Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture

An Overview and an Underview: Uneven Development and the Social Production of American Underworlds

An Overview and an Underview: Uneven Development and the Social Production of American Underworlds This book is a journey into the depths of human misery and perversity, but it begins where you would least expect it: on top of one of the loveliest buildings in the world. In 1905 the journalist Edgar Saltus stood aloft Daniel Burnham’s Fuller Building at Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in order to see for himself “the most extraordinary panorama in the world—a survey of the American metropolis.”1 The twenty-three story,triangularbuilding,popularlyknownastheFlatiron,wastheworld’s first skyscraper and a stunning harbinger of America’s emergent modern capitalist economy. The Flatiron captured, according to Alfred Stieglitz’s sanguine description, “a new America still in the making.”2 Saltus, too, recognized that the building signaled a change in the city and the nation, but perhaps an ominous one: “Its front is lifted to the future. On the past its back is turned. Of what has gone on before it is American in its unconcern” (210). The hull of the Flatiron seemed to confidently announce “full steam ahead” into the future. When it was unveiled to the public in 1903, however , there were widespread fears that the narrow building might topple over and crush its spectators, and thus for a time its upper floors remained empty. But by 1905, when Saltus climbed to the top for Munsey’s Magazine, concerns over its structural unsoundness had been laid to rest. From an Olympian height above New York City this is what Saltus saw, or perhaps it is better to say, this is what he imagined: Meanwhile, on those toppest floors, the eager sun, aslant, shuttles the mounting roar. In the noise and glare you need but a modicum 2 / an overview and an underview of imagination to fancy yourself contemplating a volcano in active operation, one that is erupting gold, coining dollars in its depths, and tossing them in the crystalline air—whence they fall, as rain falls, on those who know enough not to come in, who get in the way, fight for a place, and hold it until they have made their pile. It is not of course from such as these that gods shall come, rather a race similar to the curious dwarfs of whom Pliny told, pygmies that passed their lives fighting with phantoms for coin. So, too, fight those that you behold from the toppest floors. The struggle is the impetus of their little lives, the substances of their loves and hates; it is the magnet that draws them from regions quasi-polar, wholly tropical, from zones remoter yet, from those nethermost planes where Dante went. (209; emphasis added) After this epic description, Saltus turned southward—turning “you” with him—and looked to “the lower East Side” and to “the Chinese quarter,” and described the first as “a caldron [sic]” and the second as “a sewer” (210). The new vertical architecture of corporate capitalism made possible a way of seeing that the older, horizontal civic architecture of court houses and city halls could not. It simultaneously allowed Saltus a totalizing vision of the city and it turned loose his urban imagination in the “nethermost planes.” From on high, Saltus could not only see far but he could also see deep, or at the very least he could intimate depth in the form of an exotic volcano of production spewing gold for the “curious dwarfs” who turned raw material into profit. From on high he could see “Upper Fifth Avenue” where the “gods” of industry lived and the downtown immigrant “sewer” where the “pygm[y]” workers huddled, and he also could see that they were bound to each other (208, 210). “Dante told of the inferno,” Saltus wrote, “He told, too, of paradise. Manhattan may typify both” (201). In short, Saltus grasped capitalism’s dynamic and polarizing logic of uneven geographical and social development. On a clear day, high above the world, Saltus could discern how the ideology of unequal development had been inscribed into the geography of the city. Saltus’s petition for us to look recalls Karl Marx’s invitation to the reader in Capital to accompany him and “Mr. Moneybags” below “the surface . . . into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business.’ Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at [3.14.6.194] Project...