Some notes I took long ago...

In case I'm missing some of this information here, I figured I might as well list it here:


Journal of Urban History, Vol. 32, No. 1, 152-159 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0096144205279758
© 2005 SAGE Publications
We are All New Yorkers Now
—Christopher M. Finan
Mariellen R Sandford (1987)
Tourism in Harlem: Between Negative Sightseeing and Gentrification The Journal of American Culture 10 (2), 99–105.
Memory as Identity: The Invention of the Lower East Side Journal article by Beth S. Wenger; American Jewish History, Vol. 85, 1997
Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Mumford's Interzones
Catherine Cock's, Doing the Town
The Slum: A Project for Study
Nels Anderson
Social Forces, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Sep., 1928), pp. 87-90 doi:10.2307/3004551 This article consists of 4 page(s).
Haenni, Sabine
Visual and Theatrical Culture, Tenement Fiction, and the Immigrant Subject in Abraham Cahan's Yekl American Literature - Volume 71, Number 3, September 1999, pp. 493-527
Duke University Press
American Literature 71.3 (1999) 493-527 _________________________________________________________________ Visual and Theatrical Culture, Tenement Fiction, and the Immigrant Subject in Abraham Cahan's Yekl Sabine Haenni * Figures I am an ardent collector of slums. I have missed art galleries and palaces and theatres and cathedrals (cathedrals particularly) in various and sundry cities, but I don't think I ever missed a slum.--H. C. Bunner, "The Bowery and Bohemia" (1894) I had become as infatuated with the Ghetto as eastern boys were with the wild west.--Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931) In comparing his infatuation with the ghetto to a boyish enthusiasm for the Wild West, Lincoln Steffens imagines the immigrant ghetto as a site potentially outside the social control of the American cosmopolis, a site where grown men can engage in exciting and potentially dangerous games. Steffens's account, familiar from previous decades, recirculates an image of the ghetto proletariat as "savage," but his comment must also be understood in the context of the 1890s, a time when the Wild West had become a site of re-creation in all senses of the word (not least because the frontier was officially closed), evoking cultural phenomena ranging from the later Buffalo Bill shows to the emerging Boy Scout movement, all of which were part of a "wilderness cult" that imagined the West as a place of "endless adventure, play, and freedom."^1 For H. C. Bunner, the slums do not evoke a residual, playful, and specifically American savagery but instead replace the monuments of Western civilization--from palaces to art galleries. His comment reflects the explosion of public leisure [End Page 493] consumption in the late nineteenth century, when the "new" middle class embraced respectable vaudeville and other formerly disreputable amusements. But even as Bunner...

The Wretches of Povertyville: A Sociological Study of the Bowery By Ignatz Leo Nascher
Alas! What Brought Thee Hither?: The Chinese in New York, 1800-1950 By Arthur Bonner

Some things never change....

Late September, 2007 article on a Chinatown brothel and a nearby high school....

http://www.nypost.com/seven/09292007/news/regionalnews/brothel_shock.htm

A step toward the promised post on Essex Street Market

This article from today's New York Times crystallizes some of the overlap between historic preservation, gentrification, and low-income neighborhoods: "With Market Plans Afoot, Resistance Rises to More Fancy Foods."

One more thing on that subject...

Perhaps my reason for writing this is that while scholars of American literature and sociologists haven't overlooked slumming, historians have. My contribution to the field is to discuss slumming in the context of the history of America in the Gilded Age -- how we make sense of ethnicity, the new frontier, modernity, the Other.

The Present State of Scholarship

I've decided that this section of my proposal -- "The Present State of Scholarship" -- is going to be the key part of my proposal defense. After meeting with a wonderful historian of the Lower Est Side yesterday and getting her feedback on my topic, I've realized that the topic itself is engaging enough and rich with potential meaning. But what it tells us and how it fits into the larger historiography of New York, the Lower East Side, tourism, sexuality, etc. still remains to be seen.

As with my research paper on the Committee of Fourteen a couple of years ago, I need to do that somewhat tedious part of research preparation where I explain why what I'm doing is so damned important. And so, being realistic now, let me list the texts I really need to discuss in order to "defend" my proposal:

In terms of urban tourism/leisure:

Cocks, Catherine. Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1840-1915
Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements
Erenberg, Lewis. Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements
Wasserman, Suzanne. The Good Old Days of Poverty
etc.

In terms of slumming as slumming:

Koven, Seth. Slumming
Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum

In terms if Lower East Side history:

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements
Wasserman, Suzanne. The Good Old Days of Poverty
Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925.
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives
Abu-Lughod, Janet. From Urban Village to East Village
Mele, Christopher. Selling the Lower East Side
Diner, Hasia. ed. Remembering the Lower East Side
Tchen, Jack. New York Before Chinatown
Bonner, Arthur. Alas! What Brought Thee Hither
etc.

In terms of sex:
Gilfoyle, Timothy. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920.
Chauncey, George. Gay New York
etc.

There are also all of those American Lit. dissertation I found on slumming literature, which should be considered.

Quote from Seth Koven's Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London

"Many kinds of love, sexual and nonsexual alike, animated Britons' engagement with philanthropy. I investigate how the histories of sexuality and sexual desires usually associated with the private lives of individuals intersected with the public histories of benevolence to shape metropolitan philanthropy and social welfare. While I do not anachronistically impose the vocabulary of twentieth-century psychoanalysis on my nineteenth-century subjects, I do attempt to illuminate their psychological and sexual complexities. I examine the motives, representations, meanings, and consequences of their forays into the slums of Victorian and Edwardian London. At the same time, I reconstruct as best I can the responses of the poor to their uninvited visitors. The circumstances and survival strategies of the poor necessarily shaped their vision of the world and of their social betters.¹⁸ This book reveals the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories, overflowed their boundaries, affecting one another in profoundly consequential ways for our understanding of poverty and its representations, social policies, and emerging sexual and gender identities in modern Britain." (From Introduction)

I love Koven's approach, but I also wonder if I would need to be so subtle. I don't think erotics and sexuality informed slumming; I think it was the impetus for slumming. But then again, we're talking about different populations and places -- he's talking about Victorian London reformers and I seem to be talking about tourists.

Urban tourism vs. sex tourism

I have a lot of thoughts to sort out today, namely which approach I want to take (or if I need to even choose) between the idea of urban tourism, which would build upon the obvious slumming tours of the downtown area led by guides like Chuck Connors, OR the idea of sex tourism, which would build upon whatever research I gather from the Committee of Fifteen/Committee of Fourteen files and the like. Or would sex tourism simply be a chapter of the dissertation? I mean, how far can I go with it?

Let's examine that. So, of course, people don't seem to have called visiting the Lower East Side for the purposes of finding prostitutes "sex tourism" at the turn of the last century. Indeed, the term conjures more images of trips to a 20th or 21st century Thai brothel than it does gentlemanly excursions to the slums. On the other hand, my investigations of the Committee of Fourteen records a few years ago suggested that people definitely came to the city, visited prostitutes, and then returned to their banal lives in the country. It wasn't simply a local phenomenon with prostitutes servicing their neighbors. Evidence of this consisted of letters to the Committee, business cards, the testimony of "steerers" who worked on behalf of pimps and prostitutes to "steer" business toward them. In my research yesterday on the Committee of Fifteen papers (that committee was around from 1900-1902), it appears that the impetus for the formation of the committee was the distribution of prostitutes' business cards on the steps of a Lower East Side Episcopal church. In other words, it's not so far-fetched when one considers the incredible underground economy of prostitution on the Lower East Side to examine it in the same terms anyone would examine any other tourist industry.

On the other hand, sex tourism, like all tourism, is about consumption -- consuming products, consuming the Other. So taken with the language of consumption that permeates the other sources I've read, is it important to distinguish between this kind of sexual exchange and that of slummers who really just want to watch opium smokers, light joss sticks, buy well-made overcoats, and eat "authentic" Jewish, Chinese, or Italian food?

And that's really the question: is this about slumming as a mode of consuming the Other, in which case sex tourism is a chapter and slumming tours are another? Or is there so much about sex tourism (not just prostitution, but nightclubs, bathhouses, opium dens as locations for the "white slavery" trade, the fascination of people like Hapgood with "free love" on the Lower East Side) that I should just stick with that? If it's the former, then there are several books I need to consider: Cocks' Doing the Town, Erenberg' Steppin' Out, more guidebooks, etc. If it's the latter, then I really think I need to think about this in terms of narratives, as in Walkowitz' City ofDreadful Delight.

What's more, I need to dig in and figure out what my larger question is, as well as how it fits into a larger historiography. Is this about modernity, ethnicity, sex, the creation of a 20th century middle class, what?

Chuck Connors and Konrad Bercovici

I spent a chunk of today and an even larger chunk on Saturday at the New York Public Library (on 42nd and 5th) doing research. I focused most of my energies on two books -- Chuck Connors' 1904 book Bowery Life (written in collaboration with Richard K. Fox, then the publisher of the Police Gazette) and Konrad Bercovici's 1924 book Around the World in New York.

Connors, also widely known as the Mayor of Chinatown for his seemingly amiable relationship with the residents and workers of Chinatown and for his popular slumming tours of the neighborhood, was quite a curious, self-aggrandizing, and mysterious New York character at the turn of the last century. Because he seemed so devoted to fashioning a larger-than-life version of himself for the public -- much like other New York characters like Al Smith and our old friend George Washington Plunkitt -- it's hard to know what's real from this text and what's just part of the show. Placed atop his own flair for the dramatic is that of the Police Gazette -- a sensationalist entertainment rag (and entertaining it is!) with a mostly working-class, male audience. The book is filled with anecdotes, posed pictures of Connors looking tough, and, at the very end, a series of advertisements for jujitsu, boxing, poker playing, and "dumb-bell exercise" manuals. In other words, this is a coffee table book, not remotely related to reportage.

It is interesting, though, as a discursive piece. And by "discursive" here I mean as a representation of the discourse of white, working-class masculinity in relationship to place and ethnicity. Connors' public persona is built upon his knowledge of the exotic world of the Chinese immigrant community -- and as a working class man, as opposed to a genteel "cream cake" (as he describes uptowners), he is deemed to have particularly acute access to the community. And he's a huckster, a descendant of folks like P.T. Barnum and even (to a more minimal extent) Charles Wilson Peale. So his reputation is impressive because of the fantastic things he shows -- opium dens, Chinese-Irish marriages, tong meetings, "joss-houses," and the like. While Bowery Life offered really very little in the way of slumming data (though there is a somewhat interesting episode in "The True Story of Kitty"), it is a fun document. Here's to hoping I get to learn more about this guy.

The other book was Konrad Bercovici's Around the World in New York, which was useful on the level of how New York's ethnic neighborhoods were sold to a consuming public. Indeed, the major sense I got from this book was that it was about salesmanship -- the salesmanship of ethnic types, of ethnic goods and foods, of local color and the celebration of New York's tendency toward camaraderie instead of enmity in the face of cultural diversity. I really only read the sections on the East Side, Little Italy, and Chinatown, though there's more to go. Bercovici is far more knowledgeable about and forgiving of the East Side Jews, quick to feminize the Chinese, and happy to caricature the Italians. It'll take me some time to figure out what his goal is and what position he represents. One of the things I find most interesting about the book is the fact the Bercovici -- at least as far as Stansell is concerned -- was one of the Lower East Side's most successful "bohemians," collaborating with the likes of John Reed, Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge, and Eugene O'Neill. So as a "bohemian," I wonder what his stake is in this book and these portrayals? Or is it fair to make him representative of "bohemians?" I'd like to consider him together with Hutchins Hapgood, also a "bohemian," who in particular found coverage of the people of the Lower East Side to be essential to adding "authenticity" to his writing.

Finally, I need to think more about urban tourism and what it means. Why do people travel? What interest would people have in going to these places? Sex, authenticity, freedom, danger -- yes. But is this all? And if these things are what it's all about, would these be the way to organize my thinking more?

Ethnic Stereotypes

(One of the hypocrasies of dissertation writing -- or life itself -- is that one is simultaneously self-destructive and self-improving, preoccupied with the analysis of pretty much everything and, at the same time, fascinated by bad TV. Cases in point: tonight I watched Wife Swap and am now writing my thoughts here while I drink de-toxification tea. But none of this took place until after I smoked a cigarette.)

My thoughts are malformed, but it's clear to me that I'm working backwards and that what really interests me right now is the Lower East Side today, not so much post-slumming, but rather in the midst of a different, more postmodern style of slumming. I'm drawn in by the need of so many -- real estate developers, preservationists, historians, long-time residents, current residents, visitors, shoppers -- to identify the Lower East Side with its ethnic past. It's as if the stamp of "ethnicity" (whatever that means in a particular context) somehow adds just the right touch of authenticity. Some examples leap to mind. One is this report from Gawker that the new Whole Foods on the Bowery is trading in ethnic stereotypes. Similar images to these appear in the windows of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum office windows (photographs of which appear to be unavailable on-line, but the images appear at the 91 Orchard Street location.) While these paintings are far from the simian creatures one sees in caricatures of the Irish in the 19th century, or the thick-lipped, pickaninnies of Thomas Nast's creation in Harper's Weekly, they still oversimplify ethnicity and reduce identity to recognizable , categorizable, historical (and still tainted) visions.

To illustrate, compare the Chinese character in the Whole Foods ad with this one from a late 19th century picture book. Of course, the 19th century image is packed with feminizing elements like the fan and flouncy sleeves, not to mention that the picture is titled "John," a catchall name white Americans assigned to Chinese men in that era. And the Whole Foods image is better in that respect. Still, the Whole Foods man, wearing his buttoned-up smock and enjoying his bowl of noodles (because, after all, Asian people not only don't dress like us, but they eat rice and noodles and...well...rice noodles, right?) hardly represents a 21st century China. Indeed, it's this sense that the historical image -- touched up for maximum quaintness -- is what Whole Foods wants to sell. And why? Is it to distract shoppers from the displacement of Chinatown? Is it to give Whole Foods some sort of extra cache? Is it to say, yes, we Whole Foods respect our neighborhood and understand its history? Which brings me to another question I have no energy to address tonight: what about Essex Street market?

Historian as slummer?

I keep coming back to the general relationship of slummer to slum-dweller as a replication of the relationship between subject and analyst. This isn’t far off from the origins of slumming – the Progressive reformer studying and reshaping the urban poor or, as others have suggested, the sociologist looking down his or her nose at the immigrant ghetto resident, calculating and measuring, all for the collection of data that will be published in some journal or book and added to the dusty stacks of a vast university library. I believe it was Jenks again who wrote about the Chicago School sociologist, Robert Park, not only as a flaneur and detective, but as an urban ethnographer whose bread and butter was the impersonal analysis of the poor. Park wasn’t just a slummer in the more positive connotation of the term; he was also a slummer as tourist, who happily gathered data, then returned to the hallowed halls of the University of Chicago to build a professional career.

This brings me to the idea of historian as slummer, as well as the notion that by fetishizing and romanticizing the history of the Lower East Side (through sites like the Tenement Museum and Eldridge Street Synagogue, along with more for-profit venues like Gus’s Pickles and the now-defunct steak and chops restaurant, Tenement), historians have put the Lower East Side up for sale – literally. In other words, it’s the reclamation of this nostalgic history, this great American narrative, that has helped to drive gentrification in the area in the last twenty years and displace thousands of actual immigrants and migrants. I’m not alone in considering this possibility: a review essay by Eli Lederhendler in the American Jewish History journal from June 2001 suggests a similar reading of how historians have fed into this ennoblement of the Lower East Side at the expense of current low-income residents. And, of course, Christopher Mele writes eloquently about the phenomenon in Selling the Lower East Side. My question, therefore, lies in how we can be responsible historians and sociologists (or whatever) without necessarily negatively affecting the populations we study? Is there an ethic of social activism that must be built into our more literary interests in these subjects? And what must that social activism look like to counter the historian’s tendency to aggrandize her or his topic of study?

Some outline fill-in

I think the crucial sentence in my dissertation proposal is this one: "This exchange, I would argue, was both progressive and destructive – not only did the relationships derived from slumming help usher in a modernity that could accommodate a polyglot, flexible, and inclusive vision of American society, they also helped reinforce codes that categorized the ethnic poor as intrinsically savage, morally suspect, sexually available, and at the same time charmingly authentic." It highlights, as Seth Koven does in his book, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, the ways in which the slummer erotocizes the ethnic poor, but it also shows how the desire for encounters with difference can also be productive. As in most processes, there is always ambivalence involved in the exchange.

So, if I were to come up with a chapter breakdown, or just a topic breakdown, how might I address this provisional thesis? Here's what I'm thinking of so far:

I. Introduction -- what is slumming and how am I using the term? What's the history of the word and practice and how was it been shaped discursively over time?

II. Sexual Geography of the LES -- prostitution and "deviant" sexual behaviors; the eroticization and criminalization of residents of the neighborhood

III. Slumming Tours -- the search for new sensations; encounters of ethnic characters; perceived dangers

IV. Bohemian Encounters -- the desire on the part of bohemians to merge with and learn from the ethnic poor; Hapgood's Spirit of the Ghetto; the Ferrer Center?

V. Something about Gentrification -- I really want to write about this, but can't for the life of me figure out how to do it. I do think that gentrification of the LES is predicated on the histories I'll be writing about in the earlier chapters though. So I need to figure out how to draw it into the larger argument without jumping too far into the 20th century.

Update from Last Evening's Panel Discussion

Well, there was some conflict between the themes I gathered from reading the text of The Suburbanization of New York and the actual discussion I witnessed last night. On some level, I think I would have appreciated a more specific conversation about what suburbanization actually is (if not the building of suburbs that are "SUBordinate" to urban areas.) I also think more attention to the relationship between suburban culture and urban culture might have been worthwhile. Instead -- and this was something most of the panelists agreed upon -- the terminology seemed to be inexact. What was meant by "suburbanization" was really commercialization or Disney-fication or hyperrealism. In other words, the main problem they were engaging with was: how do we deal with a postmodern New York City?

This is particularly interesting to me because Marshall Berman, one of the panelists, wrote a lot about the modern city in his book All That is Solid Melts Into Air. He discusses it particularly in relation to Charles Baudelaire and how Baudelaire understands the role of the artist in relation to a Haussmannized Paris. One thing Berman notes, especially in his discussion of Baudelaire's poem "The Eyes of the Poor," is that the Haussmannization/modernization of the city makes the poor more visible. Boulevards pave over dilapidated neighborhoods, yes, and they also reveal the poor who have been displaced by these new, wide-open views. So in Berman's interpretation of Baudelaire, one of the major features of the modern city is how visible class is, how difficult it is to ignore urban blight when blight itself becomes part of the spectacular view.

What, then, of the postmodern city? One thing that was noted in the discussion last night was how suburbanization (read: commercialization or Disneyfication) elides class and makes everything appear at least culturally middle class. In other words, the big box stores and the glitzy signs and the H&Ms and Starbuck's on the Lower East Side and Harlem make it seem as if middle class status is not only attainable for everyone, but actually descriptive of everyone. While there may not be an economic basis for this feeling, it still has a blinding power that allows New Yorkers and tourists to imagine that class and poverty are unimportant. Marx might have believed that religion was the opiate of the masses, but Americans know that consumerism -- or, in more crude terms the iPod or the Wii -- is the real narcotic.

So while class and poverty are "disappeared" from New York's landscape as the poor are moved quietly in the night to the outskirts of town, we have to ask ourselves how we inhabit a city that, as Francis Morrone said last night, is "increasingly being conceived as a mall," a simulacrum of what it once was. As I keep saying, New York is turning into a city where the workers need to be bussed in to get things done and bussed out when the workday is over. This isn't really an exaggeration anymore.

Getting back to slumming then, I guess I need to weigh this idea of the modern city as a place that flourishes on the visibility of the poor. It's the poor (the immigrant, the working man or working girl) as curiosity that drives the slummer. So might I say that "slumming" is a function of the modern city? And what is it in the postmodern city? A simulacrum of itself? Yet another performance?

The Suburbanization of New York

I'm going to a panel discussion tonight on the topic of "The Suburbanization of New York." Folks like Marshall Berman, Francis Morrone, Neil Smith, Michael Sorkin, and Suzanne Wasserman have are all part of the panel and have contributed essays to a recent book of the same title.

Having read only a handful of the essays so far, the major thesis I've gathered from the book is that New York's old, authentic culture is being replaced by suburban pleasures -- the kinds of commerce and convenience that only those born on the outskirts of the city can appreciate. The idea is that (white, ethnic) New Yorkers fled the city once they "made it" fifty or sixty years ago; their children climbed up to the middle class and spawned privileged children in their sprawling houses and well-tended lawns; and now those children are returning to the city to revisit the rugged origins of their American forebears, while still longing for the suburban delights of their childhoods. (As a woman who has followed much the same pattern of white ethnic, working-class urbanites raising middle-class -- and class guilty -- suburbanites who, in turn, raised me, a white ethnic, urbanite with money, I can relate.)

More later on how this comes across in the panel. I'm off to it now.

Michel de Certeau and The Practice of Everyday Life

I've been thinking a lot about the flaneur -- Baudelaire's invention -- the "painter of modern life" -- and trying to figure out how to integrate the concept into my writing. Provisionally, I've been using the concept of the flaneur as a synonym for an artist who gathers inspiration and material through the act of walking through the city. I'm not particular about what city, the gender of the flaneur (though that can be problematic), the "art" produced, or the intentions of the artist. In that way, the flaneur can be a stand-in for just someone who walks and sorts the information gleaned in some creative way, like a journalist, sociologist, photographer, poet, historian, or collector, among others.

This thought brings me to something I read today from Michel de Certeau and The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). The quote I share below refers to the idea that simply walking in the city is an act of rebellion against the functions of the city as seen by its designers and govern-ers. Those who control the city see it as a whole with allowances for only prefigured pathways, certain social interactions, and planned usage. The inhabitants of the city are seen as superfluous to the city, or at least subservient to the system of the city. De Certeau suggests that the inhabitants themselves actually subvert this domination by walking the city, thereby crowning themselves the real citymakers:

"If it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements. Thus Charlie Chaplin multiplies the possibilities of his cane: he does other things with the same thing and he goes beyond the limits that the determinants of the object set on its utilization. In the same way, the walker transforms each spatial signifier into something else. And if on the one hand he actualizes only a few of the possibilities fixed by the constructed order (he goes only here and not there), on the other he increases the number of possibilities (for example, by creating shortcuts and detours) and prohibitions (for example, he forbids himself to take paths generally considered accessible or even obligatory). He thus makes a selection. 'The user of the city picks out certain fragments of the statement in order to actualize them in secret.'"

Interestingly, that final quote within the quote comes from Roland Barthes, commenting on visual culture, which adds some weight to my thought that the flaneur/walker/artist can, at least theoretically, be a photographer as much as anything else.

I don't know if this is even useful or necessary, but this might help to offer a theoretical net in which I can make sense of the historical figures who "slummed" in New York way back in the early twentieth century...

Notes on the Proposal

Below you'll find what I've written so far in terms of a dissertation proposal. Of course, there's much that needs to be expanded and -- who knows? -- maybe there are some factual inaccuracies sloshing around in there too. But in case you were wondering if I was being truthful when I said I'd written five pages of the proposal so far, here's your evidence. Be gentle with it.

Slumming

Section I. A statement of the problem

On September 14, 1884, an article appeared on page four of the New York Times announcing the inauguration of a new trend: “Slumming in This Town: A Fashionable London Mania Reaches New-York: Slumming Parties to be the Rage this Winter – Good Districts to Visit – Mrs. Langtry as a Slummer.” One imagines titillated readers being drawn in by the gossipy immediacy of the headline. Ever curious about the happenings in British society -- with the notoriously lovely and scandalous Lillie Langtry one of its celebrities -- New York City’s gentry was certainly poised to emulate this latest European fashion. Yet what “slumming” was and how it might be performed remained somewhat mysterious. The Times reported that the practice could be defined as “the visiting of slums of the great city by parties of ladies and gentlemen for sightseeing,” and in New York, it meant touring “the Bowery, winding up with a visit to an opium joint or Harry Hill’s [explain].” Still, the article argued that in London, slumming had other purposes, where it “has brought to the notice of the rich much suffering, and led to many sanitary reforms.” While New York had every bit the squalor and poverty of London, New Yorkers had yet to learn that seeing the sights might translate productively into real change for the “depraved” classes who populated the tenements and saloons of the slums. Guiding the reader in the accepted procedures of slumming – recruiting suitable docents, securing the presence of a local police officer, and dressing in inconspicuous clothing – the Times reporter hoped that this transatlantic example might take hold in New York and reform the eyesore that the city’s slums had created. Far from offering readers a thrilling peek into the drawing rooms and social clubs of London’s elite, the article admonished New Yorkers to learn from the British tradition of noblesse oblige: tour your city, it allowed, but clean it up as well.

While “slumming” might have been new in 1884, however, the impulses behind it were not. Social reformers had blanketed the city for decades and uptowners had gloried in clandestine visits to the brothels and barrooms of Manhattan’s East Side, the “Tenderloin,” and the Bowery for years. George Washington “Chuck” Connors, the so-called “Mayor of Chinatown,” too, had led tours of curious visitors through the streets of the foreign neighborhood, revealing fake opium dens and “authentic Chinamen” at least since the 1870s. Indeed, for New Yorkers of means, entering these neighborhoods and partaking of their novelties was alluring because it gave them a chance to be anonymous, to observe poverty without guilt, enjoy exotic sensations, and return home with their reputations unscathed.

By the mid-1880s, however, “slumming” took on a more weighted meaning. The foreign-born population of Manhattan grew thirty-five percent between 1870 and 1890, with the majority of immigrants hailing from Eastern and Southern Europe and settling in areas like Manhattan’s East Side, the Bowery, and Greenwich Village. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad system, the increase in trade with China, and the subsequent restriction on Chinese immigration in 1883, the Chinese population of Manhattan, which still climbed from a total of twelve in 1870 to 1,970 in 1890, was almost wholly male and isolated in the old Five Points district around Chatham Square. [expand]

While the most popular neighborhoods for slumming themselves transformed, so too did the slummer. Historian Howard P. Chudacoff calculates that by 1890, about forty-five percent of men aged fifteen or older were unmarried and that the majority of these were native-born. Migrants from elsewhere in the country moved to New York beginning in the 1870s as ….

More than simply a fashionable pastime, slumming then became a way of making sense of a rapidly changing world.

In this dissertation, I will examine the ways in which slumming served to both inoculate the slummer to the perceived dangers of the depraved “other,” but also eroticize and exoticize the relationship between the native-born uptowner and the downtown slum-dweller. This exchange, I would argue, was both progressive and destructive – not only did the relationships derived from slumming help usher in a modernity that could accommodate a polyglot, flexible, and inclusive vision of American society, they also helped reinforce codes that categorized the ethnic poor as intrinsically savage, morally suspect, sexually available, and at the same time charmingly authentic.

Section II. An examination of the present state of scholarship on this problem

To really delve into the questions I am interested in exploring, I will be engaging with an array of scholarship ranging from histories of New York’s East Side, the Bowery, and Chinatown to more theoretical treatments of urban tourism to monographs on what George Chauncey calls “sexual topography” -- that is, the interpretation of sexual encounters and the development of sexual identity through the skein of urban geography. However, there is a growing, if still fledgling, interest in the history of slumming.

Section III. A strategy for dealing with the problem

In this dissertation, I am committed to reconciling traditional historical inquiry with critical and cultural theoretical models. By combining the two methods analytically, I believe I can shed light on how the concept of slumming made sense to New Yorkers more than a century ago and how it has been transported and translated into a contemporary context. A few models come to mind.

First, I would like to engage with the concept of the “flaneur,” what sociologist Chris Jenks calls “the spectator and depicter of modern life, most specifically in relation to contemporary art and the sights of the city.

I also believe that historiography like that of Ann Stoler, Sander Gilman, and Laura Briggs, which borrows from post-colonial theory

Welcome and Explanation

Hello and thanks for joining me! I think I know who all of you are since I've probably invited you here personally. But if you're a visitor looking to slum or find out a bit more about it, I'm happy to welcome you aboard, too.

So what's the purpose of this blog?

On a general level, it exists to discuss the phenomenon of slumming -- what is it? Who does it? Does it still happen? Do we have new words for it? Does it have a history? On a more private level, the blog is here to remind me that I have spent the last five years pursuing a PhD in American History and that now that I'm in the "home stretch," I goddamn better well write the dissertation. Since my dissertation is allegedly about slumming, this seemed like a good way to hash out some thoughts about it. Of course, this is not meant to be a completely academic pursuit and not everything will end up in the dissertation. Instead, I want this to be an informal forum that is semi-public (so that people can join forces and keep me focused on finishing and thinking about this project) where I can continue to dedicate a part of my brain to the idea of slumming and all of its concomitant elements.

Feel free to respond, brainstorm, critique, rant, or add your own ideas to the posts that pop up here.

Thanks and welcome to the slums!
B