Lincoln Center Research Articles

A Free Man of Color (review)

Reviewed by: A Free Man of Color William W. Demastes A Free Man of Color. By John Guare. Directed by George C. Wolfe. Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City. 9 January 2011. John Guare's A Free Man of Color celebrates human potential. Set in a small part of the world struggling against the civilizing forces of "order" and "control" Guare's play is nonetheless sufficiently expansive to fill the Vivian Beaumont stage, where the production reminded me of both the carnivalesque explosiveness of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and the high metatheatricality of plays like Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good. A Free Man of Color not only celebrates self-invention and sensual indulgence as the characters embrace mutability, chance, and materiality, but also undermines the life-limiting constrictions of order, civilization, and law. Imbued with life-embracing vitality, this brilliant production created a sort of three-ring circus of continuous action. The play is set in New Orleans during the early nineteenth century, a time when Spanish, African, French, British, and US influences were all vying for the soul of what one character called "the free-est city in the world." This production's colorful open set, scattered with representative portable props, propelled the play from one imaginative locale to another: from marketplace to bedchamber; from a planter's home to a riverfront haunt; and even to Napoleon's bathroom. With an ornate proscenium arch erected as backdrop, the set befitted the theatrical [End Page 451] nature of the play and the rococo extravagance of colonial New Orleans. Against this background, director George C. Wolfe created a colorful New Orleans antithetical to the Yankee restraint of cities like Boston during the same period. The result was a feeling of openness and endless possibility, a world of opportunity for independent men of adventure and spirit, and a place of personal invention where "you can be whatever you declare yourself to be." The play's central character, Jacques Cornet, is just such a man, a free man of color who declares to the audience his intention to create his own character and write his own play. In essence, the main character writes the play (Cornet initially titles it The Happy Life of a Man in Power), and this city of multivalent influences is his fertile site of self-invention. Click for larger view View full resolution Jeffrey Wright (Jacques Cornet) in A Free Man of Color. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson.) In this world-premiere production, Jeffrey Wright played Cornet with the larger-than-life expansiveness that the role demands, assuming the mantel of Lord of Misrule and using his wit, sexual magnetism, and full-bodied appetite to mesmerize those characters around him. As master of self-invention and author of the play in front of us, Wright's Cornet mastered the stage like a circus ringmaster, trumpeting orders and directing attention to various corners of the spotlighted stage, where the many vignettes added up to the story of Cornet in New Orleans. Wright mastered the surface arts of appearance and seduction in a manner reminiscent of the Restoration rake, after which his character is clearly modeled. In fact, Cornet knew the stratagems used by Horner in William Wycherley's The Country Wife and literally assumed the disguise and masterful deception of his English namesake. This—Guare's most obvious reference to the libertine excesses of the Restoration world—admirably captured its comic legacy, and Wright masterfully translated eighteenth-century theatricality to the modern stage. Director Wolfe set the pace, moving the play along expeditiously in the best tradition of the comedy of manners. Seduction plots interwove political intrigue, unbridled buffoonery (Napoleon appeared several times in a bathtub scrubbing himself like a child while ranting about world domination), a chorus of prostitutes, a comically caricatured Spanish king and infanta, a wily manservant, and several insanely impotent captains of industry tricked like Keystone cops at every turn. It wasn't all fun and games, however. Wolfe's comic devices generated more than laughter; incorporated within them were instances of cruel injustice and hypocrisy among the ruling classes. Guare depicted these dissipated masters of their domain as purely...

The music of William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and Peter Mennin: voices of stone and steel

William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and Peter Mennin were three of the most significant American composers of the 20th century; yet their music has largely disappeared from view since their respective deaths. Their music is often viewed as 'interchangeable,' partly because they spent the majority of their careers working at the Juilliard School and Lincoln Center. The purpose of this book is to provide a thorough examination of their lives and work, and thereby clarify their considerable individuality, both as composers and as human beings.

Soul Vibrations: Black Music and Black Freedom in Sound and Space

This essay examines two live performance events—the opera singer Marian Anderson’s historic 1939 concert on the National Mall, and “Soul at the Center,” a little-remembered but significant 1972 festival at New York’s Lincoln Center—to examine how sound works as a cultural practice of resignifying the meaning and feeling of racially exclusive spaces. Drawing on the sonic philosophies of musicians Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk (in their concern with musical “vibrations”) and John Cage (in his experiments in with the sonic environment of the anechoic chamber), it argues that these sites are sonically saturated, and that the history of twentieth- century black musical performance in culturally and nationally significant places/spaces constitutes the use of sound to “make room” for black presence.

South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten (review)

Reviewed by: South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten Hilary Baker South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten. By Jim Lovensheimer. (Broadway Legacies.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. [xvii, 266 p. ISBN 9780195377026. $27.95.] Music examples, photographs, appendices, bibliography, index. For many younger fans of the American musical, South Pacific may seem like a bit of a relic. To them, the show may be akin to an elderly family member whom you humor at family get-togethers, letting their slightly outdated choice of language and jokes (think, “There is Nothing Like a Dame”) slide because you enjoy their overall charm (evident in classic songs like “Some Enchanted Evening”). However, in recent years South Pacific has been the subject of renewed focus, mainly due to the critical and commercial success of the 2008 Lincoln Center revival directed by Bartlett Sher. In this production, Sher and his cast and crew made the show more sympathetic to contemporary audiences. Lovensheimer’s study thus comes at an ideal [End Page 71] moment, as it rides on the coattails of the resurgence of interest in this show, and delves into the qualities that make it so important to the history of the genre. Lovensheimer’s book is the first in the Broadway Legacies series, published by Oxford University Press. With Geoffrey Block as the series editor, an impressive roster of board members (including Stephen Banfield), and volumes that will focus on figures such as Agnes de Mille and works such as Show Boat, the series is an exciting and much-needed source for musical theater scholarship. Lovensheimer’s work seems an appropriate choice as the flagship title, with its focus on such an iconic yet timely work. The general project of a book on one specific musical should be applauded and emulated, since it allows for nuanced and detailed accounts of a show’s development, and its dramatic, cultural, and musical content. Another recent example of such a focused musical theater study is Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical by Tim Carter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). The next logical step in musical theater scholarship that we can hope for is that publishers and scholars will also devote in-depth musicological explorations of a single musical to examples that fall outside the “Golden Age.” Lovensheimer describes South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten as “an investigation of the work’s thematic concerns and how they were developed or altered during the creative process” (p. 10). He focuses this investigation on three primary themes. First, he looks at the manner in which Rodgers and Hammerstein fine-honed the show “until its confrontational thematic content was thought acceptable for mainstream Broadway audiences” (p. 7). Second, he accounts for changes made not for “thematic concerns” but rather “dramaturgical purposes,” i.e., changes that contributed to the completion of a well-edited piece of theater (p. 7). Third, he demonstrates that a close examination of the show’s development, and specific instances of its revision, supply “insight into the postwar era in which it was created” (p. 7). In addition to these three themes, throughout the book he also explores issues of “gender, postwar colonialism, and the changing image of U.S. business in the postwar era” (p. 7). Lovensheimer’s broad thematic scope, coupled with his detailed analyses, easily warrant the book length of this project, and make each chapter valuable in its own right. Before launching into the specific material of South Pacific, Lovensheimer provides a history of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s personal and professional involvement with political issues. This window into the political and ideological beliefs of these two figures constitutes one of the pleasantly surprising elements of the book. For example, the account of Hammerstein’s involvement in the Hollywood League against Nazism (also known as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League), coupled with an analysis of his exploration of race issues in various musicals, results in a more complete and sympathetic vision of the book writer than most readers probably possess. Lovensheimer dedicates a chapter to the original source material for the show, James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, providing a detailed reading of its characters, setting, and themes, and the problems its formal structure presents to adaptation. With...

On Matters of the Spirit

W hat can “the spiritual” mean today to our supposedly post-metaphysical, increasingly globalized world? What usefulness could the concept have to an era in which spiritual belief has been utterly co-opted by radical rightwing cultural politics, and just as utterly commodified by the wellness and experience tourism industries? Of what might a uniquely contemporary spirituality consist, a spirituality appropriate to our times? At a moment when these questions—and many related ones concerning secularism and post-secularism, broadly put—have radically divided opinion across the worlds of contemporary political, academic, and artistic debate, Lincoln Center unveiled its first annual White Light Festival, devoted to the topic of “the spiritual dimension of music.” While the festival didn’t actively seek definitive answers to these questions, it nevertheless invited reflection on them. Moreover, it provided ample opportunities for audiences to begin thinking about these problems in the light of three weeks’ worth of performance events, ranging from concerts by the Icelandic “post-rock” band Sigur Ros in concert with the Latvian National Choir and the UK’s Hilliard Ensemble, to The Manganiyar Seduction, an evening of Hindustani classical music and traditional Sufi performed by a group of thirty-eight Rajasthani, Muslim musicians. The festival’s producers could hardly be faulted for a lack of ambition.

Nancy Spero: the work

Among the most prominent women artists of the past half century, Nancy Spero (1926-2009) created a body of work of astonishing emotional range, from fierce anger, directed against war and sexism, to joyful sexual release. Working in isolation for decades, she was a central figure in the rise of women artists that transformed international art in the 1970s and '80s before gaining international recognition in her final two decades. Each of her extended series is extensively illustrated, including the Couples and War Series of the 1960s, works based on writings of Antonin Artaud, word and image scrolls of the 1970s, and the increasingly colourful multi-panel works and installations of the second half of her career. The book explores her artistic thought and describes the innovative techniques she developed, including the creation of a stock companyA of stamped figures of women. Sumptuously illustrated, this book showcases Spero's most magnificent works and includes gate-fold presentations of the artist's signature scrolls and a mosaic mural she created for the New York City subway station at Lincoln Center. This powerful and beautiful volume is an essential reference for one of contemporary art's most original and compelling figures.

Manhattan projects: the rise and fall of urban renewal in Cold War New York

Moving beyond the usual good-versus-evil story that pits master-planner Robert Moses against the plucky neighborhood advocate Jane Jacobs, Samuel Zipp sheds new light on the rise and fall of New York's urban renewal in the decades after World War II. Focusing on four iconic projects-the United Nations building, Stuyvesant Town, Lincoln Center, and the great swaths of public housing in East Harlem-Zipp unearths a host of forgotten stories and characters that flesh out the conventional history of urban renewal. He shows how boosters hoped to make Manhattan the capital of modernity and a symbol of American power, but even as the builders executed their plans, a chorus of critics revealed the dark side of those Cold War visions, attacking urban renewal for perpetuating deindustrialization, racial segregation, and class division; for uprooting thousands, and for implanting a new, alienating cityscape. Cold War-era urban renewal was not merely a failed planning ideal, Zipp concludes, but also a crucial phase in the transformation of New York into both a world city and one mired in urban crisis.

Let Freedom Swing: Conversations on Jazz and Democracy. A Resource for Teachers Featuring Wynton Marsalis and Sandra Day O’Connor. A Collaboration by Jazz at Lincoln Center, Documentary Group, and Teachers College, Columbia University. Teachers College Press, DVD.

<i>Let Freedom Swing: Conversations on Jazz and Democracy</i>. A Resource for Teachers Featuring Wynton Marsalis and Sandra Day O’Connor. A Collaboration by Jazz at Lincoln Center, Documentary Group, and Teachers College, Columbia University. Teachers College Press, DVD.

Streets and Stages: Urban Renewal and the Arts after World War II

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan and the revitalization of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn offer insights into the intersection of arts and urbanization after World War II. This intra-city comparison shows the aggrandizing pull of the international arena in the shaping of Lincoln Center and the arts it featured in contrast to the local focus and debate that transformed how BAM fit into its Brooklyn neighborhood. The performing arts, bound as they are to a moment fused in space and time, reveal the making of place within grandiose formal buildings as well as outside on the streets that surround them—and it is, perhaps, that tensile connection between stages and streets that informs the relevancy of both the institution and the arts it features. At a time when the suburbs pulled more and more people, the arts provided a counterforce in cities, as magnet and stimulus. The arts were used as compensation for the demolition and re-building of a neighborhood in urban renewal, but they also exposed the more complex social dynamics that underpinned the transformation of the mid-20th century American city from a segregated to a multi-faceted place.

Two Successions

Two Successions Johanna Keller (bio) Are comparisons odious or instructive? When it comes to one leader succeeding another, comparisons are inevitable. The new head of a complex organization—such as an orchestra or an opera company—will shift [End Page 116] priorities, import new talent, and redirect the vision. Very often a leader is brought in as a kind of corrective to the prior regime, as happens in national politics. Whether a new captain is deemed successful depends on a combination of wisdom, talent, timing, and luck. It also depends on expectations, largely engendered by what has come immediately before. The season's opening concerts of the New York Philharmonic this fall ushered in Alan Gilbert as the new music director, with colorful posters grandly trumpeting the start of "The Gilbert Era." At Avery Fisher Hall, the audience was abuzz—perhaps with hope for a new era and with a sense of relief that the old one had passed. In 2002, when Gilbert's immediate predecessor, Lorin Maazel, took the helm, it was after a lengthy and failed search for a young, dynamic conductor. Maazel (born in 1930) was widely viewed as a short-term place-holder, but his tenure dragged into seven seasons. Let's compare. First of all, the Philharmonic finally got its young leader—Gilbert is a relatively young forty-two. He is known for working hard in rehearsals, while Maazel was notorious for reading through repertoire with his players and then dismissing them early (the Philharmonic musicians—a tough bunch—loved Maazel for that at first, according to one orchestra musician who did not want to be quoted by name, but over the years grew weary of him because he did not push them musically). Gilbert has led most of the major orchestras as a guest, but is untested as the leader of a world-class orchestra, so this appointment will be a stretch for him—there is an inherent drama in whether he will succeed; Maazel arrived having headed orchestras in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Munich, with the Philharmonic as a kind of coda to his career. But more to the point, Gilbert has been dazzling this listener with energetic and fresh conducting since he appeared on the scene; in contrast, Maazel rarely delivered a memorable performance over the past three decades. Maazel is not untalented. On the contrary, his brilliant insights—apparent when he conducts well and in his best recordings—demonstrate a superior musical mind. He has the expressive body of a dancer, able to convey myriad subtleties of interpretation. But more often than not, whether out of boredom or laziness, he seems to give five percent on the podium, and as a listener, one feels simply shortchanged. So, the Gilbert Era began. From before the first night's downbeat, Gilbert had already put his stamp on the orchestra by reseating them. In recent decades the Philharmonic's first and second violinists have been seated to the conductor's left; Gilbert split the two sections, as is very often done mostly in Europe, placing the second violinists to his right and shifting the cellists toward the center of the stage with the violists. While there are arguments to be made for both seating arrangements, the immediate effect was that the Philharmonic musicians heard a new sound onstage and had to listen more carefully to one another. Keeping top-flight unionized orchestra musicians from delivering the same-old is one of a conductor's major challenges; this worked. [End Page 117] For the opening concert, telecast on Live From Lincoln Center, Gilbert chose a program with works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries in reverse order. The orchestra commissioned a ten-minute piece by Magnus Lindberg, the Finnish composer who is beginning his two-year appointment as the orchestra's composer-in-residence. At first hearing, the work came off as formless and incidental, without inherent architecture and far from one of this talented composer's better works. I'd like to hear it better conducted—but more on that in a moment. This was followed by the shimmering song cycle, Poèmes pour Mi, by Olivier Messiaen, gloriously sung by soprano Ren...

Introduction of Effective Analysis Methods for Construction Noise Assessment

Construction noise is one of the most disruptive noise sources in New York City. Large-scale projects especially can take more than a decade to complete, and often be located in areas with various sensitive noise receptors. A technological and reliable approach is required for evaluation of the construction noise and its impact in close proximity. This paper addresses construction noise analysis methods and mitigations, along with a case of noise study (i.e., Fordham University Lincoln Center), in accordance with the CEQR Technical Manual requirements and the New York City Noise Control Code regulations. Analysis methods (i.e., screening, detailed, and refined analyses) for construction noise assessment were introduced, and various construction mitigation options (i.e., source, path, and receiver measures) were examined and developed. The results indicated that the analysis methods were effective to assess noise impacts for large complicated construction projects, the mitigation measures were practical, and noise impacts at adjacent sensitive noise receptors were minimized or eliminated. The relevant experiences learned from the study may be beneficial for use of appropriate analysis methods and practical mitigation measures for large-scale construction projects in high-density urban environments.

A Case Analysis of the re-education program for teachers at Lincoln Center using the aesthetic education

A Case Analysis of the re-education program for teachers at Lincoln Center using the aesthetic education

Jes Olesen: the people's neurologist

Jes Olesen: the people's neurologist

Embracing resistance and asymmetry in pre-service teacher aesthetic education

This narrative account describes and analyzes the story of resistance to aesthetic education in an undergraduate pre-service teacher education program. After carefully listening to the students’ resistance to the Lincoln Center Institute’s aesthetic education component of their student teacher experience, the author designs a curriculum initiative to address the questions of relevance and application of aesthetic education in pre-service teacher preparation. This article follows the initiation, development, implementation, and evaluation of the aesthetic art initiative. Framed by Young’s (1997) understanding of ‘asymmetrical reciprocity’, the author suggests that three layers of asymmetry — instructor asymmetry, departmental asymmetry, and institutional asymmetry — may have influenced the pre-service teachers’ engagement with aesthetic education. This autoethnographic account asserts that embracing resistance and asymmetry may be important to the development of aesthetic education with pre-service teachers, and also yields insight into the ways contextual features of higher education may influence educational experiences.

The Mahabharata: Twenty-Five Years Later

At age eighty-five, Peter Brook does all he can to avoid interviews. He has no interest in his own legend, and as for his theatrical ideas, he has said it all before, in his autobiography (Threads of Time), in his other books (The Empty Space, The Shifting Point), and in the body of influential productions that established him as one of the giants of twentieth-century theatre. At the request of a common friend, he nevertheless kindly agreed to speak to me on the subject of his magnum opus, The Mahabharata—a focus of the book I was writing at the time (Great Lengths: Seven Marathon Plays from Three Decades, forthcoming). Brook was in New York rehearsing his adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at Lincoln Center and accompanying the Theatre for a New Audience presentation of Love is My Sin, his staging of Shakespeare sonnets. Although he announced in 2008 that he was giving up day-to-day operation of his theatre in Paris, Bouffes du Nord, he has been notably active. Among his other recent projects have been: Fragments, a program of five short pieces by Samuel Beckett; Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead; The Grand Inquisitor, adapted from Dostoyevsky; and Tierno Bokar, a parable about tolerance and fundamentalism rooted in a spiritual dispute among Sufis.

Lunch with the Critics: The New Lincoln Center

Lunch with the Critics: The New Lincoln Center

Manfred Robert Schroeder

Manfred Robert Schroeder

Dialogues: Genesis and Concept of Human Writes

The following is a transcription of the presentation by Kendall Thomas, co-creator with William Forsythe of the performance installation Human Writes, followed by a discussion with Thomas Keenan and Mark Franko. Kendall Thomas's talk was given simultaneously with a screening of a silent video documentation of the work. (The reader can find moving images of Human Writes at &lt;http://www.art-tv.ch/human_writes.html&gt;). The panel “Rights to Move: Choreographing the Human Rights Struggle,” of which this discussion was a part, also included the participation of Leah Cox, dancer of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The event was curated and moderated by Mark Franko and produced by Alan Pally, and it took place at the Bruno Walter Auditorium of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, on October 12, 2009.

Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard (review)

Reviewed by: Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard James Martin Cousineau, Thomas. Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008. 181 pp. $48.50. The critically acclaimed adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Lime Works (Das Kalkwerk) by Polish director Krystian Lupa as part of the Lincoln Center Festival in the summer of 2009 marked an important moment in the reception of the author’s works in the United States. For many Americans, the New York stage adaptation of this early novel was their first introduction to the works of one of Austria’s most influential writers of the late twentieth-century, rivaled only by Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek and the erstwhile enfant terrible of Austrian literature, Peter Handke. Bernhard, who died in 1989, shared these authors’ passion for theatricality, critique of language, and scathing caricatures of Austrian parochialism, which differentiates them from their German counterparts north of the Alps. Despite a self-declared ban on the publication of his works in Austria during his lifetime, Bernhard gained renown as one of Europe’s great modernist writers and was duly celebrated during his lifetime; yet he remains virtually unknown to American audiences. Three-Part Inventions by Thomas Cousineau, a Beckett scholar and professor of English literature, is thus a timely critical introduction to the novels of Thomas Bernhard for English-language readers seeking to understand the formal structures of Bernhard’s writing and to situate his work within the broader tradition of Anglo-American and European literary modernism. Cousineau’s study begins with an exposition of the seminal events of Bernhard’s life that shaped his character as a writer, relying on biographical information and assessments by literary critics and reviewers. In particular, he focuses on Bernhard’s development of a performative art of exaggeration that “revives in his readers the insane fury of Nazi rhetoric while transforming it into an art that safely ‘fails,’ as it were, to harm its designated victims” (26). While Cousineau is not a German speaker and thus must rely primarily upon English-language criticism with an occasional German, French, or even Italian source, he does offer a thorough and astute discussion of recent Bernhard criticism written within the purview of American German Studies. What he lacks in detailed background knowledge of Austrian literature and history, he more than makes up for in his insightful analysis of Bernhard’s “transformative” techniques from the rhetorical level to the metafictional. Throughout his analyses, Cousineau refers to the triangular relationship of protagonist–adversary–scapegoat [End Page 494] developed by Rene Girard as a touchstone for understanding Bernhard’s patterns of repetition and permutation that are more akin to motivic development in the musical invention, hence the title Three-Part Inventions, than traditional models of narrative development. Rather than expounding at length on Girard’s theories in a methodological prologue at the beginning of the book, the author reserves his discussion of the efficacy of his theoretical model for the afterword and proceeds with a direct investigation of Girard’s triadic structure and variations thereof in six of Bernhard’s major novels: The Lime Works (Das Kalkwerk), Correction (Korrektur), The Loser (Der Untergeher), Woodcutters (Holzfällen), Old Masters (Alte Meister), and Extinction (Auslöschung). Tracing the development of Bernhard’s narrative technique chronologically across his novelistic output, the chapters start with “fugal beginnings” in reference to The Lime Works and the establishment of the Girardian tripartite model of mimetic desire that creates a need for a scapegoat. The author provides an equal mix of close textual readings backed up with discussions of secondary literature on Bernhard, including numerous articles from journals like Modern Austrian Literature and English-language monographs on Bernhard where available. He also discusses the role of the visual arts, theater, and music in Bernhard’s writing, for example the influence of Bach and Beethoven as models, and he draws illuminating literary connections to Greek myth, Dante, Shakespeare, and various Anglo and European modernists including Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. This is where Cousineau’s argument is at its strongest in both explicating Bernhard’s highly idiosyncratic writing style and successfully placing it within...

The battle of Lincoln Square: neighbourhood culture and the rise of resistance to urban renewal

This article considers the organized resistance to urban renewal at Lincoln Square in New York between 1956 and 1959. The Lincoln Square Urban Renewal Project cleared ground for acres of luxury slab‐block tower housing, facilities for Fordham University and its much‐heralded centrepiece, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Lincoln Center gave urban renewal its most high‐minded mission: providing the nation with an image of cultural maturity and urban resurgence for use in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. Organized resistance to relocation at Lincoln Square brought growing discontent with urban renewal to the attention of a citywide audience. Most importantly, the Lincoln Square resisters defended the complex social world of their old neighbourhood and revealed a vision of urban culture diametrically opposed to that on offer at Lincoln Center. They showed that endangered domestic spaces were complemented by an elaborate and also imperilled public world made up of informal commercial connections between the neighbourhood's residents and businesspeople. Ultimately, this resistance not only raised the alarm over urban renewal, but provided the glimmer of a new urban vision based on the complexity of the urban neighbourhood not the simplicity of the modern superblock.