Abstract
The frenetic rhythm in which turn-of-the-century American urban space changed as a result of population growth, the dominance of economic motives and technological prowess generated cultural assumptions of America’s future greatness that left no physical room for ruins. This forward-looking perspective found its materialization in spatial forms through “creative destruction” strategies that dominated turn-of-the-century urban politics. This essay explores nonfictional representations of New York City and contends that nineteenth-century American ruins elicited concern about America’s self-fashioning as a young nation oriented towards social progress and unfettered material pursuit. The belief in an uninterrupted linear narrative of progress made New York the place where newness and reconstruction were physically demonstrated in the city’s built environment and would not let be undermined by urban ruination.
I borrow this phrase from Max Pensky’s essay “Three Kinds of Ruin: Heidegger, Benjamin, Sebald” where he argues that “implicit in [Heidegger’s] pastoralism is the principle that there must be no ruins” (Pensky 2011, 73).
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- 1.
Heidegger’s lecture on “Bauen Wohnen Denken” was published in the form of an essay in 1954 and in English in 1971.
- 2.
In Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (1995), Berkhofer argues in favour of a voice, a viewpoint and a practice of history that is reflexive, plural and challenging. Nevertheless, the narrativization of the past as history, following the nineteenth-century model of narrative, meant organizing historical content into a single coherent story.
- 3.
As Schumpeter characteristically wrote, trying to understand capitalist economy without entrepreneurial innovation that brings about “gales of creative destruction” is “like Hamlet without the Danish prince” (emphasis in the original 1976, 86).
- 4.
In 1890, the superintendent of the US Census announced that rapid western settlement meant that “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line” (“Closing the Western Frontier”).
- 5.
In his path-breaking essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner assigned transformative powers to the frontier. Not only did urbanization in the United States occur alongside westward expansion, but the cultural forces necessary to frontier life were readjusted to accommodate the needs and energy of late nineteenth-century urban growth. Urbanization undoubtedly played a crucial role in sustaining American exceptionalism.
- 6.
The first Tenement House Act passed in 1867 was followed by the “Old Law” Tenement Act in 1879 which produced what is known as “dumbbell tenements.” However, it was the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 that met the broader concerns of urban planning.
- 7.
On slum ruins see also Chapter 3, “Dickens’s Animate Ruins ,” where Michael Hollington discusses Dickens’s response to London’s ruinous slums.
- 8.
The creative impulse that dominated the late nineteenth century greatly continued to affect urban development politics and public policy strategies for the next hundred years. In the 1930s, the New Deal institutionalized large-scale programmes of slum clearance. During the 1950s in New York, Robert Moses led the largest slum clearance programme in the United States.
- 9.
James Ford, Slums and Housing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), qtd. in Page (1999, 96).
- 10.
Yablon also speaks of unfinished or abandoned constructions: “New York’s ruination appears to precede the completion of its buildings, or indeed the very commencement of their construction” (2009, 124).
- 11.
“Old New York” in Wharton’s novels, both as an actual place and a symbolic landscape has been extensively analysed, and therefore, it will not be further discussed in this essay.
- 12.
James’s most eloquent fictional account of his relationship to the city of his birth is his short story “The Jolly Corner .” This “profoundly autobiographical tale” (Edel 1972, 322), which discloses much of James’s complex reaction to the changes of New York, has been extensively analysed and therefore it will not be further discussed.
- 13.
See Lynne B. Sagalyn (2016) for a detailed account of the controversies between the multiple forces underlying the decision-making in the world’s most visible redevelopment project.
- 14.
Waldman’s The Submission follows the memorial design competition as it actually took place—the forums and meetings of different constituent groups, the confidentiality of the jurors, the anonymous selection of the finalists.
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Tsimpouki, T. (2019). “There Must Be No Ruins”: Ruinophobia and Urban Morphology in Turn-of-the-Century New York. In: Mitsi, E., Despotopoulou, A., Dimakopoulou, S., Aretoulakis, E. (eds) Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_7
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