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Synopsis
Winner of the 2001 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.
"It'll be a great place if they ever finish it," O. Henry wrote about New York City. This laconic remark captures the relentlessly transitory character of New York, and it points toward Max Page's synthetic perspective. Against the prevailing motif of a naturally expanding metropolis, Page argues that the early-twentieth-century city was dominated by the politics of destruction and rebuilding that became the hallmark of modern urbanism.
The oxymoron "creative destruction" suggests the tensions that are at the heart of urban life: between stability and change, between particular places and undifferentiated spaces, between market forces and planning controls, and between the "natural" and "unnatural" in city growth. Page investigates these cultural counterweights through case studies of Manhattan's development, with depictions ranging from private real estate development along Fifth Avenue to Jacob Riis's slum clearance efforts on the Lower East Side, from the elimination of street trees to the efforts to save City Hall from demolition.
In these examples some New Yorkers celebrate planning by destruction or marvel at the domestication of the natural environment, while others decry the devastation of their homes and lament the passing of the city's architectural heritage. A central question in each case is the role of the past in the shaping of collective memory—which buildings are preserved? which trees are cut down? which fragments are enshrined in museums? Contrary to the popular sense of New York as an ahistorical city, the past—as recalled bypowerful citizens—was, in fact, at the heart of defining how the city would be built.
Beautifully illustrated and written in clear, engaging prose, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan offers a new way of viewing the development of the American city.
"An excellent, multifaceted analysis of the process of urban development-not the inevitability of development but the choices individuals, organizations, and developers made that transformed Manhattan. The politics of place was, Max Page convincingly argues, an ongoing battle to define and thereby control the evolving shape of the city."—David Schuyler, author of Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing 1815-1852
"Max Page transcends the usual dichotomy between those who glorify destruction for the sake of change and those who would avoid both at all cost. The sizeable borderland between architecture and preservation reveals new dimensions about science and history, innovation and memory, the cities that have been, and those yet to come."—Gwendolyn Wright, author of The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism
"A sober, humane explanation of how and why New York City became a place of continuous rebuilding. . . . For real or armchair New Yorkers, the whole package is a treat."—Kirkus Reviews
Publishers Weekly
In 1904, Henry James noted that New York was "crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history." The image of Manhattan as an urban center so much on the move that it exists only in the present and future has become enshrined in the popular imagination. In eight engrossing, interconnected essays, Page, who teaches history at Yale, traces Manhattan's constant reinvention, often at the expense of preserving a concrete past. Describing this process as "creative destruction"--a phrase first used by economist Joseph Schumpeter to characterize the process of capitalism--Page delineates the complex historical circumstances, economics, social conditions and personalities that have produced crucial changes in Manhattan's cityscape. Focusing on specific events and projects--including the evolution of Fifth Avenue as an elite residential and commercial boulevard between 1824 and 1924; the destruction of Mulberry Bend, "the wickedest of American slums," in the late 1880s; and the constant battle to promote the planting and growth of trees on the island--Page's study teases out such important issues as how social class has been defined in the city and the conflict between nature and urbanization. Carefully setting his miniature portraits of Manhattan history within a vivid panorama, Page raises pivotal questions concerning the role of cities in shaping the framework of everyday life and the broader sweep of history and nationhood. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.