THE ARTS IN NEW YORK CITY Fall 2017 | Baruch College | Macaulay Honors

By now, we’re well attuned to the fact that urban spaces and architecture reflect the social conditions of a given time period, and therefore the changes in these spaces would reflect changes in the social environment. This has been exhibited first in Lefebvre’s excerpt, where in the first line he posits “(social) space is a (social) product”, and then goes on to elaborate on that. Additionally, it was presented visually in the form of photographs, architectural drawings, and books at the New York Historical Society. A theme that also became apparent from those images, is that the social environment can be assessed not just by what projects it does construct, but also by the ones that it doesn’t. A couple examples are the plan to fill in the Hudson river or other waterways, as well as the drawing of the Washington bridge, both of which were not executed. As interesting as that topic is, however, it’s a lot easier to assess a social environment by what it does execute and build, and to draw conclusions from that.

I chose to investigate the changing conditions of New York City through the medium of film. I looked at a handful of different movies spanning from 1901 until 2016, including “What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City” (1901), “The Cameraman” (1928), “How to Marry a Millionaire” (1953), “Annie Hall” (1977), and “How to Be Single” (2016). When looking through the selected films, the architecture and general surroundings from the different time periods didn’t stick out to me as that different. In fact, the background in “What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City” reminded me very much of lower Manhattan as it looks today. Sure, the use of horse drawn chariots is definitely outdated, and the style of clothing has also certainly changed, but in terms of the buildings themselves, they didn’t seem that different. I would even bet that a lot of those exact buildings are still around today.

It was only after pointedly thinking about what differences there could be between all these different time periods that I thought of something that exists in the city now that didn’t back then: the luxury high riser, an image of a sleek, glass, modern luxury apartment or office complex. A lot of the buildings existent during 1901 and 2016 are the same, or at least stylistically the same, but at some point, there came to be more and more developments of sky scrapers, and buildings with a more modern style.

You can see this through a progression of snapshots from the movies.

What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City

The Cameraman

How to Marry a Millionaire

Annie Hall

How to Be Single

The only question left to answer is what does this shift in architectural style say about where society is heading? Paul Goldberger, in his article “What Has Architecture to Do With the Quality of Life?” from the New York Times, tries to answer a similar question, as the title would suggest. At the beginning, he posits that “Architecture is an effect of culture as much as a cause; it reflects our values at least as much as it creates them”. In other words, he says that architecture can tell us something about our society. So, in the case of modern sky scrapers, what can we learn? One of the perspectives Goldberger quotes in his article answers this question directly, which is that skyscrapers have led to “the loss of fine older buildings, the loss of sunlight, the loss of the kind of casual encounters that make urban life easy, the loss of small scale, the tendency of virtually everything to turn into an interior mall”. Now this may be a more pessimistic view of what modern architecture has wrought on (or reflected about) society, but it’s a view worth considering.

Going to school in the city, especially in the fast-paced landscape of Manhattan, it is easy to forget that an extensive history of the place we call “home away from home” exists. Looking at photographs at the New York Historical Society of project blueprints that never came to fruition, or that had been demolished, it became increasingly apparent that New York City was may not always have been structured in the modern and business oriented structure that we experience every day.

One of the sources I thought would provide an interesting perspective on the history of the New York City was the restaurant menu database. Being that I find myself eating out several times a week, I’d imagined there would be a pretty significant contrast between the city meals that I enjoy today and the palette of NYC residents in the 1800s. Looking at a menu from “The Receiving Ship at New York,” I was surprised that few of the menu items sounded foreign or obsolete. Though I don’t think that many restaurants nowadays serve “cream cheese” or “crisp crackers” as menu items, other dishes including “baked spice ham” and “cream of tomato soup” were more familiar in terms of phraseology. A few menu items that I found were a testament to the culture of twentieth-century New York were the unconventional offering of “cigars” and “cigarettes” at the bottom of the menu. Though these items don’t directly (or even indirectly) reveal much of the appearance of the city, they do open a window to the cultural contrasts, values, and the effects of information now available to the public.

A pattern that I observed while browsing through various menus from the early 1900s was the disproportionate allocation of restaurants and dining halls to sports clubs, educational institutions, hotels and other establishments with an industrial focus such as banking, or yachting. With the exception of a few bars, it seems as though serving food was not developed as a commercial industry suitable for small business, but rather a perk of the upper class. Though coffee was offered on almost every menu as “cafe noir”, or black coffee, I saw very few, if any, cafes or coffee shops that are clearly commonplace today. As I looked through each decade, particularly the recovery years of the 1940’s through the twenty-first century, I noticed a gradual decrease in the number of food establishments within hotels or vocational clubs, and an increase in private food chains; places like “Union Hill Elk’s Club” and the “Exchange Station Hotel” slowly became less prominent as small coffee shops and specialty restaurants like “Applebees” and “Redeye Grill” started to gain market share in the food industry. With this in mind, it’s reasonable to draw the conclusion that as the United States, especially New York, experienced an economic boom in the aftermath of World War 2, the economy took on more of a consumer approach to business, incentivizing small shops to cater to everyday individuals, eventually growing the consumer goods industry to comprise over 70 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Ronald Osherov

Blog #10

With food being the great congregator around which society is grounded, we are able to gather the “fingerprint” of a particular place in time. By looking through New York’s restaurant menus throughout the last century and a half, I was able to see the changing landscape through changing tastes. These changes were the result of new influences on our always evolving American palate, or came of the influx of new arrivals to the city.

This sample menu from a popular New York lunch/dinner spot in 1858 reflected many traits about life in the city from this time. The menu shows how America was still in its formative phase and foods were kept simple. In today’s New York you have hundreds if not thousands of cuisines and food types to choose from for your meals, but in the 1850’s, you were limited to mutton leg and turkey with giblet sauce.

This menu dates back to 1907 and hails from a ninth floor restaurant serving a high-rise building. The most interesting part of the menu’s I was browsing from this time period is the lack of international dishes. This shows me that although New York has always been an international city, it was not always a place that warmed up to foreigners. Where today New York feels like a mix of the worlds 20 biggest cities rolled into one, before the nativist sentiment spilled over even into food. And as Nativism always does, the country missed out on some great grub!

This menu goes back to 1959 and is from the food hall that served delegates of the U.N.. What drew my attention was that this menu typified American sentiments of the time. Although catering to a diverse, international audience, the menu is almost exclusively based on classic American cuisine. This encapsulates the feelings of the times as this was when America was on the world stage, but it still did not become one with the rest of the world. Nowhere are foods found to make the guests feel more at home, instead the very American idea of “my way or the highway” is seen at play.

What brought my attention to this menu from 2003 is that the restaurant is considered an “old school” Italian restaurant when cumulatively speaking, Italian food is quite a new to the city. In the 400 years of New York’s existence, Italians have been here for less than 100 of those in mass amounts, and already they already an “old immigrant” group. This to me gives the idea of the rapidly changing times upon us; the change of pace in this city now is greater than ever and things stay “young” for a lot less in this New York for good or bad.

The year explorer Giovanni de Verrazano sailed into the New World. 1624. The year the Dutch first settled along the Hudson River. 1664. The year the English took over and renamed the landmass New York.

Since gaining that name, the society that existed there has only evolved. It was the first city to host a Colonial Congress. The first capital of the United States. And eventually the first to build a 21-story skyscraper, the infamous Flatiron Building.

The progress in New York City has been incredible, to say the least. The city is constantly growing and adapting. It is a both a center for advancement and a cultural hub. I feel especially privileged to call it my home.

When reading over the guidelines for this assignment and scanning through the list of possible sources, the Spotify playlist instantly caught my eye. Listening to music is by far one of my favorite pastimes. Every song tells an individual story. It has a unique message. I was really excited to see what Professor Heath and Denisse had picked out.

When I saw that Stayin’ Alive was the first song on the New York City Stories playlist, the happiness I felt is indescribable. Growing up, the Bee Gees was always on full blast at my house. My dad is a huge fun. He even has a special high-pitched voice. To me, this song has always been fun and groovy. The kind of song that makes one want to dance. However, while listening to the lyrics closely, I’ve realized that the song is so much more than that. For instance, I never paid attention to the line “We can try to understand The New York Times’ effect on man.” Thinking about it now, I realize that the city has a profound impact on the people who live in it. And while New York City is constantly changing, that never will.

Another song on the playlist, that I particularly enjoyed was Rockaway Beach by the Ramones. Being a native of Queens, Rockaway Beach is a place I frequented throughout my childhood. It isn’t the greatest beach by any means, but it serves its purpose. In the song, the Ramones sing “It’s not hard, not far to reach.” Being a die-hard Ramones fan for the last five or six years, I always found that line to be catchy.  But I never realized how that line is representative of the New Yorker mentality. Which is that we can do just about anything.

Through music, it can be inferred that while physically New York City has changed, the essence of the city remains the same. As aforementioned, while each song tells an individual story, the songs on the New York Cities Stories playlist share common themes. They tell tales of love lost and lost found. They share memories both good and bad. They show the significant impact New York City has on a person. You can even take it a step further and say that being a inhabitant of the city, or perhaps just being a visitor, changes one. Which is ironic because that is the one thing about New York City that hasn’t changed.

-Alyssa Motilal

Visiting the library, it was interesting to see the maps and plans of what NYC looked like and what it could have looked like today. I liked having physical representations and maps of the plans and seeing buildings that are no longer there today. What captured my attention the most were the graffiti buildings that were torn down to build a luxury high rise. I’ve always heard about the debate on whether graffiti is art, but for the first time, looking at those buildings I considered them to be art. Those buildings would have been so popular in modern day in NYC. Everyone would be traveling there to take cool pictures to post on different social media cites. Its unfortunate that they had to be removed. I decide to pull up old maps of NYC from the New York Public Library

The two maps that caught my attention the most were of manhattan was NYC IN 1922 and 1911. The 1922 map was a map that showed all of the different factories in NYC and what they produced. It was really cool to see how much space these factories occupied. The 1911 map played into what the 1922 map showed but it was a little different. Instead of high lighting different ares to show the different manufacturing that was produced during that time, the map was more illustrative and provides an image of what the city looked like. It shows the factories and the smoke coming out of them. This new map does show a lot of new taller buildings also. It clearly represents the transition into modern day New York.

Map of Manhattan 1900 also caught my attention because it wasn’t just a street map. It showed all of the buildings. All the buildings seem to be tightly packed and I imagine life to be like a tight community even though the area is so large. There are so many little buildings and the streets look almost irrelevant. They’re just tiny spacing between the buildings. There is also lack of greenery, it took me a while to realize that all I was looking at was buildings. That aspect fit in with the surrounding factories because it gives it an “all business” feeling. Its weird to think that so many kids and families grew up in this city. It also puts my life into perspective now. Even though there is a handful of parks in Manhattan, it doesn’t seem like the most child friendly place. There are always so many people and cars and hazards, its weird to think that people grow up here.

Maps are different from other sources of information because it allows us to see the bigger picture. Photographs are often focused and biased. They usually convey a message and have an agenda while maps are strictly informative. It provides us with a view from up high and puts objects into perspective. I didn’t realize how big NYC is and how many buildings there are and how many people those buildings can hold. Seeing the maps also made me think about my current life in NYC and how a lot of aspects of family life haven’t changed. I

Although I use Google Maps every day to figure out how I’m going to get somewhere, I rarely look at an actual map. I decided to make maps the center of my blog because it was crazy to see how much information I deny myself on a daily basis. The maps in the 1900s were just as detailed if not more as our online maps right now. I wasn’t expecting that and so I was definitely surprised and captivated.

1922 Map

1911 Map

1900 Map

During the course of my Junior year of high school, I interned at the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum, where one of the things that we were taught was the importance of inclusivity in New York City. This involved a lot of things, however one of the most memorable things to note was when we looked at subway maps from 2016, and just a few years prior. Something we discovered after a while was the vast increase in handicap accessible stations over just about a decade or two, based on the social needs and demand of these stations to become handicap accessible.

My obsession with the subway system is one that has existed since I was a child and rode the one train for the first time on my way to the Museum of Natural History. So of course, I utilized the nifty link that had so many different subway line schematics since the subway ever existed, and I wanted to show my version of social change through that. I looked at a map from 1904, of the Inter-borough Rapid Transit, and this map, pictured below, was very interesting to me as an art piece. The map showed only the subway line, and the stops the train would make, and only drew in a very minimal amount of the surrounding streets or landmarks. This made me jump to the idea that I wanted to showcase, which was that our transit system has and always will only reflect the needs of the people. In this time period, you can tell from looking that this map that the stops reflected not an equal distance between stops but a direct route to the most populated areas (14^th st, 23^rd st, 42^nd st twice). The areas where people lived were obviously more densely inhabited downtown, and towards the inner part of Manhattan. These needs obviously grew through the ages, and you can see in the 1939 subway map, and then later again in the 1967 subway map, the significant increases to the amount of lines, stops, and extensions to routes that had to be made. Even if you were unaware of the immigration boom and the massive flux in population density, you would be able to extrapolate that information just by looking at these maps.

1904 Line

1939 Line Map

1967 Line Map

2010 Line Map

The fact that we had trains to commute throughout each borough showed that New York City has always been a very high paced society, and the changed to the subway system over the years has been unlike any other metropolis in the world. I believe the structure of the subway lines was dependent on where people had settled, aka centralizing on Broadway and eventually scattering outwards, and later on dictated the neighborhoods we have now. In our current society, the areas that had once been simply the most populated, are now the major shopping or business hubs that our city is known for. Around the world, 42^nd street (Times Square) is one of the most recognizable streets to anyone, and that is partially because of our subway system allowing the people to commute there and back almost instantly.

The changes to our subway system were made to reflect our needs, such as visiting relatives from one area of the city or another, getting to work if you lived in Harlem and needed to get to Wall Street, or just didn’t have the cash to hail a cab. The subway reflects the gritty, high paced (run for your train or be stuck there), trying to hustle and save a few bucks, attitude that New Yorkers are known for! Overall, I feel as though the subway is a NYC staple, and comparing the past with our current subway system only proves that we had created something worth improving on, and making better every chance we possibly could, because it worked for us!

The cliche conception of New York City is that it is “the city that never sleeps.” Perhaps this phrase has been used in reference to it so many times for a good reason- it appears to be one of the only constant factors in the ever changing New York. In a fast paced world of technological and social growth, change can be both beautiful and a little sad. Sometimes it seems that in exchange for efficiency, affluence, and expansion, we have given up some of the soul of our thriving city. Gentrification is often cited and being detrimental to the culture of an area, and that most certainly seems to be true in the case of Manhattan. Cultural neighborhoods, locally owned bookstores and cafes, and street art have been systemically replaced with upper class housing communities, chains and corporate giants in high rise buildings, and advertisements. These changes have affected the very heart of the people, and this is especially noticeable in the music and art produced in and about the city.

One of the marks of age, whether in an individual or a place, is that what once seemed new and brilliant in youth becomes a nostalgia tainted image of days long past. The New York City Stories playlist is a perfect blend of this nostalgia and modern views of the city. Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra’s stories of New York paint it as a beautiful, lavish city of heart and soul. Several decades later, however, the Wu Tang Clan speaks of it being a city divided between the rich and the poor, ruled by cops and money in C.R.E.A.M., an abbreviation of the phrase “cash rules everything around me.” Whereas NYC was once a place where everybody had a shot at success regardless of background, commercial development has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, making the gap between classes a nearly unbridgeable abyss. The problem of homelessness has only gotten worse over the years, leaving nearly every corner occupied by a person unable to feed or clothe themselves adequately, at the mercy of passersby.

The echo of the New York that once was still lives on in the memories of the people that inhabited it. Death Cab for Cutie’s Coney Island is a bittersweet eulogy for amusement park that used to be one of the happiest parts of NYC. In this song, Benjamin Gibbard says

“I can hear the Atlantic echo back roller coaster screams from summers past.
And everything was closed at Coney Island, and I could not help from smiling.
Brooklyn will fill in the beach eventually and everyone will go except me.”

This song expresses a longing for the spirit of Coney Island that seems to have faded away. The writer seems to believe that Brooklyn itself will eventually take over one of the few places where people still gather to have fun in favor of housing, stores, and corporations. Perhaps if enough other people share this sentiment, we can reclaim the spirit of the city in the coming decades before it vanishes entirely.

Veronica Funk