Description
Book SynopsisUsing examples from architecture, film, literature, and the visual arts, this wide-ranging book examines the place and significance of New York City in the urban imaginary between 1890 and 1940. In particular, Imagining New York City considers how and why certain city spaces - such as the skyline, the sidewalk, the slum, and the subway - have come to emblematize key aspects of the modern urban condition. In so doing, the book also considers the ways in which cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for more recent responses to a variety of urban challenges facing the city, such as post-disaster recovery, the renewal of urban infrastructure, and the remaking of public space.
Trade ReviewAn evocative and insightful reading of "this endlessly mutable city". * PD Smith, The Guardian *
New York City is the most overly analyzed, overly discussed city on the globe. Yet Lindner has something fresh and significant to say ... This intellectually challenging book is also extremely readable, an outcome rare in academic writing. Highly recommended. * G. R. Butters Jr., CHOICE *
This wonderfully rich and engaging book focuses on a transformative period in New York City's history to explore how and why it has so thoroughly captured modern urban imaginations. * David Pinder, author of Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism *
An exciting and compelling book, Imagining New York City provides a major contribution to the study of cultural Modernism and urban visual culture. With a richly drawn narrative and a deft interweaving of texts and images, this is clearly a first class writer at work. * Joseph Heathcott, Associate Professor of Urban Studies at The New School and President of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History *
Drawing on a rich array of literary, visual, and urbanistic materials, Christoph Lindner offers an intellectually playful, theoretically incisive guide to the cultural history of modern New York. Taking us up skylines and down sidewalks, Lindner makes it clear that imagining New York has been a crucial way of understanding urban modernity. * David Scobey, author of Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape *
worthwhile and insightful reading for anyone interested in New York City or cultural representations of urban spaces, in general. * Nico Völker, Kult_online *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements ; Introduction ; Archive City ; Changing New York ; Modern City, Urban Imaginary ; Skylines and Sidewalks ; After City ; Part 1 - Skylines ; New York Vertical ; The City from Above ; Requiem for the Twin Towers ; Building the Skyline: A Brief Architectural History ; Text and the City ; New York Dreamscapes ; Fantasy Island ; After-Images of New York ; Revisioning the Skyscraper ; Cinema and the Vertical City ; The City from Greenwich Village ; Metrotopia ; The Empty City ; New York Undead ; Part 2 - Sidewalks ; New York Horizontal ; Sidewalks and Public Space ; A Short History of the Grid ; Street-Walking ; Broadway Promenade ; Manhattan Flaneuse ; Blase Metropolitan Attitude ; City of Slums ; Sidewalks and Fear ; Tales of the Tenement ; New York Underground ; Elevated City ; High Line, Lowline ; Subway City ; Underground Fantasies ; Slow Street ; Afterword ; Bibliography
