Seeing Cities Change

Local Culture and Class

Jerome Krase

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317057819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de las minorías

Cities have always been dynamic social environments for visual and otherwise symbolic competition between the groups who live and work within them. In contemporary urban areas, all sorts of diversity are simultaneously increased and concentrated, chief amongst them in recent years being the ethnic and racial transformation produced by migration and the gentrification of once socially marginal areas of the city. Seeing Cities Change demonstrates the utility of a visual approach and the study of ordinary streetscapes to document and analyze how the built environment reflects the changing cultural and class identities of neighborhood residents. Discussing the manner in which these changes relate to issues of local and national identities and multiculturalism, it presents studies of various cities on both sides of the Atlantic to show how global forces and the competition between urban residents in 'contested terrains' is changing the faces of cities around the globe. Blending together a variety of sources from scholarly and mass media, this engaging volume focuses on the importance of 'seeing' and, in its consideration of questions of migration, ethnicity, diversity, community, identity, class and culture, will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and geographers with interests in visual methods and urban spaces.

Chapter 1
Seeing Diversity in New York City

Introduction

As Ray Hutchison and I had argued in Race and Ethnicity in New York City, because people think that New York City is perhaps “too” unique, it has never been used as a model in urban studies even though other equally unique places have served in that capacity. “While Chicago has long served as the convenient and well-studied model for urban sociology, in the 1990s Ed Soja and others argued that Los Angeles had replaced Chicago as the focus of urban study—that while Chicago was the appropriate model for the industrial city, Los Angeles had become the focal point for the postmodern heteropolis and was in fact the model for the city of the future” (2004, x).

Since its birth in the sixteenth century New York has been one of America’s largest metropolises and the focal point for the nation’s business and commerce. In the current, twenty-first, century it may be best known by the tragedy of “9/11” and the recurrent images of the falling Twin Towers. New York has also been a more intellectually challenging subject in that it has long provided both tourists and social scientists with a mosaic of social worlds rather than the more orderly, and therefore more understandable, concentric circles of Chicago. In my opinion, its current, almost kaleidoscopic, ethnic diversity is also beyond that celebrated by Los Angeles.

In addition to offering spaces for the long-established Chinese, Italian, Jewish, African American, and Puerto Rican communities, the last several decades have brought many newer, even “exotic,” ethnic groups to the city. The result is increasingly visible communities of Dominicans (in Manhattan), Haitians and Jamaicans (in Brooklyn), and Asians of all sorts (in Queens). One can also find the Indian subcontinent in Staten Island, pockets of Albanians (in The Bronx), as well as recent Middle Eastern Moslems who inexplicably mix with new groups of Israelis and other Jews in Orthodox communities (in Brooklyn). New York’s splatter of ethnic locales could hardly be a “model” for anything. As often cited, in no other historic period has this city received such a diverse, global, range of humanity that is reshaping local landscapes.

Writing Scenes of Diversity

Ethnic New York has been written about by a legion of others. There are many excellent works on the groups that mark Gotham’s landscape, but in the social sciences few since Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot (1970) have had the necessary global scope. Nancy Foner’s works, such as From Ellis Island to JFK (2000) and In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration (2005) have made up for some of the lost time. Other immigration scholars such as Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway, have noted in their recent works (2004, 2008) that, despite the contentious issue of immigration, in New York City at least, immigrants and their children can avoid some of the obstacles faced by native-born minority groups. And, Foner suggests in another work, a partial explanation for this openness can be found in the “exceptionality” of New York where its remarkable ethnic and racial diversity and centuries of migration have helped to create a special version of multiculturalism (2007).

New York tabloid journalist, Jacob Vigdor, agrees with Foner’s positive assessment and sees New York as having “the genius of immigrant assimilation” (2009). As a human foil for his article, he used the curious words of a famous baseball player who he referenced as saying, “The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners.” Noting that New York’s immigrants rapidly become Americans by learning English and then becoming naturalized citizens, Vigdor offered readers:

What makes New York City so adept at integrating immigrants into the mainstream? The city has a few things going for it. The city’s immigrants come from every corner of the globe, and no single group makes up more than 12% of the foreign-born population. That makes it tough for any single immigrant group to form an isolated enclave. Yes, the city has ethnic neighborhoods and always has, but it is both easy and common for the residents of those neighborhoods to head elsewhere to work or shop. And even in an ethnic enclave, you’re going to encounter native-born Americans and representatives of other cultures. The city is a public place, where residents have no choice but to share experiences. As immigrants and natives share experiences, they become more alike. Assimilation happens.

Many of the city’s best-known neighborhoods have, over the past century, experienced extreme ethnic transitions. Although many of the newest residents of historically immigrant areas like Manhattan’s Lower East Side of Manhattan would be familiar to Park and Burgess, others such as Moslem Bangladeshis, Egyptian Copts, and Christian Koreans almost certainly would not. Diversity as an emblem for New York City is also nothing new. It has been a defining characteristic of this real and imagined place ever since the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island some four centuries ago. Even the official seal of New York City sports a hint of diversity in the central place for a European and a Native American on its City Seal:

Arms: Upon a shield, saltire wise, the sails of a windmill. Between the sails, in chief a beaver, in base a beaver, and on each flank a flour barrel.

Supporters: Dexter, a sailor, his right arm bent, and holding in his right hand a plummet; his left arm bent, his left hand resting on the top of the shield; above his right shoulder, a cross-staff. Sinister, an Indian of Manhattan, his right arm bent, his right hand resting on top of the shield, his left hand holding the upper end of a bow, the lower end of which rests on the ground. Shield and supporters rest upon a horizontal laurel branch.

Describing the city’s variegated landscape is not the exclusive domain of social science and ethnography. Often the titles tell enough of the story. The specific words they use to describe the city are less revealing than the “way” they are used. There is a commonsense theorizing about diversity that, in some fictional works, becomes a trope. The list of novels, plays, television programs, and films whose stage is New York and whose theme is “difference” of one sort or another is almost endless. Probably the most famous of this spatial genre is the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story that was made into a movie in 1961. The scene was a poor and working-class Manhattan neighborhood in the 1950s where teenage gangs the Jets (white) and the Sharks (Puerto Rican) battle over honor and turf. More recently it would be Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), in which race and class conflict on the city’s streets invades and then takes over the life of someone at the pinnacle of his success. A good example of another book in which racial, ethnic, and class divisions play a less spectacular, but nevertheless central, role is the less well-known, post 9/11 Netherland (2008) by Joseph O’Neill in which a Dutch banker with an estranged English wife manages to salvage his troubled life with the help of Caribbean cricketers. The most spectacular in this ethnic genre was Sol Yurick’s novel The Warriors (1965). Surrealistically, a multiethnic, multi-racial teenage gang from Brooklyn acts out the Greek–Persian War story Anabasis by Xenophon as they try to make their way home from The Bronx through hostile territories. A version of the novel appeared as a film in 1979 and became, as they say, “a cult classic.”

Two non-fiction books published within a few years of each other could provide bookends for a large collection of texts describing variations on these multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial themes in the history of New York. On one end of the bookshelf might be placed historian–journalist Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (2004). As might not be expected, Shorto’s book doesn’t celebrate tolerance but rather explains that the anti-Semitic seventeenth-century Dutch leaders of the colonial outpost accepted Jews and Catholics, for example, only because it was good for business. At that time, the Dutch claimed what is now the Middle Atlantic States. Trade and administration centered in New Amsterdam (Nieuw-Amsterdam) on Manhattan (Manahata in Algonquin) Island:

This island city would become the first multiethnic, upwardly mobile society on America’s shores, a prototype of the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout the country and around the world. It was no coincidence that on September 11, 2001, those who wished to make a symbolic attack on the center of American power chose the World Trade Center as their target. If what made America great was its ingenious openness to different cultures, then the small triangle of land at the southern tip of Manhattan Island is the New World birthplace of that idea, the spot where it first took shape. Many people—whether they live in the heartland or on Fifth Avenue—like to think of New York City as so wild and extreme in its cultural fusion that it’s an analogy on the United States, almost a foreign entity. This book offers an alternative view: the beneath the level of myth and politics and high ideals, down where real people live and interact, Manhattan is where American began. (3)

At the other end of the long bookshelf could be New York Times reporter Joseph Berger’s The World in a City (2007) that I have used in many classes:

The city today is polyglot and polychrome, more cosmopolitan than the Casablanca and Shanghai of the movies, without the hovering air of Moorish menace. The whole world can be found in this city. I can do interviews in such exotic places as Ecuador and Uzbekistan and Bangladesh simply by getting on the subway for the cost of a MetroCard. When I took that walk around Manhattan [when he was 8 years old in the early 1950s], there were half a dozen sizable ethnic groups, with the rest of the world barely represented except in tourist oddities such as Chinatown and Astoria. But the descendants of those 1950s groups are by now largely settled in genteel suburbs and have been replaced by people born abroad in dozens of countries. Sixty percent of the city’s residents are either immigrants or children of immigrants. There are now at least twenty-five new nationalities with significant representations—Dominicans, Chinese, Jamaicans, Guyanese, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Haitians, Trinidadians, Colombians, Russians, Uzbeks, Koreans, Indians, Poles, Filipinos, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Salvadorans, Nigerians, and Ghanaians, to name the largest. (viii–ix)

In between the books by Shorto and Berger there could be shelved many other works including those of the poet Walt Whitman, who more cryptically celebrated Manhattan’s luscious variety in Leaves of Grass (1900):

Keep your splendid, silent sun;

Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods;

Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards;

Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees hum;

Give me faces and streets! give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!

Give me interminable eyes! give me women! give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!

Let me see new ones every day! let me hold new ones by the hand every day!

Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan!

Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give me the sound of the trumpets and drums!

(The soldiers in companies or regiments—some, starting away, flush’d and reckless; Some, their time up, returning, with thinn’d ranks—young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)

—Give me the shores and the wharves heavy-fringed with the black ships!

O such for me! O an intense life! O full to repletion, and varied!

The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!

The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the torch-light procession!

The dense brigade, bound for the war, with high piled military wagons following;

People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants;

Manhattan streets, with their powerful throbs, with the beating drums, as now;

The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even the sight of the wounded;)

Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus—with varied chorus, and light of the sparkling eyes;

Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

The most recent celebration of New York’s ethnic kaleidoscope is a virtual ode from polymath British historian Tony Judt that was published in The New York Times as an Op-Ed not long after his passing on August 2, 2010:

Today I drop my cleaning off with Joseph the tailor and we exchange Yiddishisms and reminiscences (his) of Jewish Russia. Two blocks south I lunch at a place whose Florentine owner disdains credit cards and prepares the best Tuscan food in New York. In a hurry, I can opt instead for a falafel from the Israelis on the next block; I might do even better with the sizzling lamb from the Arab at the corner.

Fifty yards away are my barbers: Giuseppe, Franco and Salvatore, all from Sicily—their “English” echoing Chico Marx. They have been in Greenwich Village forever but never really settled: how should they? They shout at one another all day in Sicilian dialect, drowning out their main source of entertainment and information: a 24-hour Italian-language radio station. On my way home, I enjoy a mille-feuille from a surly Breton pâtissier who has put his daughter through the London School of Economics, one exquisite éclair at a time.

All this within two square blocks of my apartment—and I am neglecting the Sikh newsstand, the Hungarian bakery and the Greek diner (actually Albanian but we pretend otherwise). Three streets east and I have Little Hapsburgia: Ukrainian restaurant, Uniate church, Polish grocery and, of course, the long-established Jewish deli serving Eastern European staples under kosher labels. All that is missing is a Viennese cafe—for this, symptomatically, you must go uptown to the wealthy quarters of the city.

Judt did admit the balkanized diversities of London, Paris, and even Amsterdam, but with a sarcastic reference to the “immigrant question.”

In the “Introduction” we considered Certeau’s metaphorical admonition to come down from the Twin Towers and see the city close up, where its real history begins and, therefore, ends. As argued by Louis Wirth (1938) in “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” urban society, per se, is defined by the relative size, density, and especially the heterogeneity of its population. On the positive side, living in diversity should increase tolerance and lower the barriers between class and ethnic groups. On the other, heterogeneity can increase anonymity and depersonalization. For Lyn H. Lofland also diversity is a necessary condition of urban life and culture. It is expressed in the ways that cities, ancient to postmodern, have tried to deal with the ever-present “strangers” who inhabit them. She suggested that the ways by which difference is dealt with places a city along a continuum from pre-industrial to modern (1985). Her vivid descriptions paint composite historical scenes. In all stages of urbanization “seeing” plays an important role, but in the preindustrial city it was most crucial:

Picture yourself then, a modern urban human, dropped by means of a time machine, in the midst of some mythical composite preindustrial city. You are struck, first of all, by the sheer amount of activity there. Merchants, operating out of little cubbyholes, have spread their wares in the street. Next to them, a school of some type appears to be in session and you wonder how the students can concentrate. A wandering vendor is coming toward you, shouting out the wonders of his wares, and out of the hubbub of the street noises, you can just make out the shouts of other wandering vendors moving through the other streets. A man stops the vendor and they begin haggling over the price of an item. Then you notice that the more immobile merchants are also engaged in such haggling, some of it long duration. Here and there such an encounter had drawn a crowd and bystanders have involved themselves in the interaction. Everyone is shouting, with many insults passing back and forth. (30–31)

Other city sights are assorted beggars, a merchant nailed to a door by his ear, naked people driven through the streets with whips and brushes, and on the outskirts the remains of bodies hanging in chains in a cage.

These visible transformations of public order can also be described by sociologists in other, equally thick but more poetic ways. Richard Sennett, in The Conscience of the Eye (1990), discussed the urbane poet of nineteenth-century Paris, Charles Baudelaire, who wrote about Constantin Guys’ illustrations of everyday city life. For Baudelaire using words to create images of diversity in the modern city made it possible to step outside one’s own self, as in this reflection by Sennett:

These days I usually walk from my apartment in Greenwich Village up to midtown on the East Side to eat, an amble of about three miles. There are plenty of restaurants in the village but none quite like those just above the United Nations, in the side streets of the fifties. They are French, but not fashionable; food is still prepared with butter and lard and cream, the patrons are bulky and comfortable, the menu seldom changes. The restaurants are in the ground floors of townhouses, and most are done up alike: a bar in the front leading to a long room lined with banquettes of red plush or red leather; Sunday-painter oil paintings of provincial France hand in gold frames on the walls above the banquettes; a kitchen is tucked in the back. People say New York is an unfriendly city, and I suppose any one of these restaurants could be cited as evidence. The waiters, Italians or Frenchmen in late middle age, lack the air of reassuring familiarity tourists like. But the restaurants are filled with people seemingly content to be left alone, many regular, solitary clients as well as couples speaking quietly. (123)

We can see in this excerpt the ethnographic source of Sennett’s previously quoted concern with the “walling off” of diversity in the city, or as Michael Sorkin might express it, the “theming” of difference (1992, xii). As Sorkin, once a Village Voice architecture critic, wrote in his introduction to Variations on a Theme Park,

Here is urban renewal with a sinister twist, an architecture of deception which, in its happy-face familiarity, constantly distances itself from the most fundamental realities. The architecture of this city is almost purely semiotic, playing the game of grafted signification, theme-park building. Whether it represents generic historicity or generic modernity, such design is based in the same calculus as advertising, the idea of pure imagineability, oblivious to the real needs and traditions of those who inhabit it. Welcome to Cyburbia. (xiv–xv)

Sorkin’s anthology of eight essays by architects and academics is critical of elitist designers and planners and the alienation they create with large-scale shopping malls, recreated historical settings, and gentrification. Neil Smith writes in it of New York City’s Lower East Side as a “Wild, Wild West” and begins with a description of the August 6, 1988 riot in Tompkins Square Park between anti-gentrification and housing activists, “punks,”...