The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of Americanization

By the late nineteenth century, regionalists such as Hamlin Garland, as well as literary critics more generally, considered the adjective picturesque to mean "superficial," an overused and commercial mode of representation. This opinion was commonplace as early as the 1850s when Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance was criticized for its "picturesque detail" and its subsequent lack of "moral depth and earnestness." ¹ More concerned with surfaces than depths, this aesthetic continued to fall into disfavor among literary critics in the late nineteenth century when the term completely saturated the marketplace of guidebooks and travel narratives: common were such titles as Picturesque America, Picturesque Italy, Picturesque California, and Picturesque New York to name but a few. Nearly every nation in Europe, not to mention almost every state in the Union, seemed to have its own illustrated book attesting to its regional uniqueness. Despite this context of critical disrepute and commercial excess, the term actually played a formative role in the popular representation of American modernization. In the emergent magazine culture of the late nineteenth century, the picturesque sought to make modernity less terrifying by making it familiar through a gradualist approach that linked old concepts with new phenomena. Its hackneyed language promised to turn the urban realities of class disparity and ethnic heterogeneity into potentially pleasant aspects of the modern experience.

Of all the American cities at the turn of the century, New York best satisfied the material requirements for the picturesque, namely a dramatic chasm between rich and poor combined with cultural diversity. In 1890, it became the first American city to reach a population of one million; and by 1910, over three-fourths of its inhabitants were either foreign-born or the children of immigrants. In Poverty, Robert Hunter's 1904 classic about the urban poor, he estimated that no less than 25 percent of the people of New York City lived in poverty. Among immigrant workers, he claimed that over 40 percent were unemployed for some part of the year. In 1892, Lyman Abbott noted that New York represented a "microcosm" of "all the contrasts of our modern life,--its worst and its best aspects." Anxieties about modernity focused on New York; it became the site where the fears of unruly and polyglot hordes and the "dangerous classes" were projected and elaborated. For Josiah Strong, New York signified a "City of Destruction," a bastion of Romanism, socialism and decadence, which threatened the yeoman ideals of an earlier age. For Joaquin Miller in The Destruction of Gotham, it represented a "new Babel" on the brink of collapse: "All Europe, all Asia, all Africa, the whole wide earth has sent up her best, worst, weakest, strongest, most wicked, wild, and reckless people, to the building of this new Babel." ² Gendering New York and presenting catastrophe as female hysteria, Miller concluded that the city's excessive heterogeneity had "made her mad." A generation before the 1920s, heterogeneity and New York City were already fused in the American imagination as "Mongrel Manhattan," to borrow Ann Douglas's phrase. ³ For some, this fusion inspired disturbing images of bedlam, while for others it created the positive basis for redefining and modernizing American nationhood.

In contrast to the sensational fiction of sublime terror or the nativist anxieties of looming catastrophe, what I call the "urban picturesque" provided another way of representing the metropolis, one that transformed the everyday marvels of modernity into a "whole wondrous spectacle." The urban picturesque was the aesthetic expression of Herbert Spencer's notion of "progress" as the evolution from "homogeneity to heterogeneity," which played into a triumphalist narrative of national development. New York City displayed to the nation and to the world that its "heterogeneous foreignness" was a "real triumph." ⁴ At its most fundamental level, the urban picturesque afforded a new way of apprehending urban space by making inequality and immigrant diversity expected elements of modernity. It signaled a constellation of aesthetic practices...