New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it — once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
All of everything is concentrated here, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. John Steinbeck
Sometimes, from beyond the skyscrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world. Edna Ferber
New York is the only real city-city. Truman Capote
A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe. Le Corbusier
Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place. Johnny Carson
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. Simone Beauvoir
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there…. Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. Ezra Pound
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. James Baldwin
For those who would understand the past century of American history, the role of urban society is crucial. The influence of our cities has been considerable, pervasive and shaping. America’s cities exerted broad economic, political and cultural authority, often steering the transforming forces of nineteenth and twentieth century American life. The impact of cities and especially the major metropolises on national life has been extraordinary. While the founding elite of the early republic – Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe – fastened upon the nation the ethos of the plantation and southern life, cities assumed a more important part in setting national priorities following the Civil War.
Before long urban life came to define American progress; and driving that narrative was New York City.
Herald of twentieth century modernity, New York made itself into the center of world capitalism and American culture. The variety of its markets and services afforded it a reach in space and influence that remains unmatched. Its fabled diversity provides a riveting history of relations between groups divided by class, interest, culture, ethnicity, and race.
Shown a portrait of her painted by Picasso in his characteristic style, Gertrude Stein gazed at it with some distaste, protesting: “But I don’t look like that”. “Don’t worry,” he replied, “You will, you will.” How often New York has been viewed as unique only to discover that it was merely early. Its history offers a compelling perspective for examining the development of American economic, social, and political life.
Over the past decades a generation of freshly conceived city studies have dispelled local history’s lingering fascination with superficial antiquarianism. Urban historians have fashioned a rigorous body of systematic work that is informed by theory and driven by broad questions. Skilled in the tools of social science, and sensitive to calls for inclusion and complexity, city scholars have crafted a textured urban past from the lives of workers, blacks, women, immigrants, and other strands from the common weave.
Emphasizing analysis over narrative, applying quantitative techniques to the study of social, economic and demographic patterns, and interested in subjects having to do with the material basis of existence, as well as cultural and political issues, these historians have elaborated a complex process of city history.
While some works fail to pass the test of significance, many of these studies have been provocatively, even dazzlingly conceived. At the same time many of these studies have tended to isolate their subjects from the larger history of the nation or even of American cities in general, creating a field of brilliant fragments. But other studies have taken up the challenge to relate their studies to the larger theme about the textured and varied nature of America’s past.
Course Objectives:
- Provide a survey of the history of one the world’s great urban centers.
- Offer an understanding of what forces led NYC to develop in the way that it did, and how these larger forces helped frame human decisions and actions.
- Examine New York’s cultural traditions, its diversity and its economic foundations.
- Provide an appreciation for the layers of experience that form New York’s historical tradition.
