1 JHU Osher In Person, Grace Methodist Church Spring 2023 An Illustrated Cultural History of NYC, Part II: 20th Century Themes and Motifs 6 Tuesdays 10:00 AM - Noon March 21, 2023 to April 25, 2023 Instructor: Dr. George Scheper <gscheper@jhu.edu> We begin with a look at NYC culture in the Progressive era, the 'Teens and the 20's, with a focus on the personalities of bohemian Greenwich Village, the Ashcan School of painters, the 1913 Armory Show, and the advent of Modernism. We look at F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age essays and the "strange bedfellows" of Fifth Avenue socialites and collectors and hard-core radical leftist intellectuals and labor leaders. We then move uptown for a look at the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's and 30's -- when Harlem really was in vogue. We look at Harlem cultural debates in selected writings by James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes, and such artists as Richmond Barthé, Augusta Savage, and Aaron Douglas. This is the era when NYC architecture turned distinctly modernist and distinctly vertical, as we trace the evolution of NYC's early skyscraper movement. But after the Crash of '29 and during the "lean years" of the 1930's, the arts turned toward social realism, supported by the politics of Mayor LaGuardia and FDR's New Deal. We explore three iconic projects of the era: the creation of Rockefeller Center; Robert Moses' early parkway, beach, and bridge-and-tunnel projects; and the 1939 World's Fair, a "World of Tomorrow" ironically at odds with the true urban character of NYC. Our course moves on to an examination of two contrasting visions of the nature of the city: that of the Master Builder and Power Broker, Robert Moses, and the contrasting vision of Jane Jacobs, whose vision of urban neighborhood life countered the "tower in the park" vision of the professional urban planners. We conclude with an overview of NYC in the final decades of the 20th century -- the Beatnik Village, Warhol's Factory, and "Fear City" -and the opening decades of the 21st Century, from 9/11 through the Bloomberg and de Blasio years: "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Vanishing New York." ---------------------------------------------------------------Class One: March 21, 2023: Bohemian Greenwich Village and NYC Culture in the 'Teens and 20's The culture of New York City in the 20th century prior to the Crash of ’29 and the Great Depression. This is the New York City of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era, the Ashcan School painters of Greenwich Village, the 1913 Armory Show and the advent of modernism. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously represented the era not only in The Great Gatsby (1925), but in his poignantly personal "Jazz Age" essays, where he traces the evolution from the biggest binge in the city's history to its biggest hangover. 2 We will explore the ways in which the 'teens and 20's in NYC represent a tremendous cultural turning point in the cultural history of New York, the making of the modernist cosmopolis. We consider the advent of modernity in NYC in the first decades of the 20th century in terms of politics, societal life-ways, art, literature, theater, and music. In art we trace the evolution of NYC realism in the work of the NY Impressionists and the so-called Ashcan School of painting, centered largely in Greenwich Village: the work of Robert Henri, George Bellows, John Sloan and others. We then consider the impact of the intervention of the 1913 Armory Show, generating a Modernist movement in formalist terms in New York, in Stieglitz's Gallery 291, and the work of O'Keeffe, Hartley, Stella, Sheeler, and Stuart Davis. This is the era when Greenwich Village emerged prominently as an artistic, intellectual, and politically activist center of New York life. We consider the "Strange Bedfellows" of NYC's avant-garde: the Village Bohemians with their advocacy of radical politics and radical life-style, on the one hand, and the less politicized Fifth Avenue and Midtown socialites and supporters and collectors of modern art on the other. Meanwhile, on another plane, the architecture of the City of Ambition, we trace NYC's shift from the horizontal monumentality of NY's Beaux Arts architecture to the new skyline represented by the first generation of NYC skyscrapers, and "skyscraper wars," and an infrastructure of elevators, bridges, tunnels, and subways, as NYC became the epitome of modernist Verticality and Velocity, and Art Deco streamlining. The great escapes of Coney Island and Broadway in the 20's contribute to what Rem Koolhaas has aptly called "Delirious New York." Readings available to class roster digitally, as pdf • Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age" & "My Lost City" • Some Early Broadway lyrics of the 20's • Homberger, "Greenwich Village," from New York City/ A Cultural History Some Relevant Film items: Ric Burns' New York documentary series, part 5. Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Manhatta (1921). Excerpts from Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927), Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (1936), and Buster Keaton, The Cameraman (1928). Busby Berkeley, "Lullaby of Broadway," from Gold-Diggers of 1935. Various film versions of The Great Gatsby. Milos Forman, Ragtime (1981) -- based on E. L. Doctorow's 1975 novel. Warren Beatty, Reds (1981) -------------------------------------------- Class 2: March 28, 2023: Art and Writing of the Harlem Renaissance Jazz Age Harlem, in the 1920's and 1930's -- when Harlem was in vogue -- is best known for the work of musical giants such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, and Chick Webb, but the flowering of art and literature that came to be called the Harlem Renaissance is equally of note. James Weldon Johnson's "Black 3 Manhattan" was the seed-bed of such writers and poets as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neal Hurston, and of sculptors and painters such as Richmond Barthé, Aaron Douglas, Meta Fuller, Palmer Hayden, Augusta Savage, and Lois Mailou Jones. Of course Harlem also became the site of intense intellectual debate and analysis, about African-American identity, about politics and religion in America, about the New York cultural scene, and about whether a Harlem artist or writer would best be served by seeing himself or herself as a Black artist, or as an American modernist. We'll explore these issues in essay selections by such Harlem writers as Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B. DuBois. This seminar is orchestrated as a richly illustrated slide lecture, accompanied by film clips, and relevant handouts. Discussion is encouraged throughout the seminar. We will take one ten-minute break approximately half way through the class. We'll begin with discussion of the making of Harlem as a Black metropolis: the turn of the century shift of New York City Blacks from various locales where they had been living in racially mixed neighborhoods such as the Five Points, the West Village, and the Tenderloin District to previously White Harlem. We'll explore the social dynamics of this population move, and then move to a consideration of the Great Migration of Southern blacks to cities of the North in the early decades of the 20th century, and look at how that story is told in the famous Migration series of Jacob Lawrence. We look at James Weldon Johnson's classic essay on the "Black Metropolis," chapter XIII of his book Black Manhattan, and the selection on "When Harlem Was in Vogue" from Langston Hughes' memoir The Big Sea. We then turn to the crucial overview essay by Alain Locke, "The New Negro," which sets the stage for the flourishing of that cultural phenomenon we call the Harlem Renaissance. And we will view a couple of corresponding film clips from Ken Burns' series on "Jazz": the first phase; rent parties; piano “cutting contests”: James P. Johnson and Willie the Lion Smith; Duke Ellington “downtown” and uptown at the Cotton Club. Through slides and film clips we will survey the visual arts of the Harlem Renaissance, focusing on such artists as Richmond Barthé, Meta Fuller, Palmer Hayden, Augusta Savage, and Aaron Douglas. We then turn to the literary arts, with Langston Hughes' essay on "The Negro artist and the Racial Mountain," and conclude with a reading and discussion of a selection of some of the greatest poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. Readings made available to class roster in advance. • James W. Johnson, Black Manhattan, Chapter XIII. • Langston Hughes, "When Harlem was in Vogue," & "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." • Poetry of Harlem Renaissance -- a selection • E. Simms Campbell's "Nightlife Map of Harlem," from 1932. • Sullivan, "American Shuffle" [on Shuffle Along]. NYT Magazine. Relevant Film items: Duke Ellington, Black and Tan [1929] and Symphony in Black (1934). Ken Burns’ Jazz, Part 2, “The Gift” and Part 3, “Our Language.” 4 Classes 3 & 4: April 4 & 11, 2023 NYC in the Thirties: the Great Depression -- & Great Escapes We explore the dynamic history of NYC during the difficult transition from the roaring 20's to the lean years in the wake of the Great Depression. The late 20's witnessed the construction of a new generation of ultra-tall buildings, culminating in competitive "skyscraper wars," a building mania that ended abruptly with the crash of 1929. F. Scott Fitzgerald bore witness to the moment of change from exuberant binging to a sense of nursing an enormous hangover. But as the mayoralty moved from Jimmy Walker to Fiorello LaGuardia, and the presidency from Hoover to FDR, the process of recovery began, as New York reaped the benefits of New Deal policies. Government sponsorship brought employment on public projects ranging from Long Island parkways to the Triborough Bridge -- and private investment saw the creation of the vast Rockefeller Center project. The moods of the times are reflected in the cultural cross-currents of literature, music, stage and screen, with escapist entertainment counterbalanced by strong currents of social realism and social engagement. We begin with a look at what architect Rem Koolhaas has called “Delirious New York”: the competitive mania of the skyscraper wars, and the rambunctious and over the top worlds of Coney Island, Times Square and Broadway theater in the early 20th century. We then turn to the decisive turning point of the 1930’s when, in the face of the Great Depression, New York City witnessed some of its greatest building projects: the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and the monumental projects overseen by NYC’s controversial “Master Builder,” Robert Moses in the early stages of his controversial career. We consider the shaping of culture of NYC in the 1930's, when La Guardia won the support of the federal Government under FDR for the stimulus spending policies that would come to be known as the New Deal. This was the era of, on the one hand, the seeming escapism as found in the musical extravaganzas of Busby Berkeley, or the spectacles of the Ziegfeld Follies, but also social realism as expressed in WPA art and the Federal Theater Projects. We will look closely at two distinctive projects of the era: the creation of Rockefeller Center, and the staging of Marc Blitzstein's musical "The Cradle Will Rock." Readings available to class roster digitally, as pdf. • A packet on Skyscraper Wars, Rockefeller Center, and the film The Cradle Will Rock." • Some Hollywood musical lyrics of the 30's • Scheper, "The Construction of Modernity and 'Modernism' in New York City" (2016). • Traub, The Devil's Playground/ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (2004): Chap. 7. Some Topics for Discussion: Background: “Delirious New York”: Roaring 20’s & the Crash and the Great Depression. The great escapes: Coney Island; 14th street (the "Rialto"); 42nd Street, Times Square and Broadway. Skyscraper wars: 40 Wall St.; the Chrysler Building; the Empire State Building; Rockefeller Center as the major private building project of the Depression. 5 Politics and public policies. Al Smith, FDR, Fiorello LaGuardia, and Robert Moses: reconceptualizing the infrastructure of the New York region: NYC pioneers the New Deal; "stimulus spending": the Triborough Bridge project. The WPA and the role of the arts during hard times: realism or escapism? The Federal Theater Project: Mark Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock. Art and politics: Diego Rivera and the fiasco of the Rockefeller Center mural. The art of Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, Paul Cadmus, Ben Shahn, and Edward Hopper; and of NYC documentary photographers: Lewis Hine, Bernice Abbott, Walker Evans, Weegee. The story of jazz in NYC: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman. Relevant film items From Ric Burns' series: New York: a Documentary Film (1999-2003). Program 5: "Cosmopolis"; and Program 6: the New Deal in NYC, and "City of Tomorrow." New York promotional films on the 1939 World's Fair. Ric Burns’ Coney Island (1991). Ken Burns’ Jazz, Part 2, Parts 4-6 (the ‘Thirties). Busby Berkeley’s 42nd Street (1933); Gold-Diggers of 33; and Gold-Diggers of 35. King Vidor, Elmer Rice's Street Scene (1931); Tim Robbins’ The Cradle Will Rock (1999). ---------------------------------------------------Class 5: April 18, 2023: Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs: Two Versions of Modernity Holding the title of NYC Parks Commissioner, and eventually many other nonelective but exceedingly powerful administrative offices over a fifty-year career, master builder and power broker Robert Moses oversaw one of the greatest urban rebuilding programs in human history. He began with parkway and beach projects that opened Long Island to a general middle class population, and went on to complete vast infrastructure projects and "slum clearance" and urban rebuilding programs that radically reconceptualized (in the language of the 1939 Worlds Fair) "The City of Tomorrow." Eventually the automobile-centered vision of Moses was countered by urban activists, such as Jane Jacobs, whose vision of urban neighborhoods with vital and varied street life eventually blocked Moses' plans to run superhighways through Greenwich Village, SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. We will look at selected passages from Jane Jacob's tremendously influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and discuss how her contrasting vision of urban street life holds up more than a half century after it challenged the urban planning establishment. This seminar is orchestrated as a richly illustrated slide lecture, accompanied by film clips, and relevant handouts. Discussion is encouraged throughout the seminar. We will take one ten-minute break approximately half way through the class. We follow the public career of NYC’s controversial “Master Builder,” Robert Moses from the early stages of his work under Governor Al Smith, and through the 1930's, when Mayor La Guardia won the support of the federal Government under FDR for the stimulus spending policies that would come to be known as the New Deal. At first, Moses' projects for infrastructure (notably the Triborough Bridge project), for 6 parks and recreational centers and for parkways, beaches, and other public amenities appear to be works representing a spirit of progressive reform. But eventually, what emerges is an urban vision inspired by LeCorbusier increasingly devoted to an abstract or totalizing planning model increasingly divorced from the social realities of neighborhoods and increasingly devoted to serving the interests of the automobile and automobile traffic, corresponding to the ideology of the NY World's Fair of 1939 with its vision of "The World of Tomorrow." a world of middle class consumerism, the automobile, the highway, and the suburb. The latter stages of Moses' career involved increasingly controversial "slum-clearance" projects involving massive demolition, and the building of large scale housing projects and urban expressways. Secondly, we follow the thinking of Jane Jacobs, as she moves from the role of a passive observer of the urban scene to an increasingly activist role in the controversies stemming from Moses' urban planning in lower Manhattan. Her involvements eventually led to the composition of her classic analysis The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), in which she systematically questions the most basic premises of professional urban planning as taught and practiced in her day. We will try to capture the philosophical underpinnings of these two competing visions of Moses and Jacobs, and invite ourselves to see the city through the eyes of each, and then look afresh at the new re-assessments of both Moses and Jacobs in recent years, arriving at our own sense of where these visions stand today, and what the implications may be for our sense of the future of what Tom Bender has called "the unfinished city." Readings made available to the roster in advance: • Paul Goldberger, "Eminent Domain/ Rethinking the Legacy of Robert Moses." New Yorker, Feb. 5, 2007. • Nicolai Ouroussoff, "Complex, Contradictory Robert Moses." NYT (Feb. 2, 2007). • Robin Pogrebin, "Architecture: Rehabilitating Robert Moses," NYT (Jan. 28, 2007). • Nathaniel Rich, "The Prophecies of Jane Jacobs," The Atlantic (November, 2016). • George Scheper, "A Divergence of Modernities: Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses and the ReVisioning of NYC" (Community College Humanities Review, 28 (Fall, 2008). Relevant film items: From Ric Burns' eight-part documentary film series: New York: a Documentary Film (19992003); Part 7 (episodes on Title I housing, and on the Cross-Bronx Expressway). Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (2017), directed by Matt Tyrnauer. Gut Renovation (2012), written and directed by Su Friedrich. Class 6: April 25, 2023: Present and Future NYC: "Vanishing New York"?, or “The Unfinished City”? The World Trade Center as icon. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath. Questions about rebuilding at Ground Zero: a new World Trade Center, a "Freedom Tower," a 9/11 Memorial; debate over "a mosque near Ground Zero. 7 On-going processes of "the unfinished city." NYC's neighborhoods; what's hot, what's not: Battery Park City, Tribeca, SoHo, the High Line, Chelsea, NoHo, the Bowery, NoLita, Park Slope, Brooklyn Bridge Park, DUMBO, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, Astoria, Long Island City, Flushing, Willets Point. Preservation, gut renovation, gentrification and their conflicts. Mayor Bloomberg's legacy: new urbanism or zombie urbanism? Disneyfied Times Square. Rezoning, chain corporatization, billionaire towers, and hyper-wealth development: is New York disappearing? Occupy Wall Street and Mayor de Blasio's campaign mantra of "A Tale of Two Cities" and the need for "affordable housing." Does a recognizable existential reality of New York City have a future? Readings made available to roster in advance: • Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York/ How A Great City Lost Its Soul (2017): Chaps. 2 ("Hyper-Gentrification in the Revanchist City," pp. 33-41); 10 ("Bloomberg," pp. 15569); and 22 ("Gewntrifiers and the New Manifest Destiny," pp. 319-327). • Reitano, Joanne. The Restless City/ A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present. Routledge, 2006: Chapter 9: "Big Apple Redux: Leadership Under Fire, 19701993," pp. 181-204. • Traub, James, The Devil's Playground/ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square. Random House, 2004: Chap. 11: Saving Billboard Hell," pp. 151-160. • from Patell, Cyrus and Bryan Waterman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. Cambridge University Press, 2010: Waterman, Bryan,"Epilogue: Nostalgia and Counter-nostalgia in New York City Writing,' pp. 232-240. • Pete Hamill, Downtown/ My Manhattan (2004), Chap. 1, "The Capital of Nostalgia" (pp. 326) and Envoi (pp. 269-281). Relevant Film items: Ric Burns’ New York, Episode 8 ("The Center of the World" [the WTC and 9/11]. Spike Lee, NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021½ (HBO, four episodes, 2021) ---------------------------------------------------- 8 Recommended Supplementary Reading and Viewing for Follow-up to the Course The 'Teens and 'Twenties: Donald Miller, Supreme City/ How Jazz Age Manhattan gave Birth to Modern America, 2014. Lankevich, George. New York City: A Short History. New York University Press, revised ed., 2002. Chap. 7, "Governing the World's Greatest City." Thomas Bender, Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea. NewYork University Press, 2002. Chap. 3, "Skyscraper and Skyline." Pete Hamill, Downtown: My Manhattan. Little, Brown and Company, 2004. Chap. 4, "Velocity." Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. Monacelli Press, 1994. Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams/ Greenwich Village: the American Bohemia, 1910-1960. Simon & Shuster, 2002. Jeremy McCarter, Young Radicals in the War for American Ideals. Random House, 2017. Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows/ The First American Avant-Garde. Abbeville Press, 1991. Melissa Bradshaw, "Performing Greenwich Village Bohemianism," in Cyrus Patell and Bryan Waterman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York (Cambridge UP (2010): pp. 146-159 The Harlem Renaissance Jonathan Gill, Harlem/ the Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America. Grove Press, 2011. Esp. chap. 8: "The Kingdom of Culture." David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue. Penguin, 1997. Voices From the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins. Oxford University Press, 1995. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan. Da Capo Press, 1930; 1958. James Weldon Johnson, ed. The Book of American Negro Poetry. 1922. Rpt. Harcourt, 1969. Eric Homberger, New York City: A Cultural History (2008): Chapter 7: "Harlem," pp. 219-41. Thulani Davis, "African American Literary Movements," in: Cyrus Patell and Bryan Waterman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York (2010): pp. 160-175. Douglas, Ann, Terrible Honesty/ Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs Caro, Robert. The Power Broker/ Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. (1974): Chap. 20: "One Year," pp. 368-401 and Chap. 37, "One Mile," pp. 850-884 and 38, "One Mile (Afterward)," pp. 885-894. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961): Introduction and Parts One and Two (chapters 1-12), plus chapters 15 and 22. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air/ The Experience of Modernity (1988): from Chap. V. "In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York": 1. "Robert Moses: the Expressway World" (pp. 290-312 and 2. "The 1960's: A Shout in the Street" (pp. 312-329). 9 Robert Moses and the Modern City/ The Transformation of New York, ed. Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007: Kenneth Jackson, "Robert Moses and the Rise of New York/ The Power Broker in Perspective," pp. 67-71; and Robert Fishman, “Revolt of the Urbs/ Robert Moses and His Critics.” 122-129. Flint, Anthony, Wrestling with Moses (2009): "Introduction: Anarchy and Order," pp.xi-xvii; "The Battle of Washington Square Park," 61-92; and "The Lower Manhattan Expressway," pp. 136-178. Roberta Gratz, The Battle for Gotham (2010): "Introduction/ A Clash of Visions -Then and Now," pp. xxi-xxxix; Chap. 3, “Greenwich Village/ Jacobs, Moses, and Me,” pp. 61-94; Chap. 5, “Reconsidering Robert Moses.” Martin, Douglas. [Obituary] "Jane Jacobs, Social Critic Who Redefined and Championed Cities, Is Dead at 89." The New York Times, Wednesday, April 26, 2006, p. C16.