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