Whitman and the City:

Theory and Terms

Charles Baudelaire ("The Painter of Modern Life" [1863], in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, tr. Jonathan Mayne, 1964).

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world--such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are--or are not--to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidescope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an 'I' with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-I', at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. (9-10)

Elizabeth Wilson, (The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women, 1991).

The city offers untrammelled sexual experience; in the city the forbidden--what is most feared and desired--becomes possible. Woman is present in cities as temptress, as whore, as fallen woman, as lesbian, but also as virtuous womanhood in danger, as heroic womanhood who triumphs over temptation and tribulation. Writers such as Benjamin concentrated upon their own experience of strangeness in the city, their own longings and desires, but many writers more definitely and clearly posed the presence of women as a problem of order, partly because their presence symbolised the promise of sexual adventure. This promise was converted into a general moral and political threat.

Nineteenth-century planning reports, government papers and journalism created an interpretation of urban experience as a new version of Hell, and it would even be possible to describe the emergent town-planning movement--a movement that has changed our cities almost beyond recognition--as an organised campaign to exclude women and children, along with other disruptive elements--the working class, the poor, and minorities--from this infernal urban space altogether.

Sexuality was only one course of threatening ambiguity and disorder in the city. The industrial city became a crucible of intense and unnerving contrasts. The hero, or less often the heroine, of urban literature was lured by astonishing wealth and opportunity, threatened by the crushing poverty and despair offered by heightened, exaggerated scenarios of personal triumph or loss of identity. (6)

Perhaps we should be happier in our cities were we to respond to them as to nature or dreams; as objects of exploration, investigation and interpretation, settings for voyages of discovery. The 'discourse' that has shaped our cities--the utilitarian plans of experts whose goal was social engineering--has limited our vision and almost destroyed our cities. It is time for a new vision, a new ideal of life in the city--and a new, 'feminine' voice in praise of cities. (11).

Richard Sennett, (Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, 1994).

New York is a grid city par excellence, an endless geometry of equal blocks, though not quite the grid which the Romans envisaged; New York's grid has no fixed edge or center. The Roman city builders studied the heavens to site the earthly city, and plotted the boundaries of a town in order to define its internal geometry. The designers of modern New York conceived of the urban grid as an expanding chessboard; in 1811 the city fathers bestowed the grid plans on city lands above Greenwich Village, and in 1855 this plan was extended beyond Manhattan into the northernly borough of the Bronx and the easterly borough of Queens.

Like the Roman town grid, the New York plan was laid down on largely empty land, a city designed in advance of being inhabited; if the Romans consulted the heavens for guidance in this effort, the city fathers of New York consulted the banks. Of the modern grid plan in general, Lewis Mumford has said that 'the resurgent capitalism of the seventeenth century treated the individual lot and the block, the street and the avenue as abstract units for buying and selling, without respect for historic uses, for topographic conditions or for social needs.' The absolute uniformity in the lots created by the New York grid meant that land could be treated just like money, each piece worth the same amount. In the happier, early days of the Republic, dollar bills were printed when bankers felt the need of money; so too the supply of land could be increased by extending this turf, so that more city came into being when speculators felt the urge to speculate. (359)

Mona Domosh, (Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston , 1996).

From its inception as an integral part of the Dutch trading empire, New York City had maintained a strictly commercial raison d'etre. Unlike some of the other Atlantic seaports, particularly Boston, New York's original settlement process had no religious overtones. People arrived in the port of New York to better their economic situation, not to establish utopian civic or religious communities. . . . In addition, the increasing diversity of population made it difficult to identify common goals that could form the basis of a long-term consolidated ruling class. . . . According to Edward Spann, by 1850, 45.7 percent of the 515,000 New Yorkers were foreign-born, and by 1885 the figure was 50 percent.

New York's landscape in the 1850s was undergoing tremendous change as the city experienced another economic boom. Its economy was fully recovered from the panic of 1837, and its port was beginning to feel the effects of the California gold rush. Both domestic and foreign trade increased, as easterners and foreigners boarded New York-based steamships bound for California via the isthmus of Panama. California's growing population became one of New York's most lucrative export markets, and much of the discovered gold made its way back to the city. The 1850s were also a period of growth for New York's dry goods and clothing industry. New York had captured most of the retail trade from Boston and was the major port of entry for European textiles and luxury items.

The economic and spatial expansion of the late 1840s and 1850s began to create a locational pattern that geographer James Vance argues has its basis in the capitalist economic system--a pattern based on land values and access to economic resources. For New York, much of what constituted its built environment up to this point became devoted to mercantile, commercial, and financial activities. Those who could afford to move their residences went north, fleeing the noise and congestion and seeking the most fashionable residential enclave. The streets to the west of Broadway near Trinity Church, an area that at one time had constituted a fairly wealthy residential area, was gradually taken over by commercial activities. The buildings changed uses from residential to commercial, or the structures were torn down to make way for large warehouses and shops to house New York's expanding dry goods and clothing trade. Broadway was becoming congested with pedestrian and commuter traffic (horsecars and omnibuses), as well as commercial traffic for deliveries to the shops that bordered both sides of the street and the smaller cross strees. Packed into the buildings on Wall Street were the offices of insurance companies, bankers, lawyers, and stockbrokers. . . . By 1850, then, segregation of land uses within the city was clearly apparent--commercial, financial, and emerging retail districts south of 14th Street, those who could not afford to move north remaining in tenement-style housing, and the middle and upper classes moving progressively northward up Broadway and onto Fifth Avenue. (13 - 19)