The creative destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 9780226644684, 9780226644769, 9780226644691

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page ix)
Acknowledgments (page xiii)
ONE: THE PROVISIONAL CITY (page 1)
TWO: FIFTH AVENUE'S "RESTLESS RENEWALS": REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT ALONG THE "SPINE OF GOTHAM" (page 21)
THREE: THE FOUL CORE OF NEW YORK: THE RISE OF SLUM CLEARANCE AS HOUSING REFORM (page 69)
FOUR: PRICELESS HISTORIC PRESERVATION AND THE VALUING OF SPACE (page 111)
FIVE: "A VANISHED CITY IS RESTORED": INVENTING AND DISPLAYING THE PAST AT THE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK (page 145)
SIX: USES OF THE AXE TOWARD A TREELESS NEW YORK (page 177)
SEVEN: PRO URBIS AMORE: I. N. PHELPS STOKES AND ICONOGRAPHY OF MANHATTAN ISLAND (page 217)
EIGHT: LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY AND AMNESIA (page 251)
Notes (page 261)
Index (page 299)

Citation preview

THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF MANHATTAN, IS00-1940

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THE RISE OF SLUM CLEARANCE AS HOUSING REFORM 75 Bend, even after it had been “cleared,” would be the Platonic counterideal to which all housing for the poor would be compared. The story begins at the start of the previous century, when the meager land of Manhattan Island and rapid land speculation brought wealth and poverty into close contact and pitted city builders, speculators, and workers against one another in an open conflict for space. Although since 1676 there were precedents for removal of “nuisances”—as dilapidated or vice-ridden housing was called—only in the early nineteenth century did such removal become a tool in the vocabulary of city policy. An 1800 law allowing for demolition by the city applied almost exclusively to aban-

doned buildings. In a few cases, however, the city used its power of condemnation for , purposes other than street laying or other public works: against tenements.® Historian Elizabeth Blackmar describes in detail the battle to remove the Five Points that had

by 1829 acquired the image as “ground zero,’ as we would say today, of sin and debauchery in New York (figure 3.4). Housing “horrors too awful to mention” in its tenements, brothels, saloons, and on its streets, where every sin in the Bible was acted

out, the Five Points seemed beyond defense. After four years of legal wrangling, the , city finally cleared out the triangle in 1833.” Through the 1830s, social reformers, retailers, and others who sought to enhance the value of their property supported further efforts to clean up the Five Points area. Despite these few highly visible slum clearance efforts, most of the steps taken by the city were far more tentative ones. Although a continuous line of tenement house commissions, committees, boards, and departments all had included demolition as one of their strategies through most of the nineteenth century, destruction functioned mainly as a stock rhetorical device rather than a tool of public policy. Indeed, attacks on the most notorious tenements elicited fiery words and gave reformers a moral high ground from which to preach. But even the worst tenements lasted far longer than the volume of rhetorical bile heaped on them would have portended. Only the most decrepit and dangerous tenements were destroyed by government dictate, and only after many decades of protest and denunciation. Gotham Court, which was built in the 1850s and long stood as a symbol of tenement evil, lrved—by New York actuarial tables—to a ripe old age of forty-five, before finally being destroyed in 1895 under the leadership of Jacob Riis. That it lasted so long was a shock and insult to tenement reformers, but was quite typical of the time. An 1853 tenement house committee had condemned the “crazy old buildings” and the Association for the Improvement of the Conditions of the Poor had attacked “these crying evils” and described in detail the

horrendous living conditions offered in the court. Declared Lawrence Veiller, the | secretary of the 1901 Tenement House Commission:

76 CHAPTER THREE It would seem that after such a revelation, no civilized community could tolerate such a condition of affairs for a moment, yet not till nearly forty years later was Gotham

Court dealt with. In 1896 it was torn down, and no longer can it send forth its evil influences to pollute the stream of our civic life. But if one could reckon the evil that it has done in the sixty years of its existence, what a heavy sum it would be! Who can estimate the extent of the physical and moral disorder thus created by this one building, the loathsome diseases, the death, the pauperism, the vice, the crime, the debasement of civic life??

Gotham Court owed its demise to the successful efforts a few years earlier to demolish the most notorious of New York’s slums, Mulberry Bend. The “Clearing of Mulberry Bend,’ a three-acre site located a few blocks north and east of City Hall Park, was the first salvo in the battle against the slum, and “one of the first slum clearance projects on a modern scale in New York City-’!° Just north of the infamous Five Points, Mulberry Bend had long been known as one of New York’s worst slum areas,

and there had been repeated calls for its demolition. But only when Jacob Ruis brought his camera there in the late 1880s was “The Bend” finally brought down. Through Ruis’s eyes, and through his words, New Yorkers learned about the nature

| of the “shadows” of New York (see figure 3.5). Jacob Ruis’s writings and photographs were the effective tools of a fiery social reformer who provided a map of social degradation in New York. A Danish immigrant who came to the United States in 1870, he embraced his new country with a burning patriotism, which drove his intense efforts at tenement reform for more than thirty years. Better than any other housing reformer, Riis was able to bring to the homes of Broadway and Washington Square the lives of those within the Lower East Side tenements. He provided a guide to New York’s underside, complete with the tragic dramas of young prostitutes, rampant diseases festering in overcrowded tenements, gambling, and violent encounters in the back alleys of the slums. He told the stories with the authority of an insider, having spent his days and nights exploring the basement saloons, catching sleeping boarders with magnesium flashes, and recording the sweatshop work of children. Jacob Ruis launched the modern attacks on tenements. His contribution exposed the depth of the tenement problem to those who had never been adventurous enough to explore the jungle of the Lower East Side. He was best known, then as now, for his photographs, some of the earliest and finest photojournalistic exposés.!! Riis’s strate-

: gies for reform, however, have been underestimated. His call for parks and model tenements have been considered simply part of the dominant vocabulary of social reform

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|)> eal ey 8K os SE, worry /\ pS TSE PASSO |S $oypsEEN IN \Te The death rate in the Bend, for example, was 50 percent higher than in the rest of the city. Especially tragic was the death rate for children under the age of frve—the Tenement House Commission had counted 155 in 1882—which far outpaced the rest of the city.'®© The answer to the disaster of Mulberry Bend was, to Riis, simple: “I got a picture of the Bend upon

my mind which as soon as I should be able to transfer it to that of the community would help settle that pig-sty according to its deserts. It was not fit for Christian men . and women, let alone innocent children, to live in, and therefore it had to go.”'7 For Riis, Mulberry Bend was a place of destruction: lives were destroyed by disease, souls were destroyed by sexual sin, hope was destroyed by the weight of accumulated misery. Not all of this despair, he believed, was caused by poverty or other forces beyond the control of Mulberry Bend’s inhabitants. Throughout his work, Ruis, like many other reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, main-

tained an ambivalent relationship to the inhabitants of the tenements. Although he seemed to show sympathy for the subjects of his photographs, his revelatory images

THE RISE OF SLUM CLEARANCE AS HOUSING REFORM 79 and articles were laced with words of condemnation and racist disgust. Riis’s concern

for the immigrants’ living conditions was only matched by his loathing. He often | blamed the inhabitants for their own environment, rather than focusing on, for example, city policy or the greed of landlords. The immigrants he observed were considered culpable for the unacceptable conditions of their neighborhoods. Nonetheless, Rais believed that people’s behavior would improve exactly as much as did their living conditions. Tenement dwellers “are shiftless, destructive and stupid,’ wrote Riis. “In a word, they are what the tenements have made them.”’!8 Riis was a product and a promoter of a renewed skepticism and disgust with cities

at the end of the century. A long-standing American distrust of cities increasingly found receptive authors and audiences. Best-sellers such as Josiah Strong’s Our Country (1885), Joaquin Miller’s Destruction of Gotham (1886), and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) bore testament to a deep-seated loathing of cities.!9 Perhaps most prominent in the litany of fears of the city were unrest, danger, and political upheaval. The Destruction of Gotham, for example, is a story of the burning of New York by an angry mob; Caesar’s Column, by Ignatius Donnelly, portended a final, devastating conflict between New York’s rich and poor, between what guidebooks had referred to as the “Light and Shadows” of New York.2° Riis himself, in a remarkable, breathless conclusion to How the Other Half Lives, pointed to elite fears of political revolt by immigrant masses. He created an apocalyptic vision of social unrest of the inhabitants he had just portrayed in words and photographs. On a visit to one of New York’s beaches, he drew a parallel between crashing waves in which the immigrants played and the potential for upheaval held in fragile check within the tenements: Once already our city, to which have come the duties and responsibilities of metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the swell of its resistless flood. If it rise once more, no human power may avail to check it. The gap between the classes in which it surges, unseen, unsuspected by the thoughtless, is ~ widening day by day. No tardy enactment of law, no political expedient, can close it. Against all other dangers our system of government may offer defense and shelter;

against this not. I know of but one bridge that will carry us over safe, a bridge founded upon justice and built of human hearts. I believe that the danger of such conditions as

are fast growing up around us is greater for the very freedom which they mock. The words of the poet [James Russell], with whose lines I prefaced this book, are true today, have far deeper meaning to us, than when they were penned forty years ago: Think ye that building shall endure

Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?!

80 CHAPTER THREE | For many reformers the “menace of great cities’ was encapsulated in and caused by the conditions of the slums.?? They feared social unrest and resistance to assimilation if immigrants were ill-housed. Improved housing, argued E. R. L. Gould, a national advocate for slum clearance and decent housing, “is a powerful factor in good citizenship. ... The genesis of ’isms most often takes place in the miserable tenements

, of a great modern city.’ These fears served equally to justify parks. Young people, offered “no opportunity for legitimate play, no rational outlet for an excess of animal spirits,’ naturally were drawn into gangs “for nocturnal maraudings.’?3 The 1894 Tenement House Commission (discussed in a following section) insisted that “no one can become familiar with life in the most crowded districts of New York without the conviction that no greater immediate relief can be afforded the inhabitants than by letting in more air and sunshine by means of playgrounds and small parks, and furnishing thereby, near at hand, places for rest, recreation and exercise for young and old.’?4 In the small area bounded by Mulberry, Bayard, Baxter, and Park Streets, Progressives could find an agglomeration of all the evils to which they addressed themselves 1n the city: drunkenness, youth criminality, prostitution, disease, and lack of light and air for children. Reformers were preoccupied as much with the social evils caused by the tenements as with the physical and emotional hardships affecting individuals. The tenements, with Gotham Court as the most wretched example, were “the cause of most of the problems in our modern cities.”2° Thus for Progressive urban reformers like Ruis, the slum was the breeding ground not only for the ills affecting the individuals but for the political fury that might consume the city. And since Progressive reformers saw in the city a series of physical settings for the diminution of the individual and community, they also, logically, believed that changing that environment would be the start of a solution to the problems of the cities. The reformation of Mulberry Bend might not only eliminate the “foul core of New York” but could create quite the opposite movement: homes where virtue could be promoted and healthful activities enjoyed. An ideology of “positive environmentalism,” as the historian Paul Boyer has called it, accompanied Ruis’s powerful “negative environmentalism.”’?° If a positive environment had the ability to transform persons and communities for the better, a negative environment had to be eliminated before it infected everyone within its reach. Even as Riis sought to demolish history and its effects, he wanted to achieve a different future. Destruction of the tenements, in Riis’s vision, would be followed by the building of parks, bringing the restorative powers of nature to those deprived of it. Following the tradition laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, Ruis held a nostalgic view of the countryside as the source of American virtues and productive citizenship.

THE RISE OF SLUM CLEARANCE AS HOUSING REFORM 81

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F1gape ee _ae ise. ag oe rae 3 3ae Bee wy aa aaLe es — . oe 33 eS Eeee ey,le eee aeae eeaeeoe 3 °ieee , gd : ee=. By 8 —e i,ee moeta Sere oa“ae: EE “esteat, ia eee: «6 tae tons|..Eo aA Ae ee ces ulbsos . sie, "a SE eS Para beeeeaceosey Seay aoe mae gee ‘To reformers like Ruis, the transformation of the early-nineteenth-century homes of “Knickerbocker” families into some of the worst, most congested housing in the city, was especially poignant; it was a perversion of history. Riis offered a narrative history of the tenements in which the first “rear houses,” converted into rented buildings for poor immigrants, led steadily, as immigration increased, to the six-story tenements that were the fabric of the Lower East Side by the end of the century. Like the story of Fifth Avenue, the tenement narrative led from these old houses, to Five Points, to the present crisis, where the most sophisticated and committed of reformers confronted the worst slums yet imaginable. Calling to the “memory of man,” Riis insisted that “the old cow-path [Mulberry Street] has never been other than a vast human pig-sty.’5° It was these buildings, the “crazy old buildings, crowded rear tenements,’ that had become the focus of tenement commissions and housing reformers (figure 3.7).?7 The rear houses and the old-law tenements, and Mulberry Bend in general, were thus also a problem of historical inheritance, not just one of avaricious landlords, uncivilized immigrants, and corrupt politicians. To reformers, Mulberry Bend was the physical embodiment of the history of slums in New York because it bore the accumulated evils of half'a century. Slum clearance has been described as a policy developed as a rational, final response to the problems of inhuman housing for poor peo-

, ple. But closer examination reveals how central the historical symbolism of these tenements was in contributing to their sought-after demise. Cultural understandings of the “leprous houses,” images of danger and political unrest, and the construction of the old-law tenement as the scourge to be removed continued to animate housing reform efforts. Just as the recalled and invented memories of Fifth Avenue were utilized to create an image of a successful, “good place” that had to be defended, the awful history of Mulberry Bend—the “foul core” of New York—was repeatedly paraded before the public to offer a diagnosis of a “‘sick place” that had to be eliminated. It was no accident that the focus was always on efforts to eliminate the oldest and worst slums of the city, the “rear tenements” and so-called old-law tenements that were built previous to the Tenement House Act of 1901, or “new law.’ These “leprous houses,’ as Charles Dickens called them in 1842, came to define the two sides in the “battle with the slum” over the next several decades.** The power of these places in the public imagination, an imagination powerfully shaped by Ruis’s photos and writing, would continually reappear to shape not only attitudes but the actual choice of housing development sites and strategies.

THE RISE OF SLUM CLEARANCE AS HOUSING REFORM 85 | he changing powers of city government in the late nineteenth century power“Daas shaped the development of slum clearance as policy and ideology. Ruis’s efforts, beginning in the late 1880s and accelerating until Columbus Park was opened in 1897, revealed for him the problems reformers would face in forcing action from a recalcitrant city government, political machinery, and resistant private owners. Riis quickly recognized the middle ground in which reformers would find themselves, trapped between the inchoate powers of the city government and the fractured but vociferous resistance of real estate owners and speculators. Legal limitations on the powers of government and, perhaps even more important, the political skittishness of

city government to initiate widespread slum clearance had created strong resistance , to clearing Mulberry Bend. Among the detailed recommendations of the 1884 Tenement House Commission—a set of very specific recommendations about lot coverage and access to air and light—was a call for the extension of Leonard Street to Pell Street, right through Mul-

berry Bend, the notorious tenement area. In 1884, the commission had recommended that the street be extended, “as has been recommended in former years.’? While other recommendations of these commissions dealt with the regulation of present and future tenements, only this one so clearly advocated destruction. The commission’s suggestion gained a huge boost when, in 1887, New York State passed | the Small Parks Act, which provided aid for the clearing of slums and the creation of parks within poor areas. Over the next decades, New York created a number of parks in Lower Manhattan: Mulberry Bend Park, Seward Park, Hamilton Fish Park (see figure 3.8). By 1888, plans for the park had been drawn up; all that awaited was the purchase of the buildings and the “clearing” of the Bend. But what appeared to be a relatively simple process became extremely complicated. Over the next seven years, the city battled within itself over the legitimacy of taking property for park uses. It also fought local property owners over the value of the lots. The situation reached farcical proportions when the city took possession of the properties of Mulberry Bend in 1894 but delayed the actual demolition due to lack of funds.4° The city then became a slumlord, collecting thousands of dollars in rent from inhabitants of the Bend. The following year, Mayor Strong ordered the

buildings vacated and then destroyed. Having paid the owners a total of $1.5 million . to leave their properties, the city quickly auctioned off the buildings in June 1895 for a grand total of $800 to wreckers who would demolish the buildings and remove the ruins within thirty days; some buildings sold for as little as $1.50.41 Despite this important step, the muddy lot remained empty for another year, aggravating Riis even further. Only after more pressure from Riis, and the tragic death of several children,

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| commission would be different from all that preceded it. Out of their research, the commission produced a law that fundamentally affected the building of new tenements. The Tenement House Act of 1901 limited lot coverage to 70 percent and required that toilets be installed in each floor of all tenements, new and old, that all rooms have windows, and that fire escapes be installed in all buildings. The extent of these reforms and their enforcement by a newly created Tenement House Department were so fundamental as to make 1901 a dividing line between one age and another, between old-law and new-law tenements. Ruis’s advocacy of demolition as creative reform found receptive ears. The ineffectiveness of tenement house regulations (especially the dramatic failure of the 1879 “dumbbell” regulations), the exponential growth in the immigrant populations and consequent expansion of tenement districts beginning in the 1880s, and the powerful example of urban reform in Europe spurred reformers to reconsider their strategies. But while most began to embrace wholesale destruction of tenement buildings as the answer, they did so for different reasons. The developing calculus of destroying the old in order to build better tenements was deceptively simple. Reformers found themselves at odds with one another over

| the purpose and effectiveness of tenement destruction and creation. In essence, reformers divided on the purpose of destruction and what creative act would follow demolition of the tenements. One group of reformers, including Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture Society and leader of the Charity Organization Society, advo-

THE RISE OF SLUM CLEARANCE AS HOUSING REFORM 89 cated destruction as the first step toward public housing. Adler, writing in 1884 as chairman of the Tenement House Commission, stated the new position baldly: The evils of the tenement house section of this city are due to the estates which neglect the comfort of their tenants, and to the landlords who demand exorbitant rents. The laboring classes are unable to build homes for themselves, and the law of morality and common decency binds the Government to see to it that these houses shall not prove fatal to the lives and morality of the inmates. If the houses are overcrowded the government must interfere. It must compel a reduction of the number of inmates,

enforce renovation at the expense of the landlord, and where that is no longer possi- , ble, must dismantle the houses and remove them from existence.*®

Adler insisted that since the private market had failed to provide decent housing for the poor, it was the city’s responsibility to step in to aid the helpless. The Charity Organization Society (COS), which essentially served as the social service and welfare wing of municipal government, was the earliest and most vocal advocate of municipal housing. Though it had to wait for years, the COS advocated from the 1890s onward large-scale demolition combined with model tenements. In 1896 and 1900 it sponsored design competitions for model tenements, and its exhibit of the winners in February 1900 was the inspiration for the work of the 1901 new-law commission. Indeed, many of the state and federal commissions on New York City tenements were peopled by COS members, often previous heads of the COS’s own permanent tenement house committee.” Other reformers were equally enamored of a vision of large-scale demolition ‘of tenements. E. R. L. Gould, a lecturer on social science and statistics at Johns Hopkins

University and expert witness for Gilder’s 1894 commission, utilized medical metaphors that pervaded the housing reform discourse when he declared simply: “There is no cure for cancer except the knife. Neither is there any other satisfactory way of dealing with irremediable insanitary premises than to tear them down....The first step in house-reform is to get rid of the bad houses.’48 During the investigations of the 1894 commission, the philosophy of housing reform through creative destruction was fully embraced for the first time. Gould, Gilder, and the members of the 1894 commission embraced destruction as a creative act in itself. The rear tenements, especially, were “an awful curse, destructive alike to health and morality .. . [and] should be the first to be destroyed, and its disappearance may be made the means of a positive benefit.”49 Adler found himself at odds with the com- mission because, in his mind, it was focusing too much on destruction and not enough

90 CHAPTER THREE on building new housing. Adler argued that demolition of tenements without replacing them immediately, at least in another part of the city, was an essentially destructive act, destroying desperately needed shelters. He favored the suburbanization of the population, the building of large model tenements in Harlem and beyond. But as that would not happen in the immediate future, Adler saw the value of parks—open space, fresh air—completely neutralized by the increased crowding in the remaining miserable tenements, while the displaced searched for new housing. In a lively ex-

: change with Richard Watson Gilder, Adler criticized the tendency to tear down tenements and replace them not with needed housing but with parks. Adler saw publicly funded housing as the only alternative if the city was going to destroy people’s existing homes. Gilder stridently resisted city-owned housing. He and the commission saw the movement for publicly funded and owned housing as dangerous, “bad principle

and worse policy... an unjustifiable interference with private enterprise.’ Public housing would cost too much, would require rents too high for the poor, and would discourage the “natural” development of housing by the private real estate market.5° Although Adler and the COS failed to gain support for public housing, their efforts did bear the fruit of new legal powers given to the state Board of Health and the city Department of Buildings. For much of the century, the Board of Health retained limited powers to require demolition of tenements. As early as 1866, the act creating the Metropolitan Board of Health gave that board the power to “condemn buildings that were unfit for habitation” because of physical conditions that would cause disease or Other injury.>! This new power was to be exercised only in extreme situations. These powers were elaborated in laws of 1867 and 1887, but were still restricted to

those buildings that threatened immediate harm. | The Tenement House Act of 1895 substantially increased the legal powers of the Board of Health. Expanding the reasons for condemnation and demolition, and providing a coherent process for implementing vacate and condemnation orders, the act gave new impetus to tenement reform by demolition. In what seemed like a minor semantic point, the act authorized the Board of Health to demolish a tenement if it were not considered fit for human habitation. Previously, the building had to be considered a “nuisance” under the law, which did not permit the city to compensate the owners. With the new power came a system of compensation for virtually all owners of condemned property. Soon after the Tenement House Act of 1895 was passed, the Board of Health initiated a campaign against the fabled “rear tenements.’ The fertile ground of moral and physical degradation that galvanized reformers lay deep in the interior of tenement blocks, behind the street-facing facades. Considering the currency of rear tenements

THE RISE OF SLUM CLEARANCE AS HOUSING REFORM 91 in the public imagination (enhanced by tabloid revelations about the condition of Trinity Church’s tenement properties), the Board of Health must have felt confident that it could muster public support for an attack at the source of the tenement house evils. But whatever the general support for demolishing rear tenements, when the extent of the board’s campaign became apparent, landlords and developers rebelled and challenged the board’s powers. In Health Department v Dassori, the Court of Appeals held that demolition was to be a last resort, used only when no other method could effectively remove the “nuisance.” In a pointed rebuff to the Board of Health’s larger goals for tenement reform, the decision cited a previous case, Myers v Gemmel, which rejected the notion that owners or renters had a right to light and air.>? Thus, one major obstacle to slum clearance was simply the immaturity of the city’s financial and legal mechanisms to spur and manage its growth. Condemnation powers were newly discovered and vaguely defined. Indeed, for most of the century, the

state Board of Health had final authority over the regulations concerning housing conditions. Municipal bureaucracy was not yet able to handle the monumental tasks of record keeping and regulation enforcement. And, as we have seen, one of the biggest obstacles to a concerted municipal solution for tenement problems was the cost. Any condemnation without compensation—which would alienate the powerful landowners—was politically unacceptable, but any condemnation requiring compensation was fiscally dangerous. The case of Hamilton Fish Park, between Houston, Stanton, Pitt, and Sheriff Streets in the Lower East Side, is illustrative. The city spent almost $1.7 million to acquire the land in a poor district. To make matters worse, the property was owned by a number of different people, some of whom challenged the awards given by the city.°° The question in the legal challenges had seemed to be about semantics—what was

a “nuisance’”—and the meaning of the 1895 law. But it represented a much larger conflict. The Board of Health was in essence trying to exercise extensive police powers over the built environment, extending its protectorship to encompass far more than elimination of health hazards. The board was trying to radically shape the urban environment through powers of condemnation and demolition. Furthermore, the board, even though it relied on arguments and statistics attesting to the danger of disease in rear tenements, also operated from a position of moral outrage. The reputation of these places as sources of social evil motivated its campaign. What landlords saw as encroaching state power—defining “unfitness” in moral terms as opposed to the more narrow physical definition—the Board of Health saw as a logical, responsible extension of the 1895 law. The new Tenement House Department that began its work in 1901 was built on

92 CHAPTER THREE several decades of advocacy for various new elements that would constitute a slum clearance program. But the contradictions inherent in the city’s housing reform movement—a call for speedy action along with a hesitancy about government intervention, a dedication to regulations along with the tempting presence of new condemnation powers—would make the translation of rhetorical fascination with the simplicity of the slum clearance solution into coherent public policy far more difficult.

“NEW YORK’S REAL NAPOLEON III” Jacob Riis’s success at Mulberry Bend was the culmination of a rising tide of indignation at the conditions of the slums as well as a concerted institutional effort to provide regulatory powers for transforming tenements. But despite the clearing of Mulberry Bend, as well as new legislative imprimatur for tenement destruction, the Lower East Side was not remade by slum clearance in the first two decades of the twentieth century. De jure condemnation did not translate into de facto power. In the midst of the Mulberry Bend struggle, Riis had written a biting attack on the city: Let me ask you a simple question in arithmetic, if it took us eight years to get the Mul-

berry slum made into a dunghill, how long is it going to take us, with present machinery and official energy, to get the two tenement blocks over there, where people are smothering for want of elbow room, made into two parks?>4

, Reformers, government officials, and real estate developers did not divide neatly into three camps, but fractured along several lines. Reformers were split between those urging government-built and -owned public housing, and those seeking only strong regulations. Some government officials advocated extensive clearance as part of an interventionist city-planning ideology; others sought to leave redevelopment up to private business, with regulatory guidance provided by the city. Finally, real estate interests were fractured. Speculators saw benefits accruing to landowners who knew how to exploit the “improvements” made through government-sponsored slum clearance. Small-scale landlords (many of whom were themselves immigrants), on the other hand, depended on the rental income of old-law tenements.°° The failure of slum clearance to take hold following Riis’s advocacy and initial successes, then, was

not a result simply of the lack of political will; rather, it reflected a sharp division among the interests of New York’s city-building elites. The failure of the 1895 rear tenement campaign cast a shadow for decades on the , strategy of demolishing tenements. The Tenement House Department, established in 1901 by the Tenement House Act, lamented the failure of the board’s “crusade” against

THE RISE OF SLUM CLEARANCE AS HOUSING REFORM © 93 the rear tenements. The department’s annual report of 1902, essentially its manifesto, states that “the decision of the Court of Appeals . . . has made it unwise for the department to take steps looking toward the destruction of such houses.’’>® Tenements could be “vacated”—evacuated for a period of time—but not permanently demolished, except in extreme circumstances. The department resisted advocates of largescale demolition and sought to continue the more gradual elimination of tenements. The Tenement House Department, in its first report, carefully balanced its farreaching purpose of eliminating all “houses unfit for habitation” with the political resistance on the part of property owners against large-scale demolition. While claiming its task to be enormous and radical—“‘cleansing of the Augean stable was a small task compared to the cleansing of New York’s 82,000 tenement houses . . . [some of which] surpass imagination”—the department carefully avoided zealously applying its newfound powers of condemnation: “Requiring a tenement house to be vacated is so extreme a measure that the department has naturally been unwilling to take this step except in the most serious cases.’>” Indeed, the department went out of its way to declare a détente with owners: “While recognizing that the department was created primarily to protect the health, safety and welfare of those classes of the population who are unable to protect themselves, it was felt that the department should exercise extreme care in enforcing the Tenement House Law, so as not to make it a measure of oppression to tenement house owners.”>® In the place of a missionary zeal for demolition, the department substituted a phi-

losophy of destruction through private development. Reformers observed the process | of destruction and rebuilding of business and residential buildings in the rest of the city and assumed that the same process would occur in the tenement districts. In its 1914 report, the department noted that it is not an unusual sight to see a business building, erected only a decade ago, being torn down to give place to a new structure in keeping with modern demands. In the same manner, as soon as the old tenements have become sufficiently unpopular with tenants, wholesale demolition or reconstruction is bound to follow. That time is not

far distant in New York City . . . the process of eliminating the old buildings is now not one of law but of competition, which is both surer and speedier in its results.>?

Ruis, too, had recognized that private commercial and real estate development would have to be at the vanguard of the push to remove slums. The transformation of the city “comes so quickly sometimes as to fairly take one’s breath away. More than

once I have returned, after a few brief weeks, to some specimen rookery in which I . was interested, to find it gone and an army of workmen delving twenty feet under-

94 CHAPTER THREE ground to lay the foundation of a mighty warehouse. ... Business has done more than all other agencies together to wipe out the worst tenements. It has been New York’s real Napoleon II, from whose decree there was no appeal.’©° Thus, even Riis, who gave the movement for slum clearance of the worst areas its most powerful visual and rhetorical ammunition, also recognized the power of private real estate in the city. Tenement house reformers were faced with a perplexing dilemma of their own making. They were committed to righting the wrongs of a private real estate market that had resisted change and profited from horrendous slums. But the reformers were still committed to finding the solution within that very system. Real estate owners and their organizations were skeptical. In the first decade and a half, various lawsuits challenging the Tenement House Department regulations and even the legal legitimacy of the Tenement House Law kept the department in the courts continuously. The most potentially damaging attack came from the United Real Estate Owners’ Property Association, an eight-thousand-member group, which fought the law’s demand that the “school sinks” and privies be removed and every building be hooked up to a public sewer. It hoped that by highlighting the costs to poor landlords, the department and its regulations might be abolished. Others challenged—in lower courts, successfully—that the definition of “tenement” should be narrowed, to exclude larger apartment buildings and, in Brooklyn, converted townhouses.®!

Lawrence Veiller, the cochair of the 1900 Tenement House Commission and coauthor of the Tenement House Act of 1901, was the outstanding proponent of this strategy for ridding the city of its old-law tenements. After his work with Robert De Forest on the 1901 law, Veiller followed De Forest to the Tenement House Department as an assistant (his aggressive attacks on landlords prevented him from being appointed by Seth Low as the chair). He left the department when Tammany returned to power in 1904, but continued his housing advocacy, first as chair of the Charity Organization Society’s Department for Improvement of Social Conditions and as director of the National Housing Association, which he founded in 1911. Veiller believed that victory against slums lay in investigation of slum conditions, the “education of the community,’ and a public exhibit of the results. Out of these efforts would come a movement for “legislation which will remedy . . . the evil conditions discovered, and will prevent their repetition in the future.’©3 The National Housing Association, which published Housing Betterment (later Housing) magazine, was intended to be a clearinghouse of information for communities attempting to enact and enforce tenement laws, and to be an ongoing advocate for the enforcement of those laws.

Veiller was highly critical of government-owned and -operated housing. Although at times he believed government was necessary to provide subsidies and

THE RISE OF SLUM CLEARANCE AS HOUSING REFORM 95

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118 CHAPTER FOUR The Progressive preservation of community and the more conservative preservation of architecture were conjoined in this battle. The fight over St. John’s Chapel, : which occurred contemporaneously with the City Hall conflict, reveals the broader possibilities for preservation—to be a part of a larger movement for economic reform, stability for neighborhoods in the face of speculation, and improvement of housing

for the poor. , St. John’s was a parish chapel and an offshoot of Trinity Church, one of the oldest and most wealthy churches in New York City. Trinity stands at the head of Wall Street, observing the heated work of the financial center of the world. Some New Yorkers believed that Trinity watched over Wall Street’s morals, in some way standing in opposition to the obsession with money that reigned there. But others saw Trinity as completely conjoined with the materialistic work of that street, one corporation among many. It was as if Trinity sat at the head of the table, the host to the practices people loathed on Wall Street. Looking back, it is clear that Trinity Church’s birth portended trouble. The vast land grant given by the British Crown in 1705 and its designation as the “sole” parish in the city would make it suspicious in the post-Revolutionary era. Since that time it was attacked repeatedly for its exclusiveness, its Tory leanings, and, most of all, its wealth. The Progressive attack on corporate conspiracy did not take long to find its way to the oldest of New York corporations. In 1894, Richard Watson Gilder undertook a study of the condition of Trinity’s tenements, finding that this wealthiest of churches was also a slumlord. The long ground leases Trinity had offered on its extensive Lower Manhattan properties had resulted in dense streets of worker tenements. While Trinity asserted—largely accurately—that because of the ground leases, they had no legal rights over the condition of the buildings built thereon, the symbolism was too stark: the richest church in America, dedicated to Christian charity, turned out to be a purveyor of sin and disease to its own flock. “Is Trinity the church evangelical, benevolent and Christ-like, and Trinity the landlord avaricious, grasping and devilish?” was the question that enraged New Yorkers asked.1° The uproar subsided with the demolition of the worst tenements, but distrust lingered. Trinity did not help its reputation by fighting numerous regulations sought by tenement commissions. For instance, the church went to court to fight basic tenement house legislation allowing the city to force private owners to fix their properties for health reasons. Jacob Ruis argued in The Battle with the Slum that “Trinity, the wealthiest church corporation in the land, was in constant opposition, as the tenement house landlord, and finally to save a few hundred dollars, came near to upsetting the whole structure of tenement law that had been built up, in the interest of the toilers and the city’s safety, with such infinite pains.” The issue burst in 1908 when Trinity

HISTORIC PRESERVATION AND THE VALUING OF SPACE 119 sought to close down St. John’s Chapel, one of the many churches Trinity had spawned but retained administrative control over. The outcry was swift and overwhelming. A memorial signed by, among others, President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Root, New York Mayor McClellan, and former mayor Seth Low was presented to the church and published in all the major newspapers. The defense of St. John’s inspired overblown feats of literary protest. Richard Watson Gilder, the 1894 Tenement Commission chair and poet, wrote a poem mocking Trinity’s disrespect for the “sacred stones” of St. John’s: Guardians of a holy trust Who, in your rotting tenements, Housed the people, till the offense Rose to the Heaven of the Just— guardians of an ancient trust Who, lately, from these little ones Dashed the cup of water; now

Bind new laurels to your brow, | Fling to earth these sacred stones, Give the altar to the dust!

here the poor and friendless come— Desolate the templed home Of the friendless and the poor, That your laurels may be sure! Here beside the frowning walls Where no more the wood-bird calls, Where once the little children played, Whose paradise ye have betrayed, here let the temple low be laid, Here bring the altar to the dust—

Guardians of a holy trust!!®

St. John’s parishioners and clergy organized a protest and brought their case to court, attempting to stop the closing order. Bowing to the pressure (exacerbated by continuing revelations about the condition of the tenements to which they held the eround leases), Trinity agreed not to destroy the church. It was, however, a short-lived victory. With the widening of Varick Street to make way for the dual subway system and more rapid automobile traffic to downtown, St. John’s was finally done in (figure 4.3).19 Critics charged that by destroying St. John’s, Trinity had laid waste to a

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120 CHAPTER FOUR

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expected their work to be relevant to the present, the MCNY distinguished itself by the extent to which it emphasized the role the museum would play in the unfolding of New York’s future. As John Van Pelt declared in his study of the educational goals of the museum in 1932, “the Museum is not primarily historical, rather sociological.’®! One of the central ways the MCNY hoped to be “sociological” was in its education of its young people, especially immigrant young people. The MCNY was from

162 CHAPTER FIVE the start, like so many cultural institutions, oriented strongly toward educating immigrants about their city and nation. The state charter had declared that the MCNY would be established “for educational and patriotic purposes.” “The museum,” emphasized a reviewer, “is conceived throughout as an educational institution, not a stor-

age place. The models and other exhibits will do their teaching independently but great emphasis is to be laid on the educational stafft?’©3 James Speyer had a number of

reasons for investing time and money into the MCNY; but whatever else motivated his love for the American past, he firmly believed that a good historical sense was necessary for the exercise of citizenship: There are hundreds of thousands of people living in New York who have come here from other parts of our country and abroad. Such a condition does not exist in European cities. It seems to us particularly important to give to these newcomers and to their children, some knowledge of and pride in the history of New York, to stimulate love for our City and help to make good citizens.®*

James Speyer was deeply aware and enamored of the American past but also alert to its cultural divisions, which could take ugly forms. He brought to the MCNY a highly “patriotic” attitude, but also a belief in more subtle methods of assimilation of foreign peoples to the American creed. On the evening after the museum officially opened in January 1932, Mrs. Barclay Parsons expressed a common view among the early donors of the museum. She congratulated James Speyer on the realization of his decade-long effort to build a new home for the museum. “I cannot go to bed tonight and so close the day without sending you a line to try to tell you something of how I feel after seeing the first day of your museum. .. . It was deeply moving.’ Mrs. Parsons was especially

impressed that it was Speyer, a Jew of German descent who had spent much of his youth in Germany, who was behind this “source of inspiration for good citizenship”’: For one who had been born New York and who had New York as a background the Museum would have been a priceless gift to make. Therefore how much greater is it when this great gift comes from one who has made New York his city by adoption. As an old New Yorker . . . thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you have done. The Museum that you have created will grow and grow and be a source of inspiration for good citizenship in the generations to come.®°

Mrs. Parsons’ congratulation highlights a central goal of the MCNY: to aid in the assimilation, using American history, of new immigrants (and ignorant “native” citizens) into American society. That Mrs. Parsons’s ideal example of the possibilities of immigrant economic and cultural assimilation had in fact been born in the United States and had lived in New York for over three decades seemed irrelevant.

The MCNY was like so many other cultural institutions of the time in its goal of

: INVENTING AND DISPLAYING THE PAST AT THE MCNY 163 aiding in the assimilation of immigrants. History had long been used as a crucial step in assimilation programs; Progressive Era schools, settlement houses, and other insti-

tutions pioneered new ways of presenting American history to the waves of new im- : migrants.©6 The MCNY also shared with similar organizations a distaste for the immigrants they purported to be serving. W. T. H. Halsey, the curator of the American Wing, for example, insisted that the American Wing was necessary to defend the nation against the “influx of foreign ideas utterly at variance with those held by the men who gave us the Republic.’®” Although few at the MCNY were as openly dogmatic, the museum was certainly not free of this creed. In order to assist others who had made New York their “city by adoption,’ the MCNY established links very quickly to a number of organizations dedicated to teaching New York schoolchildren about the city’s history. The City History Club, which dated back to 1896, provided guided tours of the city and had established a network of clubs throughout the city’s public schools. Beginning in 1933, the club was based at the MCNY, along with its large collection of lantern slides and guidebooks to the city. The

museum developed a “trips and trails” program that provided guide sheets for children and their families to visit different parts of the city, a Sunday lecture series, and a Saturday “Junior Museum” for children.°* In 1931 the MCNY was given a $50,000 grant

from the Carnegie Foundation to study the educational efforts of other museums around the country and develop its own programs. John V. Van Pelt, an architect and trustee, led the research effort and offered a long-term vision for the educational work

of the MCNY: “The old conception of the museum as a place to house valuable col- ! lections to be examined by the public, or even not to be examined, has been so displaced that it seems reasonable to project the possibility of many future museums that will be merely store houses for material to be distributed to various educational centers and replaced in rotation.”©? While recognizing the “lack of funds,” Van Pelt hoped that the MCNY would drastically expand its educational efforts and coordinate itself carefully with the curriculum of New York’s schools.”° Furthermore, the MCNY would loan its collections to schools, as the American Museum of Natural History was doing; it would set up branch museums to bring the museum closer to young people; it would sponsor radio shows on city history; and it would produce plays, children’s fairs, and even movies of important events in the city’s future development.’7! Writing from the depth of the Depression and the potential for political upheaval it portended, Van Pelt was blunt in his belief that the goal of the MCNY should be the “formation of good citizens”: Children should be taught that a beautiful building not only enhances the value of sur-

) rounding property, but elevates the morale of those who pass it. They should learn who are the great men of the City, living as well as dead. Not deceived by charlatans,

164 CHAPTER FIVE they should become able to evaluate their fellow citizens and be filled with desire to emulate those of real worth.

Herein lies the true mission of the Museum.’

, Speyer and his staff certainly agreed, in principle. But for all the rhetorical and even real commitments to educating the city’s youth, especially its immigrant youth, the MCNY was more dedicated to creating a storehouse for the city’s architectural and material treasures and, simultaneously, a new method for telling the story of the city’s history.

A “VISUALIZED BIOGRAPHY” The MCNY was to be “nota prosaic, historical account of the city’s development,’ one critic suggested in 1930, but a “visualized biography” of New York.7? Indeed, Henry Collins Brown, as early as 1924, noted that the MCNY was a direct product of his pet project of photographing “all that remains of Old New York.’ It was, he wrote, “a natural step from a Museum of Photography to a Museum of New York.’74 More specifi-

| cally, the museum was intended to give a visual history of New York’s physical development, to “show the metropolis in an uninterrupted series from the wigwam to the skyscraper.’7> At the laying of the MCNY’s cornerstone, Governor Al Smith spoke fer-

} vently about the value of the “visual conception of progress” that the museum would offer: “Today is the day of the pictures,’ he declared. To give “future generations a knowledge of the imperial city of their own world” required a use of the visual dimension.’¢

In this effort, photography and other printed and painted images of the city proved important. Especially after the gift of J. Clarence Davies’ enormous collection of images of New York, the MCNY would come to house one of the major collections of views of the city, along with the New York Public Library and the NYHS. By 1948, under the leadership of Grace Mayer, the curator of prints and photographs, the museum had over five thousand photographs, and thirty-eight thousand other miscellaneous pictorial materials, from postcards to prints and maps.’ At the real heart of the MCNY’s exhibitions, however, were not photographs and views but a series of dioramas and models. Beginning with dioramas of Henry Hudson and crew aboard the Half Moon, Peter Minuit purchasing the island from the Indians, New Amsterdam in 1660 based on the Castello Plan, Peter Stuyvesant submitting to British officers demanding surrender of New York, and Nathan Hale facing General Howe in the Beekman House during the Revolution, the museum produced 153 models and dioramas by 1948. 7° The museum invested a large amount of money and time into producing these first models and dioramas. Working from a studio at the top of the

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1937. In this tiny pro‘ee L- Those who criticized the planting of trees and even welcomed the removal of street trees from business areas had accepted and thus perpetuated the change in city structure that had been accelerating in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the antebellum “walking city,’ New York was quickly becoming a city of segregated activities: downtown for business, uptown for residences. There would remain—in New York especially—more mixing of uses than in other cities, but the goal, enshrined in the 1916 Zoning Resolution, of separating commercial and industrial areas from residential ones became dominant. Those who criticized tree-planting efforts in the downtown, and tree advocates who were willing to sacrifice the downtown to a treeless future, had adopted

an attitude toward urban structure that would come to dominate American city planning for much of the century. If trees were to be the park system New York never had, street tree advocates had to balance their design goals with the limitations of the dense, commercial city. On the basic issue of survival, trees were an extremely risky endeavor. On all sides— below-ground obstructions, ground-level pollutants and horse-bites, above-ground pollution and electric wires—trees faced enormous obstacles to healthy growth. Carl Bannwart, of the Newark Shade Tree Commission, displayed the frustrating limitations with a long tirade against the common curbstone, which prevented water from reaching tree roots: “The greatest enemy of the shade tree is the curbstone. Whoever invented the curb did a good thing for his time—a time when the question of ‘utility’ was first, and that of city beautification by means of trees was not in the race at all’’8° He offered detailed plans for redesigning curbstones to allow for grills and for root expansion. Much of the energy of park advocates and professionals was spent figuring out low-cost methods of providing soil, water, and protection so that trees had a fighting chance simply to survive. The tensions between the hopes of tree advocates and the limitations of the commercial city were most clearly felt as tree advocates debated how best to plant trees within a larger urban design vision. Tree advocates had to carefully balance an image of the ideal street—of towering elms and maples creating a cathedral-like effect—with the constraints of the city. Even if Olmsted complained about the limitations placed

TOWARD A TREELESS NEW YORK 203 upon him by the width of Central Park and the continued proposals for “encroach- | ments,” within the park he was largely free to design a sophisticated pastoral landscape.

But street tree planners had to consider the rights of individual homeowners, the needs of businesses, and the requirements of traffic. For instance, while trees were themselves “advertisement|s], helping to attract shoppers or house-hunters,”’ they could not be allowed to overshadow the real advertisements on the sides of buildings, nor darken shop windows, nor slow the drying of shoppers’ sidewalks after storms.®7 The Fifth Avenue Association was particularly aggressive in combating the introduction of street trees, which it was sure would block the view of pedestrians and bus riders into the now-famous shop windows along the Avenue.®*®

In order to balance the competing constituents along New York’s streets, trees would have to be “suppressed.”8? Instead of the flamboyant elms, Manhattan needed straight, thin trees, which spread high above traffic, but required little soil and could survive New York’s pollution and human and animal attacks. Some urged that only shrubs and very small trees be used on Manhattan’s streets. Pruning, which so bedeviled Olmsted, had to be vastly stepped up to hold back the growth of trees. Like Bonsai trees, street trees in Manhattan had to be restrained, stunted in their growth so that they would “decorate” rather than “form” their surroundings (see figures 6.4 and 6.5). According to one tree expert: it will probably be necessary to clip the trees, in order to restrain them from too large growth, as well as to maintain the compact growth and regular outline which are most appropriate to trees which must necessarily be dominated by architecture.?°

Tree advocates and park officials, as they sought to balance a nostalgic and idealistic vision of lush avenues with a realistic assessment of the financial, bureaucratic, and environmental conditions, fought over what trees could be planted. The vast majority of trees to be found in Manhattan in the first two decades of the twentieth century were poplars, maples, and sycamores.?! The ideal tree species thus had to be at-

tractive (according to long-standing criteria of beauty) and tough enough to withstand the harsh environment of the city, but also malleable enough to comply with the design limitations of the busy and increasingly crowded business districts.?? The ailanthus, the “tree of heaven” that would grow in Brooklyn, had at one point in New York’s history seemed to be the answer to the city’s dilemma. It was extremely hardy, flourishing notoriously on tenement roofs and right through the asphalt. It had been a popular city tree in New York, primarily for its tenacity in surviving the difficulties of life in the city for generations. But the ailanthus was less attractive because it grew irregularly and gave off a bad odor during certain times of the year. What had

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210 CHAPTER SIX But there is a nameless tree, the most sacred and beautiful that waves from the green

| landscape of memory—nameless because it is not the same with us all. It may be an oak, a poplar, a chestnut, an apple tree, or any of the others; it is the tree that stood at

, the door of the old home. Our childish feet passed in and out beneath its boughs; it _ gave welcome asylum to sweet songsters that dwelt with us in poverty or in wealth; it oo spread its shadows for our plays and pranks, and for our lazy dream-filled hours.

oo It is no accident that tree planting grew enormously in the years around World War I, when families used trees as memorials to their fallen sons.!°3 Rice found some

| consolation, as did families of war victims, in the immortality guaranteed trees by their use as furniture and building material: , Great trees, like great men, must live on in service after death, some to sweeten memory with flowers and fruits that vanished with our better years, others to know more serious duties in the march of human life. The whirling saw which parts the fallen bod-

ies of the oak and the pine, sings to them a song of immortality, and sends their timbers of strength and beauty to while away the centuries in the fairest abodes of men—

to wall and shelter happy homes; to be a table in a house of plenty; to be a chair beloved of weary beauty; to be a fiddle and carry the soul of melody; to be a desk and hear a poet’s thoughts. !04

John Flavel Mines, a flaneur of New York in the late nineteenth century, poignantly described the removal of trees behind St. John’s Chapel on Varick Street to make way for a freight depot: The only public execution I ever witnessed was the slaying of those great trees under which my sisters and I had played, and I would as soon have seen so many men beheaded. A fatal fascination drew me to the spot. I did not want to go, but could not help going out of my way to pass it by. The axes were busy with the hearts of the giants I had loved, and the iron-handed carts went crashing over the flower-beds, leaving a trail of death. The trees lay prone over the ploughed gravel-walks, and a few little birds were screaming over their tops, bewailing the destruction of their nests. It was

horrible. As I looked upon the scene, I knew how people must feel when an army passed over their homes, leaving desolation in its wake.

For Mines, the trees had been removed not for something equally valuable—‘“a block of homes’’—but rather for a “coarse pile of bricks for use as a freight depot, to make it a centre of ceaseless noise and riot.’ The destruction of this site of repose, an “earthly paradise,” for an “abomination of desolation” did not speak well to the city’s priorities.1°5 And on the Lower East Side, where trees and parks were more scarce than any-

where else on the island, inhabitants complained to housing reformers Lawrence

TOWARD A TREELESS NEW YORK 211 Veiller and Robert De Forest about the rapid removal of the few trees in their neighborhood. One woman eloquently commented on the meaning of the trees that had

been cut down after her family had moved to a new home: | This house had rather a refined, quiet aspect, and was well kept and clean. . . . But best of all, our scenery had changed. Actual trees grew before us and green yards and pretty

flowers. In the street next ours, right opposite, were two small, low, private houses, and to the people in the tenements around, the open space and lovely green were like a veritable oasis in the desert of down town. The Brooklyn Bridge was also a part of our view, and could be distinctly seen from end to end. How often by night we would watch the lights twinkling like stars in the distance. It was a very happy change, and we were permitted to enjoy it for a little while, indeed a very little while. Lots, I understand, are very valuable, and soon the beautiful trees were cut down. It was a barbarous thing. The green yards and flowers went next, and then we knew, though at first we mourned and wondered, that all this digging and uprooting mean

new houses of greater height and depth. Once more we were to have the high, forbidding walls before us. Nor did it take long. In little over a year it was all accomplished, and even our beloved bridge was completely hidden from view.!°

Arbor Day celebrations, too, were augmented with lamentations for lost trees that, like Rice’s elegies, emphasized the powerful personal attachment trees could promote. “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” by George P. Morris, was read in schools on Arbor Day, 1909:197 Woodman, spare that tree! Touch not a single bough! In youth it sheltered me, And I'll protect it now. "Twas my forefather’s hand

that placed it near his cot; There, woodman, let it stand— Thy ax shall harm it not! That old familiar tree,

Whose glory and renown Are spread o’er land and sea— And wouldst thou hew it down? ~ Woodman, forbear thy stroke!

Cut not its earth-bound ties; Oh, spare that aged oak, Now towering to the skies!

212 CHAPTER SIX Trees, as living organisms that grew slowly and steadily, and then could die of “old age, meant more as symbols of the flow of time than as monuments from specific moments in history. Where Fifth Avenue blocks could change dramatically in a decade, with sturdy buildings coming down in a day, trees could stand for decades or centuries. Trees offered few clues to the specific time in which they lived; their thick trunks and gnarled roots and branches simply spoke of great age, of the passing of time. Trees were celebrated not only because they stood in such stark contrast to the “unnatural” city around them, but because they represented a wholly dif

ferent pace of time. Where the city moved to a molto allegro pace, trees followed , an adagio tempo. That, at least, was the image. But in Manhattan, even the trees were being caught up in the “restless renewals,’ the yearly pulling down of the old to make way for the new, which had come to characterize the city’s growth. Instead of “having more than the allotted life span of man,” trees that would typically have outlived their planters died a virtual crib death in Manhattan. Trees were simply no longer standing, to serve either as traditional historical monuments or as more abstract symbols of time. “The trees,” Ernest Gruening said bluntly, “shadowed by great structures, their leaves withered by the noxious exhalations of the city, are dying,’!°8 The use of trees and the axes that cut them down as metaphors for decrying the ills of the city resonated with a long-standing trope in American culture. Dating from

the beginning of the new nation, artists (such as Thomas Cole) and writers (like Thoreau and Cooper) had used tree stumps and, implicitly, their exterminating axes as visual and literary symbols of the destructive side of the American character. But the metaphor went further: the stumps of ancient trees, felled in an instant, posed a

| “temporal crisis,’ as Barbara Novak has called it. They suggested that humans—and especially Americans—were promoting “extraordinary accelerations” in the pace of change, literally unsettling notions of time itself.1°° In the city, and in Manhattan in particular, the disparities in the movement of time, between humans and nature’s representatives, was all the more striking and troubling. The “hurricane of the axe,’ which Thomas Cole had condemned nearly a century before, ravaged not only trees in Manhattan but also the invented idea of a cohesive, consensual community.!!0 ear the beginning of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, published in 1943,

N the presence of the ailanthus serves as a warning of a neighborhood’ decline. , If there was an ailanthus growing, the narrator writes, “you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first.”111 A few years later, in 1950, E. B. White offered an equally cautionary lament

TOWARD A TREELESS NEW YORK 213 about nature in New York. He noted that outside his bedroom window an ailanthus seed had found the “perfect conditions for ailanthus growth”: “ solid rock . . . two dead vine leaves, a cigarette butt, and a paper clip.” For White, the ailanthus’s ability to survive and thrive—‘a stalwart forest giant” —spoke as much to the frailty of New York’s environment as to the hardiness of the tree of heaven. For this “soil” was the best that “the fairest city in the world can scrape together to take care of its own.’!!2 In 1955, White returned to this theme, seeing trees as bastions of creative

energy amid an often destructive city. Sitting beneath a tree—perhaps that same ailanthus—White noted that All day the fans had sung in offices, the air-conditioners had blown their clammy breath into the rooms, and the brutal sounds of demolition had stung the ear—from

buildings that were being knocked down by the destroyers who have no sense of the past.

The lone tree offered some solace and more of a “sense of the past” than existed in the world beyond its shade (see figure 6.8). White’s lamentations, like Betty Smith’s sad reminder and those melancholy notices about the Stuyvesant pear tree or the passing of Hamilton’s thirteen sweet gum

trees, may seem to come from very different places than the worry about the increased , temperature, the rising mortality among tenement children, or the quest to harmonize the chaos of styles of building forms. In fact, all these motivations for preserving and planting trees were complementary. For just as the diseases and heat of the city literally killed people and destroyed the city, so too did the absence of these living beings suggest the intangible decay of the city as a social community. Thus physical destruction and social destruction were easily conjoined in the crisis around street trees. The inability of the city government and private citizens, working individually and together in reform organizations, to protect and plant trees portended a tragic future: disease, heat, and dust would make the city physically unbearable, and bleak avenues of commercial buildings would sap the spiritual life and beauty from the city. New York would become simply a marketplace, not in any sense a community or the civilized capital city of the nation. Trees served as compelling examples of the cycle of destruction and rebuilding

that had come to be one of the defining features of the city. At the same time, they were metaphors for the process whereby intangible bonds of community, association, or economic stability were broken down, destroyed, and then started up again. What

were the stories people told themselves about change in the city? What were the “urban baedekers,” as William R. Taylor has called them, that helped city dwellers un-

a f3Roe ;: ae* Ee _eee *FS rie ate So :ots! si . ee Ee 4jae ie haem a Pies iad *mnar Sasey ‘ s ¢CEO :* Bee pesexe Taylor would certainly agree that there were many “guidebooks” to the city, many experiences that could provide ways of comprehending New York. Trees provided one metaphor, one scenario for understanding and perhaps accepting more readily the cycle of destruction and rebuilding that was coming to be “second nature” for urban inhabitants. The experience of urban tree planting—where the story almost always ended in failure and where only the tough and scrappy trees like the ailanthus persevered—may have helped established the truism that nature cannot survive in Manhattan, that the tumultuous cycle of destruction and rebuilding is the “natural” and inevitable way to build cities.

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and perhaps the most ominous example of what could go wrong, is the 1929 Chrystie-Forsyth project. In one of the city’s first major excess condemnation projects, the city paid to take and demolish five blocks of tenements between Chrystie and Forsyth Streets in the Lower East Side, only a few blocks from Ruis’s first slum clearance campaign at Mulberry Bend Park. Problems arose after the city had completed its demolition and the private developer coalition fell through, leaving “seven blocks of rubble” and no new housing.'!” Only by virtue of the intervention of the Works Progress Administration was the strip of urban desert transformed into the park that exists today. But the housing was lost forever. It was this pattern of publicly initiated demolition and infrastructure building followed by private development that would come to predominate in postwar cities, often to the same destructive ends.1®

Stokes saw no contradiction in his advocacy of radically new redevelopment powers for the state and his belief in the efficacy of private developers to bring about progressive urban development. His various careers—as architect and housing advocate, as collector and historic preservationist—had presumed some merging of government and private initiative. Howells and Stokes, while founded by two idealistic young architects, was active in building the modern commercial city, gaining commissions for office buildings in New York, the Baltimore Stock Exchange, and apartment buildings.!° The firm moved freely from designing St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia Univer-

224 CHAPTER SEVEN sity, where Stokes and his wife Edith are buried, to the Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue. Nor did Stokes acknowledge the conflicting nature of his own various activities. In fact, his firm’s architectural projects on Fifth Avenue and his personal real estate investments were part of the “compelling force” that spurred the rise of dense tenements and led to the demolition of many historic landmarks.?° Throughout his life, Stokes remained deeply involved in real estate speculation. Especially after the dissolution of the Howells and Stokes architecture firm, real es-

tate speculation and development constituted Stokes’s major income-producing work. As with many others, Stokes did well in the boom years of the real estate market after World War I—but, also like others, he overextended himself and found himself stuck with devalued property when the market plummeted. In the midst of the Depression, which his wealth could not escape, Stokes himself moved out of a townhouse on Twenty-second Street near Madison Square (which had become the headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company) and into a two-room apartment at 953 Fifth Avenue, a building he had designed. Following the script of so many in Manhattan’s wildly fluctuating real estate market, he soon moved into a cheaper apartment on less exclusive Madison Avenue.?! Stokes’s skill as a social reformer lay in his technical expertise and attention to detail. He brought a new level of sophistication to the growing field of low-income housing, and always insisted that housing and planning required the highest level of professionalism. ‘The architectural competitions he participated in and sponsored offered novel ways of bringing a professional approach to designing low-income hous-

, ing.?? This questioning of age-old methods of regulating height and lot coverage, light and air access, allowed Stokes to consider and develop far more interventionist methods of improving low-income housing. But he never questioned the basic system under which space in Manhattan was developed. His conviction that publicly assisted private development could yield a more egalitarian urban environment “diverted his attention,’ historian Roy Lubove has asserted, “from the limitations of economic planning in a speculative, entrepreneurial real estate system.’2+ Even as he pursued diverse activities of city building that fueled New York’s rapid transformation and the city’s apparent disregard for its own past, Stokes participated actively in the early efforts to protect the historical landscape. He tirelessly fought to save St. John’s Chapel from the widening of Varick Street and drafted the passionate appeal to the leaders of the Trinity Corporation, which was signed by officials from the mayor on up to President Theodore Roosevelt. As was discussed in chapter 5, he also was instrumental in saving the facade of the Assay Building, a United States branch bank built in 1823-24, which had stood adjacent to the U.S. Treasury Build-

I. N. PHELPS STOKES AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MANHATTAN 225 ing on Wall Street. Having failed to secure the building as a clubhouse for the Grolier Club, Stokes had the building moved stone by stone to a lot behind the new Metropolitan Museum of Art building in Central Park. In 1923 it was re-erected as the south facade of the new American Wing.?> Finally, beyond entering the competition for the new Municipal Building, he had in 1910 proposed a way of building a new civic center that would not require the demolition of the old City Hall.?° The Howells and Stokes architectural practice strongly advocated the adaptation of historical styles to modern forms. Stokes’s municipal building proposal adapted the Gothic style (also used by Cass Gilbert for the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913) to the setback skyscraper that would come to dominate New York’s skyline. While he freely adapted historic styles to modern buildings, he also showed a strong interest in building “authentic” historic buildings. His chapel at Columbia University presented a “rare” opportunity “not only to design, but to construct a church in close conformity with the principles and traditions of the country and period to which the design belongs. . . . The Chapel is one of the few American churches in which the dome, as well as the vaulting, is constructed entirely of masonry.’2’ In his private life, too, Stokes showed a strong desire to literally live with the aura of the past around him. In 1910, when his real estate fortunes were at their height, Stokes read an article in the British Country Life magazine about a half-timbered Tudor manor house that was to be sacrificed for “some projected municipal “improvements.” Like the Assay Building a few years later, Stokes had the whole house taken down, brought over to his property in Greenwich, Connecticut, and re-erected.78 Stokes remains a fascinating figure because he so intensely embraced the different extremes of the development of New York City, alternately immersing himself in its distant past and its utopian future. He lived his life neither as a crippled antiquarian, unable to participate in contemporary political debates—indeed quite the opposite is true—nor as a single-minded modernist, fully embracing the dawning “megalopolis.” He seemed to move fluidly from the Grolier Club and the Society of Iconophiles

to the Tenement House Commission and its proposals for model housing in the Lower East Side, from the city’s Art Commission to the Phelps-Stokes Fund’s educational programs in Africa.

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS NEW YORK: PRODUCING THE ICONOGRAPHY Stokes’s commitment to low-income housing development, as well as his other work relating to the design and planning of the city, was extensive. Nevertheless, it would

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I. N. PHELPS STOKES AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MANHATTAN 22/7 be the Iconography on which Stokes’s “lasting fame as an author” would rest (see figure 7.2).29 In its structure, its philosophy of history, the process by which it was produced, and its final statement about the nature of Manhattan’s development, the Iconography was closely linked to Stokes’s other work. For at the very root of Stokes’s interest in city history and the project of charting its physical transformation was his recognition that Manhattan’s history was being removed by the wrecking ball. The shape and substance of the Iconography reveals a powerful tension between a sentimental antiquarianism and a rational, deliberate record of Manhattan’s miraculous growth. Beginning in 1909, amid the city’s Hudson-Fulton celebration—the starting point of an exuberant new interest in the city’s history—Stokes began collecting and assembling images for the Iconography. The work was intended to be a one-volume compilation of the most important prints, views, and maps of New York from its discovery to the present (that is, 1909). Stokes soon found that the number of images he wanted

to include would far exceed the space of one volume. But more importantly, his in-

terest moved beyond merely reproducing images but in using those images to tell the | history of Manhattan. With each image—a document from which Stokes read a piece of the city’s history—the work expanded to three volumes, then four, and finally six. The Iconography as it finally evolved over two decades of work is a hybrid of several book genres: it is at once an encyclopedia, art book, history textbook, guidebook, and timeline. On one level it is simply a coffee-table book of wonderfully reproduced images of New York City. But its extensive historical summaries and analyses of each view also make it an imposing history of Manhattan Island. With its detailed index volume, it became the standard reference encyclopedia of the city’s history, where

dates and names could quickly be identified. Stokes enlisted a small army of researchers to assist him in locating, acquiring, and photographing the images; researching the background history and providing a historical analysis of each print; writing historical sketches of each period in New York’s history; assembling entries for the two-volume chronology; and—most importantly for future researchers—assembling the 677-page index volume.*° Stokes was not modest about his goals: he believed that the Iconography would be a “comprehensive history” of the city.3! In 1926, when he received an award from the New-York Historical Society for the completion of the six volumes, he insisted that he had included “all procurable information of real significance” to the history of the city.7? Stokes could make this hubristic claim with some sense of security because he had drawn from a spate of city histories produced during the previous four decades.** Stokes’s effort to document the images and history of New York City was extraordinary in its range and microscopic detail, and in the personal commitment by which

228 CHAPTER SEVEN | it was created. Just as New York is defined as the place where one finds the extremes of American life, so Stokes was the “New York” of city imaginers. Stokes was, however, joined by many others in this era in his attempt to encapsulate or comprehensively

| describe the city. Though it was only in 1995 that the Encyclopedia of News York City was published, throughout the early twentieth century various encyclopedic surveys of New York were undertaken. Photographic surveys—by the Wurts Brothers and by the Bryon Company, to name just two—provided, mainly for the benefit of the buyers and sellers of real estate, a detailed snapshot of Manhattan’s streets. Collectors, as we have seen at the Museum of the City of New York, assembled a plethora of engravings and

lithographs of New York views into portfolios of Manhattan’s development. Pure booster books, like W. Parker Chase’s New York, The Wonder City, 1932, which documented all that was great and magnificent about New York’s physical development, abounded. As Stokes was writing his Recollections, the Regional Plan Association was

busy preparing its vision for the future of the New York metropolitan region. The Building of the City (1931), a volume of the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs,

written by Thomas Adams, was a mammoth undertaking on par with Stokes’s. It surveyed the entire history of Manhattan and the larger region to offer its regional planning solutions to the problem, as Adams put it, of “City Building in a Democracy.’*4 Finally, just as Stokes was completing his most personal of encyclopedias, perhaps the most widely read of all encyclopedic portraits of New York was initiated: the Works Progress Administration Guide to New York City, completed in 1939.35 Stokes provided the model for the WPA writers and photographers. Indeed, the WPA Guide researchers and writers often consulted Stokes, especially using his massive chronology to document particular aspects of the city’s development, such as the record of housing reform laws.3° But Stokes’s more personal effort is important not simply because it influenced the WPA Guide but because of what he suggested about the times. Stokes’s effort, if seen in light of the WPA’s monumental, nationwide effort to describe the history and transformation of the key cities of the nation, suggests a larger trend of encyclopedic attempts to define a place in time. o what end was Stokes’s massive project undertaken? What first inspired Stokes

Te begin assembling images of Manhattan and, year after year, to dissect each image and display “all of the available worth-while material” on Manhattan’s physical history??” The Iconography’s roots lie not, paradoxically, in a public-reforming ethos, but in the more intangible personal reactions to the creatively destructive city. Stokes certainly saw the images of old New York as having educational value.

He donated his own collection to the New York Public Library in part to give it the widest possible audience, so it would “not only give pleasure to the eye and ed-

I. N. PHELPS STOKES AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MANHATTAN 229 ucate the mind, but stimulate civic pride and patriotism.” Early on in his collecting and researches for the Iconography, he offered the Metropolitan Museum of Art his collection of prints for five years in order to “give the greatest pleasure to the greatest number. .. . In this country, or at least in New York, the general public has no opportunity to see the pictorial record of our past, which certainly has an educational value.”3° Stokes’s model of history taught through visual imagery was utilized, if not actually copied, by the Museum of the City of New York, the City History Club, and other institutions. He served on the boards of the MCNY and the New-York Historical Society and supported their efforts to make the history of New York accessible to students and “embryo citizens.”4° Beyond these largely rhetorical efforts, however, Stokes did little to develop the educational uses of the Iconography. The book itself could only be acquired by a very few: it was printed in very limited quantities and its cost—$100 for the set—was prohibitive. Stokes, like the Society of Iconophiles, limited the number of printings, even while stating that he hoped to spark interest in old views and promulgate the lessons contained in those views.*1

If Stokes believed in the power of history—especially visual imagery of the past— to shape citizens, it was certainly not the animating force behind the Iconography. Much more important were the personal, psychological reasons behind his work, specifically the nostalgia for ““old New York.’ Despite his at times highly technical, ra-

tional, and forward-looking approach to tenement reform and city planning, Stokes was equally enamored of journeying as a tourist to the foreign country that was New York’s past. Writing in the latter part of his life, during the Depression (when his financial standing had dropped considerably), Stokes laments the passing of the city he saw in his vast collection of American prints: What person of average intelligence, possessed of a modicum of imagination or sen-

timent, could fail to be moved by the contemporary picture of some seventeenthcentury settlement constructed by our forefathers . .. or by the awe-inspiring appearance of “Ye great town of Boston,’ or of Philadelphia, or New York, as portrayed in that rare trio of Brobdingnagian early eighteenth-century “prospects,” the envy and despair of all advanced collectors. ... Or what modern mind could refuse to be impressed by the early “portrait” of some tiny hamlet which has since become an important city, or by a comparison, for example, of the sky-line of New Amsterdam with that of the modern city of New York? .. . Can there be anyone so callous, and so lacking in romance... 24

Although the Iconography’s narrative propelled New York, inexorably, toward new achievements and new heights, Stokes’s sentiment often rested on pure sorrow for a

230 CHAPTER SEVEN past gone forever. Writing in 1933, Stokes lingers over a seventeenth-century view of New Amsterdam, noting the quaint homes and neat garden plots: Indeed, we cannot escape a feeling of envy, mingled with regret, when we consider how calm and peaceful life must have been in those charming little old eighteenthand early nineteenth-century towns, where our forefathers lived under the shadows of the church steeples:—how different from that which we lead to-day! The railroad, the automobile, the skyscraper, and others of their ilk, which are chiefly responsible for these changes, are indeed doubtful blessings: they have robbed us of much that was worth while in life. Where can we find to-day such attractive cities, such alluring villages, and such charming rural and river scenes, as are portrayed in many of these early views?49

The average New Yorker, Stokes commiserates, “sadly admits . . . that the city is not what it once was.’44 Stokes used the Iconography, at least in part, as an escape hatch from the present into past worlds. It was the personal reaction to these old views that drew Stokes to them, not any abstract, formal notion about their value as art. “In most higher forms of collecting,” notes Stokes, “beauty is the ideal towards which the collector strives, the one essential characteristic which guides his choice. ... Not so with the collecting of historical prints, which, for the most part, must be judged by a different standard”: Few of the prints of Old New York can justly be called beautiful, but many possess | other qualities which endear them to the heart of the intelligent collector, who regards them almost with reverence and awe as the frail documents of a by-gone age,—silent bearers of many a half-read message, which perhaps his alert eye is destined to decipher. In themselves admittedly incomplete and unsatisfying, if judged by the standards of the average picture lover, as contemporary illustrations of successive steps in the physical growth of our great city, they render more real and vivid our written history,

, and become at once instructive and intensely interesting.*> | The insistent quest for Stokes was, if even for a brief moment, to return to the New York of years earlier, to authentically recreate in his mind the city of his youth. The two decades’ work of collecting, researching, and writing the Iconography was in part an ensemble of “authentic” images of Manhattan’s past that could serve as spurs to memory.*°

It had been, after all, a transcendent encounter with an old print that had started Stokes on his journey. In 1909, in the year after his interest was first sparked by an exhibit of old New York views, Stokes dined at the home of W. T. H. Halsey, the renowned collector and founder of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Mu-

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240 CHAPTER SEVEN . avoided” the use of photographs.©”? As Andrews said in a 1901 address to his fellow Iconophiles, the society was dedicated to “act the part of foster-mother to the moribund art of engraving as it was practiced from the invention of photography.’6* Despite the society’s best efforts, however, Andrews suspected the project would yield

only minor success: “[A]ncient and honorable crafts one and all succumbed to the pressure exerted by the camera with its numerous progeny of processes. . . . There seems to be little interest for our prints. Our usefulness has passed.’? While Stokes, Andrews, and the society were not blind to photography’s advantages, they generally looked at the camera with disdain. ““To whatever degree of ex-

: cellence photography may attain,’ argued Andrews, “its limitations we claim are as defined and immutable as those of any other mechanical art.’”?? The Iconophiles ob- | jected to photography on two grounds. First, despite its apparent fidelity to recording a place, photography, the society argued, lacked a crucial element: the obvious mark of human investment. An engraving required time: messy pencil sketches made on site, days of painstaking work on a copper plate. The Iconophiles viewed photography as a purely mechanical art. It was all too easy, a bit of industrial “magic” that required no emotional investment, neither to create nor to reproduce the image. The photographer was almost an assembly-line worker, in an increasingly anonymous fac-

| tory called New York. As Andrews commented in his 1897 Journey of the Iconophiles: That the most highly perfected photographic process yet invented is capable of producing a work of art in the high sense of the term, we are not willing to admit... . [T]he camera will continue to perform its appointed tasks like the obedient but senseless automaton that it is, and nothing more.’!

Visual memory, the Iconophiles seemed to suggest, was attainable, but only at a cost of physical and emotional labor that photography did not require. The society had no illusions that their engravings were somehow more accurate, in an objective sense; for example, the society’s correspondence with artists is filled with references to the way the scenes would be altered to. make them more appeal-

ing. The unadulterated record of a building or street was never the goal of the Iconophiles. Indeed, photography’s alleged capacity to accurately record a place and

a time was a fatal drawback. What Iconophiles sought was something that was, in their minds, more authentic: a personal rendition of historic sites living comfortably in a modern city. The society also objected to the sheer abundance of photographs. Not only did photography produce images with no power to trigger memory, but there were too many of them. The democracy of the camera, which made New York the most pho-

I. N. PHELPS STOKES AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MANHATTAN 241 tographed city in the world, yielded few useful memories, complained the | Iconophiles. They walked a fine line: the society wanted to sponsor reproducible art, but its members were frightened by the uncontrollability of photography. Engraving was a perfect compromise, one of the “purest forms of reproduction”: it was true art and yet could be reproduced in quantity.’2 But to demonstrate its exclusivity, the society made great fanfare of its regular cracking of copper plates used to make the hundred imprints of each image. The critique of photography made by this small organization resonates with much deeper cultural dilemmas concerning city building. Photography, in the end, came to embody all that the Iconophiles found so disturbing about the modern city. They saw the endless reproduction of photographs (not only as prints but also as photogravures in books) as pernicious profit-making, another example of the materialism of the modern city. Further, photography’s new processes seemed inscrutable and suspicious; they seemed to emanate from the same inexplicable source as the city’s miraculous development. Like the city “swiftly rising,’ photographs appeared almost as if “by the wand of a magician.’7? Finally, neither photography nor the city that was increasingly its private subject held the possibility of imagining a different time. The city itself, all so new, had not yet, observed Andrews, “felt the softening touch of time” that would allow for the record offered by the “artist’s pencil.’74 The twentieth-century city was, like the photographic image, “too new and spic and span.” An art that did not hold within it the possibility of spurring a recollection was “sham art—a delusion and a snare.” And “cheap art,’ Andrews intoned, “is a misnomer.’”> We live, Andrews said,

in a barely veiled stab at photography, in a “day of cheap reproductions.”7¢ | Photography’s exponential growth had made the possibility of bounding the place,

of collecting every conceivable image of Manhattan into a book, impossible. Pho- | tography’s very presence problematized the question of collective memory in Manhattan. The characteristics of photography as defined by Stokes and the Iconophiles— its democratic nature, replicability, and supposed ease—were unsettling to anxious elites eager to control the historic iconography of their city. Scholars have long focused on the messages contained in photographic images themselves to study photography’s impact: the shock of Jacob Riis’s Mulberry Bend photos, Stieglitz’s portraits of immigrants coming to Ellis Island, Strand’s cool modernistic interpretations of the skyscraper city. But equally important was the theoretical challenge offered by the method itself. In response, the devotees of older forms of illustration desperately sought to hold onto a different notion of place, organized around the cherished persistence of historic buildings and landscapes. Stokes tried to balance the Iconophiles’ roles as antiquarians and historians, alter-

242 CHAPTER SEVEN nately exhibiting the sentimental responses of the former and the allegedly dispassionate, “scientific” responses of the latter. But Stokes also played a third role, as the collector. If Stokes moved uncomfortably between soberly describing New York’s ascent to present heights, and lovingly recalling the vanished past, he never swerved from his devotion to the marketability of “old New York.”

ACQUIRING NEW YORK Stokes’s history of New York, like the city of legend, began with a purchase. In 1908, |

he happened upon an exhibit of “old New York City Views” on Fourth Avenue, probably set up in anticipation of the Hudson-Fulton celebration that would begin in the fall of 1909. He emerged an hour later “the proud and happy owner of a full dozen respectable, if not very valuable prints.””” These first purchases spurred an enthusiasm for collecting New York City views that did not abate for twenty years. Stokes’s pursuit of old views of New York bordered on the obsessive, as all true collecting must. After his encounter with the exhibit of New Yorkiana, he reported that his “enthusiasm now rapidly increased, and soon knew no bounds.” What had started as a hobby and then became a narrowly defined project of cataloging key views of New York finally produced six volumes and, admitted Stokes, “would occupy some-

what more than my leisure hours during almost twenty years.’’® “I rushed from dealer to dealer and spent every spare moment feverishly delving through portfolios [and] drawers of old stock.’7? “T think I was born acquisitive, and a collector,” observed Stokes in his 1932 memoirs.8° What began with postage stamps developed into a passion for Manhattan views, then city views more generally, and then, at the end of his life, sculptures of the human body. Beyond any educational purpose or a personal link to the past that the views and history in the Iconography oftered, Stokes was taken by the collector’s pursuit, especially the financial risk and return that accompanied the trade in prints. “One of the greatest pleasures” of writing the Iconography, he revealed, “was the search for and, if the chase proved successful, often the acquisition of rare items for my collection. ... ' The pursuit of this usually illusive game often led far afield, and sometimes resulted in romance, once or twice almost in tragedy-’®! It is Stokes the collector, not the historian or architect or housing reformer, who most powerfully shows himself in the Iconography. The Iconography was intended as much for book and print collectors as it was a reference book for historians, antiquarians, and students in the city. Stokes was at the forefront of a new “industry” in old New York views, for which there had actually been a market since the 1830s and 1840s. Stokes, the Society of

I. N. PHELPS STOKES AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MANHATTAN 243 Iconophiles, and other groups modeled their books after such nineteenth-century collections of city views as Bourne’s Views in New York (1831). Stokes, in letters to collectors and friends, expressed his hope to emulate these earlier collections as well as a similar book, New Amsterdam, New Orange, New York, by William Loring Andrews, his friend and fellow collector.®?

In producing the Iconography, Stokes was quite clear in his focus on the interests of collectors of New York views: “My ambition is to produce a book which, although probably supplying little . . . new or original matter, will, from its character and from the manner of its arrangement, be of distinct interest and value to the collector as well as to that larger and growing class of intelligent book lovers who take an interest in all that relates to the early history of the city’8* The desire to enhance New Yorkers’ interest and understanding of their city’s development was submerged beneath the

more important goal of creating a collector’s book. It was logical then that Stokes would limit the number of copies printed and would downplay the extensive historical summaries preceding the views, which he prepared with the object of supplying in the briefest readable form, an outline of the more interesting events... . They are intended primarily for the information of the general reader and the collector who are interested in knowing something of the history contemporary with the illustrations, but who may not have the time or the inclination to consider the subject in detail.°4

Thus, what the reader might normally expect to be the centerpiece of a history book , is in fact secondary in the Iconography.

In his preface, Stokes quickly dispenses with the educational purposes of the Iconography and focuses intently on describing the work’s relationship to the pursuit of collecting. After briefly explaining the Iconography’s organization, Stokes quickly moves to a discussion of the history of print collecting, especially as it became a profitable venture: “Print collecting has long been considered one of the most profitable and alluring of hobbies, as well as one admirably suited to the enthusiast of moderate means.”85 The very language he uses to describe his work in assembling the images for the Iconography is that of the consumer—the careful, savvy shopper. Stokes had entered the “land of desire,’ as William Leach has called it, where the “temptation” of a good deal always triumphs over financial prudence.*° Stokes discussed with great relish the book and print catalogs of the early years of the century, when but a few hardy collectors found innumerable “bargains which make the mouth of

the present-day collector water.’®’ | More telling is how closely the language with which Stokes speaks of print col-

244 CHAPTER SEVEN lecting mirrored that of the real estate developer and the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide. The writings of Stokes as well as other collectors include discussions

of the mysterious-reasons for the rise and fall of the market and stories of remarkable acquisitions, savvy investing, and dramatic losses. Stokes warned, for example, that “print collecting is no longer the poor man’s hobby,” but urged the potential collector to have no fear: although the time is past, at least temporarily, for bargains in the shops and auction rooms, there is still an ample reward in store for his perseverance and his discriminating knowledge, along unbeaten paths, farther afield; and that the greater effort required to bag the elusive game only adds new zest and pleasure to the quest.

But, he suggested, as “in almost every form of collecting it is a wise rule to buy the best.”88 He urged caution especially since the “high prices realised during the past few years [before 1915]” were bound to drop. ““Whether present values will continue or

not, no one can foretell... . 1 am disposed to think that they will not.’? And then there were the collectors’ yarns: stories of spectacular “finds” and inflated values. Just like the common newspaper features that traced the miraculous increase in the value of a plot of land, Stokes offered stories of extraordinary increases in the value of New York prints. Early on in his career as a collector, for example, Stokes

bought from a man “forty minutes’ ride by trolley from the Brooklyn end of the Bridge” for $400 a fragment of one of the most famous early views of New York, the

Burgis View of 1716-18. With the sale of the Edwin Holden Collection in 1910, which released into the market some extremely rare items and spurred a new excitement for New York views, the “value of New York City prints took a sudden jump” and he was able to sell the fragment for $1,800. Stokes was stung by the guilt of hav-

| ing made a killing from the poor man from Brooklyn, saying “my conscience smote me, and I seriously considered sending my Brooklyn friend an additional cheque.” But, alas, “I am ashamed to acknowledge that I never did this.”?° Stokes’s contrition toward his “Brooklyn friend” is odd, because his good fortune was in fact a “natural” outcome: to make a “killing” was compensation for the risk of being “killed” in the market. Stokes later found himself, if not killed, at least tossed violently as the market curve swooped downwards. And in an ironic twist, Stokes was essentially priced out of the market: in the 1920s he moved into collecting prints of

other cities “largely because of the steadily mounting price of New York City views.’?! Stokes, like his experience in the real estate business, overstayed the market for views. When his real estate business began to flag in the late 1920s, he tried to un-

I. N. PHELPS STOKES AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MANHATTAN 245 load his prints only to find few willing buyers. Only when his financial situation had recovered did he donate the collection to the New York Public Library.” It should not be surprising that so many of the most important collectors of city views were active city builders. Though dominated by some of the few “old New Yorkers” as well as those involved in the publishing trades (such as Theodore De Vinne), a startling number of collectors were deeply immersed in designing, developing, and planning the city of the future. Stokes’s extensive searches for views to purchase or at least photographs for the Iconography brought him into contact with a number of seemingly unlikely collectors, such as John Crimmins, the head of public works for the Borough of Manhattan and the main inspiration behind the widening of Fifth Avenue (among other radical planning efforts).°? Robert De Forest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a long-time tenement reformer, was an ardent collector, as was J. Clarence Davies, one of the most powerful real estate moguls of the time, and, of course, James Speyer of the Museum of the City of New York.*4 The cultivation of the past and the protection of its visual memory was in fact the serious pursuit of many important city builders at the forefront of developing modern New York. The work of these collectors of Americana can and should be seen as representing a new interest in the American past, a profound nostalgia that gripped the nation even as it entered its most “modern” period.®> The Iconography is, in this way, the great-

est achievement of an early-twentieth-century renewed interest in New York city and state history.°° This fascination about the development of the largest city in the world occupied a whole range of city dwellers and builders: obsessive antiquarians and profit-seeking collectors as well as budding historians, planners, and real estate devel-

opers. The strength of the movement to collect, interpret, and reproduce American | arts and crafts, architecture, and folklife suggests that contrary to standard views, New

Yorkers—and Americans more generally—were caught in the first decades of the twentieth century between looking forward and backward. Certainly Stokes pursued his collection of city views out of strong personal and emotional desires to recreate and preserve the past. The very act of collecting these old views suggests a powerful psychological engagement with the changing material world. In the sometimes odd, obsessive manners of the collector, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal have argued, lie “desires for suppression and ownership, fears of death and oblivion, hopes of commemoration and eternity. Collections gesture to nostalgia for previous worlds.’”%” It is the life of Stokes the collector that reveals his deepest anxieties about the changing urban condition and the tale it told about American society in general.

246 CHAPTER SEVEN , Virtually all collectors of Americana—Stokes included—were also collectors willing to sell their cherished possessions. The financial aspect of the collecting fever was not simply an “underside” to the phenomenon, but an essential feature of it. The tight connections between the language of real estate and the language of collecting images of Manhattan’s transformation is clearly no accident. Private real estate development has been at the heart of the city’s economy and the central engine in its physical transformation, and that logic came to prevail in the efforts to write the biography of the place. The world of collecting images of the city—and the newer business of sketching, painting, and photographing its transformation—was a derivative industry of creative destruction. In essence, the commodification of Manhattan’s space now extended to the commodification of images of that space. For Stokes and others, images of the city offered a way to literally purchase the city and “acquire” New York. Not surprisingly, the number and popularity of prints expanded precisely at the moment that the city was demolishing its physical past with the most startling efficiency.

It was those prints of buildings now gone or threatened by the wrecker’s ball that proved most popular and profitable. Stokes and his fellow collectors made money from the creative destruction of Manhattan, even as they fought to preserve its past in books as well as in the actual landscape of the city.

A “CHAOS OF MEMORIES” Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on Tolstoy uses the Greek poet Archilochus’s saying— “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”—to analyze Tolstoy’s writing. Tolstoy was, according to Berlin’s interpretation, a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog; he was by nature a writer fascinated with the infinitely varied ways individuals thought and acted, but he desperately wanted to find a single, overarching set of principles to explain the progress of history.%® This dichotomy also applies to Stokes, but in a different way: Stokes hoped that by being a fox he would become a hedgehog. In other words, Stokes hoped that his sheer drive to include “all relevant information” would somehow produce a deeper understanding of Manhattan’s transformation. Stokes wanted to write a “comprehensive history” of the city but had no interest in propounding a thesis and understanding of what had fueled the city’s growth and development. His implicit expectation was that by pure accretion of image, narrative, and facts, a sense of the place would emerge. Stokes’s dreams of “old New York” now can be seen as the dreams of a man caught between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or more accurately, between two conceptions of place. These dreams were “authentic” trips back to a nineteenth-

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