describes as a “busy and assertive conversation,”38 captures three gamblers studying the odds on the horse races and each leaning toward a different favorite. Each sings more or less the same melodic line, though their voices are staggered in a canon so that we hear the three iterations both sequentially and layered on top of one another, making them appear to argue. “Follow the Fold, ” in which we meet the characters of the Save-A-Soul Mission, voices the unified message of the missionaries in four-part block harmony, a dense but staid chorus of sound quite different from what has gone before. Finally, “The Oldest Established” stages a different kind of unified expression, as its individual characters piece together their paean to a great New York institution, Nathan Detroit’s floating crap game. Here the musical offering of one character (“The Biltmore garage wants a grand”) is taken up by another (“But we ain’t got a grand on hand”) and another (“And they’ve now put a lock on the doorВ .В .В .”).39 As the whole community joins in with the same sentiments, voices coalesce to create harmonies sometimes in step with one another, sometimes at odds. Individuals emerge from the chorality of the song to give it an ensemble feel (like the later “Luck Be a Lady” and “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat”). To take this one step further, though, we can look at the musical utterances in all of these numbers as articulating not just the characters but something more: something associated more with their environment and their trajectories through it. In the “prancing display” of “Runyonland,”40 the show is set up with perhaps the most obvious example of this, since we see a number of different characters moving through the city and identified in the music with different signature motifs. The film version is again the most stable iteration of this number to consider (though its score is somewhat different from that of the stage version): the photographer is given a brassy syncopated motif that turns and trips at different pitches to reflect his cheeky persona; the bobbysoxers who trump him at his own game have a far more feminine sound, first coquettish in the noodles of the wind, then refined and graceful as they strut flirtatiously past the movie poster guys to the refrain in the strings of “Luck Be a Lady.” Even this short section shows the complexity of the musical characterization: each character or set of characters is given a musical “footprint”—there’s that word again, though used slightly differently, earning more dough—and these footprints then create paths that interweave and interact. As the sequence continues,Page 184 → more characters and their paths emerge, introducing themes that will appear throughout the score as their routes are trodden into common thoroughfares. From this perspective, the different musical styles that characterize individuals so evocatively also create different metaphorical paths in a similar “complex interweaving of trajectories, vectors, rhythms andВ .В .В .

multidirectional dispersal” that we have explored in relation to walkers or dancers in the ballet.41 Of course, I am turning here to the sort of abstract conceptualization of a path that doesn’t trace itself onto the map in quite the same way as the paths of the ballet. However, if we take the world of Guys and Dolls to articulate a certain territorial snapshot of New York in its music, these musical utterances provide a path through it that, from a distanced perspective, we can image. Although sequentially ordered throughout scene 1, each of these numbers, and these four numbers together, conceptually create the streets through their “dance”/“score” like the characters in “Runyonland,” their paths from time to time crossing, their patterns turning corners and marking out their territorial footprint. The music is just as much an articulation of the lived city as the dance, and just as bodies “вЂproduce’ or generate spaces,”42 so too do the city’s songs. Indeed, I would suggest that one of music’s qualities is that it energetically seeks such interweaving, yearning for the play of counterpoint or the texture of harmony and thereby emphasizing the spatial determinants that make possible each different voice. If each of these first four numbers from Guys and Dolls takes a different strategy in spatializing its music (ballet, canon, block harmony, ensemble), creating interweaving paths both within each number and as a combination, the show develops to become more sophisticated in its musical articulation of space. Later the juxtaposition of “My Time of Day” with “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” performs a similar balletic crossover to the ones seen in “Runyonland.” This time the character motifs are magnified significantly, therefore slowing down the action (to suit the stillness of the night) and metaphorically creating a vast wealth of space—a whole city—in which Sky can dance his thoughts. And his dance—his path—through this empty city is spacious indeed: “You’re the only doll I’ve ever wanted to share it with me,”43 he sings, bending time, reaching high and swooping low as his musical trip through the space of the city invites Sarah to join him. Magnifying this path even on manuscript would affirm this, though this tends to restrict us to hills and valleys (or in urban terms, as we have seen, the crenellations of the architecture). If we conceptualize that spatial metaphor differently, interesting alternatives arise. Example: high notes could connote slow and low notes fast, which would give Sky an expressive pause in his movement at the beginning of this line (“only”). This is reductive, but you get my point. Page 185 →After all, we work in a reductive world where even the language of music is self-determining in its spatial fixing: notes are high and low, long and short (not brown and green, hairy and bald). Later still, Sarah and Adelaide encounter one another, their thoughts very separate yet their paths converging in a different way. In No. 29a, “Adelaide meets Sarah,” Loesser has his characters retrace their earlier paths: Sarah sings the refrain of “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” and Adelaide sings a variation on “Adelaide’s Lament.” The two are sung in counterpoint—something of a mismatch but a fascinating meeting of paths, of characters, and, as it happens, of minds, bumping into each other around a corner (as staging this scene will no doubt require, physicalizing the musical ballet of their paths in the space of the stage). How might this look on the map? We can of course only speculate, though again we encounter the restrictive spatial system for notating the trajectory of these converging voices in counterpoint. It is hardly likely that layering the musical notation over the map of the city will enable something enlightening to emerge. But let’s think differently: patterns are, after all, evident: the sequence of repeated motifs that construct both characters’ melodies; the difference in rhythmic energy that both reflects the characters and defines them; the open space of Sarah’s sustained notes against the contrasting patter of Adelaide’s short steps. Spatializing music is not just a metaphorical imposition, and using such spatial motifs in the music is not just a compositional conceit. If we extend our habitual pathology of hearing spatial characteristics in music, it is not hard to imagine music as therefore already primed to constitute itself in spatial terms and constitute its landscapes therefore as territorial paths. Music’s very harmonics encode each note with a thousand more, so space is inherent within the sound of music, as we have seen in the intervals of Copland’s music. Its hills are very much alive, as it were (or rather, it is very much alive with hills).

Up on the Roof There is an abiding irony in our perspective from above all of this, watching from on high and homing in on the

city laid out below us. In the act of stepping away from our subject to grasp its entirety, we distance ourselves—risk losing, even—what it is we wish to observe. For all their subjective and partial indulgence, at least the immersive approaches of Bannon and Quinn maintain connection. Yet these different approaches to, different perspectives on, knowing the city each have their flaws. Strangely, in none of our conceptualizations of the city have we managed to capture the actual thing: the conceived space or the Page 186 →concept-city or the distanced view is alienating; the perceived space of the experienced city in the immersive encounter is partial; and the lived space or the mythic city of the representation is fanciful. The quintessential phenomenological state of knowing the city is therefore trapped dialectically between a being in (dwelling through) and a being without (observing)—surely a metaphor and extension of the proto-Lacanian relationship of ourselves with (and without) our selves. This is significant, because to know the city is also to know ourselves, and without a grasp of our environment, our grasp of self is debilitating. That we seek to fix the city is therefore no surprise, and just as we might wish to pin down a piece of paper to prevent it from blowing away when we step back from it, the quest to “fix” our cities must be an understandable, socializing, and legitimizing act. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the “songlines” metaphor, one that might allow us to read music “spatially” like the interweaving paths of the urban ballet, is the fact that it seems to offer us both the holistic perspective of distance and the immersive experience of dwelling through. Metaphorically, the aural vantage point of the spectator in the theater is like the visual vantage point of de Certeau on top of his tower: we view (hear) the whole, and the ballet therefore emerges in its entirety before our eyes (ears). At the same time, the music washes over us, immersing us within the ballet, offering us the proximity of Bannon and Quinn. The way the paths (voices) intertwine can be discerned (from above), but the way the whole suffuses us (from within) becomes equally formative to the meaning, mood, and character of the music. The space the music molds in this iteration—in which we sit above with the ballet washing over us within—becomes tangible: the city in sound. In mapping the whole in manuscript we even confound de Certeau’s fears about transforming action into legibility. No more is this a “relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection”;44 we create in this representation the key to unlock so much more understanding of the space than even walking through it might allow. Now we can restage the ballet; now we can turn back time and replay the warp and weft, understanding the nuances of the patterns and through this understanding enabling the form to spring into life. When Nicely walks his path through the street of this city (“I got the horse right here”), he will be followed moments later by Benny (“I’m picking Valentine”) and later still by Rusty (“But look at Epitaph ”).45 Every time.

A Gang That Owns the Streets The distance in that opening sequence from West Side Story—between “the cool planner’s rational aerial eye and the ground bound, hot-headed savagePage 187 → boys”46—is made all the more pronounced, as Sarah Luria observes, because the montage is “marked by silence,”47 intensifying a sense of alienation that then becomes the dramaturgical landscape of the film. West Side Story is a show steeped in alienation, of course; yet as well as this, it is also—fundamentally—a story about belonging: belonging to a gang, belonging in the city, belonging to each other. “With a gang you walk in twos, threes, fours,” is how the Jet leader Riff puts it;48 and when we see the gang together during the early playground scenes, this is indeed how they move, a physical gesture of belonging that is magnified in the choreography of their bodies through the streets. “We always walk tall,” boasts the gang; “We’re Jets! .В .В .В The greatest!”49 In this way, alienation and belonging—the two motors affecting the psychologies of the gangs—are reflected in the opening sequence’s distanced observation of the city and the choreography’s material integration of individuals within its ecology.50 In the streets the Jets’ expression becomes heightened. Though they “walk tall” as a gang, each member peels off momentarily to reorder the gang’s formation. The movement of the gang is therefore fluid, though its path less so. Down one side of the street it moves (see figure 42); (1), then at right angles across the road before turning back on itself to head up the street on the other side. It veers diagonally off the pavement at a sharp angle, and into the middle of the road where the word “Jets” has been scrawled. Back, diagonally, to the pavement, where the gang encounters Bernardo. Here the gang breaks, and we see the first real moment of

antagonism. While most of the gang circles Bernardo and continues up the street (2), two Jets follow him across the road and intimidate him center stage, as it were. This whole sequence has taken place in the same location, asserting subliminally a sort of constancy to the threat of the gang. Though we don’t perhaps notice on first viewing the path of the gang’s movement, on inspection it makes little rational sense, doubling back on itself as it does as if the Jets are walking the perimeter of their territory. However, in this sequence that territory is at least coherent: the domain of a single street. Their challenging of Bernardo announces a new phase in the action, in which the gang is dispersed; and so too is their path. Over a series of short chase vignettes, we see Jets and Sharks bait each other in different parts of the neighborhood. The scenes are erratic, and like the gang members, we can’t predict what will be metaphorically around the next corner. Both gangs seem to own patches of the territory, but neither can claim authoritative right. It’s an impression of chaos that is magnified by the jerky angularity of the music and the spatial illogic of the territory. Cutting from one angle to another, the film editing juxtaposes unconnected streets, creating the Page 188 →impression of fracture. For several short scenes the gangs lose control, and the way the camera’s eye confuses our understanding of the geography adds to that sense of haphazard dislocation. With a clever cut from one group gesture of the Jets to another, the action moves back to the playground, sometime later. They are playing basketball, and once more in control—working cohesively as a group, their turf defined once again by the wire fences. Now there are eleven Jets. They travel with the basketball up the court (see figure 43; (1), the flow of the game determining their journey left and right through the space. Suddenly, one Jet passes the ball and it is caught by Bernardo, blocking the court with his gaggle of Sharks. No one speaks, but the ball is passed back and a signal is understood: this game is over. Jets and Sharks depart separately (2). But stragglers remain, and one Jet—Action—picks a fight with his counterpart, at first tripping him, then goading him, then scrapping in a series of fades (3). Others are called, and the gangs quickly return (4) to stage an all-out fight within the territory of the playground. The path of Action’s journey is interesting in this scene: an angular, jarring route that again doubles back on itself as he fights with the Shark. These jerky movements suit his hotheaded character, mimicking the jerky vocabulary we hear later in the scene: “Chung chung! / Cracko, jacko! / Riga diga dum! / Pam pam!”51 And as the gangs reappear, this quality is repeated, magnified, as the paths of the gangs in and around the playground veer jerkily back and forth through the fight. Finally, a moment of stillness (figure 44). Baby John is discovered, daubing graffiti on a wall: “Sharks stink.” But he has chosen a dead-end alley where he can be trapped and cornered by the Sharks themselves. He runs, in a panic (1), but this time in one smooth, graceful arc: out of the alley, through an adjacent yard, out onto the street and then curving back toward home, into the playground. Only here is the trajectory of his flight impeded, though unlike Action, Baby John simply diverts the path of his escape, once, twice, and then—with nowhere further to turn—into the clutches of the Puerto Rican gang. “Jets!” he cries, as they nick his ear with a blade. The gangs emerge from every direction (2), until finally they are quietened by the cops (3). What do we learn from this exercise? I think it takes us back to the ideas of Kevin Lynch that I noted in our first walking tour, about how we comprehend our urban environment through fragmenting “one unbroken problem” into more discernible “localities.”52 In terms of the city, this is explained by Lynch in the way we distinguish “paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks.”53 The playground in this sequence (and for the Jets more generally throughout this drama) is just such a node—more precisely,Page 189 → a core “concentration node”—which he describes as “the condensation of some use or physical character, as a street-corner hangout or an enclosed square,”54 “the focus and epitome of a district, over which their influence radiates and of which they stand as a symbol.”55 This much is evident from the basic dramaturgy of West Side Story, though I think it is interesting to overlay this fragmentary analysis of the city onto the form of the music to see how that also enables us to comprehend what otherwise might be “one unbroken problem.” Figure 42. Motion paths traveled by the Jets in the street sequence of West Side Story’s “Prologue.” Already this analysis has been focusing on a single musical excerpt from the whole, the “Prologue,” representing (in the film) approximately eight and a half minutes of the narrative, from the first shot of the

playground to the breaking up of the fight by Krupke and Schrank. In this sense one trick of form is clearly evidenced as a way of breaking up a seamless monotony of information into manageable chunks; Lynch’s “paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks” find parallels in the songs, scenes, acts, vignettes, and moments into which we separate a play or film. Some musicals, it is fair to say, go little further than this in their composition, tacking short-form song units to scenes to allow our journey through the form of the piece to be simple and linear. For these musicals, there is little choice for our journey, guided as on a scenic fairground ride on a particular path revealingPage 190 → one vignette after another. However, most commentators would acknowledge the greater complexity of West Side Story, written in score form, whose motifs recur and reflect, whose ideas develop and interweave, and whose journey for the audience is one that conceptually offers choices: to stop and absorb, to look left or right, to separate from the group or to look back to from whence you came. In this sort of show the short-form units are also more complex—less likely to consist of simple verse-chorus models that stand alone with no relation to the whole. The “Prologue” is a clear example of a complex number. “At every instant,” Lynch reminds us, “there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear.”56 Its “legibility”—the way we understand it, and moreover, the way that understanding develops and grows over time and with subsequent encounters—is therefore both a challenge and a delight. Figure 43. Motion paths traveled by the Jets in the basketball court sequence of West Side Story’s “Prologue.” The “Prologue” can of course be considered purely from a musical perspective, as various scholars have shown.57 For Joseph P. Swain, the “Prologue” establishes “not only the significant melodic and rhythmic elements for the play, but also the significant harmonic procedures and pitchesВ .В .В . which will unify the musical numbers.”58 The composition of the whole number can be seen in relation to these elements, and on the musical score59 we can identify different musical sections that we then hear in performance. In the exposition the two main themes are introduced: the swing motif Page 191 →(“the Jets are in gear,” mm. 11–18) that will reappear in “The Jet Song,” and the infamous “hate” motif (mm. 41–43).60 Each of these is introduced alongside other associated material: the Jet theme is overlaid with the counterpoint of another syncopated, laid-back theme (mm. 22–33) and later a second laconic theme evoking flight (mm. 101–19); the “hate” motif is accompanied by recurring and gradually intensifying percussive eruptions, and in other incarnations of the music, it also becomes extended to become a brooding figure in the low brass that anticipates both “Somewhere” (“There’s a placeВ .В .В .”) and “I Have a Love” (“I love himВ .В .В .”). The development section begins with a piu mosso at measure 140, and builds to the general pause in measure 227; finally, the denouement revives several of these themes before the police whistle shrieks to bring the mounting conflict to an end. The “symphonic organization” of the score,61 weaving these themes together contrapuntally and at times as a fugue, presents us with three discernible sections within which the thematic voices jostle. Insomuch as musical form is dramaturgical, the tripartite structure offers an escalation of the conflict between Jets and Sharks. Figure 44. Motion paths traveled by Baby John and the gangs in the final sequence of West Side Story’s “Prologue.” On the other hand, looking at the “Prologue” through the cartographical handling of territory in the film provides us with a somewhat different structure that dialogues with the music, intensifying the dramaturgy and establishing significant character features of the Jets and their relationship with their environment. This cartographical reading, I would suggest, createsPage 192 → a six-part structure—rather than threepart—which emphasizes the “core” of the playground as both a place of safety for the Jets and the site of greatest conflict: 1. Playground 2. Street 3. Lost in wider area 4. Playground 5. Lost in wider area

6. Playground. All three playground sections present the Jets as a unified team whose number increases at each new encounter (from seven to eleven to numerous). In the first, their unity is barely questioned; in the second, the Sharks invade; in the third, the Sharks initiate an attack, and the Jets’ cohesion is only apparent as they come to Baby John’s assistance. Beyond the playground, the organization of the Jets as a cohesive group is called into question; they are less assured and work in smaller groups. To begin with, we see them in the street just beyond the playground, where their authority is still secure. Yet even here, venturing out of their safe haven splits the pack. Once this happens and the gang moves further afield, their integrity is questioned in a number of ways: first, the camera begins to divide its loyalties, focusing on the Sharks as much as the Jets and sometimes staying with them for a significant period of screen time; second, the Jets during this section are seen not in the safety of a whole pack but vulnerable, only in small groups (though sometimes they encounter the rest of the gang); third, the camera and editing resist any sense of geographical coherence, jumping erratically from street to street and making of the cartographical footprint a confused jumble. In these sections there is the sense that the Jets have strayed into unfamiliar territory, and that they no longer have the security of their patch or the authority of their control. Of course, elements in the music emphasize this reading, such as the recapitulation/denouement, which reflects well the final section of the cartographical reading, the final “Playground” sequence. Nevertheless, it is perhaps more appropriate to see the music dialoguing with the Jets as they reconnoiter the area and then retrench to their fenced enclosure. To Auster’s narrator, “New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps”;62 within this labyrinth, as we have seen, countless journeys create the texture of space and place, and although many of these journeys may have been made with functional rather than expressive intent, their cumulativePage 193 → inscription seems to give the city its expressive if not its architectural mass. In de Certeau’s words, “The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces.”63 If the mapping of a city through cartography and the tracing of a path through surveillance are acts with particular objectives, the framing of both city and path through performance is different still. Of course, performance does not actually transport these real-life paths to the stage (though it is certainly possible to see these real-life perambulations as performance);64 it stages stylized simulations of them for aesthetic attraction. It does this in two ways: first, in terms of choreographing actual street scenes that emulate real life; second, by framing the activities of a set of people in a spatial environment throughout the course of a narrative. The document created by Quinn—the map of Stillman’s journey—does offer a reasonable (and familiar) encoding of the walk, one that at least maps the direction of its trajectory and the footprint of its coverage. On the other hand, in calcifying the embodied walk into the disembodied record of a notated document, Quinn’s mapping produces what Mike Crang calls “a cadaverous geography of traces of actions, rather than the beat of live footfalls.”65 This is not the only possible encoding of the walk, by any means; other strategies could be employed, each fixing different qualities or features of the walk into posterity. One alternative strategy might be even more bodily; in reporting back to us the surveillance of his subject, Quinn could choose to take us on the same walk as Stillman, to reenact spatially the trajectory of his path and thereby give us an experiential (semi)understanding of the walk’s qualities. While this logic of surveillance has offered interesting new approaches for performance companies interested in our relationship with space (Blast Theory, Gob Squad, etc.), it is a wholly different, more Foucauldian logic that has captured (in many meanings of the word) societies throughout the world. Thus as our real-time paths are mapped digitally on millions of CCTV memory cards to create a virtual geography of landscape usage, our understandings of those very urban landscapes are formed in part—and especially in the case of a city such as New York—by the projected mediatization of the city across global boundaries. The next walk is a long one. We may get our feet wet. Page 194 → Figure 45. The sixth stimulus: the Twin Towers. Skyline of New York City from New Jersey, dominated by the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com.

Page 195 →

Walk Six: So Great They Named It Twice From the Twin Towers to New York, New York, and from an outside observer to a couple from the hood. With two stabs of brutal simplicity, New York announced its rhetoric to the world: Tower A and Tower B went up, twin exclamations defining the new world economy of neoliberal capitalism; two towers to grace the city with two names: “New York, New York” (figure 45). The World Trade Center towers, which opened on April 4, 1973, became two of the most iconic features of New York in the final decades of the twentieth century, competing with the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building as quintessential symbols of New York. Both working office blocks and tourist attractions, the towers welcomed around fifty thousand employees and eighty thousand visitors daily. The “Top of the World” observation deck on the 110th story of the South Tower commanded unique views over New York and the surrounding areas. During their short life-span they became symbols of everything America claimed to be (great, powerful, successful) and perhaps many things it didn’t (ugly, greedy, hubristic). Their scale as architectural edifices and engineering accomplishments invited superlatives and hyperbole, attracting both admiration and animosity from within and without the city. It was from that perspective—without the city—that they were most visible and most iconic, defining the skyline as that of New York. “Even viewed from a great distance,” waxes Eric Darton in his “biography” of the towers, Divided We Stand, “the twin pylons of the World Trade Center indisputably dominate the skyline of metropolitan New York.”1 Driving in on the New Jersey Turnpike as he describes in his book, one found them unmistakable. Up close, in the canyons of the downtown streets, they did a disappearing trick to blend in with the other looming monoliths of the metropolis. But at this point, still in the twentieth century, Darton was confident that they would reappear once he drove back home, when he was far enough from the city to get them in his sights: “Most likely we will not Page 196 →register the image of the towers again until they are framed in our rearview mirror,”2 he observes, reducing these extraordinary giants of technical engineering to just a couple of inches in height, where they dangle comfortingly like tourist trinkets or aromatic air-freshening Christmas trees. This walk is going to base its viewpoint outside of New York, from where we can view it at a distance. It bears up well to this change in perspective; indeed, like the Twin Towers, we might say that New York is more visible from afar. It certainly sells itself well in its self-promotion, its images, and its icons; and as its songs travel, they too take with them a little bit (or perhaps a lot) of the city they articulate.

Twin Towers The concept of building a World Trade Center in New York had been around since the 1920s, though it really began as a postwar project in 1946 and even then took decades and the right political conditions to get off the ground. Darton pinpoints a crucial “World Trade Center moment” in 1958, when favorable circumstances helped the project gain momentum. The impetus came from David Rockefeller, youngest son of the Rockefeller dynasty, who was swiftly working his way up to becoming chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank. During the 1950s he was appointed chair of the committee responsible for overseeing the construction of the new Chase building; the committee selected Wall Street as its location, precipitating a renewal of interest in Lower Manhattan as a viable business district. By this time, Lower Manhattan had again become cluttered with buildings and amenities associated with manufacturing and the port. Although one of the virtues of Manhattan as a location was its easy access from the sea, the narrow geography of the island had created a bottleneck. It was generally greed that the infrastructure of the port was an impediment to development, but resolving that dilemma was going to cause major upheaval. The Chase decision to relocate into the downtown area signaled a confidence in regenerating Lower Manhattan, which

was consolidated when Rockefeller formed the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association. “David mobilized the downtown business elite around a high-profile strategy for redeveloping the entire district in the image of international corporate modernity.”3 With the sympathetic Robert F. Wagner appointed as mayor of New York in 1957 and Rockefeller’s brother Nelson elected governor of New York State in 1958, the momentum could be seized. “In the World Trade Center moment, it became possiblePage 197 → to further dispense manufacturing from downtown, move what remained of New York’s port to New Jersey and bury Lower Manhattan’s rundown piers under virgin real estate.”4 The regeneration of Lower Manhattan would of course—it was judged—bring long-term benefits to the area, not only in terms of finance but also in social and community improvement. Nevertheless, just as the Upper West Side regeneration had involved problematic decisions and galvanized many detractors, there was significant opposition to what could be seen as a heavy-handed obliteration of a working industrial zone. “Urban renewal—the bulldozer approach—had become fashionable in the 1950s,” writes Anthony W. Robins,5 and in early plans for the project, drawn up by the architectural consultants Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the destruction was considerable: “Some 20 blocks of old low-scale buildings along each riverfront would be levelled, on the west from Canal to Cortland Street, and on the East from the Brooklyn Bridge to Battery Park.В .В .В . Many narrow streets would be closed off to make superblocks, and others would be widened for traffic loops.”6 As plans were discussed and overall financial responsibility for the project was accepted by Austin Tobin of the Port Authority (it was considered too inefficient to be a private enterprise), the scale of demolition was reduced and shifted to a particular area on the cheaper, west side of the island. Even so, opposition from local businesses was huge: “[It was] estimated that fourteen hundred commercial enterprises doing an annual business volume of $300 million and employing about thirty thousand persons would be scattered from the area,”7 writes Leonard Ruchelman. Nevertheless, plans did proceed, slowly: in 1962 approval in principle was granted by the authorities of New York and New Jersey, and in June 1967 formal approval was granted for the construction of the World Trade Center to begin. The recruitment of Japanese American architect Minoru Yamasaki took everyone by surprise. He had very little experience of tall building projects, and none whatsoever in New York. But Tobin “admired efficiency and skilful engineering over high-art architecture.”8 The brief was simple: apart from providing ten million square feet of office space, the most important consideration was “that this building be visible and identifiable throughout the world.”9 Indeed, as James Glanz and Eric Lipton tell the story, international impact—the view from without—was the fundamental requirement of the project. They dramatize this as one of a series of events calculated to announce American imperial might to the world: “President Kennedy is going to put a man on the moon,” they voice in one conversation; “You’re going to figure out a way to build me the tallest buildings in the world.”10 Page 198 →For Yamasaki, function dictated form. He needed to provide a lot of office space, though he felt strongly that the building or buildings should be surrounded by wide pedestrian areas to permit light and air. This had become a feature of more recent skyscraper design in New York, starting with Chase Manhattan’s signature building completed in 1961. The zoning laws still stood, but architects now preferred to work with footprints far larger than their structural designs. “Encouraged by new height and bulk provisions, the dense, stepped clusters of midtown and the financial district soon began giving way to a transfigured urban landscape: tall towers set in vast paved plazas,”11 evoking the Corbusier designs. Over one hundred alternative designs with multiple buildings of shorter stature were considered, and even one giant tower of 150 stories; but in the end the twin tower design was taken up. The statistics speak for themselves: each tower rose 110 stories and 1,350 feet into the sky; 1,100 companies rented offices; 230 elevators transported people inside the buildings; three Metro stations provided access to the site. The scale was gigantic: “Even the skyscrapers surrounding these twins seem paltry by comparison,”12 suggests Darton. But with such impressive edifices came criticism: “They were brutal and overbearing, designed on the scale of monuments to some Ozymandias,”13 writes Marshall Berman. Nevertheless, quite literally, they announced in concrete terms America’s preeminence in world trade.

Actually, the claims made for the World Trade Center were far more fanciful than that. Yamasaki suggested that not only did his design “symbolize the importance of world trade to this country and its major metropolis,” but also that it stood as “a physical expression of the universal effort of men to achieve world peace.”14 Quite how this connection was made is unclear, Yamasaki’s words ringing about as hollowly as the inner atriums of his twin towers, whose design enabled the buildings to stand without internal supporting pillars. Still, as symbols they did indeed reflect such American hyperbole, and broadcast the idea that America was the capital of the free world. “The conflation of world trade and world peace, and the faith that commerce could bring people together, is the central fallacy of Yamasaki’s premise,” suggests Patricia Morton; “but this was a common misconception of American Cold War ideology.”15 All the same, these buildings, in Yamasaki’s words, “had a bigger purpose than just to provide room for tenants,”16 even if that purpose was hardly “world peace.” These were symbolic statements: testimonials to America’s supremacy in the world order; forceful statements of achieving the impossible; visible investments in finance’s future; confident emblems Page 199 →of success—assertions of existing success claimed by Manhattan, America, and capitalism; and alluring promises of future success for anyone willing to take the ride. Like never before, New York began to see itself as a global city, facing the rest of the world with “an outward-turned, supremely extrusive power.”17 The Twin Towers “took over the skyline, staking their claim not only as an iconic image of the world, but as the iconic image of what a modern city should aspire to be: the biggest, the mightiest, the imperial center.”18

Outside Inside New York is nothing if not an outsiders’ city. Indeed, as Peter Lehman and William Luhr remark, “An old clichГ© about the city is that the quintessential New Yorkers come from out of town.”19 That may seem a strange comment, and will raise the eyebrows of those who were born or grew up in the city. But somewhere along the line, New York—no, let’s be clear: Manhattan—sold out to the world. Of course, it is perfectly located to become its own promotional bit of window dressing, with its unbeatable view from the bay; and over the last 150 years, it has worked that view. The view is unmistakable, and though other cities may have signature buildings or features that make them identifiable (Sydney with its opera house, Paris with its tower, Rio with its statue), there is no other city in the world whose outside countenance makes it so instantly recognizable, with or without the Twin Towers. This is New York: and the Statue of Liberty’s beacon hand is just a synecdoche for the much bigger beacon of New York charisma that attracts us, bewitches us, and lures us. This is certainly a view that beckons, and whether it is taken in by sea or by air—or on foot—that first glimpse inspires a thrill every time. The feeling has been put into words in countless rhapsodic accounts: sailing in, Walt Whitman described the “tall topt, ship-hemm’d, modern, American, yet strangely oriental, V-shaped Manhattan”;20 years later Art Garfunkel evoked the approach by air: “New York, to that tall skyline I come, / flyin’ in from London to your door.”21 Mark Kingwell also arrives by plane: “Your A320 skims into La Guardia from across the Hudson River Valley.В .В .В . The approach is over bay water.В .В .В . Off to the right—your view if you are lucky enough to be sitting on the right—floats the undulating steel and stone mesa of Manhattan.”22 Mario Maffi, meanwhile, gets his fix of the feeling in sailing back into Manhattan from a trip to Staten Island: “The return trip resuscitates something of the original emotions experienced upon вЂarriving in New York,’ somethingPage 200 → that is very much part of American culture (and New York’s culture in particular).”23 That perspective, then—taking in the whole of Manhattan in one view—is something that generates meaning about New York; and it is necessarily a view from outside. It’s an outsiders’ city in other ways, too, from its deeply entrenched psyche of immigration to its unshakable devotion to tourism. Indeed, true New Yorkers must inevitably be outsiders—even everyone inside comes from without. Yet the distinction between being an insider and being an outsider—between knowing the city from within and recognizing the city from without—is strong, and bolstered by an equally strong rhetoric of belonging and ownership. This happens in other world cities, for sure; places where association builds kudos and to belong is a symbol of status itself. Like many clubs, Club New Yorker is an aspirational one to join. This is a distinction that Richard Blake makes in choosing to focus his book Street Smart—a film study—on four directors who are native New Yorkers, who “bear the marks of the city in their bones”24 (Sidney

Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee). “New York leaves an indelible impression on the artists that in turn leaves its mark on their films,”25 he suggests, making an argument not unlike my own when I have turned to those “great urban theorists” Bernstein, Comden, and Green to explore the musical articulation of New York through the work of native New Yorkers. Their native identity, Blake would suggest, gives them an authenticity. Conversely, the outsider’s view can only be that of a tourist, seeing things superficially, in broad brushstrokes and capturing New York only through first impressions. Here, Blake is critical of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s writings about the city because he was not a New Yorker.26 For him, Baudrillard’s visions of New York “produced a caricature, a cartoon, filled with thought-provoking social analysis, but a picture few native New Yorkers would recognize as their home.”27 For Blake, then, Baudrillard’s “distance” from the city divests him of the right to reduce it to so many iconic snapshots and cinematic references. Murray Pomerance is a little more nuanced in distinguishing the insider’s knowledge from the outsider’s knowledge of New York: “For the tourist,” he writes, “each moment in New York is, at least potentially, a sparkling treasure, an immensity of experience.” On the other hand, “For the New Yorker, there is a comforting mundanity to everyday life, a predictability and a delicious smallness.”28 For Pomerance, each of these ways of grasping the city has its merits. The “delicious smallness” is something we see in the work of insiders—it is something I have written about elsewhere in terms of the view of native New Yorkers Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Page 201 →Hart, for example, whose first hit “Manhattan” captured a charming miniature of New York. This song does not present the “monolithic New York”29 that we see (and have seen) in some other articulations of the city, but the intimate and personal view of the “familiar but newly surprising.”30 Ironically, these native New Yorkers in “Manhattan” show us a sort of tourist itinerary, a guided walking tour around their city in which they present those familiar but surprising sights. Not for them the Statue of Liberty or Times Square, however (nor the Empire State Building or Twin Towers, neither of which existed); they take us to less likely places—the zoo, Greenwich Village, the Bowling Green. The city is charming, even if they do acknowledge the unsavory downtown smells and the clamor of the traffic. And musically, too, there is an intimacy to “Manhattan,” from the very first chromatic turn of the refrain. Tantalizingly, Rodgers delays any resolution to the tonic until the very end of the chorus, leaning instead sensuously on the leading note or the supertonic to create that casual, comfortable charm. Meanwhile, Bernstein, Comden, and Green show us that other vista: the “sparkling treasure, [the] immensity of experience” that is the tourist view; three tourists with just “one day here and not another minute to see the famous sights.”31 In the film version of On The Town particularly, writes Bukatman, the immensity of their experience is magnified: “The вЂtypical’ day becomes exceptional because it is enshrined through the вЂadventure of perception’ that is the cinema”:32 “The jubilant explosion of sailors from the quiescent ship is carried forward by the bold montage of city streets and sites. This is not any day, or the everyday, but a singular day.”33 Film is well set up to magnify such experiences: “Onscreen everything is treasure, ” suggests Pomerance, while “The deliciousness of the smallness, its familiarity, cannot be shown.” This is an opinion that no doubt some would contest, though Pomerance’s accompanying comment is intriguing: “Every screen view of New York is therefore a view from the outside.”34 This is an interesting tension. On the one hand we can see in the articulations of New York made by native New Yorkers that their work has an integrity, a substance that carries a great deal of weight in cultural terms; on the other hand, the view from outside with which we are perhaps most often presented is what makes the great city recognizably great. There is also a third perspective from a different group of people. Neither insiders nor outsiders, those on the waiting list for Club New Yorker are an extended community just resident temporarily, familiar with the city and perhaps working in it for a period before moving on; or repatriated from other countries but not yet assimilated. For them—and Kingwell feels himself one of these—the attachment to New York is “a deeper but still temporary acquaintance,Page 202 → that space somewhere between tourism and residency when you feel the emotions of a love affair you know must end.”35 His description is evocative and speaks of the threshold experiences of any liminal passage during which the anticipations or anxieties viewed from the outside become the real, lived experiences of within. For those acculturating to New York, some of its external lures become

companions—buildings become familiar, areas become stamping grounds—and the map of the city becomes one that is known, embodied, daily practiced as part of a routine. “Like all residents of New York, however short term, I prided myself on my mastery of the city’s geography. It goes without saying that I never asked for directions or carried a map.”36 Mario Maffi is another outsider-insider who has gained membership of the club (“He is no longer вЂan outsider,’” according to New York historian George J. Lankevich).37 New York: An Outsider’s Inside View brings the reader right into the heart of New York. With breathless enthusiasm he offers a whole selection of walks in and around Manhattan, “ways to feel it as a living organism, pulsing, an organism that is not simply cloned from media images.”38 Maffi’s prose is so detailed, so vital, so laced with “delicious smallness” that you feel you can smell and taste the vibrancy of the streets along which he travels. As an insider, he knows those special places that defy expectation in New York: the peaceful corner, the tranquil hideaway, the personal connections, the friendly street. But as an outsider he still inhabits the thrill of discovery. He describes the privileged viewpoints of some of the journeys he goes on as “like witnessing a theatrical performance from backstage, awestruck.”39 The journey from being an outsider to becoming an insider, the reterritorialization that reenacts the emotional journey of the immigrant, is a long process. Maffi’s transition has taken many years (he first arrived in New York in 1975). Yet one of the abiding mythologies of American culture is that you can become all-American, that you can, metaphorically, work your way up a ladder to belong: witness the Russian-born Israel Baline, arriving at the tip of Manhattan in 1892 to become “the most American of great popular song composers.”40 That is a journey announced in the rhetoric of America, and—though it wears the costume of rags-to-riches—it is a journey etched into the map of Manhattan and sung in its many songs. But that journey from outsider to insider is an emotional transition for those repatriating from their countries of origin. One fictitious ex-patriot is Emma, the singular London-born heroine of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tell Me on a Sunday (1980). At first anonymous (she was never given a name when the show premiered in London), Emma settles in New York for work, and her experiences throw an interesting Page 203 →slant on the idea of the insider /outsider. Not least this is because the show went through its own acculturation process in traveling to New York from London, then acclimatizing, Americanizing, and assimilating. In particular, by the time it opened on Broadway (in 1985), the lyrics of the original songs by Lloyd Webber and Don Black had been significantly altered by New Yorker Richard Maltby Jr. When Emma first arrives, she is full of excitement, and thrilled to be living in the city: I can’t quite believe it, I’m actually here, The one place on earth I want to be. New York is just short of perfection they say. The one thing it lacks is me.41 But the reterritorialization involves a necessary adjustment, also deterritorializing from her former life. Frustrated by feelings of isolation and not yet feeling a part of the club (in a motif that recurs in images of New York: “I’ve never been so lonelyВ / Loneliness must be the worst feeling of all”), she rejects the tokens of the city’s allure, scoffing in the song “I Love New York” at the touristy trinkets that she now sees as kitsch. This is the becoming–New Yorker in Emma, who is distancing herself from any association with the tourist world, recalling with a flush of shame how those same trinkets previously inspired her:

I love New York, I love New York, I love New York The words you see On coffee cups, on shirts and hats, on lollipops And baseball bats, on pens and walls, on skates and cars In libraries and singles bars On badges, flags Tattooed on skin Oh, New York.42 On Broadway, the song was changed, adding a layer and making her transition a little more complex. Emma now no longer simply distances herself, but also at the same time begins to feel more at home; she doesn’t just rail at the superficial tourists’ Manhattan, but recognizes some of the “delicious smallness”43 of the insider’s New York: Page 204 →I love New York, I love New York I love the heat, I love the cars, I love the HГ¤agen-Dazs, the Sunday Times, The phones that work, the single bars, The TV shows that play all night.44 The features Maltby comes up with—presumably seen as more authentic references for an ex-pat living in Manhattan—are still somewhat hackneyed; this is a modest concession to the authenticity of the character. Nevertheless, perhaps in explanation of this, her loneliness is moderated by a heartfelt corollary: What does it take till you feel you belong here, Till this place shines on your face?45 With a certain desperation, Emma wears her heart on her sleeve: “Wonder if I have become a New Yorker, ” she sings; “N. Y. C. / Seems home to me.” But her enthusiasm is dissipated by the brusque putdown of her New York girl friend: Viv says I’ll never be a New Yorker. I don’t care, I like this air.46 Frankly, Emma does not sound like a New Yorker—and like the telltale characteristics of the “Englishman in New York,”47 it is not just in her accent that she belies her origins. Emma sings with none of that Broadway rhythm or melody; not a hint of the two-step and very little of the gapped scale; this is a white, middle-class English rose—the musical voice, after all, of the Kensington-born son of an English classical composer—and to paraphrase Cole Porter’s decidedly tongue-in-cheek words, neither he (Lloyd Webber) nor she (Emma)

sounds the slightest bit Jewish.48 By 2003 when the show was revived in London, “I Love New York” had been removed entirely. These views of New York from inside are to varying degrees images of intimacy and belonging. To see New York from outside, on the other hand is inevitably to see the abstraction (the drawing away: ab = away; trahere = to drag). And even taking a step backward to try to capture a sense of the city in some artistic way—in images, in music, in patterns—is to deal in the abstract. As Douglas Tallack discusses, the turn-of-the-century fascination with trying to capture the city in its entirety—somehow to take possession of it or Page 205 →own it with a sense of belonging—necessarily provoked a view of the city which abstracted it. We have discussed a number of these views—the bird’s-eye views, the Randel Plan, the skyline—and there is therefore no surprise that the World Trade Center contributed and reiterated the sense of the city as something abstract, viewed (and only viewable) from a distance. But there is a different way of thinking about this distance, which de Certeau’s godlike perspective from on top of the World Trade Center opens up; although an outside view, the view from afar, this view knows the city in a way that no one within its meanderings could possibly comprehend; that distance makes the outsider aware of the city from which the insider has become distracted. As de Certeau gazes over the city, he becomes aware of the magical, mythical value we ascribe to places, to parts of the city through which we dwell, and indeed, to the city. And it is this myth (or rather: the accumulation of these myths) that the city becomes. To de Certeau the names we give to places are significant, and not just because those are their labels;49 those become labels defining other qualities, other connotations. These names “detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define,” he writes, to create “a strange toponymy thatВ .В .В . flies high over the city like a foggy geography of вЂmeanings’ held in suspension.”50 “Times Square,” for example, represents far more than just that intersection, and far, far more than just the square housing the New York Times building; “Broadway” becomes far more than just the Heere Wight Wegh, that Wide Way which gives arterial access to trade. And “New York,” especially as “New York, New York,” becomes something even more. Indeed, the direction traveled when phrased like this—the direction of the chronological trajectory of the city’s meaning—is now an unfamiliar byway in our understanding of the city; to discover New York, that place which was so labeled, we must travel backward down the road of connotation to rediscover the new town christened “York”; the Duke of York’s new frontier outpost. Of course, this is clearly not how we view it, for New York now carries its myth on its sleeve, and projects it in the visible rhetoric of its performance: in those two stabs of brutal simplicity. They are like stars, de Certeau suggests, “directing itineraries” for our navigation of the city.51

Two of a Kind As if to mimic in its title the iconicity of the Twin Towers, one song in particular—another great cultural artifact from the 1970s, and one that is idiomatically an outsider’s song—conveyed the same: “New York, New Page 206 →York,” Kander and Ebb’s eponymous title song to the film by Martin Scorsese, said it all in just its name: two more forceful staccato stabs announcing supremacy to the world, and evoking the allure of the big city. Of course, the title of this song is a reference to the city and the state, New York, New York being comparable to Stamford, Connecticut, or Tucson, Arizona—and it is frequently referred to as a “love song to the city that never sleeps.”52 Coming at exactly the same cultural moment in the city’s evolution as the regeneration of downtown and the construction of the World Trade Center, the song “New York, New York” does far more and far less than reflect the city. It does far more because—more than being a song about New York—it has become a song about itself: this is “New York, New York” rather than New York, New York; it is Sinatra, Las Vegas, Liza Minnelli, big bands, maybe karaoke; but it is that song. On the other hand, it does far less than reflect the city because in fact it barely does that at all unless we are reminded of the association; this is a song describing a man’s decision to start afresh; sure, he plans to do this by moving to the city, but the only reference to New York in the lyrics (aside from the city’s name) is its allure. This is not that earlier “New York, New York,

” which does describe the city (“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”), or “Manhattan,” which has a New Yorker’s intimacy with the “Isle of Joy” (“And tell me what street / Compares with Mott Street / In July?”). “New York, New York” does not attempt any of this; it links to the city by mere reference and association. It is a song about the imagined city, the dream. The fact that it has become a song so synonymous with New York is a trick of the light. Like the Twin Towers, the double articulation of the title enacts Richard Schechner’s “twice-behaved behavior,” the same words repeated to perform themselves self-referentially. And that performativity is a fitting tribute to a city that is in a large way defined by performance, both in the centrality of Broadway to its identity and in the way that it performs itself on the world stage. “On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, ” de Certeau writes, “the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production.”53 More than this, asserts Baudrillard, “With the marvellous complicity of its entire population, New York acts out its own catastrophe as a stage play. And this is not an effect of its decadence but of its own power, to which there is, of course, no threat.”54 The most defining element of the Twin Towers—aside from their scale and prior to their unwitting complicity in the biggest terrorist atrocity of all time—was that they were twins and virtually identical. This is something that Baudrillard explored. “Why has the World Trade Center in New York got two towers?” he asked, noting that all of Manhattan’s other tall buildingsPage 207 → seemed to jostle shoulders in competition. And he noted the pattern that this earlier “competitive verticality” had created in the landscape of Manhattan: it was stepped, like its buildings, in “an architectural panorama that is the image of the capitalist system: a pyramidal jungle, every building on the offensive against every other.”55 Baudrillard conjured up this image, like Darton and those other outsiders, from a distance: “The system itself can be spotted in the famous image we have of New York on arriving by sea.” But with the Twin Towers, everything had changed; gone was the pyramid, the gapped scale, the impression of progress; in its place, the two forceful staccato stabs of a city announcing its authority to the world. Now, shoulder to shoulder rather than jostling in competition, the pattern had a different connotation: it spoke now of monopoly. “The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition,” he wrote; and extrapolating this into a metaphor itself, he interpreted this as “the end of all original reference,”56 as if New York no longer needed to compare itself with other cities; it was unique. Baudrillard’s comments are part of an extended fascination he has for America, all of which he sees as a simulacrum, constituted from the mediated images of the twentieth century and popular culture. “America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is the stuff of dreams too.”57 As Maffi confirms, “New York is essentially an image: the image of a metropolis.”58 Finding the “real” America (and for America read “New York”) is virtually impossible (and for Baudrillard, virtually inconceivable: who would want to find that?), though his conception of it is compelling. “It,” or what we view as “it,” is constructed from a patchwork of self-referential cultural references often stemming from the quintessentially American forms: a composite of aphorisms, movie scenes, and lyrics from film and popular music. Whether we think of the Midwest or the Deep South, cowboys or gangsters, city slickers or hicks from the sticks, there is always a prior signifier that points distractedly to another cultural reference instead of to the thing itself. And in all America (with perhaps the exceptions of Las Vegas or Hollywood), New York is the place whose signification is most deferred. A Frankenstein city, if you will. As Murray Pomerance suggests in his introduction to City That Never Sleeps (in which his focus is on film depictions of New York), New York here is not exactly a place, since we are looking at what it is onscreen. We are looking at an evanescent, but also a lingering, Page 208 →New York. That New York is an eidolon, surely—an image that is possessed of a phantasmatic, apparitional, haunting quality, and that rests out of history as a mark of aspiration, memory, and direct experience.59 Whether we see the city in Baudrillard’s terms (as simulacrum) or de Certeau’s (as myth), “the New York we write about,” suggests Pomerance, “is the New York of our screen dreams”—the New York

of “New York, New York.”

Start Spreading the News It is in this sense that the title of the song does far more and far less than create an association with the city; the name is “detached” from the place it labels and reassigned to a place of myth. Like the outsider becoming insider, it reterritorializes (only in reverse). There are two New Yorks: the real and the phantasm, the inside and the out, staring at each other and canceling each other out like the towers (“the end of representation”). And like Dr. Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, they are often confused, blurring into one singular entity that we blithely refer to as “New York” (or as “Frankenstein”). “The real New York City and filmic images of New YorkВ .В .В . become two sides of the same coin,” writes Blake; “We can’t have a film about New York without the real New York; and at least for people like Baudrillard, we can’t have the real New York without films about New York. The perceptual loop closes.”60 In a roundabout way, then, the song is “about” New York, New York, though not in the way it might at first appear to be. It’s a song that has been sung many times by many thousands of different people (including you and me, in all likelihood). Even in its original version, though, it already acted as a cipher. Here was a film by Martin Scorsese, who, like Woody Allen, has articulated New York in his output just as Gershwin or Bernstein have articulated it in song. The film starred Liza Minnelli—the original singer of the song, who had a modest hit with it—and Robert De Niro, both stars associated with New York and its mythologies of success. And of course the film has a title and plotline that are also linked with New York. Robert De Niro plays a saxophonist, picking up on a further trope of the city, though there is no hint—never was—of a saxophone in any version of “New York, New York”: this is a cabaret song with a trumpet sound. But it is assisted in its deferral of signification by its most celebrated and iconic performer, Frank Sinatra, whose personality is just as hyperreal as the song Page 209 →and the city. Even out of context, when Frank Sinatra wears a tuxedo and performs with a big band in a concert setting, the play of signifiers endlessly defers, always routing back to itself. It’s a song that looks backward—not defining or constructing the city like some of those early examples, and not discovering the city like the Bernstein, Comden, and Green “New York, New York”; this is a song that seems to turn back on the twentieth century and gaze along the road that has been traveled. That it was written in 1977 astonishes almost everyone: here is a 1930s strut and a 1950s arrangement; its protagonist the American everyman in one of Steinbeck’s tattered suits and vagabond shoes, heading out of rural Middle America and into the city. Throughout this book I have been associating the songs of New York with the idea of a map, though I have not yet followed the map of a song to discover the city. Let’s see how that works, taking the map of this song, and planning a route through it to help guide this man (figure 46). Perhaps we join the map where he states his aims, following trail 1 from the top right-hand corner. “I’m leaving today,” says the man (1), destined to follow countless thousands in heading for the bright lights and opportunity. He’s ill equipped in his tatty footwear (“these vagabond shoes”) (2), presumably walking or perhaps hitching to the city, and unfamiliar enough with it to have to pinpoint it by its state location as well as its city name: “New York, New York” (3). But doubtless he has heard the stories. New York is the beating heart of excitement (“a city that never sleeps”) (4), a far cry from the world with which he is familiar. He has a goal: to be successful, to “make it there” (5), though his ambition is vague and his trade unspecific. Is he a performer, destined for the Great White Way? Or is he a laborer with sights on construction? Either way he knows it will be a challenge: not for him the inevitable walk up Broadway to the bright lights of stardom. He knows that New York will test him (“if,” he qualifies: success is not certain) (6). Yet already he has learned knowledge of how he needs to operate—his song is laced with the syncopation of the Broadway rhythm (7) and the gapped scale of the Broadway melody (8). Perhaps some of his knowledge comes from a familiarity with what New York has passed on to him—he seems to know the legacy of “old New York” (9); and he’s familiar with that old adage that it is “the city that never sleeps” (10). Such knowledge will get him far; it might even make him “King of the Hill” (11). Though that, again, has a

naive, Old World charm. Anyway, he seems confident enough—and he gives us permission to tell the folks back home (12).

Page 210 →Of course this is just one route through the map of this particular song, this particular city. We might offer others, as Maffi does, alternative routes through the city (“From river to river and from port to port, from fish market [Fulton Fish Market] to meat market [Gansevoort Street], you can experience an aspect of Manhattan that repackaged maps can never give you”).61 So for example, we could travel on this map through the degrees of the diatonic scale (trail 2 from the top of figure 46); or from one personal pronoun to the next (trail 3). What do we learn about this song-city on these new perambulations? Well, look: in trail 2 the song inexorably rises through the scale, its median gradually getting higher (with a burst of speed midtown) until at the very end it peaks on the climax of the top octave—an articulation of the ladder up the island from arrival to achievement, perhaps? An aural path demarcating the man’s gradual climb to the top (figure 47)? And trail 3, the pronoun route: evenly spaced “I’s” throughout the song, emulating the solipsism of this personal quest (“I’m leaving today”; “I wanna be a part of it”; “I wanna wake up in a city”) until—finally!—he turns to confront the “you” of the city: “It’s up to you, New York, New York.” The route on which Sinatra leads us through this map has been well rehearsed; it is after all part of that myth. Perhaps that is why it seems to be a song from an earlier age. It may be an outsider’s view of the city—after all, he hasn’t yet left home; but it has wisdom in the way he cradles the iconicity of New York’s mythology, and his odyssey is founded on the legacy of that iconicity. As Baudrillard says, “The same mythical and analytic excitement that made us look towards those earlier societies today impels us to look in the direction of America.”62 And the realization hits us: this is a song we never heard for the first time; it has always been, constituted in our cultural memory and hardwired into our synapses from birth. In this respect it bears another similarity with New York, in the sense that it is something we already know. “People who have never even visited Manhattan feel confident that they are familiar not only with the landmarks but even more, with the social patterns and characters of the personalities that people the screen.”63 “New York, New York” articulates the city, then, but the city is already within us. In live performance Sinatra often preluded Kander and Ebb’s “New York, New York” with an excerpt from Bernstein, Comden, and Green’s “New York, New York,”64 playing these two songs with the same name against one another, two more twins bound together in a performance of the city. He starts the routine a cappella, casually throwing away the words to the Bernstein melody. As soon as he comes out with the first phrase Page 212 →“New York, New York,” the audience goes wild. Quite what provokes this response is unclear: it could be because they recognize that song (Bernstein, Comden, and Green), or it could be that in this small gesture to one song they pick up on that other (Kander and Ebb). Sinatra stops: “Wait a minute!” he cries, as if to correct them; but he shrugs and allows the applause to carry on. He starts again: “New York, New York’s a helluva town,” but he doesn’t sing the song, exactly; he just seems to rehearse its motifs, as if this is just a precursor. Out of the context of the story line, this song loses its specificity and its representation. It, too, is blind. Still, he plays with it: “The people ride in a hole in the ground,” he sings, adding a soft-shoe shuffle, fondly mocking a trope of the musical stage, and mocking the song too. He’s undermining this song (the Bernstein) to elevate the other (Kander and Ebb). The second refrain begins, and this time, he seems to place its significance more deliberately, pointing to the audience, and slowing down to present what is signaled as the main attraction. Now we hear the familiar intro to the Kander and Ebb number, and in forceful twin stabs, the trumpets stamp home the brash opening notes of the introduction: “Ba! Ba! (Bah-deda!)” (see figure 48)—twin towers of sound to accompany the double articulation of the World Trade Center and the title of this song as aural iterations of its hubristic 1970s confidence. Page 211 → Figure 46. Possible routes through the map of “New York, New York”: by narrative (trail 1), by note (trail 2), and by pronoun (trail 3). THEME FROM “NEW YORK, NEW YORK” Music by JOHN KANDER Words by FRED EBB. В© 1977 (Renewed) UNITED ARTISTS CORPORATION. All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI UNART CATALOG INC. (Publishing) and ALFRED MUSIC (Print). All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC. Figure 47. Graphic

representation of “New York, New York” rising through the scale. If the song and its performance trade in this collage of floating signifiers, they are not alone. Throughout the 1970s a slew of other New York songs pieced together rehashed images to articulate their visions of New York. These were no longer Broadway songs as such—no longer songs from the stages of New York, but instead songs from the new New York that had become, itself, a stage. The landscape had changed, after all; as the pyramid of the skyline bowed to the monopoly of the Twin Towers, and the Page 213 →steps of the architecture transformed into sheer cliffs of glass, so too the ubiquity of the Broadway voice receded, together with its articulation of that earlier period, the quintessentially American gapped scale. And onto the new rock-вЂn’roll concert stage of New York stepped the singer-songwriters: Bruce Springsteen with “New York City Serenade” (1973); Barry Manilow and “New York City Rhythm” (1975); Billy Joel with “New York State of Mind” (1976); and Simon and Garfunkel with various New York songs—“59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” (1966), “America” (1968), and “A Heart in New York” (1981). The titles themselves reveal the ongoing obsession musicians have had to articulate the city in song, and though it certainly can’t be said that these songs maintain the tropes of the Broadway New York songs from earlier years, there are features that bind this expressive canon together. True, they are all from rather different musical idioms—the rhythm and blues of Springsteen, the piano-based jazz ballad of Joel, the Latin-inspired pop of Manilow, and the country folk of Simon and Garfunkel; this in itself speaks volumes, testifying to the fact that New York (and America) is, in simplistic terms, a melting pot. Consider the trouble with that term, though: where the earlier expression of Broadway, New York, and America had sought a defining articulation of self-identity (a singular voice), the late twentieth century acknowledged a plethora of different voices, not a melting into one.65 Yet stronger than ever is the tension felt between the view from within and the view from without; a tension made all the more desperate by the slippage away from reality of the simulacrum-city. As if loosed from its moorings, Manhattan begins to float away freely into New York Bay. Various strategies are put into action to try to tether it: New Yorkers try to hold it in place with heartfelt recollections from their soul (“New York State of Mind”); outsiders try to block its escape with a mash-up of images from the films (“New York City Serenade”); poets go out of the city to consider the problem from without (“A Heart in New York”). “New York, ” sings Art Garfunkel, “like a scene from all those moviesВ / But you’re real enough to me.”66 There are still vestiges of the musical patterns we have encountered: both Manilow’s “New York City Rhythm” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song” revisit the extended syncopated motif we saw in “Broadway Rhythm,” associating it with rhythm and with “Feelin’ Groovy.” Some use of a gapped scale might also be evident, though this by now has dissipated idiomatically thanks to a greater wealth of cultural influences. In short, the singular articulation of New York is no longer apparent. On the other hand, a number of discernible scenarios are recurrent, Page 214 →constructing—or perhaps more likely recollecting—an imagery for the city. The motif of late-night melancholia, for example (Joel, Springsteen), has its provenance in earlier images from the Broadway songbook, as both Gabey in On the Town (1944) and Sam in Street Scene (1946) attest: “The crowds rush by, / A million faces pass before your eye, / Still it’s a lonely town,”67 sings Gabey. “Funny you can be so lonely / With all these folks around,”68 laments Sam. This is a familiar image of stillness in the metropolis, captured in iconic images such as that of Sinatra on the cover of his conceptual album In the Wee Small Hours (1955); it’s the “couple of deals before dawn” that Frank Loesser also depicts so evocatively in Guys and Dolls, when “the smell of the rain-washed pavement / comes up clean and fresh and cold / and the streetlamp light fills the gutter with gold.”69 Such images may be counterintuitive in a city like New York, yet they recur in our fascination with the city, as if to balance the usual play of excess. It’s a space and time associated with the “lonesome sound” of a jazz trumpet—and in The Band Wagon that is exactly the motif evoked. The “Girl Hunt” ballet opens to reveal Times Square after dark. The lighted windows of the Empire State Building and other skyscrapers tower over a quiet street, lit in the atmospheric blue of nighttime and textured with a touch of stage-smoke fog. A man saunters in: Rod Riley, PI. “The city was asleep,” his voice-over tells us; “Somewhere in an unfurnished room some guy was practising on a horn. It was a lonesome sound that crawled on my spine.”70 By the 1970s, Page 215 →the soundtrack to melancholy New York is voiced by the saxophone rather than the horn—ubiquitous in most of these songs and embodied in De Niro’s character from “New York, New York.” Figure 48. The twin brass stabs of the introduction to Kander and Ebb’s “New York, New York.”

1977 (Renewed) UNITED ARTISTS CORPORATION. All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI UNART CATALOG INC. (Publishing) and ALFRED MUSIC (Print). All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC.

“Empire State of Mind” Friday September 7, 2001, was a bright, sunlit September day. It was perfect for singer Ryan Adams to record a video to his new song “New York, New York.” Making his way to the Brooklyn waterfront, he set up beneath the bridge and sang outside, with Manhattan in the background. The World Trade Center’s towers prominently characterize the city behind him. Adams’s song is a carefree “I Love New York” number, which would perhaps have faded into insignificance had it and its video not been recorded at such a resonant moment. Who was to know that just four days later, the Twin Towers would no longer exist? The song became a testimonial to the impact, iconicity, and indelibility of the towers, now stamped into collective memory as a site of tragedy. New York’s song was largely silenced in the years following 9/11. Or rather, the sort of posturing songs I have been writing about were silenced; this was a time for reflection. In expressing emotions of grief, horror, anger, and disbelief, though, America did turn to music, staging a “Concert for New York City” at Madison Square Garden and broadcasting a live telethon, “America: A Tribute to Heroes.” The Madison Square Garden concert, held on October 20, 2011, turned to many existing songs that expressed appropriate moods: David Bowie sang “America” and “Heroes”; Macy Gray sang “With a Little Help From My Friends”; and Paul McCartney sang a number of his songs, including “Let it Be.” Billy Joel sang “New York State of Mind” together with “Miami 2017,” a song he wrote in 1976 that seems extraordinarily prophetic: I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway, I’ve watched the mighty skyline fall.71 This song goes on to recount the fictitious destruction of New York City in a terrible apocalyptic event. After performing it at Madison Square Garden, Joel commented, “I wrote that song twenty-five years ago as a science fiction song. I never thought it would really happen.” Anticipating the fact that it would be in remembrance and solidarity that the country would come to terms with such tragedy, Joel’s song concludes with a reflective epilogue: Page 216 →They say a handful still survive To tell the world about The way the lights went out And keep the memory alive. More than anything, the attack reminded everyone that cities are made of people, 2,977 of whom died on that day. How does a city respond to such a devastating act? How do you perform your emotions of grief? How do you present your city to the world? Tori Amos wrote a song, “I Can’t See New York” (2002), evoking the plane flight into the city now that the towers are no longer there; the Eagles wrote of a “Hole in the World” (2003), while Juliana Hatfield sang of a “Hole in the Sky” (2005). Suzanne Vega, touched more than others by the tragic loss of her brother in the events of 9/11, wrote the song “Anniversary” a year after the event: “Put away the draft of all your eulogies,” she sings. “Make the time for all your possibilities. They live on every street.”72

The events of 9/11 left a long shadow over New York, and it was some years before it seemed appropriate to return to the sort of anthemic celebration of the city that had been so common before. But in 2009, hip-hop star Jay-Z released an homage to New York in which he explicitly claimed status as “the new Sinatra.” “Since I made it here,” he raps, “I can make it anywhere.”73 Though 9/11 was by no means forgotten, this was an indication that New York and New Yorkers would not let it beat them. Like many New York songs of earlier periods, the lyrics to “Empire State of Mind” perform a whistle-stop tour of New York, this time featuring the locations of Jay-Z’s roots (Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen, BedfordStuyvesant) and taking in a whirlwind of cultural references from his life: basketball games, baseball games, dice games, drug transactions from his days as a dealer, cultural icons like the Notorious B. I. G., Spike Lee, and Afrikan Bambaataa, celebrity pals of Jay-Z such as the rappers Special Ed and Young Jeezy, his fiancГ© BeyoncГ©, Tribeca neighbor Robert De Niro, NBA players LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, and New York fashion icons like Anna Wintour, In Style magazine and Vogue.74 Characteristically, the track pulls quotations from a variety of sources, including Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” In its title it is a reference to the earlier track “New York State of Mind” (1994) by rap star Nas (which followed Billy Joel’s original); but it also references other tracks like his own “Song Cry” (2002), Cam’ron’s “Welcome to New York City” (2002), and Young Jeezy’s “24–23” (2009), films such as Naked City (1948), and events like the West Page 217 →Indian Labor Day carnival in Brooklyn. Aside from JayZ’s characteristic rapping during the verses, “Empire State of Mind” features a hook derived from the soul song “Love on a Two-Way Street” (1970), first recorded by Lezli Valentine. The line “(I found love on a two-way street / And) lost it on a lonely highway”75 forms the basis of a melody sung in Jay-Z’s track by fellow New Yorker Alicia Keys (“concrete jungle where dreams are made, oh”) as part of an infectious anthemic refrain. Strikingly, the melody captures precisely the New York rhythm I have been exploring. That it does this to lyrics evoking success, achievement, and chutzpah is surely not by chance: Concrete jungle where dreams are made, oh There’s nothing you can’t do Now you’re in New York.76 The track is accompanied by a black-and-white video that edits together hundreds of evocative images of New York: the sights, the buildings, the lights, and the traffic on the streets. Jay-Z and Alicia Keys are both pictured performing. He raps in a daytime street, commanding the street corner with a sense of ownership, wearing different variations of his trademark clothing: a hoodie and a beanie; a duffel jacket and baseball cap; a mock NYPD uniform. Then we see him in a swanky midtown apartment overlooking the Empire State Building; now he is dressed in a three-piece suit with the jacket and tie casually removed—the epitome of a nouveau riche bachelor in the city. The way that Keys is presented is very different: it is nighttime in Times Square. She wears a low-cut leather catsuit and stands at a grand piano mounted on the pavement. Not only do the lights and billboards of Times Square set the scene, but also the piano is illustrated with representations of the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Eventually, the two appear together, standing on the raked steps of the TKTS booth in Times Square, celebrating the fact that they have indeed made it. And this is the message of the song: Jay-Z, the boy from the hood, has answered the challenge of the metropolis by making his way from rags to riches, and in this song, he postures—like New York itself—to the world. Jay-Z and Keys were invited to perform the track at various live events, including the Madison Square Garden benefit concert for the Twin Towers disaster on September 11, 2009, when it was performed as the opening number. In performance, they pick up on some of the other references that Page 218 →have inspired the song. At the American Music Awards on November 22, 2009, for example, they preluded their song with a short excerpt from Sinatra’s “New York, New York” (as Sinatra himself had picked up on that other “New York, New York” in his performances).77 “Start spreading the news,” they sing, evoking that New York–ness of song in just a simple gesture before reclaiming their own vocal turf with “Empire State of Mind.”

So taken by the hook of this track was Keys that she almost immediately wrote her own solo version of the song with this as its basis. Entitled “Empire State of Mind (Part II): Broken Down,” the new song breaks away completely from its hip-hop origins to become a contemporary power ballad, her homage to the city of her birth. While keeping the refrain similar to the Jay-Z track (though with less of a hip-hop beat), Keys expresses her own ode to the city in newly written verses. Here we find those Broadway tropes returning, both in terms of the descriptive enactment of New York and in terms of the rhythms and melodies that have traditionally epitomized Broadway. First there is an extended introduction of largely unrelated material, building momentum for the stirring song that is to come. As with their live performances of “Empire State of Mind,” Keys makes conscious references to the song’s influences: in particular, this introduction picks up precisely on the piano introduction to Valentine’s “Love on a Two-Way Street,” with its repeated iterations of a secondinversion major triad in the right hand.78 Later, aside from using the refrain of Jay-Z’s hit, she will make reference to a number of the same images that he presents: hailing a gypsy cab, drug dealing, the melting pot; the staple tapestry of New York images that we have seen in numerous iterations in popular culture. Following a short vocal motif (“Ooh New York”), the verse begins, establishing as its characteristic melody a pattern that appears to express both the repeated-note refrain and the gapped scale. Its lyrics remind us that New York is a city that has been constructed through the images of popular culture: “Grew up in a town that is famous as a place from movie scenes.”79 This A section is repeated, with different lyrics tapping into some of the clichГ©s about New York that pepper the verses throughout: “Noise is always loud, there are sirens all around, and the streets are mean,” we are not surprised to hear. Then the melody shifts to a B section, highlighted in its jump up a fourth to a higher register, where Keys repeats the gapped motif and Sinatra’s axiom, already rehearsed in Jay-Z’s version: “If I can make it here I can make it anywhere, that’s what they say,” she sings. This material also repeats, the lyrics transporting us directly to Broadway before finally the verse concludes with a transitional C section emphasizing the Page 219 →straight line up the island in its melody. Having invoked in a number of ways the same sort of lyrical thematic material that Jay-Z did—having “a pocketful of dreams,” a desire to “make it there,” and heading to Broadway with the fantasy of seeing her “face in lights” and her “name on marquees,” Keys launches into the chorus, a refrain that (like “New York, New York”) we are not hearing for the first time; this song is already known. This version of the song has had no official video made, though a studio performance Alicia Keys did for UK television on 4Music Favourites has become the most widely repeated. Here, Keys sits dressed all in black at a black grand piano, flanked by her musicians and backing vocalists. The lighting creates an interesting effect, dominated by individual points of light against an otherwise black background. Glinting off the polished surface of the piano and the metallic chrome of the drum kit, the effect mimics the panorama of Manhattan seen at night with its windows of light and reflections in the river. In this performance, Keys simply sings and plays, though the stirring nature of the song and its evocative presentation in this cityscape of light is enough to carry this performance and make of it a definitive, iconic rendition of this new New York anthem. No doubt the link between both of these songs and 9/11 has been made serendipitously (and perhaps a little cynically). Keys’ track has been co-opted as a benefit tribute to the National Fallen Firefighters Association; perhaps this works for all parties. Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider the mood and theme of these songs and their performances of New York in the post-9/11 culture of the city with its new perspective on insiders and outsiders. Both Jay-Z and Keys voice conscious articulations of their identity as New Yorkers, yet unlike the filmmakers that Blake mentions, they don’t express these as individualistic markers of familiarity, or “delicious smallnesses.” Instead, they pick up on the obvious clichГ©s and shared public referents of the city, inciting everyone to celebrate, insider and outsider, in multiple humanistic articulations of belonging. Keys’ performance in particular, with the specific mood of its music and the visual atmosphere of (as it were) points of candlelight, creates the impression that this song is not only her ode to New York but also her vigil to 9 /11.

Song of New York So, what is the song of New York? Murray Pomerance writes of “three urban visions—nostalgic New York,

serious New York, and anxious New York—[which] constitute a set of nodes in the long progression of filmic Page 220 →treatments of a great, and very specific, urban world”;80 and he goes on to give others: “either the City Engine in which America was made, the American Metropolis—that Metropolis being a nexus of both energy and style, of both tenacity and groundedness and desire—or else the City Playground in which languages, vectors, motivations, and impulses travel against one another and collide.”81 Again, these are all elements that we can detect in expressions of the city that seem to reinforce the impression discovered on the streets. Meanwhile, Jed Perl offers the city up “as pure metaphor—of triumph, of loneliness, of romance,”82 three very different qualities that do seem to glide through expressions made by the artists and visionaries of the city. In a city so rich and textured, of course, there is no single quality that defines it or that causes its heart to beat. “Thus,” as Pomerance concludes, “New York is far from an isolated, fixed, and readily discernable entity, shape, form, or spirit.”83 And as Perl concedes, “If one thing is certain, it is that there is no getting to the bottom of New York.”84 Still, the siren call that New York seems to make to the outside world and that we have seen encapsulated on this walk in the towering majesty of the World Trade Center and in the songs that respond most vividly to that poetics, is that this is the city of dreams. In slightly different versions, the message comes through: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” sang Sinatra—qualifying his surety with the corollary “if,” recognizing the challenge and suggesting that everywhere other than New York is easy. Jay-Z’s brag is different: “Since I made it here I can make it anywhere,” he states, cocky and confident but with a surety borne out by his experience. And finally, Alicia Keys, slightly moderated: “If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere, that’s what they say”; but she goes on to affirm that “there’s nothing you can’t do now you’re in New York.” It’s the age-old mantra. But is that achievable? Is that really what New York offers? Does the man in “New York, New York” really make it there, or does he return home beaten? Sure, Irving Berlin made it there, but what about the countless other immigrants clustered around the Five Points who hadn’t his chutzpah? And what about the impoverished squatters evicted by the development of Central Park; or the Puerto Rican communities forced out by the Lincoln Center’s construction; or the thousands of small businesses moved on by the regeneration of downtown? What about the many communities whose songs don’t get heard, whose features are not indicated on the maps? Or the people who for very real reasons can only see the city from afar? How do these songs speak to these communities? How do they marginalize, devoice, or dispossess? Page 221 →

So What If Broadway Lets You Down: What Then? It’s in the name: the inflection falls away. Broadway. The first syllable confident, framed by powerful plosive bookends; the second light, set free on the breath. Mismatched siblings; a down- and upbow; the first strong, the second weak; the rise and fall of a tiny city melody; the what-goes-up-must-come-down of the inevitable. And so Broadway always disappoints, raises expectations just to drop them again. Not so it’s neighbors: not 42nd St., so brash I write it shorthand in abbreviated articulations of Manhattan’s metric code; of course not the Bronx, so macho it needs a definite article. These give you what they promise: Forty-Second Street always syncopates to its “naughty, bawdy, sporty, gaudy” beat; the Bronx is no-nonsense “up” (and the Battery’s “down”). And even the cocky Bowery, the slippery, crafty, and not-to-be-trusted Bowery. Here it is with two syllables: the Bow’ry, apostrophied at a jaunty angle, able to handle itself like its b’hoys; or here it is with three syllables: the Bo-we-ry, the safe bounce of waltz time that you could take home to your grandmother and that speaks of a time before the city grew, “When New York was a Pasture.”85 But “come on along and listen to the lullaby of Broadway”: the melody raises your hopes until the last moment, when the dream collapses; that inflection falls away. It’s a familiar lament: “You mustn’t think you own the town because you make a hit / Today you are an idol and tomorrow you’re a nit,” wrote

Herbert and Hubbell in 1905.86 Charles K. Harris (1910) wrote of the dashed hopes of “just a little white girl on the Great White Way”: She came to the city where nobody cares As thousands have wandered before And it’s there she will stay till they put her away In the city where nobody cares.87 For some, “There’s a broken heart for ev’ry light on Broadway,”88 while for others, “One year up and down Broadway will give you the blues.”89 Always deflation: Broadway lets you down. And it is the same in the music with which the word “Broadway” is given melody. In the song “Broadway Melody” itself, the word ends both of the first two lines: Don’t bring a frown to old Broadway. You’ve got to clown on Broadway.90 Page 222 →The melody of both lines climbs expectantly through the first few words, a metaphor of hope and excitement; but the word “Broadway” diffuses that, first with a descending major third (figure 49a), then with a major second to the dominant (figure 49). And this is a familiar pattern. When George M. Cohan sings, “Give my regards to Broadway,”91 it begins as a rising melody, a strong climb up the last bit of the major scale that lands resolutely on the tonic; but then the word “Broadway” slips off the tonic on its second syllable (figure 49b). How often the pattern reflects deflation: again, the movement of the melody in the “Lullaby of Broadway”92 is down—though this time to the tonic. Figure 49. (a) “Don’t bring a frown to old Broadway”; (b) “Give My Regards to Broadway.” BROADWAY MELODY Music by NACIO HERB BROWN Lyric by ARTHUR FREED. В© 1929 (Renewed) EMI ROBBINS CATALOG INC. All Rights Controlled by EMI UNART CATALOG INC. and ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC. GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROADWAY. Music and Lyric by GEORGE M. COHAN. Public domain. Later, the theme will be refined. For Sondheim, it is not Broadway but the show itself that carries the deflation (“to be in a show-oh”)93 and later still, it is not just the show but the individual hit, the “palpable hit”94—the assertive punctuation of the word “hit” (“It’s a hit! It’s a hit!”) slips tellingly down a semitone. If we hadn’t got the message in that musical pattern from Merrily We Roll Along, it will be reinforced elsewhere in that show in an Page 223 →ironic use of the retrograde gapped scale motif. The good thing Frank and Charley have got going is—as if in answer to “I got rhythm”—“going, going, gone” (figure 50). Figure 50. The call-and-response of the gapped scale motif: “I got rhythm” (a) and “Good thing going” (b). I GOT RHYTHM. Music and Lyrics by GEORGE GERSHWIN and IRA GERSHWIN. В© 1930 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORP. and IRA GERSHWIN MUSIC. All Rights Administered by WB MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC. Good Thing Going from MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. Words and Music by Stephen Sondheim. В© 1981 RILTING MUSIC, INC. All Rights Administered by WB MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved Used by Permission. Reprinted with Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. Of course it isn’t gone: “The melody lingers on,” and if it isn’t the “Broadway Melody” that captivates us, it is the “Broadway Rhythm.” But you’ll always find it—whether it is on the

“Streets of New York” or “On the Street Where You Live.” Just be prepared to listen as well as look, and don’t resist if you’re asked to dance.

Page 224 → Page 225 →

Next Steps: Performance Cartography I’ve set out in this book a sort of manifesto for performance cartography. I’ve detailed this as an approach to understanding New York, and I’ve suggested that it’s something transferable to other locales. I’ve presented a three-stage process to enacting the performance cartography (stimulus, metaphor, map) and argued that multiple iterations of that process help us to gain a multidimensional appreciation of a place. In a series of iterations I’ve called “walks,” I’ve shaped a particular view of New York. Now it’s time to move on somewhere else and discover the particular character another place presents. There will be those who say that my performance cartography is not a map, that it doesn’t show us the city, and that it does not help us find our way around. It’s true that my book does not serve the same function as—say—the MTA subway map,1 or the Broadway map (“an up to date visualization of what’s playing where on Broadway”).2 Yet these other maps are limited themselves, I would argue; aside from their particular purpose they do not offer any knowledge of the city; despite their claims, conventional maps do not really allow us to find our way around. Or at least, they only allow us to find a way around the limited domain they have chosen to represent. The subway map helps us to navigate the underground transportation system, but nothing else; the Broadway map shows us where shows are playing in relation to the street plan, and where related services such as hotels and restaurants can be found, but nothing more. These are very discrete functions, and the use-value of these maps is therefore very restricted. What may seem in them useful is in fact contingent and defined. Not only that, they rely on significant prior knowledge, I would argue, that is itself constituted by performance cartography. In order to “read” and thereby value the Broadway map, for instance, we need already the prior knowledge that Broadway is (for its purposes) a theater district and that the cultural activity of going to the theater includes making choices about which show to see, how much we are prepared to pay, and whether we are going to dine out. That set of knowledges is one absorbed from the cultural Page 226 →archive—from the marketing slogans we have seen about the city on the roofs of taxicabs; from the commentaries peddled incessantly on prime-time television and radio; from the songs performed by our kids in their end-of-year school shows. The cultural archive is ever present and all around us, and the way in which it teaches us about a city like New York is (by contrast to the MTA subway map or the Broadway map) profound. In this, performance cartography is something that we all enact every day. Like reading the MTA subway map—which takes training and recognition—it’s an activity that also requires prior or contextual knowledge. But it’s a knowledge we can block if we are not completely open to its possibility. The knowledge that performance cartography requires from us is that New York is not just that city; not only the city of two dimensions that is presented to us as a matter of course; not alone the axiom that demands no finer understanding; not simply the space that is conceived or perceived or lived. The city is far greater than all of these glimpses reveal, and although the performance cartography will never in a single instant open up exhaustively the whole, it offers more than any of those glimpses: it offers “the chance to dance.”3 For the city is there for the taking. I’ve chosen to discover it in the songs. Your discovery may be constituted by the spectrum of cuisine or the play of time on ritual. Your knowledge will be differently nuanced than mine, and you will see the city through a different prism of the oligopticon. But the important thing is to be open to the breadth of discovery and to find a “practical means of going on.”4 For this reason, I hope you will find, like me, this performance cartography to be a step in that direction. The city is there for us to discover; all you need to do is unfold the map.

Page 227 →

Notes Pre-amble

1. Brooks McNamara, “The Entertainment District at the End of the 1930s,” in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 178. 2. Taylor, Inventing Times Square, xi–xii. 3. Here I am calling on the language of critical thinkers Gilles Deleuze and FГ©lix Guattari, whose idea of the “plane of consistency” is something that delimits our ability to see the world. Gilles Deleuze and FГ©lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Continuum, 2004). 4. Doreen Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 110. 5. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 7. 6. Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City (New York: Viking, 2008), 38. 7. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, The New York Musicals of Comden and Green (New York: Applause Books, 1997), 9. 8. Carol Oja does indeed dedicate a whole book, if not just to On the Town then at least to Leonard Bernstein’s contribution, in her recent Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Meanwhile, film theorist Scott Bukatman dedicates an interesting chapter to On the Town in “A Day in the City: On the Town and The Clock,” in City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination, ed. Murray Pomerance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 33–48. 9. Chip’s guidebook was out of date; by the time the show was written, the Hippodrome had been demolished. In the song, Hildy mocks him relentlessly for all of his intended sightseeing ideas being outdated. 10. James Donald, “Metropolis: The City as Text,” in Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity, ed. Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 434–35. 11. Ibid.notes to pages 6–9 Page 228 →12. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 30. 13. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964); Lawrence Halprin, Cities (New York: Reinhold, 1963); David Seamon, “Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines and Place-Ballets,” in The Human Experience of Space and Place, ed. Anne Buttimer and David Seamon (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 148–65. 14. Here I am invoking another concept from Deleuze and Guattari’s work, extensively used throughout their writings. 15. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 14. 16. The notion of the “performative turn” has been much discussed, and informs my thinking throughout this book. A number of scholars have been instrumental in broadening the concept of performance, including Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life), J. L. Austin (How to

Do Things with Words), and Richard Schechner (Between Theatre and Anthropology). It’s useful to read Schechner’s short summary of the performative turn in “Points of Contact Revisited,” in Performed Imaginaries (New York: Routledge, 2015), 158–82, but in brief: “Anything can be apprised and analysed вЂas’ performance while what вЂis’ performance—a much more limited domain—could only be determined within specific cultural contexts located within specific points or ranges of time” (158). 17. The phrase is not new; it has been used to refer to embodied practices of mapping territories such as the aboriginal use of “songlines,” as David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis explain: “The Iatmul of the middle Sepik River map the landscape orally through chains of paired, polysyllabic names that are chanted and sung on ritual occasionsВ .В .В . the dances of the Barasana in the VaupГ©s region of Colombia enact the interconnection between persons and the cosmos in which the path of celestial bodies is replicated through the annual cycle of ritual and dance.” See The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 3: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4. However, my project of performance cartography differs from these cultural processes of mapping in that it seeks to create a playful critical methodology to engage with cultural forms and practices as articulations of a particular place. Through initiating this mode of enquiry I hope to open up new ways of understanding lived places by exposing conventionally unrecognized expressions of their landscape. In the case of this study, the expression is song and the landscape explored is the conceptual and imaginative space of Broadway and New York. There is a close connection here to the way in which Karma R. ChГЎvez uses the term in “Remapping Latinidad: A Performance Cartography of Latina/o Identity in Rural Nebraska,” Text and Performance Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2009): 165–82. There are also similarities between my approach and that Page 229 →of L. C. Sotelo Castro’s “participation cartography,” which also draws on Deleuze and Guattari and references many of the thinkers to whom I have turned. See L. C. Sotelo Castro, “Participation Cartography: Performance, Space, and Subjectivity,” Ph.D. diss., University of Northampton, 2009.notes to pages 10–14 18. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987). 19. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 75–76. 20. Derek McCormack, “Diagramming Practice and Performance,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005): 144. 21. Hayden Lorimer, “Walking: New Forms and Spaces for Studies of Pedestrianism,” in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 23. 22. Merlin Coverley, The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker (Harpenden: Old Castle Books, 2012), 12–13. As Nigel Thrift suggests, “The вЂtheorist’ is the gifted meditative walker, purposefully lost in the city’s daily rhythms and material juxtapositions. The walker possesses both a poetic sensibility and a poetic science that is almost impossible to distil as a methodology for urban research.” Amin and Thrift, Cities, 11. 23. Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010), 12. 24. Lorimer, “Walking,” 23. 25. McCormack, “Diagramming Practice and Performance,” 144. 26. Lorimer, “Walking,” 23.

27. See Rob Kitchin, Chris Perkins, and Martin Dodge, “Thinking about Maps,” in Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, ed. Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1–25. 28. Woody Allen (dir.), Manhattan (United Artists, 1979). 29. Joan Peyser, The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin (New York: Billboard Books, 1998), 74. 30. Ibid., 81. 31. Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built, with a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of about Fifty: A History of the Golden Age of American Popular Music (New York: Random House, 2007), 47. 32. Michael Garber, “Reflexive Songs in the American Musical, 1898–1947,” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2006, 212. 33. Irving Berlin, “Manhattan Madness,” from Face the Music (1932). 34. Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, “Broadway Melody,” from The Broadway Melody (1929); “Broadway Rhythm,” from Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935).notes to pages 14–18 Page 230 →35. Harry Warren and Al Dubin, “Lullaby of Broadway,” from Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935); “42nd Street,” from 42nd Street (1933). 36. Garber, “Reflexive Songs,” 212–13. 37. Most notably J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26, no. 2 (1989): 1–9. 38. Ibid., 3. Harley is quoting H. Gene Blocker, Philosophy and Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), 43. 39. J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 40. Ibid., 282. 41. Ibid., 278–79. Harley’s project has been critiqued, not least by Barbara Belyea in her 1992 essay, “Images of Power: Derrida / Foucault / Harley.” She claimed that Harley did not go far enough in his deconstruction, arguing that he “was content to add a sociopolitical dimension to the вЂreality’ which maps are usually said to represent,” and that he revealed a “fundamentally conservative approach to cartography,” in which he “accepted without question the orthodox definition of maps as images of the world.” Barbara Belyea, “Images of Power: Derrida / Foucault / Harley,” Cartographica 29, no. 2 (1992): 1. See also the retrospective of Harley’s work in the special issue Cartographica 50, no. 1 (2015). 42. As Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins opine, “Deconstructing the Map” now feels rather “backward looking, with a somewhat old-fashioned masculine perspective and state-centric view of power.” Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins, “Reflecting on J. B. Harley’s Influence and What He Missed in вЂDeconstructing the Map,’” Cartographica 50, no. 1 (2015): 38. 43. Nigel J. Thrift, “Steps to an Ecology of Place,” in Human Geography Today, ed. Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 300. 44. Ibid., 304.

45. Ibid., 305. 46. Ibid., 309, citing Tim Ingold, “Building, Dwelling, Living: How People Make Themselves at Home in the World,” in Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge, ed. Marilyn Strathern (London: Routledge, 1995). 47. These included special issues of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 4 (2000), edited by Nigel Thrift and John-David Dewsbury; Geoforum 33, no. 4 (2002), with contributions by Dewsbury, John Wylie, Mitch Rose, and Derek McCormack); and Environment and Planning A: The Possibilities of Performance 35, no. 11 (2003), edited by Alan Latham and David Conradson.notes to pages 18–21 Page 231 →48. Nigel Thrift and John-David Dewsbury, “Dead Geographies—and How to Make Them Live,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 4 (August 2000): 411. 49. Nigel Thrift, “Performance andВ .В .В .В ,” Environment and Planning A 35, no. 11 (November 2003): 2023. 50. Carter, Road to Botany Bay, xxi. 51. Ibid., xxi. 52. Ibid., 294. 53. Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, “Rethinking Maps,” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 334. Kitchin and Dodge are citing the views of John Pickles. 54. See a number of publications by Doreen Massey, but particularly For Space and “Politics and Space /Time,” New Left Review 196 (1992): 65–84. Massey argues that “we should try to get away from a notion of society as a kind of 3-D (and indeed more usually 2-D) slice which moves through time.В .В .В . Instead of linear process counterposed to flat surface (which anyway reduces space from three to two dimensions), it is necessary to insist on the irrefutable four-dimensionality (indeed, n-dimensionality) of things. Space is not static, nor time spaceless”: Massey, “Politics and Space/Time,” 79–80. 55. Dewsbury et al. write of “the unfolding nature of the world” (John-David Dewsbury, Paul Harrison, Mitch Rose, and John Wylie, “Enacting Geographies,” Geoforum 33, no. 4 [November 2002]: 437); see also James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 244. 56. McCormack, “Diagramming Practice and Performance,” 122. 57. Dewsbury et al., “Enacting Geographies,” 438. 58. Ibid., 439. 59. Ibid., 439–40. 60. Kitchin and Dodge, “Rethinking Maps,” 335. 61. Ibid., 337. 62. Vincent J. Del Casino Jr. and Stephen P. Hanna, “Beyond the вЂBinaries’: A Methodological Intervention for Interrogating Maps as Representational Practices,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4, no. 1 (2006): 51. 63. Del Casino and Hanna, “Beyond the Binaries,” 37.

64. Ibid., 36. 65. Thrift, “Steps to an Ecology,” 310. 66. Ibid., 311. 67. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 48. 68. Ibid., 22.notes to page 21 Page 232 →69. Thrift, “Steps to an Ecology,” 315. 70. Ibid., 317. 71. Catherine Nash, “Performativity in Practice: Some Recent Work in Cultural Geography,” Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 4 (2000): 654. 72. Thrift, “Steps to an Ecology,” 302. 73. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 30. Again, these phrases could be ideally applied to the terrain Carter (re)discovers in The Road to Botany Bay. 74. Thrift, “Steps to an Ecology,” 310; italics removed. 75. Deleuze and Guattari also observe that time is not something we always experience “forward”; a good deal of our awareness of time is constituted in memory, where it is sometimes haphazard—“under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity,” they suggest—and always retrospective. And memory is often linked to spatial awareness, at least in the mnemonic tool of the “memory room,” itself a sort of map with which we can find stored thoughts—though one that Deleuze and Guattari might prefer to call a “tracing.” Thus time and space can be seen as common bedfellows, and inasmuch as time is a central feature of the playing out of music, space becomes a sort of invisible corollary, gestured to in the visible inscription of the score, realized in its vertical and horizontal metaphors for pitch and meter, and allowing the speculation that music speaks spatially. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 17. 76. Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose, “Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and Subjectivities,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 4 (2000): 433–52; Robyn Longhurst, “вЂCorporeographies’ of Pregnancy: вЂBikini Babes,’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 4 (2000): 453–72; John-David Dewsbury, “Performativity and the Event: Enacting a Philosophy of Difference,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 4 (2000): 473–96, and “Witnessing Space: вЂKnowledge without Contemplation,’” Environment and Planning A 35, no. 11 (2003): 1907–32. 77. Paul Harrison, “Making Sense: Embodiment and the Sensibilities of the Everyday,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 4 (2000): 497–517; David Crouch, “Spacing, Performing, and Becoming: Tangles in the Mundane,” Environment and Planning A 35, no. 11 (2003): 1945–60; John Wylie, “An Essay on Ascending Glastonbury Tor,” Geoforum 33, no. 4 (2002): 441–54. 78. Derek McCormack, “A Paper with an Interest in Rhythm,” Geoforum 33, no. 4 (2002): 469–85; David Conradson, “Doing Organisational Space: Practices of Voluntary Welfare in the City, ” Environment and Planning A 35, no. 11 (2003): 1975–92; Alan Latham, “Research, Performance, and Doing Human Geography: Some Reflections on the Diary-Photograph, Diary-Interview Method,” Environment and Planning A 35, no. 11 (2003): 1993–2017.notes to pages 22–26 Page 233 →79. See the contemporaneous article by Fiona Wilkie, “Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain,” New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 2 (May 2002): 140–60.

80. Julie Angel, “Game Maps: Parkour Vision and Urban Relations,” in Choreographic Dwellings: Practising Place, ed. Gretchen Schiller and Sarah Rubidge (Houndmills: Basingstoke, 2014), 179. 81. Ibid., 196. 82. Ibid., 194. “The Parkour vision is the map,” she qualifies, in contrast to that of hybrid reality game players who “are given a map to overlay” (194). She explains this further: “The process of an imaginative re-perception and appropriation of the environment by the traceurВ .В .В . results in new physical, spatial and psychological connections to it. When the traceur re-conceptualises the space, there is a dialogue; traceurs refer to this as вЂParkour vision.’ This occurs before the physical act of the Parkour encounter. Traceurs experience a constant shift in the perceptual gestalt of the landscape around them. Their perception, openness, gaze and vision allows them to see and seek out opportunities for movement, an imaginative remapping of the familiar within their environments” (179). 83. Catherine Belsey, A Very Short Introduction to Post-structuralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 84. Lewis Carroll, The Complete Lewis Carroll, vol. 2 (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1999), 557. 85. Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 302. 86. Ibid. 87. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999), 325. 88. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 1. 89. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 1. 90. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 275. 91. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 13. 92. Ibid., 13–14. 93. Halprin, Cities, 193. 94. Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 82. 95. Deleuze and Guattari urge us to “plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus, 15. 96. “The fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction вЂandВ .В .В . andВ .В .В . and’.” Ibid., 27.notes to pages 28–33 Page 234 →97. Susan Sontag, “Film and Theatre,” Drama Review 11, no. 1 (Fall 1966): 30. 98. Stanley Kauffmann, “Notes on Theater-and-Film,” in Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology, ed. Robert Knopf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 155. 99. Sontag, “Film and Theatre,” 25. 100. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1988), 92. 101. There are, of course, many other routes into the city and many other ways to reconceive it; there are indeed many urban encounters—urban theories, if you like—called up by performer-cartographers mapping the city for themselves. I’m reminded of contemporary performance groups such as Blast Theory, Punch Drunk, Look Left Look Right, and Dreamthinkspeak. While some of these self-consciously engage audiences with city-spaces in general (notably Blast Theory’s work), other examples focus on themed aspects of a city’s cultural heritage, traditions, or personalities. In this type of work, the crossover between the experience of a performance, an installation, a walking tour, a visitor attraction, and a museum can be blurred. As such, other crossover forms appear (especially) on the Web, but also in print, film, and even music. I am taken by Sohei Nishino’s “Diorama Map New York” (2006) (http://www.soheinishino.com/en/works/dioramamap/newyork/index.html), the Smithsonian’s interactive 1836 map of New York (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/interactive-map-comparesnew-york-city-1836-today-180947939/?no-ist), New York Public Library’s project Old NYC (http://www.oldnyc.org/), Constantine Valhouli’s interactive song map of New York (http://untappedcities.com/2014/07/14/fun-maps-this-interactive-music-map-pinpoints-the-new-york-cityreferences-in-every-song-you-could-imagine/), and for a more old-school encounter, Becky Cooper’s Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers (New York: Abrams Image, 2013). 102. Paul Patton, “Marxism and Beyond: Strategies of Reterritorialization,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 127. 103. Ibid., 128. 104. James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, A Chorus Line: The Complete Book of the Musical (New York: Applause Books, 2000), 96.

Walk 1

1. Stephen Wolf, ed., I Speak of the City: Poems of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 20.notes to pages 33–38 Page 235 →2. These depictions were often sponsored by institutions from the city (Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, 1883), the garment industry (Root & Tinker, proprietors of The Clothier and Hatter magazine, 1879; Rogers, Peet & Co., wholesale clothiers located in “the exact center of the clothing trade in New York City,” 1879), or as merchandizing for popular entertainments (“Gracie Emmett in her great play: The Pulse of New York,” 1891, highlights key locations depicted on stage). 3. Some of the maps shift the perspective to view Manhattan from across the Hudson River, enabling more of the uptown end of the island to be viewed, and coinciding with the development of Central Park and its environs. 4. Although early photographic images of the Lower Manhattan skyline date from the 1890s, the term “skyline” was not used in respect of Manhattan until 1896. See Douglas Tallack, New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New New York (New York: Berg, 2005), 144–45; J. A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: An Essay in Graphic History (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 394–95. 5. Ellen W. Kramer, “Contemporary Descriptions of New York City and Its Public Architecture ca.

1850,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 27, no. 4 (December): 265. 6. Carter, Road to Botany Bay, xix. 7. Tallack, New York Sights, 138. 8. Bram Stoker, A Glimpse of America and Other Lectures, Interviews and Essays (Southend: Desert Island Books, 2002). 9. George G. Foster, New York in Slices: by an experienced carver, being the original slices published in the N. Y. Tribune, revised, enlarged, and corrected by the author (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1850), 46. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. David L. Rinear, “F. S. Chanfrau’s Mose: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Folk-Hero,” Theatre Journal 33, no. 2 (1981): 201. 13. Benjamin Baker, A Glance at New York (New York: Samuel French, 1848). 14. Foster, New York in Slices, 43–44. 15. Stephen Jenkins, The Greatest Street in the World: The Story of Broadway, Old and New, from the Bowling Green to Albany (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1911), 31. 16. See, for example, the map of “New Amsterdam: 1650–1660,” a contemporary composite of period maps in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 65. 17. Useful interactive maps showing the development of New York can be Page 236 →found online; the Welikia Project (formerly the Mannahatta Project) traces the loss of New York’s flora and fauna over thousands of years; the Google Maps / New York Times project “How Manhattan’s Grid Grew” shows the development of the city over time: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/21/nyregion /map-of-how-manhattan-grid-grew.html.notes to pages 38–42 18. See Jenkins, Greatest Street, 112. 19. Ibid., 28. 20. Charles Lockwood, Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995), 39. 21. Ibid., 57. 22. Ibid., 66. Another picket fence was erected, report Burrows and Wallace, this time as a barricade along Chambers Street. Whether this was to keep people out of the lower districts or to keep the fever from moving uptown is unclear. Either way, the continued faith in the picket fence is remarkable. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 448. 23. Lockwood, Manhattan Moves, 27. 24. Ibid., 82. 25. The population of what is today the five boroughs was 119,734 in 1810, and had risen to 242,278 by 1830. See Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 478. This rapid expansion was set to continue: “In the fifteen

years after 1845, the population of the area north of 14th Street increased by 290,000, almost as many people as the entire city contained in 1840.” Edward K. Spann, New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 105. 26. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 450. 27. Ibid., 435. 28. Jenkins, Greatest Street, 55–56, citing Jeremy Cockloft the Younger, “The Stranger at Home; Or, a Tour of Broadway,” Salmagundi Papers 12 (June 27, 1807). 29. Lockwood, Manhattan Moves, 36. 30. Spann, New Metropolis, 96. 31. Cited in Spann, New Metropolis, 117–18. 32. Foster, New York in Slices, 7–8. 33. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 457. 34. Joel H. Ross, What I Saw in New York, or A Bird’s Eye View of City Life (Auburn, NY: Derby and Miller, 1851), 178–79. 35. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 457. 36. Spann, New Metropolis, 94. 37. Asa Greene, A Glance at New York: Embracing the City Government, Theatres, Hotels, Churches Mobs, Monopolies, Learned Professions, Newspapers, Rogues, Page 237 →Dandies, Fires and Firemen, Water and other Liquids, &c, &c (New York: A. Greene, 1837), 38.notes to pages 42–45 38. Ibid. 39. Ross, What I Saw, 183. 40. Foster, New York in Slices, 93, 103. 41. Lockwood, Manhattan Moves, 125–26. 42. Ibid., 133. 43. Ibid., 127. 44. Ross, What I Saw, 164. 45. Indeed, A. T. Stewart briefly dabbled in theater, commissioning the conversion of a church into a performance venue for his protГ©gГ© Lucy Rushton. 46. Marlis Schweitzer, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 57. 47. Ibid., 54. 48. Ibid., 56. 49. Ibid., 55.

50. Lockwood, Manhattan Moves, 129. Ross suggests 14,400 (What I Saw, 178). 51. Ross, What I Saw, 165. 52. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 463. 53. Foster, New York in Slices, 9. 54. Lockwood, Manhattan Moves, 145. 55. See Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 439; Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 123. Although the term “the Great White Way” has come to refer to Broadway and is assumed to have been influenced by the concentration of bright lights in the theater district, other slightly conflicting reports suggest otherwise. One suggests the phrase was created following a snowstorm: “More than fifty years ago Broadway received a nickname in an unusual manner. In December 1901 a new novel appeared with the title The Great White Way. The scene of the story was the region of snow and ice around the South Pole. At that time there was a column in a popular New York newspaper telling about things of interest taking place along Broadway. It was the practice of the writer of this column to use at the head of it the title of some current novel. When the novel just mentioned came out, the newspaper writer entitled his column one day: вЂFound on the Great White Way.’ Broadway happened to be covered with snow at the time this issue of the paper appeared. Those who read the column at once associated вЂThe Great White Way’ with Broadway, and the title of a novel, now long forgotten, became the nickname of a famous street. The brilliant illuminations in the theater district on Broadway Page 238 →are often thought to explain the nickname, but they had no part in the origin of it”: Mitford M. Mathews, American Words (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1959), 56.notes to pages 45–51 56. Spann, New Metropolis, 96. 57. Foster, New York in Slices, 10. 58. Lockwood, Manhattan Moves, 89. 59. Foster, New York in Slices, 9. 60. Mrs. Kidder and Agustus Cull, “вЂFarmer Stubbs’ Visit to New York City,” songsheet (New York: Horace Waters, 1860). 61. I. A. Gairdner, “O What a Charming City,” songsheet (New York: Bourne Depository of Arts). 62. William Lingard, “Walking Down Broadway,” songsheet (New York: W. A. Pond and Co., 1868). 63. For a representative account of this production’s place in the narrative, see Knapp, American Musical, 20–29. 64. Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses. A 250-Year Journey from Bowling Green to Times Square (New York: Backstage Books, 2004), 97. 65. Ibid., 120. 66. Ibid., 116–17. 67. Still, Mirror for Gotham, 205. 68. Douglas Tallack, “New York, New York,” Culture, Theory and Critique 40, no.1: 44.

69. Taylor, Inventing Times Square, 46. 70. Armond Fields and L. Marc Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway: Lew Fields and the Roots of American Popular Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 94. For a succinct description of this process see Mona Rebecca Brooks, “The Development of American Theatre Management Practices between 1830 and 1896,” PhD diss., Texas Tech University, 1981, 4–5. 71. Taylor, Inventing Times Square, 39. 72. Longacre Square was located at the southern end of the Twenty-Second Ward, which occupied the west side of the island between Fortieth Street and the top of Central Park; the Nineteenth Ward was its reflection on the east side. Census records show massive increases in the population of these areas in the period since the Civil War; by 1890 the Twenty-Second Ward had 153,877 residents and the Nineteenth 234,846. At the same time the population of the downtown areas was reducing, showing the migration of inhabitants up the island. http://www.demographia.com/db-nyc-ward1800.htm 73. Henderson, City and Theater, 49, 91.notes to pages 51–56 Page 239 →74. Ibid., 74. 75. Ibid., 144. 76. Ibid., 170. 77. Vincent Sheean, The Amazing Oscar Hammerstein: The Life and Exploits of an Impresario (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956), 83. 78. Knapp, American Musical, 106–7. 79. Gussie L. Davis and Charles B. Ward, “Only a Bowery Boy,” songsheet (New York: New York Music Co., 1894). 80. George M. Cohan, “Give My Regards to Broadway,” songsheet (New York: F. A. Mills, 1904). 81. George M. Cohan, “All Aboard for Broadway,” songsheet (New York: F. A. Mills, 1906). 82. George M. Cohan, “Broadway Tipperary,” songsheet (New York: Cohan and Harris Publishing, 1915). 83. Frances S. Seamans, “Kindly Direct Me to Broadway,” songsheet (New York: J. E. Minnick, 1914). 84. Gene Buck and Dave Stamper, “I’m Looking for Old Broadway,” songsheet (New York: T. B. Harms, 1918). 85. Garber, “Reflexive Songs,” 201. 86. See Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor, eds., Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1999), 7. This is of course somewhat ironic, since it suggests a singular identity existing in a country constructed on pluralistic values and multicultural dynamics. 87. Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 103. 88. Mason and Gainor, Performing America, 7.

89. Cole Porter, “I Happen to Like New York,” in Robert Kimball, and B. Gill, Cole (New York: Overlook Press, 2000), 106. “Let’s Fly Away,” from the same show (The New Yorkers, 1930), neatly ribs the ubiquitous championing of the city: “I’ve such a hate on Manhattan lately, / that I’d gladly die; .В .В .В I’m tired of the Paramount’s gaudy gilding. I’m tired of looking up to the Chrysler Building.В .В .В . New York is not for us, / Let’s fly away”: Kimball and Gill, Cole, 104. 90. Cole Porter, “Longing for Dear Old Broadway,” in Kimball and Gill, Cole, 18. 91. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 9. 92. Comden and Green, “New York, New York” from On the Town (film version). 93. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, “Manhattan,” in The Complete Lyrics of Page 240 →Lorenz Hart, ed. Dorothy Hart and Robert Kimball (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 33.notes to pages 56–61 94. Spann, New Metropolis, 302. 95. George and Ira Gershwin, “New York Serenade,” in The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin, ed. Robert Kimball (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 116. 96. Al Dubin and Harry Warren, “The Lullaby of Broadway,” songsheet (New York: M. Witmark and Sons, 1935). 97. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 127. 98. Howard Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 299. 99. Knapp, American Musical, 83. 100. Ibid., 84–85. 101. Ibid., 67. 102. John Lahr, Light Fantastic: Adventures in Theatre (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 243. 103. Ibid., 2. 104. Ibid., 118. 105. Ibid., 11. 106. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 10. 107. Ibid., 107. 108. Ibid., 99. 109. Ibid., 107. 110. Ibid., 114. 111. Brown and Freed, “Broadway Rhythm.” 112. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 9.

113. Ibid. 114. Rodgers’s later show Oklahoma! may be far removed from Broadway in its themes, though again it includes an early expression of aspiration targeting a performative song and dance event (the box social) and including a single-note melodic line in its composition. Although Rodgers does not claim that this melodic line reflects Broadway, he does explicitly refer to the single-note motif representing the straight path of a roadway which at times becomes obstructed and whose obstructions are themselves represented in the music: “Oscar’s lyric suggested both a clip-clop rhythm and a melody in which the straight, flat country road could be musically conveyed through a repetition of the straight, flat sound of the D note, followed by a sharp upward flick as fowl scurry to avoid being hit by the moving wheels”: Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 219.notes to pages 62–71 Page 241 →115. The melody is confident and ironically tuneful, and shares some interesting features with other songs, not least “The Jet Song” from West Side Story (“The Jets are in gearВ .В .В .”). Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story, in Ten Great Musicals of the American Theatre, ed. Stanley Richards (Radnor, PA: Chilton Book Company, 1973), 357. 116. Babes in Arms is one of the many shows that have enjoyed major rewrites over the years. Subsequent versions of the show, which are markedly different, introduce a young ingГ©nue, Baby Rose (aka Jennifer Owen), who sings “Johnny One Note.” 117. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, “Johnny One Note,” in Hart, Complete Lyrics, 229. 118. Mickey Rooney, Richard Quine, and Ray McDonald, “Anything Can Happen on Broadway,” from Babes on Broadway (1941). 119. Stephen Sondheim, “Broadway Baby,” from Follies (1971). 120. Peter Allen, “When I Get My Name in Lights,” from The Boy from Oz (2003). 121. Barry Manilow, “Just Arrived,” from Copacabana (1994). 122. Lahr, Light Fantastic, 243–45.

Walk 2

1. Carol J. Oja and Kay Kaufman Shelemay remind us that he “had a powerful grounding in the greater Boston area and that the tie remained strong throughout his life.” Carol J. Oja and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “Leonard Bernstein’s Jewish Boston: Cross-Disciplinary Research in the Classroom, ” Journal of the Society for American Music 3, no. 1 (2009): 5. 2. Alexander McQuilkin, “The Rise and Fall of Manhattan’s Density,” The Architectural League’s Urban Omnibus: The Culture of City-Making, October 29, 2014. http://urbanomnibus.net /2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhattans-density/. Accessed March 27, 2015. 3. “CTBUH Tall Building Database.” The Skyscraper Center. http://skyscrapercenter.com/city/newyork-city . Accessed March 27, 2015. 4. “Newcomers Found in Beehive Blocks,” New York Times, January 16, 1911. 5. Solly Angel and Patrick Lamson-Hall, “The Rise and Fall of Manhattan Densities: 1790–2010,” Marrion Institute of Management Working Paper Series, 18, New York University, 2014, 15. https://archive.nyu.edu/handle/2451/33846. Accessed February 7, 2015.

6. Mark A. Weiss, “Skyscraper Zoning: New York’s Pioneering Role,” Journal of the American Planning Association 58, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 204.notes to pages 71–76 Page 242 →7. Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 31. 8. Weiss, “Skyscraper Zoning,” 204. Weiss is quoting from Louis J. Horowitz and Boyden Sparkes, The Towers of New York: The Memoirs of a Master Builder (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937), 2. 9. Walt Whitman, in Christoph Lindner, “New York Vertical,” American Studies 47, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 26. 10. Henry James, in ibid., 27. 11. Steven Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 103. 12. Arthur Meier Schlesinger, “The Significance of Immigration in American History,” American Journal of Sociology 27, no. 1 (July 1921): 72. 13. Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1878–1898 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 435. 14. From 1,164,673 in 1880 to 2,284,103 in 1920. See Richard L. Forstall, Population of States and Counties of the United States: 1790 to 1990 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1996), 112–14. 15. Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 334. 16. Ronald Weber, The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 72. 17. Richard Daniel Lehan, Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 74. 18. Keith Newlin, A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003), 277. 19. Schlesinger, Rise of the City, 60. 20. Lehan, Realism and Naturalism, 74. 21. Ibid. 22. Wiley Lee Umphlett, Mythmakers of the American Dream: The Nostalgic Vision in Popular Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press), 58. 23. Ibid. 24. M. S. Bradbury, The American Novel and the Nineteen Twenties (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), 70. 25. Weber, The Midwestern Ascendancy, 63. 26. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 116. 27. Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” in Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1967), 57. 28. Ibid., 47.notes to pages 77–81 Page 243 →29. Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1987), 173. 30. Ibid., 183–84. 31. Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Company: A Musical Comedy (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996), 50. 32. Le Corbusier, The City, 126. 33. Ibid., 166. 34. Jonah Lehrer, “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times, December 17, 2010. 35. Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West, “A Unified Theory of Urban Living,” Nature 467 (October 21, 2010): 913. West and Bettencourt’s finding have nevertheless been challenged, as Anthony M. Townsend reports in Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: Norton, 2013), 311–16. 36. Le Corbusier, The City, 172. 37. Ibid., 176. 38. See, for example, Le Corbusier’s “Plan of a contemporary city for three million inhabitants,” discussion of which can be found in relation to the Density Atlas’s case study “Le Plan Voisin, Paris.” http://densityatlas.org/casestudies/profile.php?id=99. Accessed July 18, 2015. 39. Christoph Lindner, Imagining New York City: Literature, Urbanism, and the Visual Arts, 1890–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 33–34. 40. Weiss, “Skyscraper Zoning,” 202–3. 41. Ernest Flagg, “Is New York Becoming a City of Canyons and Ravines? An Interesting Suggestion Made by Ernest Flagg, Architect of the Singer Building, for Solution of Skyscraper Problem,” New York Times, December 29, 1907. 42. Ibid. 43. Angela M. Blake, How New York Became American, 1890–1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 104. 44. See Schlesinger, Rise of the City. 45. Ibid. 46. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 86. 47. Edwards is credited for the screenplay; Jule Styne is credited for the music along with the lesser-known Leo Robin. Columbia Pictures was keen not to be accused of infringing the copyright of Wonderful Town, so it contracted a production attorney to ensure the new film was sufficiently distinct from the Broadway success. Nevertheless, the studio was sued for $6 million by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, librettists of Wonderful Town, and an undisclosed sum for copyright infringement was agreed in an out-of-court settlement.notes to pages 81–86

Page 244 →48. The film My Sister Eileen is widely available; a 1958 telecast of Wonderful Town starring Rosalind Russell can also be found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=o7z5jl8a6mc&index=3&list=PLFFAFE043822FDE93. Accessed July 15, 2015. 49. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 92. 50. Blake Edwards and Jule Styne (1955), My Sister Eileen, Columbia Pictures. 51. Raymond Knapp, “The Sound of Broadway’s Mean Streets: Setting New York City’s вЂEdge’ in Show Songs,” Studies in Musical Theatre 7, no. 2, 243. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 239. Knapp specifically mentions Copland as a composer trading in this modernist bitonality. 54. Ibid., 238. 55. Ibid., 243. 56. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 86. 57. Helen Smith, There’s a Place for Us: The Musical Theatre Works of Leonard Bernstein (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 79. 58. Smith’s consideration of Bernstein in her book There’s a Place for Us notes that the following year the young composer Stephen Sondheim would make use of the same motif in his (unproduced) show Saturday Night (1954), though Sondheim claims this to be coincidental. 59. Laird makes the point that Fancy Free is a “fascinating picture of Bernstein as a young composer.” Paul R. Laird, Leonard Bernstein: A Guide to Research (New York: Routledge, 2002), 32. 60. Oja, Bernstein Meets Broadway, 45. 61. Ibid., 38. 62. Siegfried Kracauer (1931), “Girls and Crisis,” Qui Parle 5, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1992): 52. 63. 1133 Avenue of the Americas (Emery Roth & Sons, 40 stories, 1970); 1155 Avenue of the Americas (Emery Roth & Sons, 40 stories, 1984); 1177 Avenue of the Americas (Americas Tower, Swanke Hayden Connell, 50 stories, 1994); 1185 Avenue of the Americas (Stevens Tower, Emery Roth & Sons, 40 stories, 1971); 1211 Avenue of the Americas (Celanese Building, Harrison, Abramowitz & Harris, 45 stories, 1973); 1221 Avenue of the Americas (McGraw-Hill Building, Harrison, Abramowitz & Harris, 51 stories, 1969); 1251 Avenue of the Americas (Exxon Building, Harrison, Abramowitz & Harris, 54 stories, 1971); 1271 Avenue of the Americas (Time-Life Building, Harrison & Abramowitz, 48 stories, 1958); 1285 Avenue of the Americas (UBS Building, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 42 stories, 1960); 1301 Avenue of the Americas (Credit Lyonnais Building, Page 245 →Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, 45 stories, 1964); 1335 Avenue of the Americas (Hilton Hotel, Harrison & Abramovitz, 49 stories, 1963); 1345 Avenue of the Americas (Burlington House, 50 stories, 1969).notes to pages 86–91 64. Eric Nash and Norman McGrath, Manhattan Skyscrapers (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 127. 65. Ibid. 66. Knapp, “Broadway’s Mean Streets,” 240.

67. Ibid., 253. 68. Ibid., 249. 69. Ibid., 245. 70. I am by no means the first to suggest that the early twentieth-century American songbook is recognized as the voice of the melting pot. Perhaps the closest study of this has been Charles Hamm’s book on the early songs of Irving Berlin, Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot. The Formative Years, 1907–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). In this, Hamm makes the observation that the term “melting pot” is somewhat unrepresentative of American culture of that period and of the material that it produced. Instead, he uses the term “the crucible of God,” and argues that the cultural differences between immigrant communities in New York were not blended together and obliterated during this period, but were “modified but not eliminated through contact with and accommodation to a dominant culture” (x). In particular, Hamm suggests, Berlin absorbed elements of existing EuroAmerican culture in order to find his feet, appropriated African American musical tropes to exploit their popularity, and incorporated structures and cadences of classical European provenance to assist his progress from vaudeville to the legitimate stage (221–23). Other writers have used different metaphors still: “not so much a melting pot as a chafing dish,” suggests Sheed, evoking the idea of friction (Sheed, House That George Built, 16); meanwhile, Jeffrey Melnick borrows the idea of an orchestra: “meant to suggest that even as different peoples might come together peacefully, even productively, they need not and should not forfeit their special racial gifts.” A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews and American Popular Song (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 69. 71. These are the words of Dan Rudhyar, whose writings on dissonance in fact associate it more with spiritual contexts. Carol Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 105. 72. Laird, Leonard Bernstein, 33; Oja, Bernstein Meets Broadway, 42. 73. Oja, Bernstein Meets Broadway, 45. 74. Ibid., 41. 75. Ibid., 45.notes to pages 91–102 Page 246 →76. Ibid., 41. 77. Larry Starr, The Dickinson Songs of Aaron Copland (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002), 19. 78. Ibid., 14. 79. Two of these pieces are clearly evocations of rural America; the latter is what Howard Pollack has called an “urban pastoral” sequence characterizing “the quiet city at night.” Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 331–32. As I will explore later in this book, the city at night has often been used to evoke a sense of space, and over the open intervals that sound that space, in this piece as well as others, a plaintive voice emerges from the call of a lonely trumpet.

Walk 3

1. James Goldman, Follies: A Musical, libretto (New York: Random House, 1971), 3. 2. Ibid., 109.

3. Hal Prince, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theater (New York: Dodd Mead: 1974), 160. 4. Still, Mirror for Gotham, 298. 5. Henderson, City and Theater, 110. 6. Still, Mirror for Gotham, 262. 7. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 9–10. 8. Ross, What I Saw, 178. 9. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 91. 10. Still, Mirror for Gotham, 262. Still is citing British traveler William George Fitzgerald from 1917. 11. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), 102. 12. Ann Marie McEntee, “The Funeral of Follies: Stephen Sondheim and the Razing of American Musical Theater,” in Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Sandor Goodhart (New York: Garland, 2000), 91. McEntee is citing Boris Aronson. 13. Jonathan Larson, Rent, in The New American Musical, ed. Wiley Hausam (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003), 132. 14. Massey, For Space, 110. 15. Ibid., 114. 16. Charles Grutzner, “Youth Gang Wars Kill Ten in a Year,” New York Times, May 8, 1950.notes to pages 102–7 Page 247 →17. Emanuel Perlmutter, “10 Deaths Laid to Youth-Action This Year,” New York Times, September 11, 1959. 18. Charles Grutzner, “Bronx Is Deadliest of Teen War Areas,” New York Times, May 10, 1950. One month later, Grutzner outlines the proceedings of a “peace parley” that eventually resolved tensions between two gangs, the Biggies and the Upstarts. The scene reads like an excerpt from West Side Story: Charles Grutzner, “Peace Parley Ends War of Two Gangs,” New York Times, June 9, 1950. 19. Nigel Simeone, Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 4–5. 20. Jacobs, Death and Life, 87, 89, 104, 192, 270ff. 21. Ibid., 146. 22. Berman, All That Is Solid, 326. See also Roberta Brandes Gratz, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (New York: Nation Books, 2010). 23. Victoria Newhouse, Wallace K. Harrison, Architect (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1989), 189. 24. Wesley Janz, “Theaters of Power: Architectural and Cultural Productions,” Journal of Architectural Education 50, no. 4 (1997): 230–43.

25. The first seeds of West Side Story were sown in January 1949. Bernstein’s diary entry for August 25, 1955, details the change of ideas from a Jewish-Catholic fracas to one between “newly arrived Puerto Ricans” and “self-styled вЂAmericans.’” See Simeone, Leonard Bernstein, 17, 22. 26. Spann, New Metropolis, 103. 27. William Bridges, Map of the City of New York and Island of Manhattan with Explanatory Remarks and References (New York: William Bridges, 1811). 28. Spann, Mirror for Gotham, 159. 29. Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 58. 30. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 422. 31. Spann, New Metropolis, 159, 160, 103. 32. Jacobs, Death and Life, 24, 105. 33. Ibid., 386. 34. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 20. Jane Jacobs uses similar terminology to recognize the topography of San Francisco (with all its hills) in contrast to its two-dimensional plan (the map, another grid system): Death and Life, 395. 35. Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 203. 36. Ibid., 210–11. 37. In Taylor, Inventing Times Square, xxvii. 38. Bukatman, “Day in the City,” 35. 39. If the forging of the grid by the Randel Plan creates a line in the sand in Page 248 →terms of demarcating history, it is a similar boundary that Carter notes, demarcating the “discovery” and therefore construction of Australia as a civilized state.notes to pages 107–13 40. Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 220. 41. Gilles Deleuze and FГ©lix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 1983), 39. As Mark Kingwell acknowledges, there are other aberrant pathways through the Grid: “West 4th, for instance, my street, slides across Manhattan in a roughly westward line and then cuts northeast at a sharp angle, such that, just feet in either direction from my front door, it crosses both West 10th and West 11th streets, which are themselves cutting down toward the Hudson in an antic southwesterly manner.” Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 59. 42. Wilfrid Mellers, “West Side Story Revisited,” in Approaches to the American Musical, ed. Robert Lawson-Peebles (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 129. 43. Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim, West Side Story, 360. 44. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 229. 45. Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 119. 46. Steve Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 91.

47. Ibid., 91–92. 48. Simeone, Leonard Bernstein, 62. 49. Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 298, 304, 455. 50. Ibid., 297, 312. The songs mentioned are from Oh, Please! (1926), Hit the Deck (1927), Take a Chance (1932), and Great Day (1929), respectively. 51. Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1. 52. Lewis A. Erenberg, Stepping Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 153. Erenberg is citing Maud CuneyHare’s Negro Musicians and Their Music (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1936), 133. 53. Typical interpretations of the rhythmicization of popular music come laden with rhetoric about freedom, particularly sexual freedom, which carries various connotations of sexually transmitted disease with it. 54. Furia, Poets, 33. Alternatively—and still jockeying for the race card—we might see it as representative of a tension between other populations of the city—let us say between the mainly patriated Dutch city planners of the nineteenthPage 249 → century and the Central European immigrants who were assimilating to American life. Here we have one set of (first-wave) immigrants establishing a power structure for second- and third-wave immigrants to conform to. The tension here perhaps relates to notions of national identity and citizenship and at what stage newly homogenized Americans begin to see themselves as Americans. This tension undoubtedly relates to the various Irish, Jewish, and Italian communities that were beginning to create New York’s “melting pot” during the nineteenth century, and the appropriation by these populations of other alternative voices is, of course, a part of the heritage of Tin Pan Alley. There are clearly a number of ways that we can read syncopation into performance and into identity politics. I want to avoid reducing my discussion to a simple deterministic set of judgments, however, so rather than situating the context of this chapter in a discussion of identity, I am going to see the tension of syncopation depicted in the palimpsest of New York I have been discussing.notes to pages 113–16 55. Rian James and James Seymour, 42nd Street, screenplay (Madison: Wisconsin Center for Film and Theaters Research, 1980). 56. Spann, New Metropolis, 302, quoting Evening Post, July 17, 1852. 57. Jacobs, Death and Life, 60–65. 58. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 99. 59. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 229. 60. Ibid., 16. 61. Jacobs, Death and Life, 60. 62. Ibid., 62. 63. Ibid., 64, 60. The idea of the city as a ballet has become a common trope: Mike Crang writes about “a ballet of lines of motion”; David Seamon writes of “place-ballets”; and, as we have seen, Lawrence Halprin writes of the city as “an environment for choreography” that “must be

experienced through movement.” Mike Crang, “Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion,” in Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. John May and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 2001), 187–207, 193; Seamon, “Body-Subject”; Halprin, Cities, 193. 64. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 230. 65. “Each associative flow must be seen as an ideal thing, an endless flux, flowing from something not unlike the immense thigh of a pig.В .В .В . [This type of break] should in no way be considered as a separation from reality.В .В .В . It functions like a ham-slicing machine, removing portions from the associative flow.” Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 39, 38. These three accounts follow a long tradition of similar anecdotal observations of New York (Foster, New York in Slices; Greene, Glance at New York; Ross, What I Saw). 66. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 93.notes to pages 116–25 Page 250 →67. Ibid., 92. 68. Ibid., 91. 69. Ibid., 93. 70. Ibid., 97. 71. Ibid., 99. 72. Ibid., 100. 73. Ibid., 102. 74. Ibid., 103. 75. Ibid., 93. 76. Ibid., 95. 77. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 219. 78. Ibid., 220. 79. Ibid., 222. 80. Ibid., 229. Subsequently, a number of other theorists have brought an understanding of rhythm to the study of space: see Seamon, “Body-Subject”; Tom Mels, ed., Reanimating Places: A Geography of Rhythms (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 81. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 227. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 222. 84. Jane Feuer, “The Theme of Popular vs. Elite Art in the Hollywood Musical,” Journal of Popular Culture 12, no. 3 (1978): 491–99, reprinted in Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 85. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 100.

86. Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 59. 87. Roland Barthes famously wrote about the rustle of language (The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989]). 88. Follies appeared in a number of smaller versions shortly before its main revival: the small Forum Theatre in Wythenshawe (Manchester) produced a version in 1985; that same year a concert version was staged at the Lincoln Center, providing a “definitive” cast recording—though Bruce Kirle’s Unfinished Show Business questions this concept in general, and in terms of this recording of Follies specifically. Kirle, Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 12. 89. Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) (London: Virgin Books, 2010), 243, 249. For accounts of the differences and rewriting decisions, see Finishing the Hat, 198–249 and Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 175–212.notes to pages 125–27 Page 251 →90. Frank Rich, “Stage View: Sondheim’s вЂFollies’ Evokes Old Broadway,” New York Times, September 15, 1985. 91. Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 212. 92. James Goldman, Follies, libretto (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 1. 93. Kirle, Unfinished Show Business, 119. 94. Goldman, Follies (1971), 3. 95. Goldman, Follies (2001), 1. 96. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 227. 97. Gordon Cox, “A Long and Winding Road to N.Y.,” Variety, November 7, 2008. 98. Kirle, Unfinished Show Business, 119. Marvin Carlson has written in a similar vein in The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 99. Kirle, Unfinished Show Business, 12. 100. John Freeman, Blood, Sweat and Theory: Research through Practice in Performance (Faringdon: Libri Publishing, 2010), xii. 101. Ludivine Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini, eds., Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 120. 102. See Brad Haseman, “Rupture and Recognition: Identifying the Performance Research Paradigm, ” in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 147–58; Shirley McKechnie and Catherine Stevens, “Knowledge Unspoken: Contemporary Dance and the Cycle of Practice-Led Research, Basic and Applied Research, and Research-Led Practice,” in Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts, ed. Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 84–103; see also Dominic Symonds, “вЂPossente Spirto’: Notes on a Music Theatre Practice as Research Project, by C. Monteverdi and A. Striggio,” in The Legacy of Opera: Music Theatre as Performance and Experience, ed. Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 208–28. 103. Smith and Dean, Practice-Led Research, 19–25.

104. Ibid., 8; a diagram of Smith and Dean’s Iterative Cyclic Web can be found on page 20. 105. Scott Ross, “The Evolution of Follies,” Sondheim Review (2011), http://www.faqs.org /periodicals/201107/2328897501.html. Accessed August 8, 2011. 106. Ted Chapin, Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (New York: Applause Books, 2005), 45.notes to pages 127–32 Page 252 →107. Craig Zadan, Sondheim & Co. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 161. Zadan is interviewing Michael Bennett: “The original opening was very scary and everybody was afraid that it would put the audience off. It had no music. It was done with the orchestra tuning up and it was raining and all the guests arrived with umbrellas and the ghosts started appearing.” 108. McEntee, “The Funeral of Follies,” 90. 109. Kirle, Unfinished Show Business, 119. 110. Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 212. 111. McEntee, “The Funeral of Follies,” 89.

Walk 4

1. If New York the capitalist and economic powerhouse has been built on the efficiencies of this protovirtual topography, it is a success that has been bought—strikingly—at little (and yet extreme) cost. Just as Dubai’s much later exponential increase of its seafront has driven the economies of both giant tourism and equally giant vulnerability, New York’s exponential increase in real estate has constructed an edifice of supersized success and fragility. How often the city itself has articulated the flip sides of this metonym—from the errant idealism of the ambitious Empire State project to the arrogant hubris of its Twin Towers. 2. Jason Wasiak, “Being-in-the-City: A Phenomenological Approach to Technological Experience,” Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 1 (2009): 355. 3. Bonnie Nardi and Vickie O’Day, Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 27. 4. Still, Mirror for Gotham, 206. 5. Cited in ibid. 6. Neal Bascomb, Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 91–100. 7. Still, Mirror for Gotham, 206. 8. Ibid. 9. Herbert T. Wade, “The Problem of Vertical Transportation,” Technical World, December 1909, 712. 10. Otis Traction Elevators Handbook (Yonkers, NY: Otis Elevators, 1912), 8. 11. Lindner, “New York Vertical,” 12.

12. Eric Darton, Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 6. 13. Ibid., 7.notes to pages 132–48 Page 253 →14. Tallack, New York Sights, 144. 15. Nancy Groce, New York: Songs of the City (New York: Billboard Books, 1999), 31, 82, 87, 116, 117. 16. Tallack, New York Sights, 153. 17. Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 72. 18. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 107. 19. Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 72. 20. Ibid., 74. 21. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 108. 22. These block diagrams all work on the same principle, converting the melodies into diagrams by assigning pitch to the vertical axis (with one unit representing a semitone) and note length to the horizontal axis (with one unit representing a quaver). 23. Garber, “Reflexive Songs,” 201. 24. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 9. 25. Tallack, New York Sights, 154. 26. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 119. 27. Bascomb, Higher, 5. 28. Koolhaas, Delirious New York. 29. Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 15. 30. Ibid., 143. 31. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 110. 32. C. G. Poore, “The Riveter’s Panorama of New York,” New York Times, January 5, 1930. 33. “Sky BoysВ Who вЂRode the Ball’ onВ Empire State,” Literary Digest, May 23, 1931, 30. 34. Mark Kingwell, Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 142. 35. Hart, Complete Lyrics, 164. 36. Ibid., 141. 37. See David Schiff, Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14. 38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., 23. 40. “The Skyscraper as a Work of Art,” New York Times, February 4, 1908. 41. Kingwell, Nearest Thing to Heaven, 46. 42. Ibid., 7. 43. Ibid., 56. 44. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 10, 184, 191. 45. Darton, Divided We Stand, 7–8.notes to pages 148–53 Page 254 →46. Hart, Complete Lyrics, 199. 47. Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 47–48. 48. Kingwell, Nearest Thing to Heaven, ix. 49. Ibid., 46. Here Kingwell cites Saul Bellow from More Die of Heartbreak. 50. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, Little Shop of Horrors (London: Josef Weinberger), 35. 51. Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim, West Side Story, 396. 52. Spann, New Metropolis, 173. 53. Bridges, Map of the City. 54. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 421. 55. Andrew J. Downing, “The New York Park,” in First Annual Report on the Improvement of the Central Park, New York (New York: Chas W. Baker, 1857), 159. 56. “Huge buildings covering whole blocks pack the thousands of humans in them, stifled with gasses and putrid air, breeding plague and raising puny half-formed children to fill up the cemeteries”: Lewis Masquerier, Sociology, or The Reconstruction of Property, upon the Principles of the Equality, the Perpetuity, and the Individuality of the Private Ownership of Life, Person, Government, Homestead and the Whole Product of Labor, by organizing all Nations into Townships of Self-Governed Homestead Democracies Self-Employed in Farming and Mechanism, Giving all the Liberty and Happiness to be Found on Earth (New York: Lewis Masquerier, 1877), 17. 57. “A public park could create harmony between social classes and help unify an increasingly stratified city”: John S. Berman, Central Park (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 20. 58. “Properly designed environments like English-style landscaped parks could elevate the character and condition of the poorer classes”: Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 793. 59. Ibid., 791. 60. Ibid., 793. 61. Dorceta E. Taylor, The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s–1900s: Disorder, Inequality and Social Change (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 268. 62. Ibid., 266.

63. George P. Landow, “Ruskin and the Aesthetic Movement: Inspiration and Strawhorse,” Victorian Web, last modified March 12, 2007, http://www.victorianweb.org/decadence/ruskin2.html 64. Spann, New Metropolis, 177. 65. Elke Mertens, Visualizing Landscape Architecture: Functions, Concepts, Strategies (Boston: BirkhГ¤user, 2010), 159. 66. Ibid., 151.notes to pages 154–62 Page 255 →67. Hugh Fordin, MGM’s Greatest Musicals (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 417. 68. Ibid., 416. 69. Only seconds earlier, a previous scene has located Riley in another of those iconic locations of the city. Scampering down from street level, the detective finds himself in Times Square subway station—not on a concourse exactly, but in a hub connecting various thoroughfares. Staircases lead back up to street level on either side; in the background a platform gives on to one subway line receding into a tunnel in the distance; and in the foreground, the closest platform dips away to suggest that we, the audience, are situated as if in a stationary, invisible train. From here, the arteries of the city plunge into darkness, a dense network of tubes and tunnels spilling over and around one another in their subterranean tangle. 70. Robert W. De Forest and Lawrence Veiller, The Tenement House Problem (New York: Arno Press, 1903), 104–7. 71. Peyser, Memory of All That, 81. 72. David W. Chen, “An Escape, and a Retreat; A Neighborhood Communicates, Plays and Daydreams on Its Porches in the Sky,” New York Times, August 15, 2004, 39. 73. If the fire escapes, subways, and elevators offered the logistics of release, they complemented an imagination of release in the cultural expression of the city. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the establishing of leisure resorts. A short ride away, Coney Island replicated the struts and rails of the city’s tools of freedom in its rollercoasters, reinforcing the role of technology as the means of escape. Meanwhile, the pastoral was both evoked and controlled in the landscaping of Central Park and in the construction of entertainment palaces like Niblo’s Garden and the Winter Garden. The order of the structured week and the rigid confinement of grid living was balanced in experiences of freedom. 74. Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen, “Iron Ivy,” Cabinet 32 (Winter 2008–9): 67. 75. Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim, West Side Story, 368. 76. Ibid., 395. 77. Keith Garebian, The Making of “West Side Story” (Richmond: Reynolds and Hearn, 2003), 13. 78. Ibid., 14. 79. Claudia L. Rocco, “Integrating Ensembles to Build a Hybrid Work,” New York Times, June 11, 2010, C3. 80. Compare the swing section, beginning measure 34, with the marcato phrase, beginning measure 192. References are to motifs in the full orchestral score, though this differs to the film soundtrack; the referenced sections can be Page 256 →seen at 1:59 and 6:37 of the fiftieth anniversary official full number, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxoC5Oyf_ss . Accessed June 10, 2013.notes to pages 162–69

81. Ibid., from 5:13 and from 7:40. 82. Fordin, MGM’s Greatest Musicals, 416. 83. Amanda Card, “The вЂGreat Articulation of the Inarticulate’: Reading the Jazz Body in Australian and American Popular Culture in the 1960s,” Journal of Australasian Studies 22, no. 58 (1998): 20. Card is referring specifically to Fosse’s choreography to the number “Steam Heat” from The Pajama Game. 84. Knapp, American Musical, 234. 85. Neil Simon, Cy Coleman, and Dorothy Fields, Sweet Charity, libretto (New York: Tams Witmark, 1966), 59. 86. Russell Freedman, Martha Graham: A Dancer’s Life (New York: Clarion Books, 1998), 56. 87. Consider the mythology of the frontier, the pastoral space of rural settings, or the “open road” that Ali Hakim romanticizes in Oklahoma! 88. Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim, West Side Story, 396. 89. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New York: New Directions Books, 2011), 57. 90. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes, In the Heights: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical, libretto (New York: Applause Libretto Library, 2013). 91. Koolhaas, Delirious New York. 92. Peyser, Memory of All That, 82. 93. Lorraine B. Diehl, Subways: The Tracks That Built New York (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2004), 21–22. 94. Although the idea was picked up by Ellitrope Company and installed at the cost of $150,000 in the Woolworth Building, the system didn’t really work. As Carrajat notes wryly, “The inventor of the Ellitrope Air Cushion was killed in Baltimore while demonstrating the effectiveness of his device”: Patrick A. Carrajat, The Past as Prologue: The History of the Elevator Industry in America, 1850–2001 (New York: Certified Elevator and Escalator Products Corporation, 2009), 11. 95. Simon, Coleman, and Fields, Sweet Charity, 69–70. 96. Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 54.

Walk 5

1. Sarah Luria, “Air and Space,” in Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture, ed. Miles Orvell and Jeffrey L. Meikle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 389–90.notes to pages 170–78 Page 257 →2. Markus Rheindorf, “Processes of Embodiment and Spatialization in the Writings of Paul Auster,” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 2, no. 3 (2002), http://reconstruction.eserver.org/023/rheindorf.htm. Accessed September 19, 2013. 3. de Certeau, “Walking in the City”; and in relation to City of Glass, Steven Alford, “SpacedOut: Signification and Space in Paul Auster’sВ The New York Trilogy,” Contemporary LiteratureВ 36 (1995): 613–32; Richard Swope, “Supposing a Space: The Detecting Subject in Paul

Auster’sВ City of Glass,” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 2, no. 3 (2002), http://reconstruction.eserver.org/023/swope.htm. Accessed September 17, 2013. 4. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (New York: Penguin, 1990), 62. 5. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 93. 6. This is not true for all musicals set in New York or filmed in New York. The film of Godspell, for example, very deliberately stages itself in the city, and in a sense makes the attempt to “fix” New York as its habitus. Despite that attempt (and despite the new song written for the film, “Beautiful City”), the film does not inhabit, evoke, or construct New York in anything like the same way that West Side Story and Guys and Dolls do. 7. Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 45. 8. Richard Schechner has referred to performance as “twice-behaved behavior” throughout his work since the 1980s. For an early explanation of this, see Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36. 9. Thomas L. Riis, Frank Loesser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 82. 10. Ibid. 11. James Traub, “New York, Then and Now,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/packages /khtml/2004/03/15/magazine/20040315_TIMESSQ_FEATURE.html. Accessed September 25, 2013. 12. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 97. 13. Ibid. 14. Carroll, The Complete Lewis Carroll, 197. 15. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 22. 16. Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 2008. 17. Bukatman, “Day in the City,” 34–35. 18. Fiona Bannon, “Articulations: Walking as Daily Dance Practice,” Choreographic Practices 1 (2010): 99. 19. Ibid., 98. 20. Ibid., 101. 21. Ibid.notes to pages 178–87 Page 258 →22. Ibid., 99. 23. Alford, “Spaced-Out.” 24. Mark Dorrian, “The Aerial View: Notes for a Cultural History,” Strates 13 (2007), http://strates.revues.org/5573. Accessed September 17, 2013. 25. Bannon, “Articulations,” 100.

26. Ibid., 101. 27. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 162. 28. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 93. 29. Ibid., 112. 30. Sarah Rubidge, “Nomadic Diagrams: Choreographic Topologies,” Choreographic Practices 1 (2010): 45. 31. Ibid., 47. 32. Derek McCormack, “Geographies for Moving Bodies: Thinking, Dancing Spaces,” Geography Compass 2, no. 6 (2008): 1822. The notion that we create space by living through it is at the heart of Doreen Massey’s work in For Space and elsewhere: “space is a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations,” she writes; “we make space through interactions at all levels, from the (so-called) local to the (so-called) global.” And she goes further: if this is the case, she suggests, then “places, regions, nations, and the local and the global, must be forged in this relational way too.” Doreen Massey, “Geographies of responsibility,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86, no. 1 (2004): 5. 33. Bannon, “Articulations,” 101. 34. Ibid., 98. 35. Ibid., 101. 36. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 23. 37. Riis, Frank Loesser, 89. 38. Ibid., 86. 39. Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls: A Musical Fable of Broadway, libretto (London: Weinberger, 1978), 13. 40. Riis, Frank Loesser, 82. 41. Rubidge, “Nomadic Diagrams,” 45. 42. McCormack, “Geographies for Moving Bodies,” 1822. 43. Loesser, Guys and Dolls, 72. 44. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 97. 45. Loesser, Guys and Dolls, 4–5. 46. Luria, “Air and Space,” 389–90. 47. Ibid., 389. 48. Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim, West Side Story, 359. 49. Ibid., 357.

50. That these individuals are all male does not go unnoticed. It’s somewhat Page 259 →interesting that the ground-level space carving out the locus of New York (in this example at least) is so gendered. In other examples—noticeably the New York of the aspirant newcomer arriving in the city (42nd Street, Wonderful Town, Copacabana) the protagonist figures are female. In examples that we observed in the walking tour of Walk 4 (In the Heights, West Side Story, Sweet Charity) the female space is up at a height—out of the city and off the ground, in the space of escape. Are these recurring tropes just coincidental, or does the Broadway musical gender space in such a way as to consolidate the “turf” of the city as a man’s world and the marginal spaces of arrival and escape as feminine?notes to pages 188–97 51. Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim, West Side Story, 356. 52. Lynch, Image of the City, 11. 53. Ibid., 46. 54. Ibid., 47. 55. Ibid., 48. 56. Ibid., 1. 57. See Swain, The Broadway Musical, 230–34; Simeone, Leonard Bernstein, 93–95. 58. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 233–34. 59. As Simeone, Leonard Bernstein, observes, there exist various versions of the score and a “definitive” version is perhaps unlikely. The bar numbers noted relate to the Boosey and Hawkes orchestral score HP1176. 60. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim and Lloyd WebberВ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 303. 61. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 134. 62. Auster, New York Trilogy, 3. 63. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 93. 64. Bannon, “Articulations.” 65. Crang, “Rhythms of the City,” 194.

Walk 6

1. Darton, Divided We Stand, 146. 2. Ibid., 146. 3. Ibid., 58. 4. Ibid., 59. 5. Anthony W. Robins, The World Trade Center: Classics in American Architecture (1987).

6. Ibid.notes to pages 197–200 Page 260 →7. Leonard I. Ruchelman, The World Trade Center: Politics and Policies of Skyscraper Development (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1977), 25. 8. Benjamin Flowers, Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century (Pennsylvania: University of Philadelphia Press, 2009), 170. 9. Ruchelman, The World Trade Center, 46. 10. James Glanz and Eric Lipton, City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center (New York: Times Books, 2004), 108. 11. Darton, Divided We Stand, 16. 12. Ibid., 4. 13. Marshall Berman, “When Bad Buildings Happen to Good People,” in After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, ed. Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (New York: Routledge, 2012), 6. 14. Minoru Yamasaki, A Life in Architecture (New York: Weatherhill, 1979), 112. 15. Patricia A. Morton, “вЂDocument of Civilization and Document of Barbarism’: The World Trade Center Near and Far,” in Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11, ed. Daniel J. Sherman and Terry Nardin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 20. 16. Quoted in Morton, “Document of Civilization,” 20. 17. Darton, Divided We Stand, 6. 18. Sharon Zukin, “Our World Trade Center,” in Sorkin and Zukin, After the World Trade Center, 13. 19. Peter Lehman and William Luhr, “I Love New York! Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” in Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps, 24. 20. Walt Whitman, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, vol. 1: Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University 2007), 170. 21. Art Garfunkel, “A Heart in New York.” 22. Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 27–28. 23. Mario Maffi, New York City: An Outsider’s Inside View (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 87. 24. Richard A. Blake, Street Smart: The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese and Lee (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 13. 25. Ibid., 14. 26. Baudrillard wrote extensively about America, and like other commentators (Mrs. Trollope, P. G. Wodehouse) repatriated from Europe to live the hybrid life of a “legal alien”: Sting, “Englishman in New York,” single (Santa Monica, CA: A&M Records AM 1200, 1987). 27. Blake, Street Smart, 8.

28. Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps, 11.notes to pages 201–6 Page 261 →29. Ibid., 14. 30. Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 169. 31. Comden and Green, The New York Musicals, 9. 32. Bukatman, “Day in the City,” 36. 33. Ibid. 34. Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps, 11. 35. Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 34. 36. Ibid., 60. 37. Maffi, New York City, xi. 38. Ibid., 19. 39. Ibid., 22. 40. Peter Evans, Top Hat (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 12. 41. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Maltby, Jr., “Tell Me on a Sunday,” from Tell Me on a Sunday. 42. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black, “I Love New York,” from Tell Me on a Sunday. 43. Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps, 11. 44. Lloyd Webber and Maltby, “I Love New York.” 45. Ibid. 46. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Maltby, Jr., “So Much to Do in New York (II),” from Tell Me on a Sunday. 47. Sting, “Englishman in New York.” 48. See Rodgers, Musical Stages, 88. 49. Amin and Thrift indeed see names as labels helping us to define the city: “We negotiate the city through used tracks and construct imaginaries around them of the known city. This is one way in which the city, with all its complexity, size and change, is named.” Amin and Thrift, Cities, 22. 50. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 104. 51. Ibid. Paul Carter’s consideration of Botany Bay enacts a similar retelling of the “prehistory” of its labeling. Indeed, a significant part of his argument throughout The Road to Botany Bay rests on his deconstruction of the rhetoric of names. 52. Frank Sinatra, “Theme from вЂNew York New York,’” performance from “Sinatra: The Man and His Music,” from Frank Sinatra: Concert Collection, 7-DVD box set, http://www.youtube.com

/watch?v=xMfz1jlyQrw. Accessed January 10, 2013. 53. de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 91. 54. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), 22.notes to pages 207–20 Page 262 →55. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 2004), 69. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 28. 58. Maffi, New York City, 88. 59. Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps, 4. 60. Blake, Street Smart, 9–10. 61. Maffi, New York City, 18. 62. Baudrillard, America, 29. 63. Blake, Street Smart, 10. 64. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-0nNWOKK2Q 65. Perhaps for this reason Jeffrey Melnick’s metaphor of the orchestra is one that suits the heteroglossic voice of this multicultural city (though Melnick raises concerns even about this term): Melnick, Right to Sing, 69. See also Walk 2, n. 71. 66. Garfunkel, “A Heart in New York.” 67. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 36. 68. Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes, and Elmer Rice, “Lonely Town,” from Street Scene (1947). 69. Loesser, Guys and Dolls, 72. 70. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, The Band Wagon, filmscript (London: Lorimer, 1986), 104. 71. Billy Joel, “Miami 2017” (1976). 72. Suzanne Vega, “Anniversary” (2002). 73. Shawn Carter, Alicia Keys, Janet Sewell, Angela Hunte, Sylvia Robinson, Burt Keyes, and Alexander Shuckburgh, “Empire State of Mind” (2009). 74. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPQD5RT_MPg 75. Sylvia Robinson and Burt Keyes, “Love on a Two-Way Street” (1970). 76. Carter et al., “Empire State of Mind.” 77. I am indebted to the website “Rap Genius,” which meticulously annotates Jay-Z’s lyrics, offering a wealth of information on the references made in this track: http://rapgenius.com/Jay-z-empirestate-of-mind-lyrics#note-48735. Accessed January 13, 2014.

78. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nOajAt7LSE 79. Shawn Carter, Alicia Keys, Janet Sewell, Angela Hunte, Sylvia Robinson, Burt Keyes, and Alexander Shuckburgh, “Empire State of Mind (Part II) Broken Down” (2010). 80. Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps, 9. 81. Ibid., 14. 82. In Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 34.notes to pages 220–26 Page 263 →83. Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps, 9. 84. In Kingwell, Concrete Reveries, 34. 85. Al Piantadosi and Joe McCarthy, “When New York Was a Pasture,” songsheet (1911). 86. Joseph Herbert and Raymond Hubbell, “There’s No Room for a Dead One on the Great White Way” (1905), in Groce, New York, 79. 87. Charles K. Harris, “In the City Where Nobody Cares” (1910), in Groce, New York, 115. 88. Howard Johnson and Fred Fisher, “There’s a Broken Heart for Every Light on Broadway” (1915), in Groce, New York, 79. 89. Arthur Swanstrom and Carey Morgan, “Broadway Blues” (1920), in Groce, New York, 114. 90. Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, “Broadway Melody,” from The Broadway Melody (1929). 91. George M. Cohan, “Give My Regards to Broadway,” from Little Johnny Jones (1904). 92. Harry Warren and Al Dubin, “Lullaby of Broadway,” Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935). 93. Stephen Sondheim, “Broadway Baby,” from Follies (1971). 94. Stephen Sondheim, “It’s a Hit!,” from Merrily We Roll Along (1981).

Epilogue

1. http://web.mta.info/maps/submap.html. Accessed September 15, 2016. 2. www.broadwaymap.com. Accessed September 15, 2016. 3. Kirkwood and Dante, A Chorus Line, 96. 4. Thrift, “Steps to an Ecology,” 304.

Page 264 → Page 265 →

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Index Allen, Woody, 12–15, 200, 208 Manhattan (1979), 12–15 affect, 11, 18–20, 122 African American music, 89–90, 112–13, 245n70 Alphabet City, 86, 100, 169 America (American), 35, 40, 41, 46–48, 53, 55–56, 60–65, 69, 71, 74–76, 79–80, 88–89, 91–94, 102, 108, 112–13, 127, 131, 135, 147–48, 152, 162–63, 195, 197–200, 202–3, 207, 209–10, 212–13, 215, 219, 246n79, 248n54, 258n26 “America” (Bowie) 215 “America” (Simon and Garfunkel) 213 “America” 163 An American in Paris. See Gershwin, George American-ness, 55–56, 79, 92–94 “An American Rhapsody.” See Gershwin, George identity, 47, 52, 55, 57, 79–80, 155, 164, 202, 239n86, 247n25, 248n54 music of, 13, 14, 47, 53–57, 65, 89–94, 127, 146–47, 157, 164, 213, 215, 245n70, 246n79 as opposed to Europe, 14, 33, 47, 53, 54 See also migration Appalachian Spring, 91–93, 246n79 See also ballet; Copland, Aaron architecture, 7, 10–11, 14, 27, 72–73, 76–77, 79, 98–99, 101, 105, 117, 131, 135, 137–39, 142, 147–48, 157–58, 160, 166, 177, 179, 181, 184, 195, 197–98, 207, 212 Aronson, Boris, 97–98, 100, 124 aspiration (ambition), 39, 41, 43, 51–52, 58, 60–63, 71, 75–76, 80, 107, 113, 125, 145–46, 149, 164, 200, 208–9, 240n114 of the city, 39, 52, 63, 149 of immigrants, 60, 62 of New Yorkers, 41, 43, 51 for success, 58, 60–63, 71, 75–76, 80, 107, 113, 145–46, 164, 200, 209

Astaire, Fred, 120, 154–55, 157, 162, 164 Auster, Paul, 170, 192 Austin, J. L., 8, 226 axiom, 4, 6, 124, 218, 224 ballet, 6, 47, 68, 83–84, 95, 97, 101, 162 An American in Paris, 120 Appalachian Spring, 91 See also Appalachian Spring; Copland, Aaron “Ballet at the Village Vortex,” 92 “Broadway Melody” ballet, 101, 119–21 dream ballets, 121 Fancy Free, 68, 83–85, 92, 95, 244n59 “Girl Hunt” ballet, 120–21, 153–55, 158, 162, 164, 214 Page 282 →ballet (continued) as metaphor, 6, 115–16, 176, 178–79, 182–86, 249n63 See also metaphor: ballet New York Ballet Theatre, 84 “Runyonland,” 172–74, 178–79, 183–86 “Times Square Ballet,” 3 West Side Story, 162 See also West Side Story Band Wagon, The (1953) “Girl Hunt” ballet, 120–21, 153–55, 158, 162, 164, 214 Bannon, Fiona, 9, 28, 178–82, 185–86 Barthes, Roland, 123, 250n87 Battery, The, ix, 2, 4, 33–34, 38–39, 41–42, 45, 52, 58, 78, 145, 197, 206, 221 Baudrillard, Jean, 4, 15, 22–23, 200, 206–8, 210, 260n26 “competitive verticality,” 132, 207 Bennett, Michael, 127, 252n107

Berkeley, Busby, 172 Berlin, Irving, 14, 53, 57, 60–61, 89–90, 138–39, 202, 220, 245n70 “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” (Miss Liberty), 60–61 Israel Baline, 202 “Manhattan Madness” (Face the Music), 113, 138, 141 Berman, Marshall, 99, 101–2, 198 Bernstein, Leonard, 2, 27–28, 55, 61, 67–69, 72–73, 76, 80–84, 86–87, 89–95, 101–3, 110, 138–39, 200–201, 208–10, 212, 227n8, 241n1, 244nn58–59, 247n25, 259n59 and Copland, 69, 90–94, 103 See also Copland, Aaron Fancy Free, 68, 83–85, 92, 95, 244n59 “New York, New York” (On the Town), 2–5, 61–62, 68, 73, 97, 139, 142, 209–10, 217, 223, 227n9 On the Town, 2–4, 28, 62, 68, 73, 80, 83, 94, 101, 116, 133, 138, 201, 214, 227n8 West Side Story, 14, 29, 67–69, 82–84, 101–3, 107–13, 117, 123, 133, 150, 153, 156, 160, 162–66, 169–72, 186–191, 241n115, 247n18, 247n25, 257n6, 258n50, 259n59 See also West Side Story Wonderful Town, 2, 55, 68–9, 76, 80–83, 89–95, 101, 243n47, 244n8, 258n50 Bird’s-Eye view, 8, 27, 33–35, 48, 52, 58–59, 62–63, 65, 131, 133, 137, 205 black and white, 13, 15, 34, 126, 217 Black Crook, The (1866), 42, 47 Black, Don, 202–4 block diagram. See diagram: block Borges, Jorge Luis, 22–23 Bowery, The, 35–37, 42–43, 46, 52–53, 104, 221 b’hoys, 35–36, 43, 53, 221 Bowling Green, 1, 40, 41, 43, 201 breath, 163, 220 of air, 67 “Breathe” (In the Heights), 164–66 breathlessness, 109, 132, 163, 166, 202

breathe in, 4 “contraction and release,” 162–63, 167 means of playing instruments, 165 means of release, 164–66 See also escape: release physiognomy of, 164–65 take breath away, 140, 157 inability to breathe, 149, 166 as technology, 166 Broadway, 1–2, 4, 7, 48–49, 51–52, 54, 58, 63, 106–7, 119, 156 Page 283 →allure of, 54, 58 diagonal trajectory of, 48–49, 52, 62, 106–7, 156 history of, 1–4, 52 iconicity of (the street), 1–2, 4, 7, 63, 119 iconicity of (the theater industry), 51, 63, 119 mythology of success, 58, 63, 65, 69, 76, 121, 208 Broadway melody, 14, 33, 52, 56–58, 62–65, 119–21, 133, 204, 209, 220–22 “Broadway Melody” (ballet), 101,119–21 “Broadway Melody” (concept), 33, 52, 56–58, 62–64, 65, 204, 209, 220–22 See also gapped scale “Broadway Melody” (song), 14, 565–68, 64, 119–21, 221–22 Broadway Melody of 1938 (film), 133 See also melody Broadway rhythm, 14, 27, 57, 62–64, 97, 100–101, 109–14, 119–23, 127, 133, 137–38, 140, 204, 209, 222 “Broadway Rhythm” (concept), 14, 27, 97, 100, 114, 127, 222 Broadway Rhythm (film, 1944), 133 Broadway rhythm (idiom), 27, 62–63, 109–13, 204, 209 “Broadway Rhythm” (Broadway Melody of 1936), 14, 57, 63–64, 101, 113–14, 119–23, 137–38, 140, 157, 213

Broadway “two-four,” 109, 112 See also rhythm Broadway songbook (Great American songbook), 11, 60–61, 147, 214, 245n70 Bronx, The, 1, 3, 4, 48, 102, 206, 221 Brooklyn, 3, 34, 48, 72, 83, 102, 131, 133, 197, 215–17 Brooklyn Bridge, 34, 48, 133, 197, 217 Brown, Denise Scott, 9–11 Learning from Las Vegas, 9–11 See also urban theory Brown, Nacio Herb “Broadway Melody” (Broadway Melody of 1929), 14, 56–58, 64, 119–21, 221–22 “Broadway Rhythm” (Broadway Melody of 1936), 14, 57, 63–64, 101, 113–14, 119–23, 137–38, 140, 157, 213 Butler, Judith, 18, 21 Carroll, Lewis, 22, 174 Carter, Paul Road to Botany Bay, The, 9–11, 18–19, 34, 106–7, 232n73, 247n39, 261n51 cartography, 7, 10, 15–22, 26, 89, 160, 193, 228n17, 230n41 Central Park, 39, 46, 88, 102, 129, 131, 143, 146, 150–53, 220, 235n3, 238n72, 255n73 Charisse, Cyd, 120, 162 choreography, 13, 14, 26, 28–29, 81, 83, 101–2, 122–23, 160–62, 172, 177–79, 182, 187, 193, 249n63, 256n83 Chorus Line, A (1975), 30, 224 Chrysler Building, 99, 137, 139, 143, 239n89 city City of Tomorrow, The, 77 “City of Towers,” 86 concept city, 4, 65, 117–18, 123, 181, 186 See also de Certeau, Lefebvre; grid: concept iconic city, 4

See also iconicity Image of the City, The, 9, 27, 33, 58–59, 65 See also Lynch, Kevin Page 284 →city (continued) lived city, 186 See also Lefebvre, Henri: lived space lure of (allure), 58, 69, 71, 74–75, 150, 199, 202–3, 206 See also lure “Lure of the City, The,” 34, 66, 69, 76 metaphorical city, 119 See also metaphor mythic city, 28, 117, 181, 186 preceding city, 6, 9 “real” city, 6, 117, 181 Rise of the City, The, 9, 69, 74, 94, 132 score of, 26, 182, 184 See also score: of the city See also Bannon, Fiona; Jacobs, Jane; Massey, Doreen; Schlesinger, Arthur Meier; urban theory City Hall, 34, 37–38, 40, 43, 46 Civil War, 47, 50, 52, 62, 238n72 clustering of buildings, 47, 68–69, 72–73, 76, 86, 89, 95, 198 of notes, 27, 67–69, 72–73, 76, 81–82, 89, 92, 95 of people, 88, 220 Cohan, George M., 1, 53–54, 110, 138–39, 221–22 “Give My Regards to Broadway” (song), 1, 53, 110, 138, 221–22 Comden, Betty, 2, 55, 80, 82, 177, 200–201, 209–10, 212 “New York, New York” (On the Town), 2–5, 61–62, 68, 73, 97, 139, 142, 209–10, 217, 223, 227n9 On the Town, 2–4, 28, 62, 68, 73, 80, 83, 94, 101, 116, 133, 138, 201, 214, 227n8

Wonderful Town, 2, 55, 68–69, 76, 80–83, 89–95, 101, 243n47, 243n48, 258n50 competency, 2, 25–26 Coney Island, ix, 3, 53, 56, 166, 256n73 congestion, 71–72, 80, 148, 151, 153 consistency, 11, 227n3 Copland, Aaron, 13, 69, 90–94, 101, 103, 185, 244n53, 246n79 and American sound, 90–94, 246n79 Appalachian Spring, 91–93, 246n79 and Bernstein, 69, 90–94, 103 See also Bernstein, Leonard Billy the Kid, 91, 246n79 “Connotations for Orchestra,” 103 Quiet City, 13, 91–92, 246n794 counterpoint, 59, 82, 91–94, 100, 108–9, 121–22, 133, 178–79, 182, 184–85, 191 dance, 1, 14, 22, 28, 30, 83, 85, 101, 107–8, 113–16, 120–23, 130, 154, 161–63, 163, 165–66, 177–79, 182, 184, 222, 224, 228n17, 240n114 corporeality of, 113 dance halls, 90, 160 incitement to, 100, 113–14 metaphor of, 115, 123, 177 modern dance, 162 See also Graham, Martha; modernism spatiality of, 28, 177–79, 184 de Certeau, Michel, 9, 29, 100, 101, 174, 178, 181, 182, 183, 185, 189, 190, 196, 209, 210, 211 and the concept city, 4, 65, 117–18, 123, 181, 186 See also grid: concept; Lefebvre, Henri Page 285 →and the mythic city, 28, 117, 181, 186 and rhythm, 101, 115–19 See also rhythm “Walking in the City,” 9

See also city Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 15, 17, 18, 21, 25–26, 30, 100, 227n3, 228n14, 228n17, 232n75, 233n95, 249n65 “becoming,” 20, 109, 203 “lines of flight,” 30 and maps, 8, 15, 25–26, 232n75, 233n95 “nomad,” 30 “plane of consistency,” 11, 227n3 “rhizome,” 25–26, 30, 105, 119, 124, 127, 231nn95–96 “strata,” 26, 30, 100, 254n57 “territorialization” (de-, re-), 7, 20, 30, 108–9, 112, 124, 202–3. 208 “tracing,” 25–27, 31, 60, 231n95 density, 8, 27, 65, 68–95, 243n38 densification, 68, 70, 76–77 See also Le Corbusier Derrida, Jacques, 15, 24, 230n41 dérive (dérivism, dérivist), 4, 11 diagram block, 11, 132, 137–38, 140–41, 253n22 as methodological approach, 3, 10–12, 22, 109–10, 132, 137–38, 140–41, 212, 253n22 See also McCormack, Derek diatonic, 14, 60, 72, 138, 210 Dickens, Charles, 8, 35–36, 45, 119 dissonance, 27, 67–69, 76, 81–83, 85, 87–92, 94–95, 245n71 dog-leg, 33, 48–49, 52, 62–63, 137, 152 downtown. See Lower Manhattan Dubin, Al, 14–15, 31, 55–56, 61, 79, 81, 113–14, 172, 221–22 Forty Second Street (film, 1933), 61, 79, 81, 172, 221 “42nd Street” (Forty Second Street, 1933), 14, 15, 79, 114, 221 “Lullaby of Broadway” (Gold Diggers of 1935, 1935), (song, 1935), 14, 31, 56, 61, 113, 221–22

Duchin, Eddie, 82 dwell (“dwelling perspective,” Heidegger), 4, 6, 9, 17, 21, 25, 29–30, 59, 70, 130, 178, 186, 205 East River, 34, 38–40 Ebb, Fred, Kander, John, 28, 139, 206, 210, 212, 214 “New York, New York,” 11, 139, 142, 206, 208–12, 214, 217–18, 220 elevator, 129–32, 145, 148, 157, 164–65, 198, 251n73, 256n94 and entrapment, 164–65, 25n73 means of travel, 129, 145, 148, 198 technology of, 130–32, 148, 157, 164–65, 256n94 See also technology Empire State Building, 129, 137, 149, 169, 172, 195, 201, 214, 217, 252n1 construction of, 143 See also sky boys iconicity of, 14, 99, 147, 195 and music, 147 escape, 213 aspirational, 152, 161, 163, 164 avoidance, 41, 51 fire escape, 129–30, 153–58, 160–61, 163–64, 166, 255n73 flight, 27, 149, 156–57, 160–61, 167, 188 release, 150, 152–53, 157, 160–61, 163–64, 167, 255n73, 258n50 Europe as aspirational, 41, 45, 151 influence of, 52, 54, 57, 89, 131, 147, 245n70 Page 286 →Europe (continued) nostalgia for, 52 as opposed to America, 14, 33, 47, 51, 53, 54, 112, 123, 152, 162, 166 refugees from, 49, 60, 74, 248n54, 260n26 See also migration

See also Old World excess, 6, 13, 27, 65, 68–69, 71, 74, 76, 79–80, 85–86, 89–90, 124, 132, 143–44, 151, 167, 206, 214 performance of, 6, 13, 27, 79, 132, 143, 206, 214 Fancy Free (1944), 68, 83–85, 92, 95, 244n59 See also ballet; Bernstein, Leonard; Robbins, Jerome; Smith, Oliver Fantasia 2000 (2000), 145–48 Ferriss, Hugh “Lure of the City, The,” 34, 66, 69, 76 Fields, Dorothy “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (Lew Leslie’s International Revue) 31, 45 Fields, Joseph, 80, 240n47 fire escape, 129–30, 153–61, 163–64, 166, 255n73 and escape, 129–30, 153–57, 160–61, 163–64, 166, 251n73 iconicity of, 156–57, 160, 166 See also iconicity pattern of, 156–60, 166 technology of, 130, 155–57, 164 See also technology flâneur (flânerie), 4, 11 Follies. See Sondheim: Follies footprint, 70, 171, 173–74, 176, 183–84, 192–93, 198 Forty-Second Street Forty Second Street (film), 61, 79, 81, 172, 221 “42nd Street” (song), 14, 15, 79, 114, 221 Forty-Second Street (street) 4, 14, 50–51, 120, 221 Fosse, Bob, 80–81, 162–63, 256n83 Foucault, Michel, 6, 230n41 Freed, Arthur “Broadway Melody” (Broadway Melody of 1929), 14, 56–58, 64, 119–21, 221–22

“Broadway Rhythm” (Broadway Melody of 1936), 14, 57, 63–64, 101, 113–14, 119–23, 137–38, 140, 157, 213 frontier, 74–75, 79, 205, 256n87 gapped scale, 14, 33, 57–58, 62–63, 65, 73, 123, 138–39, 146, 204, 207, 209, 213, 218, 222 See also melody Garber, Michael, x, 14, 54–56, 138 Garland, Judy, 63, 122–23 Gershwin, George, 13, 15, 53, 55–57, 61, 67, 84, 89, 119, 139, 145–47, 157, 159, 164, 208, 227 “American in Paris, An,” 56 American in Paris, An (film), 120, 153 and American music, 13, 53, 55, 157 and the city, 15, 56, 67, 139, 145 “Fascinating Rhythm” (Lady be Good, 1924), 88, 90 “I Got Rhythm” (Girl Crazy, 1930), 57, 142, 222 musical traits of, 57, 89, 119, 146, 159, 164 Rhapsody in Blue (An American Rhapsody), 13–14, 28, 145–48, 157, 159, 164–65 “Girl Hunt” ballet, 120–21, 153–55, 158, 162, 164, 214 Page 287 →Glance at New York, A Glance at New York, A (account, Asa Green, 1837), 34–35, 42 Glance at New York, A (play, Benjamin Baker, 1948), 34–36, 54 Goffman, Erving, 8, 228n16 golden age, 8, 28, 53, 55–57, 62, 97, 110, 153 Graham, Martha, 162–63 “contraction and release,, 162–63, 165 modern dance, 162 Grand Central Station, 48, 50, 56, 148, 169, 177 Great American songbook. See Broadway songbook Great White Way, 1, 54, 209, 221, 234n55 Green, Adolf, 2, 55, 80, 82, 177, 200–201, 209–10, 212 “New York, New York” (On the Town), 2–5, 61–62, 68, 73, 97, 139, 142, 209–10, 217, 223,

227n9 On the Town, 2–4, 28, 62, 68, 73, 80, 83, 94, 101, 116, 133, 138, 201, 214, 227n8 Wonderful Town, 2, 55, 68–69, 76, 80–83, 89–95, 101, 243n47, 243n48, 258n50 Greenwich Village, 37, 40, 42, 67, 81, 83, 94, 201 grid, 2, 96–97, 103, 104–8, 123, 143, 147–48, 150–51, 167, 180, 235n17, 247n34, 247n39 Broadway’s relation to, 48, 52, 106–7, 113, 123, 248n41 concept of, 123, 180 design of, 39, 70, 98, 104–5, 106–7, 117, 150, 180, 247n39 See also Randel plan layer of, 2, 105, 107, 114, 115 See also palimpsest metrical rhythm of, 9, 108, 115, 123, 125, 167 and order (control, restraint), 27, 39, 104, 106–7, 117, 125, 167, 256n73 plan of, 1811, 27, 39, 70, 96, 105, 106, 122, 148, 150, 180 See also Randel Plan repetition of (monotony, uniformity), 88, 105, 151, 167 and space (escape, release), 39, 106, 150–51, 167, 256n73 and space/time, 21, 107 street plan, 27, 148 Stuyvesant grid, 27, 104, 106, 122 Guattari, Félix, 8, 15, 17, 18, 21, 25–26, 30, 100, 227n3, 228n14, 228n17, 232n75, 233n95, 249n65 “becoming,” 20, 109, 203 “lines of flight,” 30 and maps, 8, 15, 25–26, 232n75, 233n95 “nomad,” 30 “plane of consistency,” 11, 227n3 “rhizome,” 25–26, 30, 105, 119, 124, 127, 233nn95–96 “strata,” 26, 30, 100, 254n57 “territorialization” (de-, re-), 7, 20, 30, 108–9, 112, 124, 202–3. 208

“tracing,” 25–27, 31, 60, 233n95 Guys and Dolls (1950), 1, 81–83, 88, 111, 170–76, 179–80, 182–84, 214, 257n6 “Adelaide’s Lament,” 185 “Adelaide meets Sarah,” 185 film version, 172–76, 179–80 “Follow the Fold,” 182–83 “Fugue for Tinhorns,” 173, 182–83 “Guys and Dolls,” 174 “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” 185 “Luck be a Lady,” 111, 183 “My Time of Day,” 185 Page 288 →Guys and Dolls (1950) (continued) “The Oldest Established,” 88, 182–83 “Runyonland,” 172–73, 175, 178–80, 182–84 “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” 183 stage version, 182–85 Halprin, Lawrence, 25, 182, 249n63 Hammerstein, Oscar I, 50–51 Hammerstein, Oscar II, x, 61, 127 Harlem, 56, 133, 147, 151, 216 Harlem River, 48 Harley, J. B., 16–17, 23, 230n41 Hart, Lorenz, 56, 61, 62, 79, 144, 148, 200–201, 240n114 “Babes in Arms” (song, Babes in Arms), 61 Babes in Arms (film, 1939), 122, 124 Babes in Arms (show, 1937), 61, 241n116 “Blue Moon” (Manhattan Melodrama), 148–49 “Johnny One Note” (Babes in Arms), 61–62, 241n116 “Manhattan” (Winkle Town), 55, 201, 206

“Manhattan Melodrama” (Manhattan Melodrama), 79 “Nobody Loves a Riveter” (The Hot Heiress), 56, 144 Hegel, Georg, 124 Heidegger, Martin, 17, 21 High Line, The, 129, 153 hip-hop, 22, 28, 216, 218 Hirschfeld, Al, 145 Hudson River, 34, 39–40, 199, 232n3, 248n41 iconicity, 1–4, 6–8, 13–15, 28, 34, 51, 55, 63, 68–69, 71–72, 76, 99–100, 119, 121, 129, 132, 137–38, 143, 145–48, 150, 153–54, 156–57, 160, 164, 166, 170, 195–96, 199–200, 205, 208, 210, 214–16, 219, 255n69 of advertising, 1, 196 of Broadway (the street), 1–2, 4, 7, 63, 119 of Broadway (the theater industry), 51, 63, 119 of the Empire State Building, 14, 147 See also Empire State Building of “Empire State of Mind,” 219 See also Jay-Z: “Empire State of Mind”Jay-Z of the fire escape, 156–57, 164, 166 See also technology: fire escape of Frank Sinatra, 208, 214 See also Sinatra, Frank of Guys and Dolls, 170, 219 See also Guys and Dolls; Loesser, Frank: Guys and Dolls of “Lure of the City” (Ferriss), 69, 76 of Manhattan, 34, 72, 76, 99, 146, 154, 255n69 of New York, 3–4, 6–8, 13, 15, 69, 76, 137, 146, 150, 160, 195–96, 199–200, 208, 216 of “New York, New York” (Bernstein), 68 See also On the Town: “New York, New York”; Bernstein, Leonard; Comden, Betty; Green, Adolf of “New York, New York” (Kander and Ebb), 205, 208

See also Ebb, Fred: “New York, New York”; Kander, John: “New York, New York” of the skyline, 34, 129, 140, 148, 150, 195, 199 See also skyline of the subway, 250n69 Page 289 →See also subway of Times Square, 121, 145 See also Times Square of West Side Story, 160, 170 See also Bernstein, Leonard; West Side Story of the World Trade Center, 195, 199, 205, 210, 215 See also World Trade Center identity, 2, 6–7, 10–11, 13, 47–48, 52, 54–56, 60, 63–65, 72, 80, 89, 115, 117, 129, 132, 138, 148, 166, 169, 171, 178, 200, 206, 213, 219, 239n86, 248n54 American (national identity), 47–48, 52, 54–56, 80, 148, 163, 213, 239n86, 248n54 of immigrants, 60, 63 of New York, 2, 65, 129, 132, 152, 163, 213 of place, 10–11, 65, 89, 117, 129, 163 imageability. See Lynch, Kevin: imageability immersive, 30, 63, 118, 178, 185–86 immigration. See migration In the Heights, 164–66, 258n50 “Breathe,” 164–66 Brown, Denise Scott, 9–11 Learning from Las Vegas, 9–11 See also urban theory Jacobs, Jane, 9, 101–2, 105, 115–16, 118–19, 176, 179, 180, 182, 247n34 See also urban theory Jay-Z, 216–20, 262n77 “Empire State of Mind,” 215–18 jazz, 68, 72, 84, 92, 95, 119, 122, 145, 147, 162, 166, 213–14

Joel, Billy, 213, 215–16 “Miami 2017” (song), 215 “New York State of Mind” (song), 213, 215–16 Kander, John, 28, 139, 206, 210, 212, 214 “New York, New York,” 11, 139, 142, 206, 208–12, 214, 217–18, 220 Keeler, Ruby, 14, 80 Kelly, Gene, 101, 120–22 Knapp, Raymond, 52, 55, 57, 81–88, 113, 163, 238n63, 244n53 “broken-record” effect, 82–88 “emblems of edginess,” 81–82 Keys, Alicia, 28, 216–20 “Empire State of Mind (Part II): Broken Down,” 215–18 Koolhaas, Rem, 9, 28, 56, 98, 106, 135, 137, 139, 142, 148, 247n34 “Manhattanism,” 9, 28 Lacan, Jacques, 186 Larson, Jonathan, 31, 100, 176 Rent (1996), 31, 100, 176 Laurents, Arthur, 102, 241n115 See also West Side Story layer (plane), 2–3, 7, 27–28, 30, 63, 93–94, 97–98, 100, 105, 109, 114–15, 116–17, 122–27, 129, 131, 146, 165, 176, 178–80, 183, 185, 203, 227n3 See also palimpsest Lazarus, Emma, 60 “New Colossus, The,” 60 Le Corbusier, 9, 77–78, 86, 198, 243n38 City of Tomorrow (1929), 77 “City of Towers,” 86 Lefebvre, Henri, 9, 101, 115–16, 118–19, 122, 178–81 conceived space, 180, 185 See also city: concept city; grid: concept of; space: conceived space

lived space, 21, 29, 181, 186 See also city: concept space; space: lived space Page 290 →Lefebvre, Henri (continued) perceived space, 181, 186 See also space rhythmanalysis, 9, 101, 115, 118–19, 121–22, 180 See also rhythm; rhythmanalysis Lincoln Center, 27, 51, 101–3, 106, 220, 259n88 Lloyd Webber, Andrew, 202–4 Tell Me On a Sunday (1980), 202–4 Loesser, Frank, 82, 172, 185, 214 Guys and Dolls (1950), 1, 81–83, 88, 111, 170–76, 179–80, 182–84, 214, 257n6 loneliness, 8, 76, 154, 203–4, 214, 216, 220, 246n79 Lower East Side, 56, 70 Lower Manhattan, 33, 38, 40, 51, 67–68, 71, 78, 100, 167, 195–97, 201, 206, 235n4 congestion in, 41, 72, 167, 196 regeneration of, 40, 196–97, 220 “Lullaby of Broadway” (song, 1935), 14, 31, 56, 61, 113, 221–22 See also Dubin, Al; Warren, Harry Lunch atop a Skyscraper: (New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam) (photograph, 1932), 143, 150 lure (allure), 14, 34, 45, 54, 58, 66, 69, 71, 74–76, 127, 147, 150, 199, 202–3, 206 of Broadway, 54, 58 of the city, 34, 58, 69, 71, 74–75, 150, 199, 202–3, 206 of lights, 45 “Lure of the City, The” (Ferriss), 34, 66, 69, 76 of music, 14 of nostalgia, 127 of success, 147 Lynch, Kevin, 9, 27, 33, 58–59, 65, 180–81, 188–90

image of the city, The, 9, 27, 33, 58–59, 65 imageability, 33, 58–60 legibility, 59, 174, 186, 190 Mackintosh, Cameron, 124 Madison Square Garden, 54, 215, 217 Maltby Jr., Richard, 202–4 Manhattan, 1–4, 6, 8–9, 12–14, 27–29, 33–34, 37–40, 42, 48–50, 54, 59, 61, 65, 69–72, 74, 76, 78–79, 81, 86, 89, 94, 96, 98–99, 101–2, 104, 106, 113, 124, 128–31, 135, 137–39, 141, 143–48, 150–51, 153–54, 157, 164, 166–68, 170, 177, 196–204, 206, 210, 213, 215, 219, 221, 235nn3–4, 239n89, 248n41 architecture of, 14, 98, 137–38, 148, 166 See also architecture density of, 27, 70–72, 74, 76, 89, 104, 196 See also density development of, 28, 38–39, 42, 49, 59, 70, 79, 98, 101, 104, 144–45, 151, 197 excess of, 76 See also excess iconicity of, 34, 146, 154 See also iconicity Lower Manhattan, 33, 38, 40, 51, 67–68, 71, 78, 100, 167, 195–97, 201, 206, 235n4 See also Lower Manhattan Manhattan (Allen, 1979), 12–14 See also Allen, Woody Manhattanism, 9, 139, 148, 164 See also Koolhaas, Rem “Manhattan” (song), 200–201, 206 “Manhattan Mad” (song), 54 “Manhattan Madness” (song), 113, 138, 141 Manhattan Melodrama (film), 148–49 Page 291 →“Manhattan Melodrama” (song), 79 Manhattan Opera House, 50

Manhattan Symphony (Lancen, 1962), 13 Manhattanville, 34 patterns of, 6, 28–29, 72, 138–42, 207 performance of, 14 See also performance skyline of, 34, 128, 131, 135, 138, 144, 235n4 See also skyline upness of, 28, 65, 72, 129, 131, 146, 157, 164, 207 See also upness Manilow, Barry, 63, 213 Copacabana (1994), 63 “New York City Rhythm” (song), 213 map, 2–4, 7–12, 15–17, 20–31, 37, 48–49, 52, 58–60, 62, 65, 72, 104, 107, 123, 129, 137, 170–71, 173–79, 182, 184–86, 193, 202, 209–11, 220, 223–24, 228n17, 230nn41–42, 231n53, 232n75, 233n82, 233n95, 234n101, 235n3, 235nn16–17, 247n34 act of mapping, 3, 7–8, 10, 15–17, 20–26, 29, 60, 62, 65, 170–71, 173–74, 177–79, 186, 193, 228n17, 233n82, 234n101 bird’s-eye view, 8, 27, 33–35, 48, 52, 58–59, 62–63, 65, 131, 133, 137, 205 conceptual mapping, 8, 27, 29, 31, 59, 65, 174, 233n82 See also Bannon, Fiona; de Certeau, Michel; Jacobs, Jane; Le Corbusier; Lynch, Kevin and deconstruction, 15–26, 230nn41–42 Deleuze and Guattari and, 8, 15, 25–26, 232n75, 233n95 See also Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix and metaphor, 7–9, 15, 22–26, 30, 63 See also metaphor musical mapping, 9, 11, 15, 60–65, 72, 107, 123, 137, 182, 185–86 and parkour, 233n82 See also parkour and performance cartography, 8, 65 See also performance cartography performative mapping, 8, 16–26

and power, 15–17 and representation, 15, 16–26, 230n41 See also representation Massey, Doreen, 2, 9, 100, 124, 231n54, 258n32 See also urban theory McCormack, Derek, 11, 19, 26, 258n32 See also diagram melody, 14, 33, 46, 52, 56–65, 73, 85, 91, 109, 114, 119–21, 123, 133, 137–38, 140–41, 146, 204, 209–10, 216–18, 220–22, 240n114, 241n115 “Broadway Melody” (ballet), 119–21 See also Singin’ in the Rain: “Broadway Melody” “Broadway Melody” (concept), 33, 52, 56–58, 62–64, 65, 204, 209, 220–22 See also gapped scale “Broadway Melody” (song), 14, 56–58, 64, 119–21, 221–22 See also Brown, Nacio Herb; Freed, Arthur Broadway Melody of 1938 (film), 133 melting pot, 13, 88, 213, 218, 245n70, 248n54 See also metaphor: melting pot Page 292 →metaphor, 7–9, 12–15, 17–19, 21–26, 28, 30, 44, 56, 59–61, 63–65, 73, 75, 79, 89, 100, 105, 116–19, 123, 130, 146, 165–66, 174, 177, 180, 182, 184–87, 202, 207, 219, 221, 223, 232n75, 245n70, 262n65 of aspiration (rags to riches), 60, 65, 79, 121, 202, 217 See also rags to riches of ballet, 6, 97, 115–16, 172–74, 176, 178, 182–86 See also ballet of “contraction and release,” 162–63, 165 See also escape; Graham, Martha of dance, 1, 115–16, 123, 177, 179, 182, 184, 222 of drama, 10, 180 of footprint, 70, 171, 173–74, 176, 183–84, 192–93, 198 See also footprint

of immigration, 60–61 in language, 14, 24, 117 of map, 7–9, 15, 22–26, 30, 63 See also map of melting pot, 13, 88, 213, 218, 245n70, 248n54 See also melting pot the metaphorical city, 119 as methodological approach, 7–9, 12, 223 multidimensionality of, 7, 29 musical, 7, 9, 14, 59–65, 73, 89, 100, 105, 118, 123, 184–86, 223, 232n75, 262n65 of performance, 15–22, 177 spatial, 7, 9, 28, 63, 146, 184–86, 189–92, 229n75 as used by others, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21–26, 30, 44, 64, 75, 79, 116–19, 130, 162, 165, 174, 177, 186–87, 207, 219, 232n75, 245n70, 262n65 of vehicles, 182 of walk (walking tour), 2, 8–9, 11–12, 26–31, 33, 58, 60, 63, 65, 67–70, 73, 78, 97, 100, 116, 123, 129–30, 146, 156, 162, 169–71, 174, 177–78, 180–81, 187, 188, 193, 195–96, 201, 209, 220, 223, 258n50 of Wild West, 74, 78–79, 195 Metropolitan Opera, 51, 83, 101 midtown, 33, 48, 56, 68, 70, 129, 145, 151, 198, 210, 217 Midwest, 27, 75, 207 migration, ix, 27, 34, 40, 42–43, 48–49, 51, 53, 60–63, 71–76, 90, 102–3, 108, 117, 151, 164, 167, 202, 220, 245n70, 248n54 from rural America, 27, 74–76, 90 European immigration, ix, 27, 34, 42, 48–49, 53, 60–63, 71–74, 167, 202, 220, 245n70, 248n54 Puerto Rican immigration, 102–3 uptown, 40, 43, 51, 238n72 Minnelli, Liza, 206, 208 Miranda, Lin Manuel. See In the Heights modernism, 7, 14, 28, 33–34, 48–50, 54, 56, 62–63, 68, 70, 72, 77, 79, 82, 84–86, 89–90, 98–99, 101–3, 106–7, 113, 131–32, 139, 142–43, 147, 149, 151, 162, 164, 166–67, 177, 180, 196, 199

in architecture, 72, 77, 86, 98, 106–7, 139, 143, 164, 177 ideas of, 7, 34, 49–50, 56, 68, 79, 82, 85, 101, 131–32, 142–43, 147, 149, 162, 167, 199 in music, 56, 72, 82, 84, 89–90, 92, 101, 103, 113, 244n53 modern dance, 162 See also dance, Graham period, 72, 98 push toward, 28, 33, 48, 180 Page 293 →technologies of, 28, 54, 131–32, 147, 167 See also technology Moses, Robert, 101–3 multidimensionality, 2–4, 7, 10, 12, 19, 21, 22, 25–26, 28–29, 98, 105–6, 115, 118–19, 123–24, 130–31, 148, 154, 156, 171, 174, 177, 180, 223–24, 231n54, 247n34 My Sister Eileen My Sister Eileen (book, 1938), 80 My Sister Eileen (film, 1955), 80–81, 83–84, 244n48 See also Wonderful Town mythology, 1, 6–7, 28, 34–35, 58, 63, 65, 69, 74, 76, 79–80, 112, 121, 126–27, 143, 145, 150, 202, 208, 210, 256n87 of America, 74, 127, 202 of New York, 79–80, 150, 210 of success, 58, 63, 65, 69, 76, 121, 208 New Amsterdam, 37, 104, 137, 235n16 “New Colossus, The.” See Lazarus, Emma newcomer, 18, 27, 60, 71, 73–74, 258n50 New York density of, 67–96 design and planning of, 97–128 history of, 33–66 iconicity of, 3–4, 6–8, 13, 15, 69, 76, 137, 146, 150, 160, 195–96, 199–200, 208, 216 identity of, 2, 65, 129, 132, 152, 163, 213

mythology of, 79–80, 150, 210 New New York, ix, 50, 212 New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 84, 101 Old New York, 50, 209 people’s journeys in, 169–94 songs of, x, 52, 54–55, 90, 113, 212, 213, 216 technologies of, 129–68 as world city, 195–222 See also Brooklyn; Bronx; Manhattan; Queens; Staten Island; and other areas such as Broadway, Central Park, Greenwich Village, etc. “New York, New York” (Bernstein), 2–5, 61–62, 68, 73, 97, 139, 142, 209–10, 217, 223, 227n9 iconicity of, 68 See also iconicity See also Bernstein, Leonard; Comden, Betty; Green, Adolf; On the Town “New York, New York” (Kander and Ebb), 11, 139, 142, 206, 208–12, 214, 217–18, 220 iconicity of, 205, 208 See also iconicity See also Ebb, Fred; Kander, John Niblo’s Garden, 42, 47, 255n73 nonrepresentational theory, 15–22 See also Thrift Old World, 33, 47, 52–54, 60, 90, 152, 209 Oligopticon, 2, 3, 28, 30, 224 On the Town (1944), 2–4, 28, 616–22, 68, 73, 80, 83, 94, 101, 116, 133, 138, 201, 214, 227n8 “Come Up to My Place,” 4–5 film version, 133, 201 “New York, New York,” 2–5, 61–62, 68, 73, 97, 139, 142, 209–10, 217, 223, 225n9 “Times Square Ballet,” 3 See also ballet See also Bernstein, Leonard; Comden, Betty; Green, Adolf

Page 294 →outsider, 34, 68, 81, 199–203, 205, 207–8, 210, 213, 219 palimpsest, 27, 100, 103–5, 124, 127, 248n54 See also layer parkour, 4, 22, 28, 230n82 pastoral, 14, 39, 69, 91, 151–52, 246n79, 255n73, 256n87 pentatonic, 14, 57, 62 See also gapped scale performance (concept), 6, 7–11, 13–14, 18, 22, 27–28, 55, 65, 69, 79, 82, 100–101, 114–15, 120–24, 126–27, 132, 143, 149, 167, 173, 176–87, 179, 184, 190, 193, 205–6, 210, 212, 214, 217–19, 228n16, 234n101, 248n54, 257n8 of excess, 6, 13, 27, 79, 132, 143, 206, 214 See also excess of identity, 55, 65 of place, 7–8, 14, 22, 65, 69, 123, 149, 167, 193, 205–6, 210 See also place of song, 14, 28, 114–15, 120–23, 132, 190, 210, 212, 217–19 performance space, 172–73 “performative turn,” 8, 15–22, 228n16 “twice-behaved behaviour,” 177, 206, 257n8 See also Schechner, Richard See also performance studies performance cartography, 7–11, 19, 27, 30, 33, 65, 66, 80, 86, 133, 166, 223–24, 228n17 explanation of, 8–11 performance studies, 8, 15, 17–22 See also performance performativity, 3, 8, 10, 15–22, 26, 101, 115, 119, 122, 124, 129–30, 172–73, 182, 206, 240n114 phenomenology, 11, 15, 28, 30, 130, 166, 178, 181, 184, 186 piano (composition), 58, 67–68, 72, 82–83, 85–86, 95, 109, 145–47, 165, 213 stride, 72, 145–46 “thumb-line,” 109, 122

place, ix, 1, 7–8, 10–11, 14–15, 18, 20–25, 41, 47, 54, 65, 69, 73, 75, 79, 81, 90, 117, 123, 149–50, 153, 157, 160–61, 164, 167, 178, 182, 192–93, 200, 202–6, 208, 210, 213, 218, 223, 228n17, 249n63, 258n32, 261n51 aspirational, 1, 41, 54, 69, 200, 202–5 Broadway (the city, Manhattan, New York, America) as, 7, 41, 47, 54, 65, 69, 73, 75, 79, 81, 207, 213, 218 of escape, 150, 153, 157, 160–61, 164 See also escape experience of, 10–11, 21, 178 mapping of, 22–25, 228n17 See also map naming of, 205, 208, 259n51 music as, 14, 54–56, 138 See also Garber, Michael performance of, 7–8, 14, 22, 65, 69, 123, 149, 167, 193, 205–6, 210 See also performance representation of, 15, 18, 20 Plan of 1811. See Randel Plan playfulness, xi, 2, 4, 12, 20, 26, 30, 65, 98, 100, 105, 107, 113, 119, 121, 155, 173, 184, 212, 214, 228n17 population, 38, 40, 49, 51, 68, 70–71, 74, 76–78, 88, 102–4, 115, 151, 206, 236n25, 238n72, 248n54 growth, 38, 40, 49, 70–71, 74, 77, 103–4, 151, 236n25, 238n72 Porter, Cole, 39, 55, 57, 147, 204, 239n89 Page 295 →postmodernism, 15 poststructuralism, 8, 15–17, 20, 23–24, 26, 30, 119, 127 progress, 6, 14, 37, 39, 59, 64–65, 72, 74, 79, 82, 85–86, 95, 98–99, 100, 106, 143, 149–50, 153, 167, 207, 245n70 psychogeography, 11 Queens, 48, 102 rags to riches, 60, 65, 79, 121, 202, 217 See also metaphor Randel Plan (plan of 1811), 27, 39, 96, 101, 103–4, 106, 122, 150, 205, 247n39 See also grid

repetition, 13, 27, 46, 53, 57, 60–62, 67–68, 72, 75, 77–79, 82–83, 85–88, 90–91, 94–95, 108, 111, 114, 126–27, 137, 145–47, 157, 167, 176, 185, 188, 206, 218, 240n114 representation (concept) 8, 10, 12–13, 15, 16–23, 23–26, 27, 35, 37, 60, 131, 135, 137, 151, 159, 176, 178, 184, 189, 190, 213, 216, 217, 222 See also non-representational theory rhythm, ix, 7, 9, 14, 26–27, 53, 56–57, 59, 60–63, 73, 81–83, 85, 88–89, 91–92, 100–101, 105–23, 127, 137–38, 144, 146, 148, 154, 156–57, 167, 177–79, 182, 184, 190, 204, 209, 213, 217–18, 229n22, 240n114, 248n53, 250n80 “Broadway Rhythm” (concept), 14, 27, 97, 100, 114, 127, 222 Broadway Rhythm (film, 1944), 133 Broadway rhythm (idiom), 27, 62–63, 109–13, 204, 209 “Broadway Rhythm” (Broadway Melody of 1936), 14, 57, 63–64, 101, 113–14, 119–23, 137–38, 140, 157, 213 See also Brown, Nacio Herb; Freed, Arthur de Certeau and, 101, 115–19 See also de Certeau, Michel “Fascinating Rhythm” (song), 88, 90, 100 See also Gershwin, George “I Got Rhythm” (song), 57, 142, 222 See also Gershwin, George Lefebvre and, 9, 101, 115, 118–19, 121–22, 180 See also Lefebvre, Henri; rhythmanalysis “New York City Rhythm” (song), 213 ragtime, 53–54, 86, 90, 95, 113, 146 of life, 56 See also syncopation rhythmanalysis, 9, 101, 116–21, 123–24, 184 See also Lefebvre, Henri; rhythm rialto, 50, 58, 62 Robbins, Jerome, 14, 83–84, 101–2, 162 See also Fancy Free; On the Town; West Side Story Rodgers, Richard, 56, 61, 62, 79, 144, 148, 200–201, 240n114

“Babes in Arms” (song, Babes in Arms), 61 Babes in Arms (film, 1939), 122, 124 Babes in Arms (show, 1937), 61, 241n116 “Blue Moon” (Manhattan Melodrama), 148–49 “Johnny One Note” (Babes in Arms), 61–62, 241n116 “Manhattan” (Winkle Town), 55, 201, 206 Page 296 →Rodgers, Richard (continued) “Manhattan Melodrama” (Manhattan Melodrama), 79 “Nobody Loves a Riveter” (The Hot Heiress), 56, 144 Rodgers and Hammerstein, x, 127, 240n114 See also Hart, Lorenz; Rodgers, Richard Rooney, Mickey, 63, 122–23 Runyon, Damon, 1, 88, 172, 174 New York Stories, 1 rural, 38, 46, 69, 74–76, 78–80, 89–94, 152–53, 209, 246n79, 256n87 America, 69, 75–76, 79, 90, 93–94, 209, 246n79 Schechner, Richard, 8, 171, 206, 228n16, 257n8 “twice-behaved behaviour,” 177, 206, 257n8 See also performance Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, 9, 69, 74, 94, 132 Rise of the City, The, 69, 74, 132 See also city; urban theory score, 11, 13, 22, 26–27, 67, 72–73, 82–3, 84, 91–92, 95, 105, 107, 121–22, 144, 146, 178, 182–84, 190, 191, 230, 232n75, 255n80, 259n59 of the city, 26, 182–84 as diagram (map), 11, 22, 26 Shubert Brothers, 50 Sinatra, Frank, 206, 208–10, 212, 214, 216–18, 220, 259n52 iconicity of, 208, 214 See also iconicity

Singin’ in the Rain (1952), 56, 101, 119–21, 153 “Broadway Melody” (ballet), 101, 119–21 skyline, 6, 9, 28, 34, 94, 128, 131–35, 137–39, 143–44, 194–95, 199, 205, 212, 215, 235n4 abstraction of, 132–34, 137–39, 143, 205 construction of, 138 iconicity of, 34, 138, 195 See also iconicity pattern of, 9, 28, 137–39 planes of, 94 steps of, 133, 135, 137, 212 towering nature of, 6, 138, 199 skyscraper, 12, 15, 56, 68, 72–73, 77–79, 95, 129, 131–32, 135, 137, 139, 142–45, 147, 149–50, 198, 214 See also tower Smith, Oliver, 83, 92, 155–56, 158 See also The Band Wagon; Fancy Free; West Side Story Sondheim, Steven, 63, 67, 77, 82, 97–102, 109–10, 114, 124–27, 222, 244n58, 250n88, 250n89, 252n107 Follies, 82, 97–101, 114, 124–27, 250n88 Merrily We Roll Along, 126, 222 songlines, 9, 20, 22, 176, 178, 186, 228n17 space (spatial), 2, 4, 7–8, 10–12, 15, 18–23, 25–30, 38–39, 44, 59, 65, 67, 70–73, 78–80, 83, 89–93, 100, 107, 113–18, 120, 123–24, 129–32, 139, 147–48, 150–53, 157, 160–63, 166–67, 169, 172–74, 176–82, 184–86, 188, 192–93, 197–98, 202, 210, 214, 224, 226n17, 230n47, 231n54, 232n75, 233n82, 234n101, 246n79, 249n63, 250n80, 256n87, 258n32, 258n50 conceived space, 29, 130, 180–81, 185, 224, 228n17 See also city; grid; Lefebvre; urban theory congested space, 70–73, 80 embodied experience of, 11, 21, 30 Page 297 →space as escape, 39, 129, 150–63, 160–61, 163, 258n50 filmic space, 28–29, 160, 172, 176 lived space, 21, 29, 180–81, 186, 224

See also city, Lefebvre, urban theory mapping of, 12, 15, 20, 230n47 metaphors of, 7 methodological approach to, 4 musically constructed, 29, 67, 83, 89–93, 184–86, 246n79 perceived space, 59, 116–17, 180–81, 186, 224 See also city; Lefebvre; urban theory performative exploration of, 9, 22, 28, 169, 172–73, 178–82, 185–86, 233n82 rural space, 79–80, 90–93, 151, 256n87 spatial practices, 9, 28, 116–17, 178–82, 185–6, 228n17, 233n82, 249n63, 258n32 stage space, 10, 29, 160, 176 and time, 2, 8, 15, 19, 21–22, 65, 100, 107, 115, 123–24, 214, 231n54, 232n75 vertical space, 129, 131–32, 147–48, 157, 166, 258n50 virtual space, 30, 123 walking in, 12, 116–17, 169, 172–74, 177–82, 185, 186, 188, 192–93, 233n82, 258n32 See also Massey Staten Island, 48, 72, 131, 199 Statue of Liberty, 1, 3, 33, 60, 65, 74, 195, 199, 201, 217 Steinbeck, John, 209 stimulus, 8, 9, 27, 33, 223 Stoker, Bram, 35, 119 straight line motif, 49, 59–62, 65, 73, 156, 165, 218, 240n114 Stuyvesant grid, 27, 104, 106, 122 See also grid Stuyvesant, Peter, 37 Stuyvesant, Petrus, 39, 104 subway, 1, 3, 51, 68, 81, 88, 115, 129–30, 148–49, 154, 162, 165, 181, 223–24, 255n73 commuters, 68, 115, 148–49 construction, 81

iconicity of, 154 See also iconicity map, 223–24 noise of, 1 as performance space, 149, 162 as technology, 130, 148, 165, 181, 255n73 trains, 1, 3, 129, 148 See also technology Sweet Charity (1966), 81–82, 163, 165–66, 258n50 “Big Spender,” 163 “Rich Man’s Frug,” 163 “There’s Gotta be Something Better Than This,” 163 syncopation, 7, 9, 27, 53, 82–84, 90, 100–101, 103, 105–10, 112–13, 115, 119–27, 147, 156–57, 180, 183, 191, 209, 213, 221, 248n54 synecdoche, 2, 54, 117, 138, 199 technology, 1, 3, 12, 15, 16, 28–29, 48, 51, 54, 63, 68, 70, 75, 81–82, 88, 115, 120–21, 129–32, 145–50, 153–67, 177, 181, 198, 223–24, 255n73, 256n94 developments in, 48, 70, 75 elevated railway, 34, 153 elevator, 129–32, 145, 148, 157, 164–65, 198, 255n73, 256n94 See also elevator fire escape, 129–30, 153–61, 163–64, 166, 255n73 See also fire escape Page 298 →technology (continued) iconicity of, 150 as metaphor, 130 neon lighting, 1, 12, 15, 54, 63, 120–21 subway, 1, 3, 51, 68, 81, 88, 115, 129–30, 148–49, 154, 162, 165, 181, 223–24, 255n73 See also subway tempo, 7, 9, 122, 164

texture, 9, 25, 68, 73, 89, 92, 100, 119, 123–24, 127, 180, 182, 184, 192, 214, 220 Thrift, Nigel, 2, 6, 8, 17–19, 21, 25–26, 30, 174, 182, 229n22, 230n47, 258n49 See also non-representational theory Times Square, 1, 3, 4, 30, 50–51, 65, 68, 120–21, 145, 154, 169, 172, 176, 201, 205, 214, 217, 238n72, 255n69 iconicity of, 121, 145 See also iconicity Longacre Square, 50–51, 238n72 “Times Square Ballet” (On the Town), 3 See also On the Town Tin Pan Alley, 6, 53, 90, 105, 132, 139, 248n54 tower (notion of towering), 2, 6, 12, 67, 72–73, 76, 80, 86, 88, 116, 118, 129, 131–32, 135, 137–39, 143, 145, 147–49, 163, 166, 170–72, 179, 185–86, 194–96, 198–99, 201, 205–8, 212, 214–17, 220, 252n1 “City of Towers,” 86 See also city; Le Corbusier vantage point, 2, 116, 118, 171, 179, 185, 205 See also De Certeau See also Empire State Building; skyscraper; upness; verticality; World Trade Center trace, 2, 4, 12, 25–28, 31, 37, 60–62, 91, 103–4, 106, 124, 146, 170, 184–85, 193, 233n82, 235n17 Deleuzian tracing, 25–27, 31, 106, 233n95 Derridean trace, 28, 31, 103, 106, 124, 170 parkour traceur, 233n82 Trollope, Frances, 35, 41, 45, 258n26 “two-four.” See Broadway rhythm Union Square, 43, 47–50, 52 upness, 28, 146, 157, 164–65 See also tower; verticality Upper West Side, ix, 14, 30, 97, 101, 143, 169, 171, 197 urban, 14, 37, 39–40, 43, 54, 56, 58–59, 68–69, 70, 75–81, 83–90, 92–94, 100–102, 104–6, 112–13, 115–17, 129–30, 133, 139, 153, 158, 160, 162–63, 165, 167, 171–72, 177, 180–82, 184, 186, 188, 193, 197–98, 219, 229n22, 234n101, 246n79

allure, 58, 75 decay, 76 density, 69–70, 76–77 development, 37, 39, 102, 105 nightlife, 54 as opposed to rural, 14, 80, 89–90, 94, 246n79 planning, 43, 70, 78, 101, 104, 177, 182 regeneration, 40, 105, 165, 197 sounds (music), 56, 90, 92, 100, 113, 167 See also urban theory urban theory, 2, 8–9, 11, 33, 58, 69, 77, 80, 101, 200 City of Tomorrow, 77 See also Le Corbusier Page 299 →“City of Towers,” 88 See also Le Corbusier conceived space, 29, 130, 180–81, 185, 224, 286n17 See also Lefebvre, Henri; space concept city, 4, 65, 117–18, 123, 181, 186 See also de Certeau, Michel; grid image of the city, The, 9, 27, 33, 58–59, 65 See also city; Lynch Learning from Las Vegas, 9–11 See also Brown, Denise Scott; Isenour, Steven; Venturi, Robert lived space, 21, 29, 180–81, 186, 224 See also Lefebvre, Henri; space “Lure of the City, The,” 34, 66, 69, 76 “Manhattanism,” 9, 28 See also Koolhaas mythic city, 28, 117, 181, 186

perceived space, 59, 116–17, 180–81, 186, 224 See also Lefebvre, Henri; space rhythm, 115–19 See also de Certeau, Michel; rhythm rhythmanalysis, 9, 101, 116–21, 123–24, 184 See also Lefebvre, Henri; rhythm “Walking in the City,” 9 See also Bannon, Fiona; city; Jacobs, Jane; Massey, Doreen; Schlesinger, Arthur Meier Venturi, Robert, 9–11 Learning from Las Vegas, 9–11 See also urban theory verticality, 8, 28, 65, 72, 78, 86, 124, 129, 132, 146–47, 156–57, 164–65, 180, 207, 232n75, 253n22 “competitive verticality,” 132, 207 See also Baudrillard, Jean Wall Street, 6, 34, 37, 41, 137, 142, 167, 196 banking industry, 6, 167 Warren, Harry, 14–15, 31, 55–56, 61, 79, 81, 113–14, 172, 221–22, 261n50 Forty Second Street (film, 1933), 61, 79, 81, 172, 221, 261n50 “42nd Street” (Forty Second Street, 1933), 14, 15, 79, 114, 221 “Lullaby of Broadway” (Gold Diggers of 1935, 1935), (song, 1935), 14, 31, 56, 61, 113, 221–22 West Side Story (1957), 14, 29, 67, 69, 82–84, 85, 101–3, 107, 110–12, 117, 123, 125, 133, 150, 153, 156, 158, 160, 162–66, 169–72, 186–87, 189–91, 241n115, 247n18; 247n25, 257n6, 258n50, 259n59 “America,” 163 “Balcony Scene, The,” 109, 160 “Dance at the Gym, The,” 68 design, 156, 158 See also Smith, Oliver film version, 29, 101–3, 133, 153, 160, 169–70, 186–87, 189–91, 257n6 and fire escape, 156, 158, 160, 163–64 See also fire escape

“Gee, Officer Krupke,” 68 “Ker-chung” (opening musical motif), 14, 67, 69, 72–73, 82, 84, 107 “I Have a Love,” 191 “Jet Song, The,” 68, 108, 110, 191, 241n115 “One Hand, One Heart,” 109 “Prologue,” 14, 68–69, 107–8, 125, 127, 161–62, 171, 189–91 Page 300 →West Side Story (1957) (continued) “Something’s Coming,” 68, 108, 110, 112 “Somewhere,” 161, 191 “Tonight,” 68, 111 See also Bernstein, Leonard; Laurents, Arthur; Robbins, Jerome; Sondheim, Steven Whiteman, Paul, 13, 165 Whitman, Walt, 33, 199 Williams, Tennessee, 164 Glass Menagerie, The (1945), 164 Winter Garden, 95, 97, 99, 114, 255n73 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 17, 21 Wizard of Oz, The (film, 1939), 76 Wonderful Town (1953), 2, 55, 68–69, 76, 80–83, 89–95, 101, 243n47, 243n48, 258n50 “Ballet at the Village Vortex,” 92 “Christopher Street,” 1, 67, 81–84 “Conquering New York,” 94–95 “Ohio,” 89–90, 92, 94 telecast (1958), 81 248nn47–48 “Wrong Note Rag,” 90 See also Bernstein, Leonard; Comden, Betty; Green, Adolf; My Sister Eileen Woolworth Building, 4, 67, 71–72, 78, 256n94 World Trade Center, 116, 132, 170, 179, 194–99, 201, 205–7, 210, 212, 215–17, 219–20, 252n1 as metaphor, 205–7, 210, 212

terrorist attack, 206, 215–16, 219 Twin Towers, 132, 194–96, 198–99, 201, 205–7, 212, 215, 217, 252n1 See also iconicity; tower Yamasaki, Minoru, 197–98 See also World Trade Center Youmans, Vincent, 111 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 54, 121 zoning law, 70, 135, 138, 147, 198