Imagining New York City: Literature, Urbanism and the Visual Arts by Chistoph Lindner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagining New York City: Literature, Urbanism and the Visual Arts by Chistoph Lindner Tim Verlaan Imagining New York City: Literature, Urbanism and the Visual Arts. By Chistoph Lindner, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 228 pages, $29.95 Paper. New York is probably the most visualized city in the world. Both as a material and as an imagined space, the city has served as a backdrop to millions of paintings, photographs, and poems. In an original attempt to bring literary, visual, and material culture together, urban and cultural theorist Christoph Lindner examines a wide array of primary and secondary sources related to the urban imaginary of artists, urbanists, and writers. His focus lies on the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, a period labelled by Lindner as a transformative moment in the cultural history and architectural development of the city. Within this half-a-century, New York truly became a modern metropolis and a role model for cities worldwide, akin to the role of Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was this notion of New York as the epitome of urban modernity that inspired its residents and visitors to imagine and reimagine the city’s skyscrapers and streets as signifiers of urban change, resulting in a rich body of artworks capturing the experiences of contemporaries. Skyscrapers and streets are the main characters in Lindner’s narrative, splitting his study of cultural reproductions along vertical and horizontal lines. The first part examines the rise of New York’s skyline and its [End Page 245] symbolic and cultural meanings, featuring well-known landmarks such as the Singer, Metropolitan Life, Woolworth, Chrysler, and Empire State Buildings, while the second part investigates the cultural manifestations and spatial reconfigurations of the modern sidewalk as a site of contestation and experiment, focusing on the flaneurs of Broadway, the lives of the poor as pictured by Jacob Riis, and the lived spaces of the city’s transportation system. With this approach, Lindner reproduces the familiar dichotomy of the view from the tower versus the view from the ground, or Robert Moses versus Jane Jacobs, which stood at the center of Samuel Zipp’s recent study of urban renewal in postwar New York. The case studies, which consist of both primary and secondary sources, are bound together by the concepts of modernity and the urban imaginary. In line with the work of the late New York-based urban theorist Marshall Berman, modernity is defined by Lindner as the “capitalist condition” shaping the aesthetic sensibilities of the period he investigates. The urban imaginary, an equally multifaceted concept derived from the work of spatial theorist Edward Soja, should be understood as “the mental or cognitive mappings of urban reality.” Working from a historical perspective, Lindner acknowledges the many ways in which present-day perceptions and interpretations of New York have been influenced by the visual cultures of a bygone era. The end result is an eclectic and fascinating journey through both space and time. An obvious starting point for a cultural history of New York focusing on skylines and sidewalks is one of the city’s many observation decks. By choosing the viewing platform of the old World Trade Center, Lindner immediately drives his point home. Welding together the work of Michel de Certeau and Jean Baudrillard, he admires how both theorists transform Manhattan’s ever-changing skyline into a complex but legible text. Despite their physical disappearance, the Twin Towers continue to influence the way New Yorkers and visitors experience the city through their imagination. From this theoretical viewpoint, Lindner delves into the history of the skyscraper phenomenon. In a pattern that repeats throughout the book, the author takes us from a real space to its theoretical reinterpretations and historical understanding. While the background information on Lindner’s case studies bring nothing new to the table for New York historians, his associative thinking does lead to refreshing perspectives and new connections. [End Page 246] Most importantly, he steps away from the obsolete view of skyscrapers as cathedrals of capitalism, instead offering a more complex narrative in which the experiences of contemporaries dominate. Their visual reproductions of high-rises exemplify feelings of shock...