The "Solar Eye" of Vision: Emergence of the Skyscraper-Viewer in the Discourse on Heights in New York City, 1890-1920 Author(s): Meir Wigoder Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 152-169 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991837 . Accessed: 15/08/2011 17:55

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The "Solar Eye" of Vision

Emergence of the Skyscraper-Viewer in the Discourse on Heights in New York City, 1890-1920

MEIR WIGODER Tel Aviv University

In 1912 the pictorialist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn set out to capture the modernity of New York

by photographing from the pinnacles of the city. He was inspired by a trip taken to the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Park a year earlier where he had photographed the cliffs and canyons from great altitudes. In his series of

photographs titled "New York from its Pinnacles," which was exhibited together with his photographs of the Grand

Canyon at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1913, he treated the city as he did nature by giving credence to the

literary metaphors that likened New York City to a desert of steel, its skyscrapers to cliffs, and its avenues to canyons. Of the photographs that were exhibited (Trinity Church from Above, The Municipal Building, Woolworth Building, The Thousand Windows, and The Octopus), I shall concentrate on the most famous in this series-The Octopus (Figure 1).1

The Octopus has received critical attention from both art and photography historians, who have hailed it as the first photograph to have ever abstracted a city from above. From the start, reviewers of pictorial photography exhibi- tions, such as Charles Caffin and Joseph T. Keiley, had noticed Coburn's predilection for formal composition.2 The influence of James Whistler's nocturnes on pictorial pho- tographers and Cobur's association with the painter Arthur

Wesley Dow, who taught and introduced him to Japanese landscape paintings, were also cited as examples of inspira- tion for his work.3 While Coburn's tendency for abstraction can already be discerned in his early London photographs,

in which the fog was used to erase all unnecessary details and produce the correct tonal and atmospheric effects, one must also locate The Octopus within the broader framework of modernist art: Picasso's analytical cubist paintings were then being exhibited in New York City. During some of Coburn's saunterings he was joined by his friend Max Weber (an abstract painter who had returned from self-

imposed exile in Paris fresh with the influences of Cubism), who climbed the pinnacles of the city with him to paint the rectilinear buildings and gridded streets.4 Even earlier, Suprematist abstractions had led Kazimir Malevitch to credit the impact of the machine and aviation on modern culture and art, while Alexander Rodchenko's aerial views and

oblique angles sought to create the effects of formal

estrangement in photography. And later, Laszlo Moholy- Nagy's aerial perspectives, especially the abstraction of space from the Berlin Funktum radio tower, also recall The Octopus.

Coburn photographed many cities, including London, Edinburgh, Pittsburgh, Paris, and Venice.5 His photographs of New York City read like a list of illustrations from Van

Dyke's The New New York: the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the Battery and the Stock Exchange, the skyline and the ferries, Chinatown and an impressive list of the tallest buildings in New York.6 He claimed he wanted to show "the dignity of the architecture"

by trying to render beautiful what others thought ugly.7 It was Alfred Stieglitz, the founder of the Photo-Secessionist Movement and Gallery 291, who showed that it was possi-

ble to capture the ferries, the trains, the Flatiron, and other icons of New York City by using a small hand-held camera, which enabled the photographer to respond more quickly to the city's driving energy, without having to manipulate the

photograph later to obtain the required artisitic effects.8 In "The Relation of Time to Art," published with Stieglitz's most influential photographs of New York in the thirty- sixth issue of Camera Work (1911), and a year before The Octopus was made, Coburn praised the camera, "the most modern in arts," for its ability to capture "an impression in the flashing fragment of a second" such as a painter could never achieve. In a memorable passage Coburn makes a connection between the camera and the modern transfor- mation of New York:

Photography born of this age of steel seems to have naturally adapted itself to the necessarily unusual requirements of an art that must live in skyscrapers, and it is because she has become so much at home in these gigantic structures that the Ameri-

cans undoubtedly are recognized leaders in the world move- ment of pictorial photography.9

Coburn's claim that the success of American art pho- tography relied on its affiliation with the modernization of New York is misleading, especially when we consider that most pictorial photographers were in fact not fond of urban

subjects and were far more inspired by nature. Those picto- rialists who did choose urban subjects enveloped the city in mood effects of light, which either erased the signs of labor and urban change or romanticized them.10 The ideology of

pictorial photography was characterized by an air of sedate- ness-soft focus and use of gauzes negated the shrewd

propensity of the camera to reveal detail. The pictorialists' predilection for the past legitimized their choice of subjects: languid nudes and insipid angelic children were used under the pretext of presenting mythological and literary themes; arcadian scenes blended sojourns in the country with indoor

family scenes. This was an aesthetic of anesthesia; it disre-

garded utilitarian reality and celebrated the opiated vision of privileged viewers, whose fondness for leisure and ability to travel to escape the pressure of urban reality testified to the financial and artistic freedom of their class.

The Photo-Secessionist Movement cultivated the notion of amateurism-as opposed to professional com- mercial photography-by asserting the importance of indi-

viduality and creative power. It did this through a complex system of clubs, social gatherings, competitions, publica- tions, and galleries that were meant to legitimize its claim that photography was an art."l The pictorialists, who believed in art-for-art's sake, adopted a picturesque vision

Figure 1 Alvin Coburn, The Octopus, 1912

that set them apart from the average taste. Osborne I. Yel- lott's characterization of the competitive jury system for pic- torial exhibitions gives an inkling of the stress they placed on artistic genius: "[T]o be different from the masses, to do

something which the masses cannot understand, ergo, to be misunderstood by the masses, is to them the final and the

only necessary evidence of individuality.12 At the core of many of Coburn's photographs of New

York, especially the ones that have received the least criti- cal attention, was the dilemma he faced between his infat- uation with the energy of the city during a period of urban transformation-the thrill of chaos, speed, mechanized

transport, shifting shapes of amorphous crowds, and sky- scrapers in different stages of construction-and his need to maintain the tenets of pictorial aesthetics, which demanded formal control, lack of spontaneity, and an

emphasis on design to create balanced and calm composi- tions. Hence, one can easily understand how the pinnacles of the city offered an ideal setting to cultivate aesthetic detachment, as the photographer was able literally to main- tain a distance from the bustling streets below. This sort of

EMERGENCE OF THE SKYSCRAPER-VIEWER 153

vision was characterized by Wolfgang Kemp in terms of the

way the picturesque demanded "a perception of reality that

only functions when all associations with utility and moral-

ity, along with historical and political issues, are kept out of consideration for the sake of aesthetic effect."13

One can easily grasp why The Octopus became such a celebrated photograph. It succeeded in presenting the ulti- mate artistic formal image of a city space from above: first, it relied on choosing the correct season (in spring or sum- mer the leaves of the trees would have hidden the design of the park, which would be filled with pedestrians). But in

winter, with few pedestrians to be seen and the trees bare of

leaves, one could discern the pattern of the park with the aid of the snow that delineated the paths-the division between the dark paths and the beds of white snow attests to the formal properties of black-and-white photography that accentuate formal design. The use of a long focal lens flattens space and underlines the two-dimensionality of the

photograph that was beginning to become crucial in mod- ern art. In bringing the square closer to our eyes, the lens

negates the real sense of distance between the position of the photographer above and the object of his vision below.

The effect of abstraction is even more extreme in a smaller version of The Octopus: the bare, wintry trees are

foreshortened, appearing to float in space, much like the effect of aerial perspective in Japanese landscape paintings. The centripetal paths lead to a circle resembling a disem- bodied eye that can be seen correctly from every side as the

logic of spatial direction (up or down) ceases to matter; the role of abstraction here is to liberate the camera from grav- ity and from the horizontal perspective by eradicating the horizon. Finally, the abstraction in both versions relies iron-

ically on the figurative title of the photograph, which wants us to correlate its clear pattern of paths with the tentacles of the octopus, whose shape is actually associated with some-

thing amorphous and constantly changing.'4 What I have found unsatisfactory about the various

artistic analyses of Coburn's Octopus is not only the lack of

curiosity regarding the location of the scene and where it was taken from, but also the lack of interest in the role the observation deck of the Metropolitan Life Tower, the tallest

skyscraper in the city in 1909, played in providing Coburn with a platform to look down and photograph Madison

Square. What we need to unravel here is why the creation of this first abstract composition of an urban space from above was so important from a historical and cultural per- spective at this particular juncture.

Understanding the way a photograph participates in

defining a broader cultural practice has followed different approaches: urban historians have used photographs to illus-

trate studies of the way of life in a city at a given period, while

photography historians have turned to many details from urban and architectural history to inform us about the mute

subjects in the photographs. There is another area of inquiry, however, that has been developing over the last two decades, and which Thomas Bender argued for in a book review in

1988, especially in reference to T J. Clark and Carl Schorske's studies of Paris and Vienna in the nineteenth cen-

tury. Bender claims that there is a need to place greater atten- tion on a history of perception of the city: "[T]he task of the urban cultural historian may well be to describe the crisis of

perception and the reformulation of the cultural under-

standings that gave meaning to individual and collective life in the new metropolis."'5 Such an inquiry emphasizes the

practices of behavior of a city's inhabitants with attention to

space and the ways different classes of society use it. Bender

suggests that an inquiry into the forms of discourse and

tropes that writers use to describe their period enables us to understand how urban commentary as a genre and a set of discursive practices may be reinforced or disrupted by social, intellectual, or political experience.

Both Bender and Donald B. Kuspit, who traces in an article the development of New York urban artists from the Ash-Can School to Abstract Expressionism, rely on the model Georg Simmel proposed for understanding the rela-

tionship between individualism and collective experience in the metropolis.16 Simmel argued that the experience of shock affecting the pedestrian in the new metropolis (con- gested traffic, jerky crowd movements, having to sit in close

proximity to strangers in public transport) causes individu- als to erect stimuli barriers to protect themselves from being emotionally overwhelmed; the individual either adopts a blase attitude, emphasizing calculated and rational behavior, or exhibits peculiar tendencies in order to stand out in pub- lic and thus claim a distinct sense of individuality. Bender relies on Simmel's model to claim that the individual's need to define his identity in relation to collective experience is the key factor in understanding social relations during the

making of a new metropolis. Likewise, Kuspit posits his

inquiry on the affinity between the individualistic charac- ter of modern art and the way personal identity was defined in New York, a city typified by its need to be unique and distinct from cities in Europe. This leads Kuspit to ask whether the iconography of New York relied on the artist

deriving his identity from the modern city, or on "how much [the artist] resisted [the city] and saw it as a threat to his individuality."17

Similar questions can be posited in relation to the ide-

ology of the Photo-Secessionist Movement, which Coburn joined in 1902, and which unashamedly promoted the cult

154 JSAH / 61:2, JUNE 2002

of romantic genius. In retrospect, postmoder critics found art photography an easy target for attack by questioning the notion of authorship per se. Nonetheless, despite the valid

misgivings postmodern theory has found in romantic and humanistic theories of the self, it has failed to provide an

adequate theory of agency. I suggest here an approach to

understanding how subjectivity is constructed in a dynamic social surrounding, an approach that avoids the rigid dichotomy between the autonomous romantic self and the

subject as a socially determined construct. The study of

everyday life and the consideration of the role space plays in

intersubjective relations can help us here. The writings of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre have opened up rich

possibilities for studying pedestrian practices and social

spaces. Such study reveals a curious paradox: on the one

hand, routine levels people; homogeneity creates social con-

formity and human anonymity. On the other hand, the

practices of ordinary pedestrians can be spontaneous, attest-

ing to the differences among people and thereby emphasiz- ing individual actions that seek alternative ways to resist

cultural, linguistic, and political maneuvers intended to cur- tail and supervise them from above.

My aim here is to explore the social and urban circum- stances that made it possible for Coburn to stand on top of the highest tower in 1909 and create the first urban photo- graphic abstraction from above. In doing so, I will analyze the rudimentary discourse on heights that emerged during this period, between 1890 and 1920, in order to extrapolate the emergence of this new spectator who needed to shift from being an anonymous pedestrian in the crowd to find-

ing creative ways to assert his own identity and vision. I will

rely on the discourse that was emerging in its infancy, as writers searched for new ways to describe modernity, gen- erating a prolific upsurge in publications of architectural, urban, literary, and artistic illustrated journals whose task it was to please a growing upper-middle-class public by pro- viding them with a sense of pride in a city that was itself

searching for its identity. The vast quantity of these journals and their important role in shaping the civic identity led Lewis Mumford to characterize the social fabric of New Yorkers as being built "on a foundation of printed paper."'8

Vertical-Horizontalism: The Emergence of

Heterotopian Spaces If we placed a compass in the center of the centripetal design of paths in Coburn's photograph and drew a circle, we could trace the most important landmarks in the early history of modern New York architecture that Coburn so carefully left out of Madison Square in order to achieve the

abstraction: on the northeast corner stood Madison Square Garden, bounded by Fourth and Madison Avenues and by 26th and 27th Streets.19 This was the entertainment center of New York and accommodated a concert hall, an

amphitheater, a banqueting hall, and a roof garden. In 1891 its tower was one of the first places to offer the public the

possibility of viewing the panorama of the city. Coburn's

photographic endeavor had already been anticipated by the

sculpture of the huntress-goddess Diana atop the Madison

Square Garden tower, which one writer had described, on account of her height and nudity, as a figure that caused

pedestrians to stop and look up. She pointed her weather- vane arrow in different directions as if directing the specta- tors on the observation deck where to look at the view.20

West of the Garden, at the confluence of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, stood the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It had opened in September 1859 and was famous for its foreign guests and its view overlooking Madison Square. Later, this six-

story building was to be the first hotel to install a passenger elevator. On the southwest corner, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue intersect at 23rd Street, stood the famous Flat- iron Building, one of the first skyscrapers, built in 1901 by the firm of Daniel Burnham. This building had quickly become an icon and the subject of many caricatures, illus-

trations, and descriptions that compared it to the prow of an ocean liner, a thin slice of cake, or a peg that held two parts of the city together, on account of its triangular shape at the intersection of two avenues. One writer had even described it as pointing the way to those immigrants aspiring to make

money and climb the social ladder, from the downtown docks where they had arrived, to the uptown of rich soci-

ety.21 Finally, on the southeast corner of the square stood the Metropolitan Life Building, which was built in 1909 and was photographed by Coburn from ground level: he used the shadows to create the moody effect of the canyon in order to emphasize the height and romantic stature of the

fifty-two-story tower (Figure 2). A balcony with five arched

openings on each face of the tower and on top an octagonal colonnaded observatory extending to a height of 658 feet above the sidewalk gave the spectators a spectacular view of the city, one that Coburn ignored when he pointed his cam- era down at Madison Square.22

The tower on Madison Square Garden and the Met-

ropolitan Life Tower had similar features: they were not

fully fledged skyscrapers but rather towers constructed either beside or on top of a block-shaped building. Thomas Bender and William R. Taylor locate the tension between "civic horizontalism" and "corporate verticality" in the aes- thetic design and construction of New York's new buildings, which show that the skyscrapers were not immediately

EMERGENCE OF THE SKYSCRAPER-VIEWER 155

Figure 2 Alvin Coburn, The Metropolitan Tower, photogravure, 1909, from "Mr. Coburn's New York Photographs," Craftsman 19, no. 5

(February 1911): 466

accepted and that they actually derived from the horizontal

style of the buildings.23 The term "civic horizontalism" cap- tures the struggle of organizations and societies like the City Beautiful Movement, which demanded the creation of

parks, playgrounds, wider pavements, tree planting, an increase in civic art, and laws to curb the heights of sky- scrapers, which prevented light from reaching large areas of the city.24 Madison Square was the quintessential early example of a thriving city center whose civic function

brought much pride to New Yorkers and proved the neces-

sity to invest in civic projects. In its vicinity were theaters, stores, and famous restaurants. It started by being a venue for leisurely promenades by the upper classes before those with money began to move uptown. As a park it functioned

according to the highest expectations writers had of such

places: "And so in the center of the hurry of New York and

bordering on its strongest current," wrote E. S. Martin in 1907, "lies Madison Square, a little oasis of repose and phi- losophy" (Figure 3). As such, it symbolized the need people had for more "rural retreats," ample "resting places for the

weary traveler," and open parks that were described as "the

lungs of the city," reflecting the need of pedestrians to see the sky, breathe fresh air, and sit among the foliage that would redeem the city from "its ugly brutish arid planes."25

Corporate concerns, however, were transparent and unashamed: the city grid enabled developers to divide New York into neat plots of real estate with the sole aim of hous-

ing the greatest number of people in the least amount of

space; verticalism signified proud capitalism.26 Once sky- scrapers began to be less vilified as social nuisances and rec-

ognized instead as having an independent aesthetic value, they were endowed with individual qualities. They became modern icons testifying to the individualistic spirit of Amer- ican capitalism. While literary and art journals sought to define the picturesque qualities of skyscrapers, trade jour- nals were more down to earth in describing their architec- tural properties. Montgomery Schuyler noted that "it is certain that the earliest and the most indispensable of the factors which enabled the construction of these mighty monsters was the 'passenger elevator."'27 Lincoln Steffens

explained that in its earlier forms no one was able to fore- see the use of the passenger elevator, which "was to be to modern building what the steam-engine is to transport, a

revolutionary agent."28 Eventually the elevator made all floors equally accessible. Before its invention, people would

grumble at having to walk up more than four stories. The

expensive apartments were on the lower levels while the jan- itors lived on the top floors. After elevators were introduced to facilitate the construction of taller buildings, developers slowly understood that it was the top floors that would

156 JSAH / 61:2, JUNE 2002

become the most desirable and eventually the most expen- sive. "Now the top storeys of high buildings bring in more rent than the middle floors," wrote Steffens. "There are men called 'high livers' who will not have an office unless it is up where the air is cool and fresh, the outlook broad and

beautiful, and where there is silence in the heart of busi- ness."29 After the Singer Tower was completed in 1908,

becoming the tallest skyscraper tower of the time, the office

workers, satisfied with assurances of their safety at working so high above the street, actually looked forward "to the

experience of working at their desks far above their fellow workers with positive relish."30

"Height" was still a difficult concept for the average reader to gauge. The most popular illustration of skyscrap- ers was the New York skyline because it could still empha- size the horizontal character of space by showing the jagged roof levels of office buildings that were competing to become the highest in the city. Panoramic bird's-eye views were correlated with written statistics about city life so as to

give readers a sense of order. Even descriptions of the

height of buildings had to use horizontal spatial terms to

explain the magnitude of tower heights. One writer

attempted to explain the height of the Singer Tower by reporting that the building contained "metal piping enough to extend from New York to Albany (136 miles); wires that would reach 3425 miles or three hundred beyond Paris; and steel enough, if made into a three-quarter-inch cable, to connect Manhattan Island with the city of Buenos Aires

(about 7100 miles)."3' Three years before Coburn included the shadow of the Metropolitan Life Tower in the photo- graph of Madison Square, the editors of Scientific American

(1909) had a similar idea when they "tipped over" the tower to explain its sheer enormity in spatial terms (Figure 4). If the tower were overthrown, noted the writer, and laid on its side, "the tip of the Flagstaff which surmounts the sum- mit would fall beyond the upper boundary of Madison

Square, somewhere near 27th Street."32 The participants in this architectural drama of heights around the square, which Coburn had chosen to ignore, are spread out in a panoramic horizontal sensibility on the front cover of the journal The American City. The relationship between the Flatiron Build-

ing, the Metropolitan Life Building, and Madison Square Garden is clearly visible in a photograph used to establish the level to which water can rise without the aid of pump- ing in New York's water-supply system (Figure 5).

Coburn's Octopus arrived at the tail end of a deluge of illustrations that equated the new skyscrapers with progress in technology, such as the front cover ofKings Views of New York (1911), which shows us a multilayered city with land-

ing sites on roofs and midair walkways bridging verticals

Figure 3 Jules Guerin, "The Flat-iron," Twenty-Third Street and

Broadway, drawing, from Randall Blackshaw, "The New New York,"

Century 64, no. 4 (August 1902): 512

and horizontals as if they were the futuristic counterpart of

nineteenth-century Parisian arcades (Figure 6). Just as the arcade provided Parisians with an escape from dangerous traffic and bad weather by covering the street with steel and

glass and turning the exterior into an interior lined with

shop windows, the same sort of reasoning needed to be used to resolve the congestion, noise, and discomfort that New Yorkers felt when they realized that their private space and civic rights were being encroached upon. Hence, corporate verticalism ingeniously took advantage of the criticism lev- eled at it by the civic horizontalism activists. It compensated for space lost at ground level by providing alternative open spaces for leisure activity on the roofs of the city.

EMERGENCE OF THE SKYSCRAPER-VIEWER 157

'CIENTIFIC AIMERICA

t E :

Figure 4 Toppling the Metropolitan Tower, drawing, from Scientific Figure 5 The Depth and Height of New York's Catskill Water Supply, American 100, no. 26 (26 June 1909), cover illustration photograph, from The American City, May 1914, cover illustration

Spending one's leisure time on the roofs of New York became a popular social pastime (Figure 7). Municipal authorities and entrepreneurs began to realize the vast

opportunities the rooftops offered, presenting "approxi- mately nine thousand three hundred and fifty-nine acres of unused space" in New York City and the Bronx.33 Bertha H. Smith, author of a succinct survey of the roof phenom- enon, claimed that most New Yorkers were driven to the roofs in the summer because of the scorching heat. "No one will ever know who first saw possibilities in this flat and endless span of roofs," she wrote.34 It may have been the poor tenants on the Lower East Side, who dragged their bedding to the roof to escape their sweltering apart- ments; or maybe it was an architect "seeking to palliate the sin of planning houses that toe the sidewalk in front and leave scarce space enough in the rear for clothes-lines and

back-yard cats."35

Around 1893 gardens started to spring up on the roofs of theaters. One of the first was constructed on Madison

Square Garden, where Diana swung aloft "and gave notice to the populace that there, in the heart of Manhattan, was a cool spot where fresh air was to be had at a small cost, with a band concert thrown in."36 As early as 1890, a writer in Harper's described the advantages of Madison Square Garden's summer entertainment:

The enormous sliding skylight covers half the roof, and when it

is drawn back in the evening a cool temperature is assured. Half

of the space is occupied by seats, while the rear is devoted to

small tables and chairs. Here a man may sit and hear excellent

music while he enjoys a Perfecto; and should he get warm

enough to wish it, a cooling drink whose inebriating qualities are nil. What more could the flaneuror the business man ask for

a summer evening in town?37

158 JSAH / 61:2, JUNE 2002

-* 1~~~~~~~~~1 E~~~~~. -1- 1. vwiM w >t -- - < *i

.at0 4 j

,0 n " I "

Figure 6 Cover illustration, King's Views of New York-Four Hundred

Illustrations, 1911

As roof gardens became ever more popular, people demanded different forms of entertainment, which usually took the form of vaudeville shows. Writers complained about the bad quality of the entertainment and the vulgar choice of material.38 (The prestigious St. Regis Hotel

expressed its exclusivity by not constructing a roof garden.) The real reason for going up to the roof, however, remained what it was at the start: the need to find "a restful place to flee from the dust and the heat of the lower thoroughfares, for a quiet tete-a- tete in a breezy corner, and for surround-

ings full of life and gaiety."39 For the millionaire business- men who frequented the famous Metropolitan Club, dining in the roof garden compensated for being away during the week "from their country places or their yachts."40 People paid for the pleasure of promenading through the roof gar- dens, as designers and architects installed more picturesque features-kiosks, arbors, pergolas, ornate parapets, and pil- lars. The heterotopian character of these gardens relied on three crucial principles: because they copied the horizontal

experience of the streets, they enabled people to be above while feeling that they were actually below; they allowed vis- itors to imagine themselves in different settings-from the domestic garden to the countryside-without leaving the

city; and, third, they offered the possibility of standing at the edge of the roof and looking down at the city as if it were a sublime, romantic view enjoyed from a mountain crag.41

Figure 7 T. Dart Walker, The Roof Garden of New York City-Under the Glass Roof of the Olympia,

drawing, from Harry B. Smith, "The

Roof Gardens of New York,"

Harper's Weekly 40 (26 September

1896): 945

EMERGENCE OF THE SKYSCRAPER-VIEWER 159

Figure 8 Alvin Coburn, Paris Roofs from Notre-Dame, photograph, c. 1904

Figure 9 Andre Castaigne, Viewing the Balloon from the Eiffel Tower, drawing, from Sterling Heilig, "The Dirigible Balloon of M. Santos-

Dumont," Century63, no. 1 (November 1901): 73

"Euphoric Vision": Artistic, Commercial, and Stereographic Views of the City from Above

It is impossible to understand the modern skyscraper viewer without recourse to a tradition of visualizing the city from above that had already begun in Parisian art and literature in the nineteenth century. One immediately recalls the car- icature of Nadar in a balloon making aerial photographs of Paris. Even before technical innovations made it possible to photograph the city from great heights, however, Paris was described from the top of Notre-Dame Cathedral by Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This view

inspired scores of famous illustrators and photographers to make a pilgrimage to the top of the cathedral: Aubrey Beardsley depicted the celebrated American illustrator

Joseph Pennell sketching the city from the observation deck of Notre-Dame.42 Coburn appropriated the point of view that Charles Meyron etched in Le Stryge (1853), which shows the devilish figure on top of the cathedral tower look-

ing down at the city. In another photograph, Coburn points the camera down at the city and includes two of the gar- goyles as well (Figure 8). In an amusing illustration by Andre Castaigne, a prolific illustrator for the Century mag- azine, a group of globetrotters are climbing the Eiffel Tower to ogle a dirigible that is being photographed (Figure 9). Social elevation, top hats, flowing garments, aviation, and

leisurely delight that equate free time with looking at the

city from great heights are depicted here in relation to a flattened city that has turned into a landscape. The illustra-

160 JSAH / 61:2, JUNE 2002

tion reminds us that the real ancestor of the New York sky- scraper was not the European campanile that so many writ- ers romantically alluded to, but the Eiffel Tower's welded-iron structure, which became an important construction princi- ple in the development of skyscraper architecture.43

What did Coburn, shown here photographing with his Graflex at the edge of the Grand Canyon (Figure 10), have in common with the commercial operator of a stereo cam- era who sits astride an iron rod high above Fifth Avenue

(Figure 11)? Each of them performs an act that is facilitated

by the press of a button. One can characterize the shift in vision that follows the move from pedestrian street level to a view of the city from above by making an analogy between the moment Coburn pressed the camera button on top of the Metropolitan Life Tower and the moment in which the elevator operator pressed the button to ascend at great speed while pronouncing "up" to the passengers:

What a wonderful thing it is truly to be able thus by a word and without effort to fly away from the fume and worry of jostling crowds, from the noise and smell of the streets, up, up, over roofs and domes and steeples into the silent skies, where the ledge of your window actually scrapes the sky, as they say! Look! Here comes a man out into Broadway through a door in one of the great stone hives. It is past noon. The man is weary with the strife and strain. Where shall he go for a brief respite and the strengthening of his body? A few years back it must have been to some clattering, bustling restaurant level with the roaring pavement, where was not respite at all, but crowds always, noise always. Now he walks a few blocks, turns in at another door, and takes an express elevator for the fifteenth, the eighteenth, the twentieth floor, and in ten seconds is as much out of New York as if he had made an hour's journey into the country. The din dies away. He is far above dust and clang- ing cars. He can breathe pure air. And, sinking back in the arms of a hospitable leather chair, he looks down over the city as a tired traveler might look down from a mountain crag.44

Countless descriptions of this kind expressed the uplifting sense experienced by pedestrians when they left the street level behind them. Cleveland Moffet, who wrote the above

description in 1901, blessed the new trend in midair dining clubs that had sprung up all over Manhattan. Many of the famous business clubs that had taken pride in their uptown mansions on Fifth Avenue moved to the skyscrapers. They understood the importance of providing such lofty spaces for their business clients, who were able, under the pretext of having lunch, to do more business in an hour than they would otherwise have done during the whole day. In View

from a New York Mid-Air Club (The Arkwright), the arrange- Figure 10 Fanny E. Coburn, Alvin Langdon Coburn at the Grand

Canyon, photograph, 1911

EMERGENCE OF THE SKYSCRAPER-VIEWER 161

Figure 11 Photographing New York-on a slender support 18 stories above pavements of Fifth Avenue, stereographic card, 1906

Figure 12 Otto H. Bacher, View from a New York Mid-Air Club

(The Arkwright), drawing, from Cleveland Moffett, "Mid-Air

Dining Clubs," Century 62, no. 5 (September 1901): 642

ment of the silverware in the foreground places us in the

position of the businessman seated at the table (Figure 12). The feeling of power the diner gains from being able to consume his meal while looking down at the view is sug- gested by the alignment between the view of the city through the window and the setting of the cutlery on the table. Countless illustrations of people in interiors over-

looking the city recall to mind Georgia O'Keeffe, who was one of the first people to live on the highest floors of an

apartment hotel. She reasoned that the modern artist in New York must live at the highest elevation in the heart of the roaring city because "he has to have a place where he can behold the city as a unit before his eyes."45 The word unit could imply that the unity of the city can only be seen from above, as one writer insinuates while describing the view from the spot where Coburn had stood on the Metro-

politan Life Tower: "Manhattan Island will resolve itself into streets, blocks, and individual buildings with the dis- tinctness and detail of a map."46 This kind of topographical allusion was not necessarily what O'Keeffe was thinking about, however, bearing in mind that unit can also mean a

fragment, and recalling that she rarely painted the city as a

panorama but preferred instead to treat the skyscrapers as individual buildings.

Descriptions of views from city roofs were already prevalent at the beginning of the century, as in one illustra- tion that clearly shows the pattern of the paths in Madison

162 JSAH / 61:2, JUNE 2002

MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE. VoL. XXXIII. JULY, 1905. No. 4.

NEW YORK FROM THE FLATIRON. BY EDGAR SALTUS.

THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY PANORAMA IN THE WORLD-A SURVEY OF THE AMERICAN METROPOLIS FROM ITS FOCAL POINT AT THE

CROSSING OF ITS TWO MOST FAMOUS THOROUGHFARES, BROADWAY AND FIFTH AVENUE.

"' HAT do you know of New York?" too, of paradise. Manhattan may typify v said one wanderer to another. both. It represents other things also. "Only what I have read in Dante," The latter, mainly, are superlatives.

was the bleak reply. From the top floors of the Flatiron you Dante told of the inferno. He told, get an idea of a few. On one side is

Madison Square arden and TowerF Eat Rver. Long Island City.

Eo 5so use5. New Chsurch Prent I harh

Vemon H. Bailey, View from the Upper Floors of the Flatiron Building.

Figure 13 Vernon H. Bailey, View from the Upper Floors of the

Flatiron Building, drawing, from Edgar Saltus, "New York from the

Flatiron," Munsey's 33, no. 4 (July 1905): 381

Square for an article titled "New York from the Flatiron"

(Figure 13). Most commercial photographers worked for

journals whose descriptive character was already prototyp- ically photographic. The commercial view had no artistic

pretense, and its success relied on the amount of informa- tion it gave.47 Some commercial photographers took stere-

ographic views of landmarks in the city for both local and

foreign customers who collected stereograph cards. In our

example (see Figure 11), the actions of the photographer taking the picture are mirrored by a stereograph operator who is posing with his twin-lens camera as he looks west- ward in the direction of the Hudson River, while the

"canyon" of Fifth Avenue stretches away below and the back of the Flatiron Building rises to the north. Placing the pos- ing photographer in the midground of the photograph was crucial for making a three-dimensional image that consists of foreground, midground, and background views: two

metal rods lead the eye from foreground to midground where the photographer sits. His precarious seating on the metal rod causes us to look beyond, to plunge into the

depths of Fifth Avenue and appreciate the subject's perilous position. Another popular way of "transporting" the viewer into the stereograph space was by placing a figure in the

foreground from whose point of view, over the shoulder, the city could be seen. Stereographs enabled the imaginary entry of a disembodied eye that could move, hover, or sim-

ply scan the layers of depth in the photograph and imagine itself actually in the location.48

In the following little-known example I compare phys- ical elevation and aesthetic cultivation to reveal something of Coburn's relationship to the Photo-Sessionist Move- ment. In 1902 Theodore Dreiser wrote about pictorial pho- tography after having visited Stieglitz at the New York City Camera Club. One can picture Stieglitz giving Dreiser a

guided tour of the spacious quarters: after visiting the

library and the darkrooms, they end their walk "in the lit- tle portrait studio which was built for the club on the roof of the sky-scraper where the club has its home." Two sig- nificant individuals of this period, a master of the pen and a master of the camera, who wanted to capture their age and had realized the potential beauty of New York City through ambivalent feelings toward the effect of modern urban

experience on individualism, stand and look down at a city they have both described in terms deriving from nature. Here, high above the city, there is no danger to the indi- vidual, as Stieglitz explains to Dreiser the tenets of the new

photography that is based on personal control, careful selec- tion of images, and much labor.

Stieglitz and Dreiser reach a window and stop to look at "the panorama of roofs and spires and jetting steam-pipes, and the narrow grottoes of streets, in the depths of which the turgid stream of humanity flowed noisily."49 Stieglitz raises his voice while listing to Dreiser the names of other

accomplished photographers in his circle. They stand by a window that serves as a picture frame for the scene and turns the city into a representation. Stieglitz's head is sharply out- lined against a sunset forming over New Jersey, an image that would have suited "his own artful camera." The

panorama of lower New York turns into an abstract "fogged negative" as the Brooklyn Bridge becomes "an indistinct detail of sweeping lines which seem[s] to be responding quickest to the touch of the developer."50 Against this picto- rial backdrop Stieglitz asserts that the most important aspect of the new photography is individualism. "If we could but

picture the mood!" he says to Dreiser, waving his hand over the city. Moments later these two creative demigods leave, as

Stieglitz leads "the way back to earth.""5

EMERGENCE OF THE SKYSCRAPER-VIEWER 163

The above description reinforces the connection between the definition of individual creativity and the way the pinnacles of the city facilitated the visual experience of aesthetic detachment. The need individuals had to look at the city from above in order to experience their own sense of separateness from the masses below was not exclusive to artists and photographers. Numerous descriptions show over and over again the thrill people felt at looking down and having the illusion of omnipotence and power. Under the entry "Monday, September 30, 1912," the year Coburn

photographed The Octopus, the writer Pierre Loti ascended to the top of the Times building and described the phan- tasmagoria of New York, which he defined unmistakably as the capital of Modernism. He acknowledged the sense of satisfaction in knowing that one is privileged to see some-

thing that is not shared with other people and to some extent is even at their expense:

It is quite enjoyable up here on this artificial summit... the six millions of beings who are striving, struggling, and suffering round about me oppress me no longer. I almost resent the

thought of having shortly to redescend from the high perch where I have been breathing deeply pure air, and plunge again into the human sea that foams down there. 52

Coburn's description of looking at the city from the Singer Tower was written for the catalogue of his exhibition New

Yorkfrom Its Pinnacles and serves as an apt example as well:

How romantic, how exhilarating it is in these altitudes, few of the denizens of the city realize; they crawl about in the abyss intent upon their own small concerns, or perhaps they rise to the extent of pointing with pride to the "tallest building in the world." Only the birds and a foreign tourist or two penetrate to the top of the Singer Tower from which some of these vistas were exposed.53

Coburn's romantic exhilaration is aligned with the

leisurely gaze of the tourist in contrast to the constant stream of the working masses who crawl below and are unaware of their city because they are "intent upon their own small concerns." His description posits the only two extreme possibilities the New Yorker had of seeing his city: either to throw his head back and look up at it or to go up and look down at it. But there was another possibility that

produced the same effect in the spectator as that from the view above. The view of the New York skyline from the water gave a sense of satisfaction because travelers were able to see the city's borders. Several guidebooks started their introduction with a description of the city panorama from

the water and then invited tourists to enter the city and take

walking tours. The introductions were titled "The Picture,"

implying that in order to see the city as an aesthetic coher- ent unit one must always stand outside it and be detached. The sense of mastery that is implicated by this detached

viewpoint did not go unnoticed by the sensitive eye of Charles Caffin, who described the view from a ferry as early as 1900:

He [the spectator] glories in being a part of it, and feels lifted out of his little self into a bigger and fuller purpose. He realizes the

dignity of the civic life. It is detachment that has given the true

perspective, while a closer inspection [of the city] reveals much that is brutal, amorphous, incoherent.54

The "little self" of the spectator is lifted by a plethora of

feelings that give a temporary sense of power and civic dig- nity, a feeling of belonging. It is predicated on the sense of

aggrandizement provided by the correct perspective and distance. (We can imagine the observer stretching his hand out and shutting one eye to get the right perspective to be able to place the entire city in the palm of his hand, before

reaching harbor where he would alight from the ferry and become just another number in the crowd.)

More than eighty years later, the shift in perspective informed Michel de Certeau's insightful reading of the

experience of seeing New York from the Twin Towers. He described how the pedestrian disengaged from the street level in order to see the panoramic view of the city from the World Trade Center, at the time the tallest buildings in New York:

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp. One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators.... His elevation transfigures him into a

voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was "possessed" into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a

viewpoint and nothing more.55

De Certeau's pedestrian is "lifted out of the city's grasp." He feels like a "solar eye" that has an omnipotent authorial

capability to "read" the city precisely because he is removed

164 JSAH / 61:2, JUNE 2002

from "the obscure interlacings of everyday behavior." 56 This "voyeur's" assumption of power is wrong, however, because he assumes the fiction that being removed from the

city, and being able to see it in its entirety as a text or a pic- ture, is equal to his being able to have knowledge of it.

In his analysis of the Eiffel Tower, Roland Barthes also offers a reading of what is entailed in looking at a city from above. He offers a dialectical reading of panoramic vision, which entails two disparate and simultaneous levels of expe- rience. On the one hand, the ability of the gaze to glide with no disturbance along the panoramic view produces a sense of euphoria in the spectator precisely because everything is

nicely connected. On the other hand, it is precisely this con-

tinuity of vision that compels the curious viewer to stop and

identify the sites and landmarks, which involves a process of dissection. Hence, in one type of viewing the city is virtu-

ally prepared for the viewer to consume passively the "over- all view," while in the other the viewer's topographical knowledge of the city struggles with perception when, for

example, he tries to locate a place he knows that is actually hidden from his view. Here the viewer tries to reconstitute the view by using the knowledge and memory he has of the

place to bridge over its visual absence from its expected location. The view from above offers a type of vision that is

predicated on the power of intellection: "The bird's-eye view, which each visitor to the Tower can assume in an instant for his own, gives us the world to read and not only to perceive."57

Barthes points out that from above the city panorama turns into a landscape, which is then perceived as nature rather than as something that was built. Both he and de Certeau posit the privileged position of the viewer on the basis of his need to be removed from the city through main-

taining a sense of detachment. The same principle governed popular mass imagery of the city. Miriam Hansen has men- tioned the use that amusement parks made of panoramic landscape representations of the New York skyline and the

Alps to give the visitors who took the roller coaster and other forms of entertainment a mixed impression of close- ness and distance. What she writes about the use of these

painted panoramas can easily apply to the gratification prac- tices of the New Yorker who looked at the city from above: "[T]he image of the Alps not only naturalizes and mythi- fies economic and social inequity; it also asserts a different, or rather, timeless nature, a place beyond history, politics, crisis, and contradiction."58 On this basis, the view of the

city becomes a purely aesthetic experience that led de Certeau's pedestrian to become enveloped in "voluptuous pleasure" and Barthes's subject to engage in "euphoric vision."

The "Optical Unconscious" of The Octopus Let us recall Walter Benjamin's and Siegfried Kracauer's

premise that a photograph can contain details that the pho- tographer was unaware of and that his own generation may have been blind to until a following generation discovered in hindsight what lay buried in the photograph. I now return to The Octopus, which Coburn described in his auto-

biography in purely formal terms as a "composition or exer- cise in filling a rectangular space with curves and masses, depending as it does more upon pattern than upon subject matter."59 In fact, however, and without wishing to belittle Coburn's artistic achievement, the remarkable aspect of this

photograph lies precisely in the way it succeeds in record-

ing the traces of the three main activities that were avail- able to the modern spectator in New York, who was able to observe the city from its elevated areas: by intersecting the shadow of the Metropolitan Life Tower with the ground of Madison Square, Coburn mapped on the surface of the

photograph the most pertinent social and urban paradigm of his day, which led us to discuss the struggle between the needs of "civic horizontalism" (represented by the park) and the power of "corporate verticalism" (represented by the shadow of the tower). Coburn gave the photograph a figu- rative title to stress his purpose of abstracting the square. Was he aware of the significance the word octopus held in New York parlance? In 1905 H. G. Dwight compared the elevated railway in New York to "a kind of monstrous octo-

pus, fastened upon the city and destroying wherever its ten- tacles reach."60 It served as an urban metaphor for the

"spindle-legged trestles" of the elevated train, which enabled passengers to see unexpected parts of their city from the height of the third and fourth stories of buildings (Figure 14).61 Coburn was so busy concentrating on the

square that he probably did not notice the double-decker bus, traveling along Fifth Avenue outside the parameters of the square in the photograph, which was also providing a

popular leisure activity for tourists wishing to see the city from above. Passengers embarked on the bus either in

Washington Square or by the Flatiron Building and

alighted in Central Park. The top deck of this public trans-

port was equated by one writer to "roof gardens" on account of the leisurely time passengers spent on summer

days watching the city unfold on every side from its upper deck. This type of situation is visible in the illustration of traffic beside Madison Square, in which a woman alights from the steps of the upper deck of a bus while the Flatiron is prominently visible in the background (Figure 15). The traveler's experience is perceived in a double-spread illus- tration showing sightseers sitting on the top deck of a horse-

EMERGENCE OF THE SKYSCRAPER-VIEWER 165

Figure 14 Joseph Pennell, Elevated Road on the Bowery, sketch, from J. C. Van Dyke, The New New York (New York, 1909), pl. 54

drawn stagecoach as it travels along Fifth Avenue; the sights they see are depicted in photographs surrounding the cen- tral image (Figure 16).

I have equated Coburn's action of pressing the camera button to the pressing of the passenger elevator button, and his elevated physical position on the tower has been inter-

preted in terms of his artistic aspirations and social distinc- tion. But what I have not mentioned is the fact that this

omnipotent position, characterized by de Certeau as the observer's illusion of being a "solar eye," was already embedded in the actual role that the Metropolitan Life Tower was playing in popular imagery of the day.62 I am

alluding here to the possibility that the tower itself takes on a reigning position whose function Barthes defined so accu-

rately in his description of the Eiffel Tower: it is a place that

every pedestrian glance could see from anywhere in Paris and it is also the spot from which all the city could be seen in a glance. For this reason, the double function of the tower is to transgress the "habitual divorce of seeing and

being seen," between being here and looking there, that

Figure 15 Wallace Morgan, Along Fifth Avenue and Broadway There Is

a Visible Slackening in the Pace of Pedestrians, from J. B. Yeats, "Outdoors in New York: An Irishman's Impressions of the Spirit and

Temper of the Metropolis," Harper's Weekly 54 (19 November 1910): 12

Figure 16 Milton Bancroft and Roderik C. Penfield, Fifth Avenue, as

Seen from the Top of a Stage, drawing and photographs, from

Harper's Weekly 45 (17 August 1901): 822-823

166 JSAH / 61:2, JUNE 2002

i4.S i <

0

^^y tf^M

>t s!B

i

Figure 17 Metropolitan Life Building,

photographic montage, 1928

remains the basis of every creative representational activ-

ity.63 Accordingly, the special function of the Eiffel Tower results in achieving "a sovereign circulation" that enables both positions of seeing and being seen to coincide.

In one popular image (Figure 17), the Metropolitan Life Tower is perceived simultaneously from two disparate views: we see the building and the tower from the point of view of the pedestrian on street level (a position we corre- lated with looking up, the crowd, and mass identity), while the points of view of the imaginary observers, who are invited to take the elevator and look at the city from above, appear as views framed like cartoon bubbles, showing the

panorama from all sides of the tower's observation deck (a position we identified with looking across and down and with the observer's joy of defining his individual distinction). The "sovereign circulation" of Coburn's Octopus relies pre- cisely on its ability to evoke a dialectical relationship

between the privileged viewer above and the pedestrian below. It enables skyscraper and square, city and country, the vertical and the horizontal, corporate and civic identi- ties, and pictorial and commercial photography to exist side

by side. These relationships finally testify to the fact that, despite Coburn's pictorial aesthetics and aspirations to abstract and erase the utilitarian significance of Madison

Square, the photograph yields us information attesting to the way social space participates in the construction of sub-

jectivity and determines the practice of artistic creativity.

Notes 1. The International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House has over 17,000 roll-film negatives by Alvin Coburn. I want to thank Andrew Eskind, manager of Information Systems at GEH, for his kind help during my research with the Coburn collection. 2. Charles H. Caffin, "Some Prints by Alvin Langdon Coburn," Camera

EMERGENCE OF THE SKYSCRAPER-VIEWER 167

Work 6 (April 1904): 18; and Joseph T. Keiley's review of the pictorial show in Buffalo, Camera Work 36 (October 1911): 27. 3. Charles Caffin cites The Dragon as an example of Cobur's early predilection for abstraction. It is a photograph taken from Arthur Dow's studio of a landscape with "a curious effect of serpentine lines of water winding through the flat- lands." Coburn pays attention to the "patterning of the composition" without

losing track of "the substantial realities of the ground plan," an observation we can also attribute to Cobur's Octopus; "Some Prints by Alvin Langdon Coburn," 18. Caffin also attributed the success of Coburn's photographs and "freshness of vision" to his predilection for travel; see review of Cobur's solo exhibition at the Photo-Secession Gallery in Camera Work 27 (July 1909): 30. 4. On the friendship and working relationship between Coburn and Weber, see Percy North, Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910-1920, exhibition cata-

logue (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1991). 5. Besides Coburn's books of photographs he also contributed photographs to numerous articles. See, for example, "Some Photographic Impressions of New York," Metropolitan Magazine 23, no. 5 (February 1906): 537-542; "Mr.

Coburn's New York Photographs," Craftsman 19, no. 5 (February 1911): 464-468; "A Bit of Cobur-Our Pictures," Camera Work 21 (January 1908): 30; and a photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge in Archibald Henderson, "In Praise of Bridges," Harpers 121, no. 726 (November 1910): 925-933. 6. See John Van Dyke, The New New York (New York, 1909); and Alvin

Coburn, New York, foreword by H. G. Wells (New York, 1910), illustrated with twenty photogravures. 7. Alvin Coburn, "My Best Pictures and Why I Think So," Photographic News

51, no. 579 (February 1907): 83; also quoted in Giles Edgerton, "Photogra- phy as One of the Fine Arts: The Camera Pictures of Alvin Langdon Coburn, a Vindication of This Statement," Craftsman 7, no. 4 (July 1907): 394-403. For an example of an analysis of the way Cobur photographed a single build-

ing in New York, see Erica E. Hirshler, "The 'New New York' and the Park Row Building: American Artists View an Icon of the Moder Age," Ameri- can Art Journal 21, no. 4 (1989): 26-45. 8. Stieglitz articulated his opinion about the use of small hand-held cameras as early as 1897; see Alfred Stieglitz, "The Hand Camera-Its Present Impor- tance," in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print (Albuqerque, 1981), 214-217. For an example of the way Stieglitz's photographs were used to illus- trate an article about New York, see John Corbin, "The Twentieth-Century City," Scribner's 33, no. 3 (March 1903): 260-261. 9. Alvin Coburn, "The Relation of Time to Art," Camera Work 36 (October 1911): 72. Coburn wrote quite prolifically about his own work and pictorial photography. For further references, see Alvin Cobur, "Retrospect," Photo-

graphic Journal 98 (1958): 36-40; idem, "Alvin Langdon Coburn, Artist-Pho-

tographer-By Himself," Pall Mall Magazine 51, no. 242 (June 1913): 757-763; idem, "Photography and the Quest for Beauty," Photographic Jour- nal 48 (April 1924): 159-167; idem, "My Best Pictures," 83; On the formal methods of his work, see Amber Reeves, "The Finding of Pictures," Lady's Realm 25, no. 148 (February 1909): 449-459. 10. On the aesthetics of pictorial photography in the city, see Sadakichi Hart-

mann, "A Plea for the Picturesqueness of New York," Camera Notes 4 (Octo- ber 1900): 91-97. 11. My reading of the Photo-Sessionist Movement and pictorialism is indebted to a few fine critiques on the subject: Ulrich F Keller, "The Myth of Art Photography: An Iconographic Analysis," History of Photography 9, no. 1 (January-March 1985): 1-38; and idem, "The Myth of Art Photography: A Sociological Analysis," History of Photography 8, no. 4 (October-December 1984): 249-275; Allan Sekula, "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning," Artforum, January 1975, pp. 36-45; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "The Return of Alfred Stieglitz," Afterimage 12, no. 122 (Summer 1984): 21-25. 12. Osborne I. Yellott, "Third Philadelphia Photographic Salon," Photo Era

5, no. 5 (December 1900): 176. 13. Wolfgang Kemp, "Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tra-

dition," October 54 (Fall 1990): 107. 14. It was not the first time Coburn used a figurative title to describe the city. He referred to the novelty of the bridges that connect Manhattan to its bor-

oughs as "marine-like monsters" and was especially keen on the elegance of the steel cables that held up the bridges, which he likened to the webs of a spider. See the review of the Albright Exhibition at Buffalo, which Cobur originally wrote for Harper's Weekly and reprinted in Camera Work 33 (anuary 1911): 63. 15. Thomas Bender, "The Culture of the Metropolis," Journal of Urban His-

tory 14 (August 1988): 494. 16. Donald B. Kuspit, "Individual and Mass Identity in Urban Art: The New York Case," Art in America 65 (September-October 1977): 66-77; Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in Richard Sennett, ed., Classic

Essays on the Culture of Cities (Englewood Cliffs, NJ., 1969), 47-60. For an excellent account of the way New York turned into a subject for artists dur-

ing this period, see Wanda M. Corn, "The New New York," Art in America 61 (July-August 1973): 58-65. 17. Kuspit, "Individual and Mass Identity," 66. 18. Lewis Mumford, "The Metropolitan Milieu," in America and Alfred

Stieglitz (New York, 1979), 29. 19. On Madison Square Garden, see M. G. Van Rensselaer, "The Madison

Square Garden," Century 47, no. 5 (March 1894): 732. 20. Articles about Madison Tower and its observatory include: William A.

Coffin, "The Tower of Madison Square," Harper's Weekly 35 (24 October

1891): 819. Edward Cary, "The Diana of the Tower," Century 47, no. 3 (an-

uary 1894): 477. For a description of the way the loss of the sculpture of Diana was mourned, see "The Passing of a Young Landmark," Outlook, 21 Novem- ber 1908, pp. 605-606. A wonderful photograph of the workers posing on top of the tower as they install the statue of Diana can be seen in Joseph Durso's Madison Square Garden (New York, 1979), 80. 21. My references to the Flatiron Building were borrowed from Grace Mayer, Once Upon a City (New York, 1958), 1-2; "The 'Flatiron' or Fuller Building," Architectural Appreciations 12, no. 5 (October 1902): 531; and Edgar Saltus, "New York from the Flatiron," Munsey's 33, no. 4 (July 1905): 381-390. 22. The information about the Metropolitan Life Tower is described in "A

Twentieth-Century Campanile," ScientificAmerican 98 (30 March 1907): 470; and "Tall Buildings of New York," ScientificAmerican 99 (5 December 1908): 403. 23. Thomas Bender and William R. Taylor, "Culture and Architecture: Some Aesthetic Tensions in the Shaping of Moder New York City," in William R.

Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham (New York, 1992), 51-68. 24. The problem the skyscrapers posed to the light in the city is discussed in "The Invasion of New York City by Darkness," Real Estate Record and Builders 81 (6June 1908): 1056-1057. For articles on the civic concerns of New York

City, see Ernest Flagg, "The Plan for New York and How to Improve It," Scribner's 36, no. 2 (August 1904): 253-256; Julius E Harder, "The City Plan," Municipal Affairs 2 (March 1908): 24-45; Charles H. Caffin, "The Beautify- ing of Cities," World's Work 3 (November 1901): 1429-1435; idem, "Munic-

ipal Art," Harper's 100 (April 1900): 655-666; Sylvester Baxter, "Art in the

Street," Century 71, no. 5 (March 1906): 697-705; and Ada Rainey, "Shade Trees for City Streets: What They Furnish in the Way of Beauty, Health and Comfort," Craftsman 24, no. 6 (September 1913): 611. 25. E. S. Martin, "Moods of a City Square," Harpers 115 (August 1907): 406. For articles on the issue of parks and the city, see Royal Cortissoz, "Land- marks of Manhattan," Scribners 18, no. 5 (November 1895): 531-544; War- ren Taylor, "The Small Parks of New York," Munsey's 8, no. 1 (October 1892): 25; and Samuel Parsons, Jr., "The Parks and the People," Outlook 59 (7 May 1898): 23-24.

168 JSAH / 61:2, JUNE 2002

26. For a useful critique of the effect of the skyscraper on public life in the city, see Henry James, "Is the Skyscraper a Public Nuisance?" World's Work 54

(May 1927): 66-76. The writer was a consultant on Special Problems in a Committee for Regional Planning of New York and Its Environs. 27. Montgomery Schuyler, "The Evolution of the Sky-Scraper," Scribner' 46, no. 3 (September 1909): 258. 28. Lincoln Steffens, "The Modem Business Building," Scribner's 23 (July 1897): 41-42. 29. Ibid., 44. 30. James Anderson, "The Highest Building in the World," Metropolitan Mag- azine 27, no. 3 (December 1907): 388. 31. Joseph B. Gilder, "The City of Dreadful Height," Putnam's 5, no. 2

(November 1908): 134. 32. "The Metropolitan Tower and the Zeppelin in Two Striking Compar- isons," ScientificAmerican 100 (26June 1909): 478. For a comparison that uses vertical parameters of gauging the difference between the heights of the Met-

ropolitan Life Tower, Park Row, and the Washington Monument, see the cover of Scientific American 99 (5 December 1908). 33. "New York's Wasted Acreage," Craftsman 24, no. 4 (July 1913): 386. For

descriptions of the reasons why people used the rooftops, see Theodore

Waters, "The Roof-Dwellers of New York," Harper's Weekly 47 (8 August 1903): 1300. For descriptions of the way writers compared the janitors' cot-

tages on the roofs of buildings to "rural retreats," see Earl Mayo, "Modem

Cliff-Dwellers," Metropolitan Magazine 24, no. 3 (June 1906): 315, and Everett N. Blanke, "The Cliff-Dwellers of New York," Cosmopolitan 15, no. 3 July 1893): 355-362. 34. Bertha H. Smith, "The Top Layer of New York," Outlook 80 (17 June 1905): 469. 35. Ibid., 470. 36. Ibid., 471. 37. "Madison Square Garden," Harper's Weekly 34 (13 September 1890): 718. The text was written for the illustrated cover of the magazine, which shows an audience in the amphitheater of Madison Square Garden. 38. On the character of the theatrical reviews on roof gardens, see Harry B.

Smith, "The Roof Gardens of New York," Harper's Weekly 40 (26 December

1896): 944-946; and Stephen Burge Johnson, The Roof Gardens of Broadway Theaters, 1883-1942 (Ann Arbor, 1985). 39. Warren G. Hicks, "Roof Gardens and Their Habitues," Metropolitan Mag- azine 4, no. 2 (September 1896): 135. 40. Smith, "The Top Layer of New York," 473. 41. Michel Foucault defines the third principle of heterotopia as being capa- ble of "juxtaposing in a real place several spaces, several sites that are in them- selves incompatible"; "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics, Spring 1986, pp. 22-27. 42. Beardsley's illustration, titled "Joseph Pennell etching on the tower," appears in Joseph Pennell, The Adventures ofan Illustrator (Boston, 1925), 219. 43. H. A. Capam develops the idea of why the skyscrapers owe more to the Eiffel Tower and Crystal Palace than to any of the solid campaniles in "The Riddle of the Skyscraper," Craftsman 10, no. 3 (June 1906): 487-488. 44. Cleveland Moffett, "Mid-Air Dining Clubs," Century 62, no. 5 (Septem- ber 1901): 644. 45. Quoted in Anna C. Chave, "Who Will Paint New York?" American Art

5, no. 122 (Winter-Spring 1991): 98. 46. "A Twentieth-Century Campanile," 270 (see n. 22). 47. Ulrich Keller shows two examples of photographs that were taken from the Metropolitan Tower by the Brown Brothers and H. C. White, both com- mercial photographers, to challenge the originality of Coburn's pictorial strat-

egy. He argues that either Cobur may have seen these images, or, at the very

least, their existence diminishes the claims of the uniqueness of Coburn's Octo-

pus. But, in fact, the Browns' photograph shows a far wider view of the square while White's photograph relies on the pattern of the paths, proving that it can look abstract without even intending to. These photographers relied

mostly on their descriptive task to inform the reader about the city and not search for beauty for the sake of art. Their work does not diminish Coburn's creative endeavor; rather, it is his work that cannot fully separate itself from the interlacings of everyday life; Keller, "The Myth of Art Photography," 24, 26. 48. For a very good reading of the process of looking through a stereoscope, see Rosalind Krauss, "Photography's Discursive Spaces," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 151-170. 49. Theodore Dreiser, "A Remarkable Art," Great Round World 19 (May 1902): 433. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 434. 52.Pierre Loti, "Impressions of New York," Century 85, no. 5 (March 1913): 761; and idem, "Impressions of New York," Century 85, no. 4 (February 1913): 609-613. 53. Alvin Langdon Coburn, "New York from Its Pinnacles," exhibition cata-

logue (London: Goupil Gallery, 1913), n.p. 54. See, Caffin, "Municipal Art," 657 (see n. 24). 55. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall

(Berkeley, 1988), 92. Another translation of this passage was published in an article in which de Certeau develops his ideas on the practices of the pedes- trian in the city; see "Practices of Space," in Marshall Blonsky, ed., On Signs (Baltimore, 1985), 122-145. 56. Blonsky, ed., On Signs, 124. 57. Roland Barthes, "The Eiffel Tower," in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Son-

tag (New York, 1982), 242. 58. Miriam Hansen, "America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity," in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cin- ema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, 1995), 388. 59. Alvin Langdon Coburn, Photographer, an Autobiography, ed. Helmut Gern- sheim and Alison Gernsheim (New York, 1978), 84. 60. H. G. Dwight, "An Impressionist's New York," Scribners 38, no. 5

(November 1905): 546. Wanda Corn also notices that writers described the "elevated" as an "octopus"; "The New New York," 60 (see n. 16). 61. Simeon Strunsky, "The City's Ragged Edges," Harper's 132, no. 789 (Feb- ruary 1916): 438. 62. An even more striking use of the incorporation of two points of view in a

single photograph (combining the building from street level and the city from the top of the tower) is evident in similar photographs of the Singer Tower. These photographs were used for commercial purposes and may have also

appeared as postcards. Examples exist in the collection of the Museum of the

City of New York. 63. Barthes, "The Eiffel Tower," 236.

Illustration Credits

Figures 1, 8, 10. Collection of the International Museum of Photography at

George Eastman House

Figure 6. Collection of the New-York Historical Society Figure 11. The New York Public Library. The Robert Dennis Collection

Figure 17. The Museum of the City of New York

EMERGENCE OF THE SKYSCRAPER-VIEWER 169

Vertical Cities and Horizontal Suburbs

This week we will continue our study of urban planning by focusing on two basic dimensions of physical urban growth: “up” and “out.” We will begin with a discussion of skyscrapers and their contribution of city skylines. Of particular interest is the way skyscrapers figured largely in early urban zoning laws in New York City. But beyond their physical transformation of urban space, skyscrapers also contributed to new ways of experiencing the city in a social sense. We will briefly consider Le Corbusier’s reaction to New York’s skyline, which will set the stage for when we revisit his influence on urban redevelopment in a few weeks.

As cities grew skyward, so too did suburbs grow in a horizontal fashion. In the second part of the lecture, we will consider the historical context for the widespread investment in post-WWII suburban growth in the U.S. In particular, we will consider how the war and its following period of economic prosperity contributed to developments in housing. The Federal Housing Administration coupled with private banking and lending institutions were largely responsible for determining the economic and social landscape of postwar suburban housing. We will conclude with a brief overview of two large postwar suburban developments: Lakewood, California and Levittown, on Long Island in New York.

“Diagram  of  the  Principal  High  Buildings  of  the  Old  World”  in  Cram's  Unrivaled  Family  Atlas  of  the  World,  Chicago  IL.  (1884)    

The birth of the modern skyscraper has been a much debated topic over the course of the past century. What is for certain is that the building type originated in the United States, though there is some discrepancy on whether Chicago or New York can claim authorship of the skyscraper. Some architectural historians have tried to identify the “first” skyscraper based on such elements as height (taller than the average structure), the inclusion of an elevator, and the use of iron construction. Others have found this definition too limiting, especially since height alone is an inadequate definition. Even the cathedrals of medieval European towns rivaled the height of the earliest American skyscraper “types” (see previous slide). Instead, a more open- ended definition of the early development of the skyscraper is useful. In his book, The Chicago School of Architecture (1964), Carl W. Condit outlined a number of factors that contributed to the gradual development of the typology. We will explore the significance of some of these factors, and will also consider how early urban zoning laws influenced the form of skyscrapers (in New York, especially), therefore determining the overall aesthetic of the vertical landscape.

William  Le  Baron  Jenney,  Home  Life  Insurance   Company,  Chicago  (1884-­‐5).    Een  cited  as  the   “first”  skyscraper  based  on  its  use  of  fireproof   metal  frame  construcJon  that  supported  both   interior  and  exterior  walls.  

A very basic first definition of the modern skyscraper would point to its essential characteristics: •  It exhibits great height in relation to buildings

surrounding it •  Its interior arrangement of space is in a series of

stories •  It aims to provide the maximum amount of space and

light for each story

The development of the skyscraper relied on key technological requirements: •  The use of skeleton construction wherein the main

horizontal and vertical members are steel beams. Instead of the exterior and interior walls (usually masonry/brick) bearing the load of the building, in a skeleton construction (such as iron or steel frame), the beam provide the structural support.

•  In addition to steel frame skeleton construction, the use of reinforced concrete (developed as a building material in France in the 1890s) provides excellent tensile strength as a structural element. Because concrete shares a very similar coefficient of thermal expansion as its reinforcing steel rods, reinforced concrete is very resistant to internal stresses.

•  The introduction of the passenger elevator made vertical transportation between stories feasible. Elisha Otis installed the first passenger elevator in a New York department store in 1857.

•  Adequate ventilation, and reliable fireproofing and foundations were also essential technological features.

By alleviating the weight-bearing role of exterior walls, these technological developments, along with the introduction of large sheets of plate glass, allowed for significant transformations in the overall appearance of buildings. No longer constricted by producing windows only as large as a wooden or stone lintel or a brick arch could support (windows are a fundamental element in the exterior appearance of a building based on their spacing and proportions), architects could now design buildings with whole walls made of glass, if desired. The revolutionary quality of these new building materials would come to transform architecture in radical ways, yet it would take decades before the majority of American buildings shed the superfluous ornament of Neo-Classical, exotic and period styles. Some early exceptions to this stubborn use of the historicist façade can be seen in many early Chicago School designs, including Daniel Burnham’s Reliance Building (1894), seen at right. Here the revolutionary use of “Chicago windows” both flooded the interiors with light and “allowed the steel structure to be expressed for the first time in a straightforward manner.” (Dupre, Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Famous and Important Skyscrapers)

Other technological considerations not related to the structural soundness of the structure nonetheless provided the context for the development of the building type. For instance, the development of communication technologies allowed for the physical separation of production and management within a corporate or industrial setting. As most of the earliest skyscrapers functioned as office space, technologies within telecommunications enabled managerial or “white collar” workers to operate the business or financial aspects of a business away from the production of the factory or retail space, for instance.

A broader history sets the stage for this physical separation of labor and management, a narrative that includes the “incorporation” of businesses into legal and fiscal entities in the form of companies or corporations. The skyscraper was a physical manifestation of this economic and corporate restructuring, and s k y s c r a p e r s o f t e n s e r v e d a s i c o n i c advertisements for the corporations that funded their construction. An early example of this type of visual representation of financial power is the Woolworth Building in New York (1913), headquarters of the nationwide network of five-and-dime stores. The close association between skyscrapers and their capitalist investors resulted in a visual reinforcement of the financial system of the urban environment. The exaggerated verticalism of the structures that came to be known by the names of major American financial institutions became a signifier of proud capitalism. Just as church spires had once been the most visually and culturally dominant landmarks of the medieval town, so had the skyscraper become the icons of modern capitalism in the twentieth century metropolis.

In addition to the technological considerations skyscrapers required, and in addition to the financial icons they embodied, this new architectural form created new means of experiencing urban space. •  First, the spatial experience of height could produce an exhilarating sensation. As

we will read in Meir Wigoder’s article, ”The "Solar Eye" of Vision: Emergence of the Skyscraper-Viewer in the Discourse on Heights in New York City, 1890-1920,” the city views made available by being at the top of a skyscraper both gave citizens a more holistic and more abstract comprehension of their urban surroundings. Because the city was viewed from above, it became more benign and socially distant. Those at the top, working in the bright and ventilated floors several stories high, were away from the noises, smells, and crowds of the streets below. The problems of the city become blurred, miniaturized, and impersonalized. In effect, skyscrapers separated white collar workers from working class workers. The technology of elevators swapped the social structure of urban space: while once the ground floors of apartments were the most expensive, now, those at the top with the view were most desirable. Having an office or a penthouse near the top floor insinuated prestige and professionalism.

•  Secondly, skyscrapers contributed to the loss of public space in the downtown. Grand lobbies within skyscrapers, staffed by doormen, set the professional tone for the atmosphere in the building, while at the same time serving as a form of surveillance that would discourage street traffic that did not fit into the professional realm. In some cases, the white collar professional could avoid almost any interaction on the public street thanks to intricately planned subway terminals below concentrations of business nodes in the downtown.

This loss of public space was evident in developments like the network of buildings surrounding Grand Central Terminal in New York. The   passengers   arriving   at   the   Terminal   from  somewhere  beyond  the  limits  of  New  York  were  able  to  walk  directly   into  elevators  that   convey  them  to  the  lobbies  surrounding  hotels.    They  were  able  to  go  directly  from  their  Pullman   train   cars   to   their   room   in   the   hotel   not   only   without   having   stepped   from   under   cover,   but   without  having  passed  beyond  the  Grand  Central  Terminal.    The  separaJon  of  the  pedestrian  from   vehicle  traffic  on  the  street  here  embodies  a  classic  element  of  twenJeth  century  urbanism  in  its   compartmentalizaJon  of  urban  public  space.  

While the development of skyscrapers in American cities largely took place on a incremental basis, in the case of New York, urban zoning codes quickly exerted a significant degree of control over their visual appearance. As a result, the overall skyline of the city took on a distinctive form, especially in the aftermath of the 1920s “golden era” of skyscraper construction. In 1916, the New York Board of Estimate passed the first comprehensive zoning code in the United States. The code became municipal law because of the combined efforts of city planners, urban reformers and wealthy real estate owners. According to its supporters, the code sought to “stabilize and conserve property values, to relieve the rapidly increasing congestion in the streets and in the transit lines, to provide greater safety in buildings and in the streets, and in general to make the city more beautiful, convenient and agreeable.” The idea of a comprehensive zoning code had been discussed for decades, but the when the garment district was threatening to encroach upon the upscale merchant district along Fifth Avenue, the city combined efforts to pass the legislation. In essence, the code accomplished two major controls on the urban environment. First, it separated the city into districts by use (business, residential, and industrial). Secondly, the code placed restrictions on the height and bulk of a tall building that could be constructed on a site.

This restriction on building height and setback would come to define a new architectural style for the city of New York. The law created a “zoning envelope” which protected a measure o f l i g h t a n d a i r i n t h e c i t y ’s “canyons” (streets between the cliffs of towering buildings). After a fixed vertical height, the building had to be stepped back as it rose in accordance with a designated angle from the center of the street. Then after a point, a tower covering no more than ¼ of the total site could rise to unlimited height.   Originally, motivated by practical, political and economic considerations, the zoning law ultimately came to influence the visual and aesthetic properties of buildings and the city as a whole. Builders wanted to maximize the space they could build upon; this therefore essentially set forth a formula – the shapes of buildings were predetermined by the code. This practice transfor med NY’s landscape from a sea of flat-topped buildings to a series of mountainous masses with similar proportions.

New  York  skyscrapers  exhibiJng  the  zoning  envelope  and  setback.   LeE:    Hotel  New  Yorker  (1929);    Middle:  Chrysler  Building  (1928-­‐30)   Right:    Empire  State  Building  (1931)  

According  to  a  digital  image  gallery   on  the  website  of  the  Museum  of   the  City  of  New  York:     “The   place-­‐making   character   of   the   zoning   law,   applied   to   the   grid’s   foundaJon   document   of   wide   avenues   and   narrow   cross   streets,   can  be  clearly  seen  in  any  aerial  view   of  New  York  in  the  1930s.  Berenice   Abboa’s   brilliant   photograph   of   Seventh   Avenue   in   the   Garment   District   captures   both   the   massive   cliff   of   the   street   wall   of   loE   buildings  and  the  human  scale  of  the   workers  through  the  windows  of  the   sun-­‐lit  setbacks.”         Berenice  AbboD,  Seventh  Avenue  Looking   North  from  35th  Street,  1935   Museum  of  the  City  of  New  York,  GiE  of   Federal  Works  Agency,  Work  Projects   AdministraJon,  Federal  Art  Project   hap://thegreatestgrid.mcny.org/greatest-­‐ grid/manhaaan-­‐monumentality/          

Francisco  Mujica,  concept  for  “The  City  of  the  Future”  (1929-­‐30)  

Originally,   the   design   of   setback   skyscrapers   was   merely   a   response   to   zoning   based   on   the   urban  problems  of  the  laissez  faire  city.    Eventually,  zoning  served  as  a  sJmulus  behind  a  vision   of   a   modern   skyscraper   metropolis.     This   new   “setback   style”   was   disJnctly   modern   and   American.    Architects  now  gave  increased  aaenJon  to  the  arJsJc  design  of  exterior,  as  all  sides   of  the  building  (not  just  the  façade)  would  be  visible.    Some  of  the  most  striking  examples  of  the   style  featured  ornamental  moJfs  of  Art  Deco  or  Gothic  Revival.    Yet  the  setback  formula  itself   had  evolved  into  a  style.    Architects  began  envisioning  how  the  modern  metropolis  might  be   conceived  of  as  a  raJonalized  city  of  towers.    Perhaps  the  skyscraper  itself  could  be  the  answer   to  bringing  formal  order  and  harmony  to  a  city  plan.    On  some  level,  skyscrapers  represented  a   shiE  away  from  the  civic  horizontalism  of  the  City  BeauJful  movement.  

In  1935,  Swiss  born  architect,  Le  Corbusier,   visited  the  United  States  on  invitaJon  from   the   Museum   of   Modern   Art   in   New   York,   which   featured   his   work   in   a   traveling   exhibiJon.     Le   Corbusier   admired   the   American   skyscraper   as   an   example   of   the   mastery   of   steel   frame   construcJon   and   American   technology   for   its   capacity   to   realize   such   megastructures   –   although   he   thought  New  York’s  towers  were  too  small!  

We’ll  come  back  to  Le  Corbusier  soon  to  consider  his  (largely  unrealized)  urban  plans  for   Paris  and  ciJes  in  LaJn  America,  North  Africa  and  India.    While  he  is  most  credited  with   his  contribuJons  to  modern  architecture,  Le  Corbusier’s  visions  for  urban  plans  would   be  influenJal  in  indirect,  yet  substanJal  ways  in  the  United  States,  as  well.     The  new  towering  landscape  of  the  American  metropolis  had  just  crystalized  when  the   economic  stress  of  the  Great  Depression  in  the  1930s  brought  all  major  construcJon  to   a  screeching  halt.    By  the  Jme  that  warJme  producJon  during  World  War  II  (1941-­‐1945)   had   pulled   the   U.S.   out   of   its   economic   crisis,   a   new   urban   fronJer   sat   poised   for   dramaJc  development:    that  of  the  suburb.    We’ll  learn  in  a  few  weeks  about  the  post-­‐ war   focus   on   urban   redevelopment   projects,   but   the   post-­‐war   also   precipitated   an   intense   period   of   urban   decentralizaJon.     Last   week   we   read   about   the   origins   of   suburban  planning  and  development.    This  week  we  will  consider  how  this  trajectory   conJnued  and  ulJmately  came  to  influence  the  dominant  form  of  American  residenJal   development.