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
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