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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Americans Against the City, By Stephen Conn (2014)

By Emily Whalen

“Have you ever lived in the suburbs?” New York City Mayor Ed Koch asked in a 1982 interview for Playboy magazine. The interviewer had asked the famously witty Koch if he would ever consider a gubernatorial campaign for the state—if Koch won the race, it would mean a move away from the Big Apple and to the governor’s mansion in semi-rural Albany. “It’s sterile,” Koch continued, “It’s nothing. It’s wasting your life, and people do not wish to waste their lives once they’ve seen New York!”

conn-cover

Koch’s bluntness likely closed the door to a potential governorship, despite his popularity among urban constituents. During Koch’s long tenure as mayor (1978-1989) most Americans harbored distinctly anti-urban attitudes, preferring the serenity and monotony of suburban life over the clamor and chaos of the “greatest city in the world.” In fact, as Stephen Conn argues in Americans Against the City, the story of American anti-urbanism—a generalized distaste for the dirt, diversity, and disarray of the city—stretches across the nation’s history. According to Conn, since the end of the Civil War, the American political and physical landscapes have been deeply interrelated. Where and how we live shapes our political attitudes and expectations. Focusing on the material, social, and cultural elements of living habits inside and outside the city, Conn argues that the anti-urban strain in American culture—manifest in the growth of suburbs and decentralized cities—relates directly to a mistrust of centralized government. Progressives in the 1920s saw the dense cities of the Northeast as workshops where the problems of governance could be perfected. Yet by the end of the Second World War, that optimism had faded. Cold Warriors and their successors on both ends of the political spectrum tried to reclaim their independence from big government by rejecting urban life. Conn links the decline of “urbanity” (a sense of collective responsibility and tolerance) in modern politics to this national decentralization—the “hustle and bustle” of a true city provides “lessons in civility and diversity” that once enriched our political process. As Americans fled to suburbs, urbanity—and civility—plummeted.

new_york_city_aerial_view_1919
New York City in 1919 epitomized the benefits and problems of urban life (via Wikimedia Commons).

Beginning with Frederick Jackson Turner (whose 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Conn describes as “a Mid-Westerner’s revenge on…an overbearing East Coast.”), Americans have been skeptical of cities. Conn examines how a sense of exceptionalism convinced many Southerners and Westerners in the late 19th century that urban centers like New York City and Chicago posed a threat to American values, like ruggedness, self-sufficiency, and independence. Furthermore,  city-dwellers at the turn of the century faced real problems, such as unsanitary living conditions, corrupt political machines, and overcrowding. Yet the solutions that urban-skeptical reformers offered didn’t address these issues; instead, most of these projects aimed to push people out of cities. The problems of the city, according to people like Benton MacKaye, arose from the density and variation of urban life and would not follow Americans into nature. MacKay designed the Appalachian Trail, the 2,200-mile hiking trail extending from Maine to Georgia, in 1921 in the hopes that city-dwellers would follow it out of the urbanized Northeast and, after finding a more wholesome existence, never return.

appalachian_trail_heading_to_double_springs_gap_from_clingmans_dome
The Appalachian Trail (via Wikimedia Commons).

As suburbs proliferated across the nation, Conn argues, they sustained “decentralized cities,” where whites and other privileged groups left urban centers at the end of the work day and returned to homogenous housing developments. “Most suburbs,” Conn explains, rather than developing a unique culture, “functioned to reject the city while simultaneously taking advantage of it.” Decentralized cities like Albuquerque, NM relied on federal government spending for growth, largely for maintaining and constructing roads, despite the anti-government attitudes of their citizens. Other decentralized cities in the Midwest, like Columbus, OH, embarked on “urban renewal” schemes in which the living history of the city fell victim to commercial development. In 1979, city leaders demolished Columbus’s historic train station to make way for a convention center and parking lot. “Beyond expressing their contempt for trains,” Conn argues, “those who ordered the building torn down expressed their contempt for Columbus’s past.” Dismissing the benefits of city dwelling, and the importance of a city’s history, anti-urban sentiments poisoned most urban renewal schemes of the late 19th century.

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This 1987 mural by Gregory Ackers depicts Columbus’ historic Union Station. In 2014, new construction on the lot blocked the mural from public view (via Wikimedia Commons).

Conn looks at many cities across the country in his history of anti-urbanism, including a place familiar to Texans: Houston. Houston city leaders refused to accept federal zoning requirements throughout the 20th century, even when it meant passing on attractive funding opportunities that would enrich public governance and culture. During the Cold War, Houston’s elite saw nefarious designs behind the push for federal zoning laws.  “Zoning was part of a transitive property that led straight to Moscow: zoning = planning = government interference = Stalinism,” Conn relates. Affluent, white residents believed that the free market, not public regulation, would solve Houston’s successive housing crises. Yet, because housing areas were largely segregated by color, privileged Houstonites ignored the problems their poor and marginalized neighbors faced, all while undermining public programs designed to improve general welfare. The elites “simply could not acknowledge that the ‘market’ does not function the same way for all Americans.”

Houston also serves as an example of how modern “gated communities” attempt–and fail–to cultivate the vibrant urbanity lacking in decentralized cities. Communities, Conn demonstrates, are just as much about exclusion as inclusion, and the gated oases of suburbia represent  “exactly the opposite of city life.” The gated communities suggest “a society where social ties have frayed, where we simply do not trust each other and do not even want to make the attempt.” That exclusion—in Houston, as in Greenwich, CT—often follows racial and socioeconomic lines.

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Sprawling suburbs, like Indian Creek outside of Dallas, characterize many cities of the American Southwest (via Wikimedia Commons).

Americans Against the City pays close attention to both liberal and conservative anti-urbanism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Conn describes the “hippie” communes and environmental movements of the 1970s as “essentially different versions of white flight” from urban issues. Yet toward the end of the book, Martin Anderson (one of President Reagan’s most important economic advisors) and the New Right bear the brunt of Conn’s criticism. These men largely promoted policies based on the idea that the market is more democratic than public government, while simultaneously benefitting from federal access and funding. Fighting against public spending on services and entitlements, Anderson helped entrench the now-prevalent idea that the government has no “role to play in promoting the general welfare, except as it enhances private wealth.”

Americans Against The City stands as a well-researched and provocative history of the ideas and politics rooted in our physical environment.  Conn’s easy writing style and fascinating evidence make the book a pleasure to read. His conclusions resonate with the contemporary moment and offer a new explanation for the fraying political consensus. Suburbs, Conn explains, disconnect us from our geography–disassociating our work lives from our personal lives, our futures from our histories. As a result, although Americans are more mobile than ever, we feel detached from our political geography. This disruption lies at the heart of a creeping polarization in our political discourse, canceling out opportunities for compromise and eroding a sense of collective responsibility. The values of democratic government, Conn reminds us, arose from urban milieux. It remains to be seen whether they will survive in the suburbs.


Read more by Emily Whalen on Not Even Past:
Historical Perspectives on Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
Killing a King, by Dan Ephron (2015)
Digital Teaching: Talking in Class? Yes, Please!

Hearing the Roaring Twenties: The New Archive (No. 12)

by Henry Wiencek

Ultimately, the task of any historian is to piece together the experience of another time—to understand what it was like being on the streets of Paris in 1789. Photographs, primary documents and personal recollections offer important glimpses, but one digital history site specifically wants to understand how it sounded. “The Roaring Twenties”—a collaboration between Emily Thompson of Princeton University and Scott Mahoy of the University of Southern California—compiles audio files and written noise complaints from 1920s New York City to capture the utter cacophony its residents experienced. Arranged by sound type, geography and timeline, this database is a new type of documentary and experiential history—recreating what the Roaring Twenties sounded like.

A screenshot of the "Sounds" section (The Roaring Twenties)

A screenshot of the “Sounds” section (The Roaring Twenties)

The variety of noises that 1920s New Yorkers endured is astonishing. Click on any of the listings in the “Sound” section and you’ll get the brief history of a particular sound: its source, its location, its formal noise complaint (if such documentation existed) and, in many entries, a contemporary piece of footage capturing the actual noise. It is remarkable to visit the utterly different sonic world these videos capture. While many of the auditory sensations caught on film would be familiar to present day residents—sirens, construction and honking cars—actually hearing (and seeing) them feels like entering a parallel universe. For the individuals seen on camera, all that rattling, whistling and yelling would have been the ordinary context for daily life; yet to us, it is exotic and bizarre.

A formal complaint Louise P. Jenkins of Manhattan filed with the New York Commissioner of Health in 1933 regarding the sounds of fire engines (The Roaring Twenties/NYC Dept. of Records/Municipal Archives)

Screenshot of the formal complaint Louise P. Jenkins filed with the New York Commissioner of Health in 1933 regarding the sounds of trucks in her Manhattan neighborhood (The Roaring Twenties/NYC Dept. of Records, Municipal Archives)

In order to provide a spatial context for this historical soundscape, the “Space” section arranges each sound entry onto a map of the city. Manhattan has the highest concentration, but you can find yelling newspaper vendors, saxophone playing neighbors and noisy radios in every borough. Many of these sounds reflect the unique cultural and ethnic character of New York’s neighborhoods: there is a Kung Fu demonstration on Chinatown’s Mott Street; an “Ol’ Clo'” Jewish peddler looking for clothing to buy on the Lower East Side; and ferry boat whistles along the Battery promenade. They also reveal an industrial city at work. Gotham echoed with dynamite blasting, steel factory operations, riveting, and boring machines.

Screenshot of the "Space" section, which arranges different sounds onto a map of New York City (The Roaring Twenties)

Screenshot of the “Space” section, which arranges different sounds onto a map of New York City (The Roaring Twenties)

But look closer and you’ll discover many sounds that will complicate our assumptions about what a “modern” industrial city sounded like. In 1930, Mr. W.C. Mansfield filed a noise complaint about an Upper West Side horse stable. That same year saw multiple complaints for rooster crowing in upper Manhattan as well as several sites in the Bronx. And in 1932, Mr. Arthur Campe of Brooklyn informed the city about one Mr. Johnson’s “noisy chickens.” New York did not just contain a diversity of sounds, but also a diversity of economies and lifestyles—both industrial and pre-industrial. Even as the jackhammering of factories and construction projects rang through the air, the neighing of horses and crowing of roosters were present as well.

Screenshot from the video "Fire Engines, and Children at Play" (The Roaring Twenties/NYC Dept. of Records, Municipal Archives)

Screenshot from the video “Fire Engines, and Children at Play,” circa 1928-30 (The Roaring Twenties/NYC Dept. of Records, Municipal Archives)

Books can elegantly describe trends like industrial growth and urbanization, but “The Roaring Twenties” goes deeper by uncovering the sonic minutiae that accompanied them: a noisy bakery on Ogden Avenue in the Bronx; dairy wagons bothering J. J. Cohen each day in upper Manhattan; or the early morning racket created by live poultry aboard the NY Central Railroad cars along Riverside Drive. And these sounds are not just pieces of trivia. They exhibit people, machines and animals projecting their unique way of life into the sonic atmosphere. This compelling and very addictive site captures New York City at its noisiest, most contested and loudest.

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And an economic, demographic and oceanic history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade

 

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