Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem (review)

In her magisterial account of the Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs likens urban life to "an intricate ballet in which all the dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole" (50). Seldom has Jacobs' analogy been more completely captured, enlivened, and compellingly realized than in Robert Dowling's Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem. In an effort to "consider new ways of reading realist narratives by outsiders" in such a way as to simultaneously free "the insider voice" from the limiting and too easy identity restrictions of being from "neighborhoods like the East Side waterfront," or "the Bowery," Dowling performs a rather brilliant and incredibly useful sleight of hand (3). As Dowling explains in the book's opening passages, "I invert the popular usage . . . so that 'insider' replaces 'outsider,'" and when read alongside each other, these various voices interanimate each other and "[t]aken as a whole . . . reveal a more open pattern of social transformation and moral experimentation" than has generally been understood or accepted (1-2). Dowling's book reveals the imaginative and interpretive force which comes with interdisciplinary and synthetic thinking, the latter being especially relevant to Slumming. Chapters continually juxtapose slumming outsiders against often considerably lesser known inside voices and perform an interpretive give and take which cumulatively have the effect of forcing the reader not only to question his or her preconceived modes of understanding, but even to suspend judgment altogether. This strikes me as the great gift of Dowling's book. During the period the book investigates, roughly the 1880s through 1930, New York experienced a time of tremendous growing pains which were not limited to the infrastructural pressures that came as a result of a massive population expansion (from immigration and domestic migration). To be sure, this is a period of significant social anxiety, a time in which the city breaks into balkanized neighborhoods or zones, and a time in which the "other" becomes a source of increasing social, cultural, and political concern. As Dowling explains, mainstream modes of representation during this period of New York life were characterized by a complicated blend of sentiment and sensation which grew "into a new mode that might be called 'moral realism,' a fusion of the romantic and the pragmatic" (21). One of the principal aims of moral realism was to learn to read, to understand, and represent the growing body of the other on its own terms, and, inevitably, via its own voice. As he explains of the real world stake in allowing the representing voices to speak freely and beyond the language of stereotype, "If ethnic neighborhoods were to be cultivated and appreciated by the larger community in New York, they must first be endowed with the cultural "stock"—or cultural "capital"—that a boy on the Bowery would be proud to retain, not forced to reject" (136). And while Dowling does a good job in pointing out the inherent prejudices and power discrepancies in applying the "moral realism" paradigm, he does a great job in showing why and how it succeeded for the good, both then and now. Readers familiar with some of the outsider narratives from this time period will undoubtedly know and have been bothered by the touristic quality which attends many of these accounts, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives comes to mind. The afterlife of these mainstream narratives still casts a long and sometimes over determining shadow. But Slumming in New York sheds a much-needed light here. By placing the outside and inside voices in conversation with each other, Dowling also foregrounds the inherent conflict between voices which speak with historically and politically sanctioned authority—which too often includes the power to define and demarcate a topic—and those voices which were too quickly marginalized and diminished because their content and composition tended to raise as many questions...