The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980 ed. by Katherine A. Bussard, Alison Fisher and Greg Foster-Rice (review)

In the late 1960s on Chicago’s West Side, an African American gang called the Vice Lords turned away from turf battles and street fights. Concerned about the example that members were setting for neighborhood youth and believing that gang infighting perpetuated larger racial and economic oppressions, the group sought to improve relations among neighborhood gangs while also participating in actions for civil and economic rights and developing black-owned businesses. It announced its transformation with a new name: Conservative Vice Lords, Inc. Social justice filmmaker DeWitt Beall’s 1970 documentary Lord Thing chronicles this struggle for political viability in an illuminating representation of life during the decades of America’s urban crisis.¹

Lord Thing is just one of the dozens of projects undertaken by city dwellers from a variety of backgrounds in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s discussed in the visually absorbing volume The City Lost and Found. The book, which complements an exhibit of the same name in 2014 and 2015 at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Princeton University Art Museum, includes 250 images (many in color), twenty-six short essays by an interdisciplinary array of scholars, and three longer essays. Together, they explore initiatives by urban artists, activists, and planners who aimed to transform, in the words of editors Katherine Bussard, Alison Fisher, and Greg Foster-Rice, “conditions of crisis into provocative and visually compelling statements about the culture, landscape, and politics of the three largest cities in the United States” (10).

The striking visual material—including photography, planning documents, popular media, community organizing publications, and stills from films (feature and documentary) and performance art—creates a fascinating collage of city life during the upending 1960s and 1970s. Collectively, it addresses three broad themes. The first, preservation, reflects the call made by many urban dwellers to prevent further social and physical disintegration of their neighborhoods. The second, demonstration, includes a range of politicized art along with photography and cinematic representations of protests and uprisings. The third, renewal, encompasses projects that proposed specific solutions to urban problems along with more sweeping reimaginations of urban life.

The City Lost and Found is hardly the first volume to highlight how residents of U.S. cities undertook creative initiatives to comment on, and remedy, the so-called urban crisis. In the 1980s and 1990s, historians such as Arnold Hirsch and Thomas Sugrue traced the roots of the crisis through local and federal policies, housing segregation, and deindustrialization and job loss.² And for well over a decade, the literature has explored how working-class people of color, in particular, used protest, community organizing, strikes, lawsuits, and political campaigns to attempt to remake their troubled environments. But scholars have generally overlooked the importance of art and other visual material in understanding these efforts.

The volume’s greatest strength is its images. These include pictures of gritty street life of the sort often conjured up in public remembrances of this pregentrification era, such as Helen Levitt’s and Martha Rosler’s photos of New York in the 1960s and 1970s. The collection also depicts the period’s protests and uprisings through, for example, Barton Silverman’s and Fred McDarrah’s stirring shots from the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. While photos of this type are familiar, several of those included were never widely seen or have long been forgotten. This arresting material is augmented by Bussard’s essay arguing that the images of demonstrations and protests that filled newspapers, magazines, and television reports in the 1960s reflected “a shift in photographic, cinematic, and planning practices that privileged the close observation of streets, neighborhoods, and seminal urban events” while simultaneously shaping...