Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924

Introduction

In 1941, Claude Lévi-Strauss, living as a refugee in New York and developing the ideas that would lay the foundation for structural anthropology, found himself enchanted by his urban surroundings. The monumental modernist architecture that dominated the metropolis, he realized, imposed only a superficial layer of order on the landscape. Wandering down “miles of Manhattan avenues” and cross streets like a latter-day flâneur, he found the“physiognomy”of the urban landscape changing“from one block to the next: sometimes poverty-stricken, sometimes middle class or provincial , and most often chaotic.”New York appeared an“immense vertical and horizontal disorder attributable to some spontaneous upheaval of the urban crust.”1 Confronted with this apparent disorder, the anthropologist remained unbaffled. To him, these little islands of culture, cut off from their contexts and deposited as the debris of history on the shores of Manhattan, revealed their“secret affinities”with different times and places.“Whoever wanted to go hunting,” he wrote about his New York experience later, needed only “a little culture, and flair, for doorways to open in the wall of industrial civilization and reveal other worlds and other times.” New York was a collision of the old and the new, where,“in the disorder of a changing society, social strata were violently disrupted, sliding over one another and creating huge holes which engulfed styles and bodies of knowledge.”2 A house in Greenwich Village recalled “Paris in Balzac’s time.” Harlem, Chinatown, the Puerto Rican district, Little Italy, Greek, Czech, Scandinavian , Finnish, and other neighborhoods seemed like time warps where along with “their restaurants and their places of worship and entertainment ,”“they had preserved customs and stories that had vanished without ix introduction a trace in the old countries.” With exhilaration, Lévi-Strauss remembers “the performances that we watched for hours at the Chinese opera under the first arch of the Brooklyn Bridge, where a company that had come long ago from China had a large following. . . . I felt myself going back in time no less when I went to work every morning in the American room of the New York Public Library. There . . . I sat near an Indian in a feather headdress and a beaded buckskin jacket—who was taking notes with a Parker pen.”3 But despite Lévi-Strauss’s ambulant, almost wistful remembrance of ethnic things past, the visual order he himself imposes on this chaotic landscape , James Clifford has observed, is informed by a “unified perspective” that remains rooted in the notion of culture as organic unity, anchored in time, place, and language—even as New York, the embodiment of modernity , relegates that notion of culture to the past. Ethnic neighborhoods and Chinese opera appear as time capsules, specimens of genuine and authentic cultures about to face extinction in the “emerging uniformity” of mass culture.4 Indeed, the “one-dimensional fate” of modern culture announces itself most keenly in one key symptom: the “need to escape.” This need, LéviStrauss remarks, is present in the tendency of American women to “disguise ”themselves,“dressed as little sailors,Egyptian dancing girls,or pioneer women of the Far West.” It appears in the “art of shopwindows,” which “presented their collections on dummies acting out dramatic scenes—rapes, murders, kidnappings—settings, lightings and colors realized with a consummate skill that would have been the envy of the finest theaters.” It also makes itself felt in the lives of Lévi-Strauss’s American colleagues and friends, who exchange the comforts of East Side luxury for the rustic life of Long Island and the illusion of being homesteaders that goes with it.5 The tropes Lévi-Strauss employed in this cultural mapping of 1940s New York are familiar to the repertoire of the urban exploration narrative, which became exceedingly popular in Gilded Age America, when rapid industrial growth and immigration set the stage for an urban expansion that made its landscapes unrecognizable to its erstwhile inhabitants. These narratives responded to the visual chaos of the new metropolis with a scopic regime that uncovered its underlying semiotic codes and registers. They imposed an epistemological grid on the city that consistently mapped the congruence of place (neighborhood), class, labor, body and physiognomy, language , customs, and (ethnic) identity. At the same time, they were haunted by those instances in which this visual order broke down, and the slippages, x Introduction improvisations...