Public Space in 19th Century in NY

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by: [TÜBİTAK EKUAL]On: 22 April 2011Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 772815468]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Annals of the Association of American GeographersPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t788352614

Those “Gorgeous Incongruities”: Polite Politics and Public Space on theStreets of Nineteenth-Century New York CityMona Domosha

a Florida Atlantic University,

Online publication date: 15 March 2010

To cite this Article Domosh, Mona(1998) 'Those “Gorgeous Incongruities”: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets ofNineteenth-Century New York City', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88: 2, 209 — 226To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1111/1467-8306.00091URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.00091

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t788352614

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.00091

http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

Those “Gorgeous Incongruities”: PolitePolitics and Public Space on the Streetsof Nineteenth-Century New York City

Mona Domosh

College of Liberal Arts, Florida Atlantic University

The streets of mid-nineteenth-century New York City were sites of complex social engagementsand economic activity. The promenades along both Broadway and Fifth Avenue were highly scriptedrituals, where social mores and upper-class values were enacted and embodied on a daily basis.Focusing on analyses of three images, I argue that these streets were also the sites of political activity,but a politics that I define as “micropolitics” of “tactical” transgressions made possible by thestructure of these social rituals. By making such an argument, I show how the streets of nineteenth-century cities were neither completely democratic nor totally controlled public spaces. I also providea broader alternative to thinking about politics, one that understands the complex and contextualnature of human agency, and suggest that our frameworks for thinking about contemporary publicspace may be blinding us to potential sites of transgression. Key Words: public space, micropolitics,transgression, New York City.

Ellen Olenska, the heroine of Edith Whar-ton’s novel The Age of Innocence (1968), isimmediately marked as an outsider to New

York society when she returns from Europe andstrolls on Fifth Avenue with Julius Beaufort, aman of questionable virtues. Mrs. Welland, aprominent social figure in the city, thinks to her-self: “It’s a mistake for Ellen to be seen, the veryday after her arrival, parading up Fifth Avenue atthe crowded hour with Julius Beaufort” (1968:32). This first social faux pas defines her characterirrevocably, since Ellen Olenska could have de-clared her impropriety no more extensively thanby her transgression on Fifth Avenue, the mostpublic thoroughfare in middle-class New York, onthe day after her arrival in the city. Similarly, LilyBart, the tragic heroine of Wharton’s The Houseof Mirth (1984), positions herself outside thebounds of decorum when she is seen on the wrongstreet in New York, at the wrong time of day, andis forced to lie about her destination, a lie thatultimately leads to her destruction. Edith Whar-ton saw the streets of New York as a public stage,where the intricate scripts of bourgeois behaviorwere played out each and every day. And as publicstages, the scripts were monitored closely.

Wharton’s streets of nineteenth-century NewYork seem to bear very little resemblance to theimages of streets created by recent scholarship onmodernizing cities. Scholars lamenting the loss of

public space in the postmodern city depict thestreets of the nineteenth century as the preemi-nent sites of “democracy and pleasure” (Sorkin1992: xv). Michael Sorkin, for example, speaks ofthe nineteenth-century city as a “more authenticurbanity,” comprised of “streets and squares,courtyards and parks.” He counterposes this“authentic urbanity” of the past with the cities, or“theme parks,” of the present, places that havelost their traditional moorings in space andtime (Sorkin 1992: xv). In drawing these con-clusions, Sorkin is pulling together differentthreads of recent cultural criticism and politicaltheory that posit connections between the de-cline of the democratic, public sphere and thedisappearance of public spaces.1 Other urbanscholars, such as Mike Davis (1991) and Ed-ward Soja (1989), suggest similar scenarios,particularly as they describe a Los Angeles thathas lost any connection to real communities,and whose public spaces have become “milita-rized”—that is, fenced-in and controlled byprivate interests.

Yet analyses of behavior in the public spaces ofnineteenth-century American cities suggests thatthese spaces too were often controlled by privateinterests, and were not necessarily any moredemocratic in the sense of tolerating deviantbehavior than are our postmodern “theme parks”(Davis 1986; Domosh 1996; Abelson 1989).

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(2), 1998, pp. 209–226©1998 by Association of American GeographersPublished by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

Downloaded By: [TÜBTAK EKUAL] At: 07:59 22 April 2011

Edith Wharton’s characters were not free intheir behavior on the streets of New York; theywere intensely guarded in their displays, awareall the time of how their public behavior com-municated their identities. This, then, is a dif-ferent sense of “public,” where public spacerefers to places under public scrutiny, removedfrom the privacy of the domestic.2 In these publicspaces, a governing set of social norms controlledbehavior, and therefore it is difficult to suggestthat these spaces contributed to a completelydemocratic public sphere, where people were freeto express themselves.

Through an analysis of three select images ofstreet life in mid-nineteenth-century New YorkCity, I provide case studies of how social normswere embodied in the everyday, public actions ofpeople on the streets. I also suggest that thosesocial controls were never completely hegemonic.I argue that socially controlled street spaces couldserve as sites of political and social transgressions,but in ways different from those suggested bySorkin and others. It is only by looking carefullyat the often hidden codes of social performancethat such slight transgressions can be made ap-parent. Our recent conceptual frameworks foranalyzing the nature of public space seem todirect our attention elsewhere. By providingthis analysis of the streets of a nineteenth-centurycity, I hope to show that the democratic poten-tial of public spaces may still be possible, evenin our contemporary “theme parks,” if we directcareful attention toward slight, everydaytransgressions.

Conceptualizing Public Space

The ideas expressed by Sorkin and othersabout the nature of public space draw on whatDon Mitchell argues are the two “predominantways of seeing public space in contemporary cit-ies,” ways that correspond to a dichotomy set upby Lefebvre3 (Mitchell 1995: 115). On the oneside, space serves as the arena for human action,and public spaces are the sites of human actionunconstrained by political or social laws or mores.They are the places where people are free to voiceopinions, and to actively engage in behaviors thatrun counter to dominant societal norms. Mitchellcounterposes this view of public space with thatreferred to by Lefebvre as representations ofspace. In this view, space is purposely repre-sentational of certain societal ideals, and there-

fore the holders of these ideals attempt to controlits use. Public space in this sense is a “controlledand orderly retreat where a properly behaved pub-lic might experience the spectacle of the city”(Mitchell 1995: 115, emphasis in original).

According to Mitchell, the publicness of spacesis constantly being negotiated through a dialecti-cal relationship between these two visions:“Whatever the origins of any public space, itsstatus as ‘public’ is created and maintainedthrough the ongoing opposition of visions thathave been held, on the one hand, by those whoseek order and control and, on the other, by thosewho seek places for oppositional political activityand unmediated interaction” (115). This schemafor thinking about the publicness of spaces ispowerful and useful. It helps us understand thepassionate fights over the uses and control ofpublic parks, shopping malls, and urban plazas. Italso helps to explain how scholars have inter-preted the public spaces of nineteenth-centurycities, particularly how they contrast what theybelieve were the unconstrained public spaces ofthe past with the controls of the present. Yet, asa schema, it outlines only the broad contours ofthe arguments about what constitutes urban pub-lic space. What I suggest here is that on closeinspection, and in particular cases, these oppos-ing visions as outlined by Mitchell do not providea sufficient descriptive framework.

First of all, by creating a framework of opposingpositions, theorists set up two extreme positionsthat cannot adequately describe the complexitiesof real life. For example, it is difficult, if notimpossible, to imagine spaces of complete, unme-diated interaction. Even homeless communitiesexisting on the edges of mainstream society estab-lish their own sets of social norms, so that certainforms of behavior are simply not tolerated inparticular “homeless” spaces (Rowe and Wolch1990; Veness 1995). As Susan Davis points outin her study of parades and rituals in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, “no social space (or behav-ior) can be neutral, precisely because it has beenspecified as social” (1986: 14). In fact, the idea ofsocial controls is central to Habermas’s thesisconcerning the origins of the modern publicsphere (1993).4 In order for private, bourgeoisindividuals to meet in public spaces, these spaceshad to be shaped to fit their needs. For the citizensof seventeenth-century London to gather in thestreets and coffeehouses of the city, those spaceshad to be made acceptable for the new bourgeoi-sie. In distinction to the spaces of the court

210 Domosh


(where hierarchical relations dominated), thetavern (where “chaotic” exchanges occurred),and the bedroom (the site of emotional relation-ships), the new public spaces of the seventeenth-century formed sites where the principles ofindividual equality and rational exchange of ideaswere the controlling norms. Habermas’s publicsphere, “the sphere of private people come to-gether as a public” (1993: 27) was governed bythose norms, by “protocols of style and decorumthat were themselves correlates and markers ofstatus inequality” (Fraser 1989: 119). What is atissue, therefore, is not whether public spaces werecontrolled, but rather whose norms would be usedto define those controls. We know that the pub-licness of the early modern city was defined byand for middle and upper-class white men (Fraser1989, 1992; Marston 1990). For the most part,women, the working classes, and minorities wereexcluded from participation in the free exchangeof ideas on the streets of early modern cities. Butthis control was not completely hegemonic. AsJames Winter says of the streets of nineteenth-century London: “Access to public streets and tothe activities carried on there were full of all kindsof restrictions on just about everyone’s free move-ment and free enterprise. Those who made therules that governed the streets were usually men,and they tended to use this power to secure thebest jobs and territories for themselves—but notalways and not everywhere” (1993: 180). Thehighly scripted nature of public spaces meant thatsome activities that ran counter to the dominantnorms would be tolerated if the actors stayedwithin certain bounds of polite behavior. New anddifferent identities could be expressed and com-municated in subtle ways; transgressive behaviorwas possible. Similarly, even in spaces that areunder extreme forms of scrutiny, oppositionalbehavior may be tolerated, at least for a time, asMitchell suggests was the case in the protests inTiananmen Square in 1989.

Secondly, by setting these two views in oppo-sition to each other, the schema serves to focusattention on the times and places where theseviews actually come into head-to-head con-tact—that is, when there are violent strugglesbetween the people who represent them. In thisway, it limits definitions of a counter-politics tothose highly noticeable events that arise when,for example, police face rioters in People’s Park inBerkeley, or when homeless people are forciblyremoved from urban streets, where “the stakes arehigh and the struggles over them might very well

be bloody” (Mitchell 1995: 127).5 This meansthat the schema does not help us understandsituations where transgressions are being madewithin, and in some instances because of, heavilysurveyed and controlled public spaces.

Polite Politics and the Everyday

Here I emphasize that there are “polite” politi-cal events that happen within, and because of, thehighly surveyed and scripted public arena of every-day life in the streets. Through an analysis ofspecific minor events on the streets of nine-teenth-century New York, I suggest that theoristsadopt a more nuanced approach to thinkingabout public space, an approach that sees publicspace interpreted and confronted on a daily basis,and not as an “ongoing opposition.” In this way,my approach draws specifically on two bodies ofliterature: feminist critiques of the definition ofpolitics, including discussions of “micropolitics,”and theories of the “everyday” and its transgres-sive potential.

In response to the inadequacies of traditionaldefinitions of politics, definitions constructed outof patriarchal and masculine forms of societalinteractions, feminist philosopher Patricia Mannhas rethought the idea of agency and put forwardthe notion of “micropolitics.” Informed by recentsocial and political feminist theory, she suggeststhat we need to reconceptualize our under-standing of agency so that it incorporates thecomplexity and situatedness of everyday life.6 Asshe states, “Previous models of oppositional poli-tics fail to recognize the fact that class, race, andsex, as well as other differential grounds for ac-tion, interact today in site-specific ways, requiringa more dynamic and flexible model of politicalagency” (1994: 159). What she suggests is a moresocial way of thinking about both individual andcollective agency, such that agency can be de-fined only within a particular social context. Thisallows for a theory of agency that does not definepolitical acts as those that ensue from a unitaryindividual directed against a unitary opponent,but instead recognizes the complexity of multipleidentity positions. By using this more multiplesocial and contextual notion of agency, Mannposits a new way of thinking about politics thatincludes actions previously characterized as apo-litical. Her “micropolitical” analysis recognizesthat “there are serious political implications inmany of the everyday decisions individuals make

Those “Gorgeous Incongruities” 211


with respect to how they will act in a givencircumstance, even when these decisions are notaccompanied by traditional forms of political con-sciousness” (1994: 31). And it is with a mindtoward recognizing these “micropolitics” that Iexamine actions on the streets of nineteenth-century New York. I look at a politics that isembodied in everyday activities, that may not beexplicitly intended to elicit response, thatchanges as it is enacted, and that is thoroughlycontextual. But I examine power relationshipsnonetheless—probably those forms that are mostpersistent because they are almost transparent.As Cynthia Enloe reminds us, “Power, not simplytaste, is at work here” (1989: 3).

I consider the people in the images I examineas political agents akin to what Michel de Certeaucalls “poets of their own acts” (1984: xviii). Hisuse of the term “tactics” is important here, as itpoints to ways of acting that are not oppositionalin the traditional sense, since they always incor-porate the “other.” A tactic is not moored in itsown space; it does not circumscribe a position.Rather, a tactical gesture derives its power fromtime: “A tactic insinuates itself into the other’splace, fragmentarily, without taking it over in itsentirety, without being able to keep it at a dis-tance . . . because it does not have a place, a tacticdepends on time—it is always on the watch foropportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing’ ”(1984: xix). Tactical gestures are enacted andresisted through everyday spatial practices, butpractices that are fragmentary, fleeting, and notin place, i.e., a woman’s meaningful look back atthose who fix their gaze on her, a momentarypositioning on the sidewalk so that others mustreposition themselves, an unintended touch inthe crowd. None of these actions have declaredadversaries, none lead to forceful recognition, butall are manipulations of power. In this way, theseacts constitute forms of transgression, defined byCresswell as acts that are not necessarily intendedbut that are “judged to have crossed some linethat was not meant to have been crossed” (1996:23). But here I examine “tactical,” everyday,transgressions; those acts, less obvious thanCresswell’s examples of graffiti or sit-ins, thatoften are unnoticed, and therefore only rarelyinscribed in our histories or geographies.

These tactical transgressions, or what Mannrefers to as acts of “micropolitics,” are thereforedifferent from how others have defined acts ofresistance and transgression. In James Scott’sanalysis of everyday forms of peasant resistance

in a Malaysian village, resistance was comprisedof individual acts of “foot dragging and evasion”(1985: xvii) that, although unnoticed at the time,multiplied and formed the conditions for largerand more noticeable politics. According to Scott,therefore, acts of resistance are intended but notnecessarily noticed. Indeed, it is the fact thatthese acts go unnoticed that allows them to be atall. In distinction, the power of transgressive actslies in their being noticed, whether or not theagents of the acts intended that power to beoppositional in nature. As Cresswell makes clear,“transgression, in distinction to resistance, doesnot, by definition, rest on the intentions of actorsbut on the results—on the ‘being noticed’ of aparticular action” (1996: 23, emphasis in origi-nal). Resistance “occurs behind the backs of thosewho are being resisted” (Cresswell 1996: 23),while acts of transgression gain their power fromoccurring in front of, and being noticed by, thosebeing resisted.

The acts I am examining are similar toCresswell’s transgressions, in that intentionalityis left as an open question, and in the fact thatthe acts certainly occur in front of those who arebeing resisted. The difference is that these actsare tactical, i.e., they may not even be noticed ascrossing “some line that was not meant to havebeen crossed” (Cresswell 1996: 23). As tacticaltransgressions, these acts are slight, “polite,” notobvious, and do not circumscribe a space or aposition; they happen only in a moment and inthe smallest of ways. But, like Scott’s acts ofresistance, they form the bulwark that is the baseof social change:

Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousandsof individual acts of insubordination and evasioncreate a political or economic barrier reef of theirown. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, anymoment that is particularly newsworthy. And when-ever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runsaground on such a reef, attention is typically di-rected to the shipwreck itself and not to the vastaggregation of petty acts that made it possible (1985:36).

It is the “petty” acts that I examine here, but“polite petty” acts—those that occur without up-setting the contours of acceptable behavior asoutlined by dominant norms, but that insidiouslyand accumulatively undermine them.

My point here is that, since our theories directour attention to the “shipwreck,” we either tendnot to see these tactical transgressions or to have

212 Domosh


little ability to interpret them within their histori-cal/geographical contexts. The everyday strugglesof Wharton’s Lily Bart and Ellen Olenska tocreate and maintain an independent identity inmid-nineteenth-century New York were foughtin the very public parlors and streets of the city.Women’s behavior on the street was certainlyprescribed by social norms. And so indeed was thebehavior of everyone—of all classes, sexes and“races.” In fact, it was precisely the publicness ofcertain spaces that made prescribed behavior soimportant, and that therefore made transgres-sions somewhat acceptable because they wereconducted in public. Oppositional politics is cer-tainly less likely in highly surveyed places, butwhat I have called tactical transgressions happenonly within those situations; contexts where ac-tions are themselves scripted and therefore can,momentarily, be slightly “seized ‘on the wing’ ”(de Certeau 1984: xix). And yet, done under thepublic purview, such agency is tolerated becauseoutright scenes of aggression are simply not ac-ceptable. For example, one of the most public andsurveyed activities of the nineteenth-century citywas that of the promenade, a highly scripted ritualof people both watching and being watched asthey walked along the boulevards. According tohistorian David Scobey (1992), these rituals weregoverned by the norms of respectability, andthose norms did not allow for acts that werepersonal in nature. In other words, along thepromenade, people were not to engage in behav-ior that was directed at anyone in particular. Anysort of disruption, such as shouting or rude behav-ior, was simply not acceptable in this public thea-ter of respectability. These norms, therefore,offered protection from aggression. As long asacts followed the ritualized patterns, they wereallowed, even if they crossed other lines of accept-ability. What I am arguing, then, is that the codesthat governed respectable public behavior al-lowed for, in fact created the conditions for, tac-tical transgressions.7

The set of dominant beliefs that governedthese codes is often difficult to discern. We tendto read back in history our own social clues,coming up with generalizations, that, as indicatedabove, seem to miss the point. Large politicalprotests certainly occurred in the streets of NewYork and are mentioned in our histories. Buttactical struggles happened too. To “see” thosestruggles, we have to understand the subtle butincredibly powerful social norms and codes of themid-nineteenth century. Edith Wharton brings

those codes directly to the reader’s attention byhighlighting the transgressions of Ellen Olenskaand Lily Bart. So, in an attempt to understand thedominant norms that dictated behavior on thestreets of nineteenth-century New York, I lookedto images depicting activity that ran counter towhat I understood to be bourgeois ideology. Herethe codes and their subversion in the “everyday”might speak out.

I will present here three images of transgres-sions on the streets of 1860s New York. By closeanalysis, I hope to tease out from them the socialcontext in which this behavior is seen as unusual,and by so doing, to move closer to understandingthe socioeconomic conditions in which these so-cial codes were being formulated. In this way, Ihope to present examples of how, in everydayways, public spaces indeed allowed for opposi-tional politics, but a “polite” politics where trans-gressions were slight, yet stunning nonetheless.

The Streets of New York

New York City’s population at the close of theCivil War was a little less than a million people,of whom 85 percent lived less than two miles fromthe city’s population center, Union Square, whereBroadway crossed 14th Street (Figure 1). Thatdensity of population reflected the economicgrowth of a city that would become the capital ofcapitalism in its next quarter century, and, ofcourse, the relative lack of intraurban transpor-tation systems. All movement of people, goods,and animals took place on streets designed, as theCommissioner of Public Works said in the 1870s,to “impede rather than to facilitate travel”(quoted in Mandelbaum 1965: 12). On thosestreets all types of people could be found, al-though not in the same proportion, time, or man-ner. New York in the 1860s was a citycharacterized by extremes in wealth and poverty,by ethnic and racial diversity, by economic elitescompeting for political power, and by an unstablesocial-class system. As public spaces, then, thestreets provided not only transportation corri-dors, but also sites for the displays of social classand political power.

The three images analyzed here depict sceneson Broadway and Fifth Avenue. By mid-nine-teenth century, these two streets had becomeimportant icons for portraying the city and, withthe addition of Wall Street, constituted the rangeof symbolic streetscapes that were usually high-



Figure 1. A map of Lower Manhattan showing the large display avenue of Broadway and the lower portion of FifthAvenue.

214 Domosh


lighted in contemporary accounts (Spann 1981;Domosh 1996; Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992).Already by 1860, Wall Street had come to sym-bolize the economic power of the city. Thecommercial dominance of the country thatNew York attained by the 1840s was translatedinto financial dominance on the eve of the CivilWar (Hammack 1987). And that control over thenation’s capital was forcibly expressed in the tightclusters of banks, insurance offices, and financialtraders that surrounded the exchange buildingson Wall Street, “the great financial centre ofAmerica” (Martin 1868: 141). In the small, oftencramped offices of financial institutions alongWall Street, the business of America was con-ducted. The symbolism of Wall Street as thecapital of finance was so powerful that as early as1850 it was known simply as “the street”—hometo the “favored and powerful individuals whoexert this immense control over society and theworld” (Foster 1850: 224).

Broadway was the grand boulevard of display,extending the whole length of the island, andtherefore carrying along its edges an incrediblydiverse array of people and activities. Below WallStreet, it was home mainly to business offices,particularly shipping, while farther north were theoffices of realtors, insurance companies, andbankers. Beyond City Hall, on Broadway atChambers Street, were the beginnings of the re-tail district, centering in 1860 on Stewart’s Store,just north of City Hall. This retail area, sur-rounded on sidestreets by wholesalers, extendedalmost to 14th Street and Union Square, wherebusinesses were taking over what had been aresidential area. At that time, the built-up area ofBroadway extended to about 23rd Street, at itsintersection with Fifth Avenue. Along this path,and particularly on the stretch of businesses southof 14th Street, throngs of New Yorkers passeddaily. And those New Yorkers were a diverse lot:“Every class and shade of nationality and charac-ter is represented here. America, Europe, Asia,Africa, and even Oceania, has each its repre-sentatives here. High and low, rich and poor, passalong these side-walks . . . Fine gentlemen inbroadcloth, ladies in silks and jewels, and beggarsin squalidness and rags, are mingled here in trueRepublican confusion . . . From early morning tillnear midnight this scene goes on” (Martin 1868:46). This account may not have been exagger-ated. In 1850, almost 60 percent of New Yorkerswere foreign-born (Spann 1981: 24). The largestgroup of the foreign-born were the Irish, who

constituted about thirty percent of the city’spopulation in the 1850s (Spann 1981). In distinc-tion, the proportion of people with known Afri-can heritage was relatively low—1.6 percent ofthe total population in 1860 (Scheiner 1965: 6).Their population was centered in the lower west-side, particularly along the narrow streets ofGreenwich Village (Bernstein 1990). Althoughthere was a small “social aristocracy” within theblack community, most African-Americans werepoor. According to a state census of 1855, theunemployment rate among blacks was almost 60percent, and those who were employed workedlargely in services, with domestic servants as theprimary occupation (Freeman 1994). HistorianRhoda Freeman (1994) argues that the smallnumbers and relatively low social status of thepre-Civil War black community prevented it fromwielding any form of political or economic powerwithin the city. Yet all these groups inhabited thesidewalks and main thoroughfare of Broadway. Itconnected their tenements in the lower east sideand west side with the factories, offices, ware-houses, and homes of the wealthy farther north,where they worked.

Fifth Avenue was the center of the upper-classresidential district of New York in the 1860s, as“Wall Street” was “constantly sending fresh ‘stars’to blaze on Fifth Avenue” (Martin 1868: 80). Theupper classes of the city had been on a northwardmarch throughout the nineteenth century, seek-ing refuge from the expanding commercial areasbelow 14th Street and particularly, the immigrantand working-class neighborhoods of the lowereast and west sides (Scherzer 1992; Lockwood1976). By the 1850s, after several prominent NewYorkers built brownstone mansions there, FifthAvenue became the new fashionable area. It waslined with costly private residences, private clubs,and churches, the magnificence of which in-creased as one moved farther north. When Alex-ander Stewart built his mansion on the corner ofFifth Avenue and 34th Street in 1864, he has-tened the movement north to this newest offashionable areas in the city. The street, with itsdisplays of wealth, was the symbolic center of“society”—the space where people could exhibittheir good taste, both in fashion and culture. Itwas the preeminent site of promenades, rivalingthe retail areas of Broadway for ladies paradingtheir new fashions: “Nowhere else in America arethere such fine opportunities for the display ofdress as in New York. Where else in the broadworld can there be found such a magnificent



week-day promenade as Broadway, or such aSunday morning strolling-place as Fifth Avenue? . . .The spacious sidewalks [of Fifth Avenue], bow-ered in the most luxurious of foliage, make it atempting place to walk in the fashionable season,especially on a bright and sunny Sunday morning”(Ellington 1869: 34–35). As public spaces, there-fore, these two streets were highly scripted arenasfor social display.

Scobey (1992) positions the era from the late1850s to the 1860s as a “threshold-moment” inNew York’s economic and social history, a mo-ment that was embodied both in the masses ofimmigrants and natives who comprised the urbanstreet crowds, and in the rituals of respectabilitythat dictated bourgeois behavior on the streets.New York’s mid-century economic boom createdgreat social anxieties. By the mid-1850s, NewYorkers had secured for themselves a dominantposition in the national economy, as wealth fromnational and international trade, from the goldrush in the West, and from investments in trans-portation systems and real estate, began to accu-mulate in the city (Spann 1981). This wealth wasin the hands of a new class of merchants, notthose who guarded the mercantile coffers of thelate-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries(Jaher 1982). Not only did these new moneyedclasses seek means to express their identities, but,even more profoundly (and partly as a result ofthese new identities), the constant social andeconomic fluidity that characterized the mid-nineteenth century served to question the verybasis of a bourgeois solidarity—how would re-spectable New Yorkers recognize each other as aconsolidated class? As Scobey states: “It [socialand economic fluidity] rendered problematic thevery basis of bourgeois identity: the capacity ofthe propertied and powerful to recognize oneanother as constituents of a moral collectivity”(1992: 212). Under threat both from the masseson the streets, and from constant social mobility,New York’s bourgeoisie participated in ritualisticbehavior, in a cult of manners, that was enactedat balls, in visits and church-going, and, mostimportant in terms of outward display, on thestreets—that is, in the “promenade.” Elaboratecodes operated here,8 as small gestures took ongreat meanings, and where the only norms werethose of respectability, worked out in salons andparties, later written into manuals.9 And it is thisuse of the streets, as a way of performing identi-ties, and at times challenging those identities, towhich I now turn my attention.

Images of the Streets

All three of the images examined here are fromThe New-York Illustrated News, a weekly newspa-per modeled after Harper’s Weekly (Mott 1957).10

I use these illustrations as a means of “seeing” andperhaps understanding some of the tactical trans-gressions that created, in Scott’s terms, the “bar-rier reef” on which eventually the “ship of stateruns aground” (1985: 36). As an outside observer,both in terms of space and time, what I offer asan interpretation is based on my understandingof the specific spatial, economic, political, andsocial context of mid-nineteenth-century NewYork City. With these images as entry points, Iattempt here a plausible account of some of thetactical transgressions on the public streets ofnineteenth-century New York. The first one ap-peared in January 1860, showing the crowds onBroadway at different times of day (Figure 2). Thecaptions are telling: “at 7am—laborers, shopboys, and factory girls, begin the moving pano-rama of the day”; “at 9am—merchants and clerkshurrying to their place of business”; “from12–3pm—beauty and fashion on the prome-nade”; “at 6pm—general rush for home”; “mid-night revelry in Broadway.” An almost totalsegregation of classes is evident in the first threeimages—including the working classes, the mid-dle and aspiring middle classes, and the leisuredclass, particularly the bourgeois women who areallowed to parade in their fashions while window-shopping at the new dry-goods stores alongBroadway. As indicated by an 1869 description ofBroadway, this temporal segregation was appar-ent to many:

Broadway, which leads alike to the banker’s officeswith their thousands of gold, the large mercantilehouses with their immense stocks of goods, leads alsoto the working places of the working women. Atearly morn these poor females walk down the greatVanity Fair; later still, the working men; then theshop-boys; then the young clerks; then the juniorpartners. Later still, the heavy members of the firmroll down in their magnificent carriages; and bynoon the wives and daughters, who spend themoney their husbands and brothers make, will be outin large numbers promenading and patronizing thevarious stores. What a contrast between five and sixa.m., on Broadway, and twelve noon! (Ellington1869; 579).

Yet in the fourth and fifth images, both workingand middle classes are commingled—merchantsand laborers, factory girls and fashionable

216 Domosh


Figure 2. “A Photograph of Broadway.” New-York Illustrated News, January 21, 1860, p. 148. Collection of the NewYork Historical Society.



women, prostitutes and male consumers. Lookcarefully at the faces in the fourth image. The verydepiction of certain facial features was, at least inthe nineteenth century, enough to indicate to ageneral audience the particular class and type ofa person. According to Mary Cowling (1989), thissystematic connecting of physical and mentalattributes was part of a belief in physiog-nomy—the “science” of classifying people ac-cording to physical characteristics—that waswidespread in nineteenth-century England andAmerica. Physiognomy formed an important partof nineteenth-century anthropology, borrowingmethods of classification developed by naturalhistorians. In this system, such features as a largejaw and face in proportion to the forehead andhead (where the so-called higher faculties reside)indicates people of a lowly, possibly criminal sort.Other lowly signs were a convex chin, “a long, flatupper lip and coarse formless mouth” (Cowling1989: 297). We can see in this image, then, at-tempts to depict members of what were consid-ered the lowest class in New York, most likely thenew Irish immigrants, mingling in the crowds withmembers of several other classes. Indeed, all fiveof the images can be read as excursions into ananthropology of the modern city, depicting forthose at home the various specimens of humanlife. According to Cowling, this was a fairly com-mon form of imagining the nineteenth-centurycity, creating and then satisfying the curiosity ofthe middle classes about how their new industrialcities looked and functioned.

And Broadway was the perfect site for suchimaginings, since it formed, as I have alreadyshown, one of the most heterogeneous corridorsin 1860s New York. It was also the preeminentsite of streetwalkers: “Broadway is their favoriteresort—their principal time of going out, at night.The gas lights are no sooner lighted than theycome forth. It is fit that they should walk onBroadway. The street is broad, and on its pave-ments how many thousands have been led todestruction God only knows” (Ellington 1869:298).

But, like Wharton’s Lily Bart, fashionablewomen found on Broadway at the wrong time ofday were in danger of losing their bourgeoisstatus—even more so, of course, if they were seenon the street at midnight, when different classesand sexes mix in the revelry of “dark” Broadway.From most accounts of the lives of middle-classNew York women in the 1860s, it is indeed true

that they rarely ventured out alone to walk afterfour in the afternoon.11

And yet in this image there are fashionable,middle-class women to be found in the crowds oflate afternoon. They were, in Cresswell’s terms(1996), “out of place.” At certain times, then,Broadway brought together different classes ofpeople. And that diversity was frightening—itpresented a challenge to nineteenth-centurybourgeois life, where each group was meant toinhabit their own places.12 As historian Scobeysays of the promenade, it was “the bourgeoiswoman who figuratively condensed the class re-quirements and sexual risks of polite sociability.Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, herpresence marked what had to be protected in andfrom public exposure” (1992: 214–15). To see abourgeois woman on Broadway beyond what hecalls the “canonical” hour (11 a.m.–3 p.m.) wasa breach of “respectability” (215). But suchbreaches occurred often. As Elizabeth Wilsonstates, the most frightening aspect of the streets“was the crowd—the promiscuous mingling ofclasses in close proximity on the street. The gen-tleman and, worse still, the gentlewoman wereforced to rub shoulders with the lower orders andmight be buffeted and pushed with little cere-mony or deference” (1991: 29). So althoughthroughout much of the day, the purported pub-licness of Broadway was highly scripted and actedout according to prescribed norms, at other hours,a “dangerous” mingling of the crowd was possible.

In fact, it was the very “publicness” of Broad-way that allowed such behavior. Because it was soopen to public scrutiny, any threat of potentialevil behavior could be assuaged. An entire genreof urban guidebooks written in the mid-nine-teenth century focused on the moral and politicalthreats of the hidden city, those areas beyondpublic view. With such titles as “New York byGas-Light,” “Lights and Shadows of New YorkLife,” and “Sunshine and Shadow in New York,”these tracts, aimed at the mostly rural audienceof middle-class America, presented a view of theevils of the city residing in the hidden spaces ofthe city—the basements of oysterhouses, theclosed doors of brothels and dancehalls, the darkstreets of lower Manhattan (Foster 1850;McCabe 1872; Smith 1868). In Stuart Blumin’sassessment of this genre, “much of the immoralityof the city occurs underground, in oyster cellarsand in basement-level gambling dens and dancehalls, reached only through well-guarded andlabyrinthine passageways. Above-ground de-

218 Domosh


bauchery occurs upstairs, behind deceptive fa-cades, in brothels and gambling houses . . .”(1990: 49–50). Yet, within the surveillance of thebright lights of public scrutiny, immoral behaviorwas less likely. The bourgeois codes of the streetcould be violated, at times, if those violationsoccurred within the purview of the public.

The second image, from January 1863 (Figure3), was accompanied by a caption and an expla-nation in the text:

Our best society—A scene on Fifth Avenue, thefashionable promenade on Sunday afternoons.From a sketch taken opposite the (blank) club, 15thStreet and Fifth Avenue. Our city readers will notfail to recognize the faithfulness of the picture onpage 196, having probably experienced the difficultythat attends a stroll through this fine avenue anypleasant Sunday afternoon.

Our influential Colored Citizens have recentlytaken this magnificent promenade under their su-pervision, turning out on Sundays and holidays,with a degree of splendor and enthusiasm quitestartling to a reflective mind. The gorgeous incon-gruities of costume, and the highly intellectualcountenances (as seen in the illustration) whichproudly sail by the humble white pedestrians, areenough to make a sorrowful man laugh.

The air of satisfaction and nonchalance thatcharacterizes our friends on these occasions, is irre-sistible. The way they ignore the privileges of theirwhite brethren is not, however, so agreeable.

The scene of our sketch lies in the vicinity of oneof the fashionable club-houses. If the reader imag-ines, for a moment, that our artist has yielded to hissatirical propensities, we beg that skeptic to make apilgrimage through Fifth Avenue the next un-clouded Sunday afternoon (New-York IllustratedNews, Jan. 31, 1863: 196).

Certainly this image is in some senses a satire ofproper, white society and its discomfort with thosewho are “in,” yet “out of place” in their space. ButI believe that it also tells us about a world wheresuch displacements were possible and probable.To situate this point, recall that Fifth Avenue wasthe most prestigious residential address in 1863,and that the area between Union and Madisonsquares was home to several upper-class men’sclubs and fashionable churches. The Sundaymorning fashion promenade had become a stand-ard activity for middle-class New Yorkers—afterSunday morning services at the Presbyterian orEpiscopal churches on Fifth Avenue, families pa-raded in their finest up and down the Avenue. As

Figure 3. “Our Best Society”—A Scene on Fifth Avenue. New-York Illustrated News, January 31, 1863, p. 196.Collection of the New York Historical Society.



a contemporary commentator noted: “There isthe Sunday stroll, with pensive face and prayer-book in hand, on Fifth avenue . . . The time willbe immediately subsequent to morning service.The scene may be scarcely appropriate, followingso soon upon the religious exercises that havepreceded it, but it is very fascinating in its freaksof worldly frivolity . . . all the extremes of thelatest fashions mingle in one vast stream of wealthand luxury” (Ellington 1869: 35).

This image certainly represents a freak ofworldly frivolity. A relatively large group of Afri-can-Americans are walking up Fifth avenue ontheir Sunday promenade. At first glance, theyseem appropriately middle-class and fitting to thescene. The central figures form a traditional fam-ily unit, dressed in what seems the latest fashions.Their grouping fits the norms of the Victorianfamily—the woman’s arm is resting on her hus-band’s, she is leaning toward him in a diminutivemanner, and their daughter walks along themother’s side.

Yet middle-class and fashionable “colored citi-zens” upset and shock their white counterparts.First of all, there were, of course, no African-American churches on Fifth Avenue, nor did anyblacks live there. They have come to Fifth Ave-nue purposely and solely to promenade—to showoff. According to Rhoda Golden Freeman, therewas indeed a “social aristocracy” (1994: 317) ofblacks in New York at this time, as concernedabout their dances, parties, social visits, clothes,and promenades as their white “brethren.” Herreading of African-American newspapers sug-gests that “ladies of the Negro community wereas concerned with fashion and elegant attire aswere their white counterparts” (1994: 318). It isnot difficult to imagine, for example, Lucy Gib-bons Morse and her family walking along FifthAvenue in her Sunday finery. She was the daugh-ter of a wealthy and prominent black family wholived within walking distance of the scene de-picted here.13 In terms of their ability to paradein their finery on New York’s display avenues,members of this socially elite class were on a parwith other upper-class residents of the city. AsScobey says, this was indeed the point of thepromenade—to disengage from any sort of per-sonal or concrete relationships in order to engagein a ritualized behavior whose raison d’etre wasthe performance: “Not only private sentiments,but also social affiliations, material interests, in-deed all concrete grounds of relationship were tobe disengaged from the performance of respect-

ability itself. As one expert put it, the ‘passers inthe street know no difference in individuals’ ”(1992: 217). The family may be black, but theyare completing the performance. Yet even thetightness of behavioral codes that governed thepromenade cannot prevent some obvious disrup-tions, such as staring. Look particularly at thewhite women’s faces. Clearly, a violation ofsorts is taking place here. The most obviousviolation is that the African-Americans havetaken over the sidewalk, and are pushing their“white brethren” onto the street. Notice thepositioning here, as a black woman walks aheadwhile the white couple bend to keep their balanceon the sidewalk—obviously white “privileges” arebeing ignored. The literal space of the prome-nade, then, is being appropriated by African-Americans.

There are other, less obvious violations here.The clothing of the African-Americans is tell-ing—most are depicted with clothes a bit over-the-top, some quite literally, with hats that aremore ornate and unusual than their white coun-terparts.’ The couple in the center are certainlydressed in their finest and have outdone thewhites. The woman’s skirt is heavily flounced, hercape is edged in fur, her bonnet is topped withflowers, and she completes her outfit with a para-sol, quite an unnecessary item in January in NewYork, and particularly so for a black woman. Theman’s fully displayed white vest is topped with anelaborate cravat, and his hat is decorated with awide band. He carries his walking stick out fromhis body, resting its end against his face. Both arewearing white gloves. Fancy clothes, white gloves,parasol, walking stick—all items completely dedi-cated to fashion, to leisure, without function ona cold winter’s day. Scholars of African-Americanculture have documented the importance ofclothing to both slaves and freed blacks in distin-guishing the “hours of work from the hours ofleisure and, in the case of those still enslaved, themaster’s time from the slave’s” (White 1991:195). As signifiers of status, then, clothes wereextremely important to freed blacks. To see Afri-can-Americans in clothes clearly unsuited towork must have seemed particularly threateningto whites, who had difficulty fathoming a leisuredblack class.

But the “gorgeous incongruities” alluded to inthe text get more to the heart of the issue. It isthe juxtaposition and contrast between, on theone hand, black skin (with all the racist meaningsthis carried to white culture), and, on the other,

220 Domosh


top-of-the-line fashions and middle-class familystructure, that apparently shocked not only theviewers depicted here, but also the lithographerof this scene. This juxtaposition represents aninversion of the “natural order,” and when theworld is thrown upside down in this way, direconsequences were sure to follow. Such direconsequences seemed just around the corner inJanuary of 1863—this image appeared in printfour weeks after the Emancipation Proclamationwas signed, abolishing slavery in America. Most“emancipation” images that appeared in NewYork newspapers carried a much less threateningmessage—one of freed blacks as good laborers forthe American industrial powers, often depictedas laborers barely above animals in the evolution-ary chain. But in this image, the fear of freed,leisured blacks marching north to New York (asthey are here walking up the Avenue), promenad-ing in white space, pushing whites out on thestreet, is given form and voice. Six months later,in July of 1863, New York City experienced themost violent civil disorder in nineteenth-centuryAmerica, when protests against the ConscriptionAct for the Civil War turned into riots. The majortargets were black laborers, many of whom were

hung on the streets, and a large percentage of therioters were Irish workers who felt threatened byblack labor and feared the consequences of a largelabor supply if freed slaves moved north (Ignatiev1995).14 The Draft Riots, as they were called,differed from other instances of racial violence inNew York City, suggesting, in the words of histo-rian Iver Bernstein, a “citywide campaign to erasethe post-emancipation presence of the blackcommunity” (Bernstein 1990: 5). But on FifthAvenue, polite society stopped, stared and, atleast for the moment, allowed the parade to con-tinue. To do otherwise would have upset thescript far too much.

A week later, the image shown in Figure 4appeared, with the short caption “Club house,Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street, New York”—ascene just across the Avenue from the previousone. The men of the Manhattan Club are staringintently at the fashionable crowd passing in frontof their plate-glass window. We could argue thatthe image illustrates the powers of the bourgeoismale flaneur of the modern city, surveying thescene, choosing which delights he will indulge in.One of the women on the street is looking backat the men, as is the child, but for the most part,

Figure 4. “Club House, Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street.” New-York Illustrated News, February 7, 1863, p. 212.Collection of the New York Historical Society.



the women are passing without acknowledgingthe men in the window, without returning thegaze. They are the objects to be consumed, themen are the subjects who decide. In New Yorksociety this type of street scene was common: an1868 description of Fifth Avenue mentions “Thenumerous clubhouses, filled with young menengaged in flattening their noses against thefrench plate-glass windows” (Ellington 1869: 35).But that description continues, saying that thesemen watching add “to the attractions of the walk,so far as the display of dress is concerned.” Thissuggests a more active role for these women asdecision-makers in their own right—since whatgood is a fashionable outfit in nineteenth-centuryNew York unless you can display it to wealthymen? In other words, the male flaneur is in someways the object of these women’s active display.

This inversion of the expected order is moreapparent in the text that accompanies the illus-tration:

the reader is now called upon to respectfully admire,at a distance, some of the approved types of “our bestsociety” as they languidly lounge at the Club Housewindow, ogling the pretty women, who, we arebound to say, do not always seem sufficiently im-pressed with the honor done them.

Mesdames! take your revenge, and look them outof countenance—in our picture! Without a blush,Miss Crosspatch, without so much as a drop of youreyelash, behold Tittlebat Tittlmouse in his element!behold the elegant Adolphus; and the famous Fitz-Clarence, (as carefully gotten up as a venerableballet-dancer), and, close behind him, observe SirLoin Beef, the young English baronet, who carnt se,for the life of him, why we ‘aven’t such fine womenin this blasted country as he has been in the ‘abit ofmeeting at ‘ome. Behold them all — those prettyhot-house plants, native and exotic, as they faintlybud and bloom, and languish in their plate-glassconservatory (New-York Illustrated News, Feb. 7,1863: 212).

The caption suggests how the image in some wayssubverts social and spatial norms. First, several ofthe women seem in no way “impressed” by themen in the window, in other words, they are notparticipating in the expected rituals of the fashionparade. They are simply getting on with theirbusiness. Second, the men are inside the house,the women outside on the street. This spatialreversal is echoed in the reversal of gender roles.As occupiers of the interiors, the men here areemasculated. Think of the words and images usedtodescribe them: languid,pretty, ballet-dancer,hot-house plants, exotic, buds and blooms—these are

undoubtedly feminine descriptors. These club-men are decorative objects, as delicate as hot-house flowers in a conservatory, as useless andsilly as titled English aristocrats. After all, real(bourgeois, American) men work.

This association with the English nobilitymight be of more than passing interest. The Man-hattan Club was the center of the upper-classDemocrats of the city, whose loyalty to Americawas being questioned by Republicans who heldthe White House. Many Confederacy sympathiz-ers, who fashioned themselves after the Englishnobility, were Democrats whose loyalty to theUnion was often under suspicion during the CivilWar. For a complex set of reasons, they also sidedwith the Irish immigrants in the city, thus settingup an image of themselves as more European andless American (Bernstein 1990). So the Demo-crats are pictured as emasculated foreigners, to belaughed at by women.

Yet it is difficult to read the reversal of roles andspaces in the image as subversive in and of itself,for as a signifier of the feminine, the relativesubordinate positioning of the domestic in societyis simply reinforced—even when occupied bymen, it serves a denigrating function. So the menare made fun of precisely because they occupywomen’s subject position. In this sense, the imagedoes not suggest resistance to the status quo, butsupports traditional beliefs by using the idea of thefeminine to denigrate a certain group of men. Yetsmaller, tactical transgressions are also evident.Women in the image are both watched andwatching, but so are the men. The caption isdirected at the women readers of the newspaper,who are given the final authority as observers.They are being invited to view these men at adistance and, with a long and accurate gaze, tosee them for what they really are—mere fops whowould wilt in the cold February air. The womenare conducting the important business of thestreets, while the men attend to decorative mat-ters. Again, this presents an inversion of thenatural order. In the public space of Fifth Avenue,women were, in some senses, in control of thebusiness of life, as they ventured out daily toparticipate in the commercial city, paying bills,visiting stores, eating at the new restaurants setup for them. In fact, just a block south of the siteof this image was Delmonico’s, the most fashion-able, although exclusively male, restaurant intown. When the first women’s club was organizedin New York in 1868, it held its meeting at Del-monico’s, in direct and conscious challenge to the

222 Domosh


status quo (Blair 1980). The club’s membershipwas limited to professional, middle-class women,but these women used their access to these newspaces of the city to renegotiate their identities.Because they could walk on the streets unes-corted (at certain times), and could participate inthe commercial life of the city (albeit in limitedways, usually as consumers), their identities asbourgeois women expanded beyond the domes-tic, into the public spaces and activities of the city.And the women viewers of this image, who aredirectly addressed in the caption, are invited totake “revenge,” to stare back, to become the“looker”—in other words, to take advantage ofwhat the modern city allows, to switch identities,however intermittently or ambivalently. So theimage suggests the possibilities of transgressionsat the same time that it supports existing powerrelationships. Some women could stare back andgain power. Although for some their relegation tothe domestic sphere meant that their power wasannihilated, they nonetheless could, on thestreets, at least for a brief time, “take revenge.”

Conclusion

These last two images are particularly ironic,as they consciously juxtapose bourgeois norms ofbehavior with depictions of actual behavior thatrun counter to those norms. Whether that ironyis apparent only to us or was intended by the artistis impossible to determine. But what we can sayis that these images point to how the public streetsof nineteenth-century New York were neither the“democratic” spaces of an authentic urbanity norcompletely manipulated and exclusionary. Amore nuanced analysis suggests that the meta-phor of theater might be more appropriate, but atheater where scripts could be manipulated. Evenin the heart of middle-class space, on Broadwayand Fifth Avenue, classes mingled, different“races” fashionably paraded, and gender rolescould be reversed.

A polite politics was possible on these publiclyguarded streets of 1860s New York, but not oneimmediately apparent from our historical record(although, as I have argued, the cumulative ef-fects of such slight transgressions often are appar-ent, i.e., the appropriation of Delmonico’s by awomen’s group). Nor was it a politics that corre-sponds to notions of an “authentic urbanity” ofdemocratic possibilities. It was a politics madepossible by the conditions of social surveillance,

not surveillance by the state or institutions usingtechnological means, but one constituted ofminute activities of seeing and being seen. Be-cause bourgeois norms of behavior encouragedpeople to parade in their finery up Fifth Avenue,and because that space was heavily surveyed,African-Americans too were allowed to engage inthe promenade. Their behavior disrupted at thesame time as it supported bourgeois standards.Because Broadway was the most public thorough-fare of the city, the mingling of different classeswas tolerated when it took place in the “light” andout of the “shadows.” And middle-class womencould be as much the subject of the gaze as theobject because social norms positioned some menas displays in the windows of Fifth Avenue, similarto the frocks and corsets seen in other plate-glasswindows.

Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart was eventually de-stroyed by her transgressions, not by violent strug-gles where the “stakes are high,” but by theaccumulative effects of a social system that toler-ated certain “polite” forms of transgressive behav-ior and punished those who pushed the bordersof politeness too far. Like the images analyzedhere, Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1984) is insome sense a satire of the mores of New York’supper classes, and as such casts that “reality” intostark relief. Lily Bart’s transgressions were tacti-cal, as she never positioned herself in oppositionto the status quo. Indeed, she is presented to usas the embodiment of the cult of manners, thewoman who will make her way by knowing all therules and playing by them. Yet her social miscuesare obvious to those who matter around her, andeach small step positions her in spaces furtherremoved from polite society. Her fatal error, if wecan call it that, was refusing to marry the “appro-priate” man (the wealthy and well-positionedPercy Gryce) and to seek instead her own individ-ual fulfillment. Her “micropolitics,” then, wastransgressive to the established norms but wasevident only in the smallest of ways, and only tothose who understood the complex and contex-tual script of polite performance.

If we know how and where to look, it seems wewill find similar “polite” politics being enactedeveryday in our “theme parks” that we now callour cities. As Jon Goss recently reminded us, evenspaces considered the most manipulated and con-trolled, such as festival marketplaces, can be sitesof alternative politics, since their “universalistrhetoric” opens them to unintended effects andtransgressive readings (1996: 232). But our theo-



ries of public space and oppositional politics blindus to their potential force. Broadening our defini-tions of politics to include a “micropolitics” ofcomplex and contextual agency should direct ourattention to the “tactics” that many of us, whocannot afford the emotional and spatial distancerequired of an oppositional politics, embody inour everyday transgressions.

Acknowledgments

This paper has benefitted greatly from the com-ments and suggestions of colleagues, particularlyStephen Daniels, Richard Dennis, Peter Goheen, DonMitchell, Joan Schwartz, and several anonymous refe-rees. I am grateful to Nick Fyfe for organizing a sessionon “the street” at the Glasgow Institute of BritishGeographers meeting, where I presented a paper con-taining the kernel of the ideas expressed here, and tothe participants’ comments at seminars in geographydepartments at Queen’s University in Kingston, On-tario, Royal Holloway College of the University ofLondon, University of Vermont, and Middlebury Col-lege. Thanks are also due to Barbara Hutchings for hercartographic skills. The research for the paper wasfunded by the National Science Foundation, Anthro-pological and Geographic Sciences, #9422051.

Notes

1. Sociologist Bruce Robbins aligns this scenario ofdecline with a more general “myth of generaldecline” about the role of the academy, and arguesthat like all myths, it is a “defense of a veryparticular group—in this case, perhaps, white,male, native-born intellectuals who once hadsomething of a monopoly of American ‘public’discourse but since the 60s, when the universitiesin fact became more ‘public’ by letting some newpeople in, no longer do” (Robbins 1990: 258).

2. For a very interesting and useful assessment of theimportance of private space as a political possibil-ity, see Squires (1994).

3. Here I am using not Lefebvre’s work but Mitchell’s“take” on it. Lefebvre’s (1991) analysis of publicspace exceeds the bounds presented by Mitchell.

4. I am invoking Habermas’s discussion of the publicsphere to show that even in his analysis, which hasbeen duly criticized for its exclusionary ideal of thepublic (see Fraser [1992] and Negt and Kluge[1993]) there was a recognition that the “public”was in some senses always a notion prescribed bythose in power.

5. For recent examples of research into the more“mundane” aspects of contesting access to public

space and contesting regulatory norms, see PeterGoheen (1994) and Meghan Cope (1996).

6. For other feminist reconsiderations of the politi-cal, see Fisher and Davis (1993) and Meehan(1995).

7. I do not mean to suggest by this that nineteenth-century ideas of respectability formed sites of truedemocratic possibilities, in the sense of allowingoutright subversive activity without comment.The rhetoric of respectability included the repub-lican notion that all citizens could participate, yetthe norms themselves were set by certain elitegroups. According to Scobey, this “cult of man-ners sought to accommodate these contradictorysentiments, to reconcile the egalitarian claims ofrepublicanism with the need to legitimate classand cultural hierarchy” (1992: 219).

8. Scobey provides numerous examples of thesecodes, drawn mostly from etiquette manuals(1992). A proper woman on the promenade wasto faintly smile and present a formal bow to a maleacquaintance, while a gentleman was to bow, butnot speak, to a female acquaintance. If a manwanted to accord a woman a certain distinctionof affection, he should dip his hat at least ninetydegrees from its resting place.

9. For example, see How to Behave: A Pocket Manualof Republican Etiquette (New York, 1872), Rules ofEtiquette and Home Culture (Chicago and NewYork, 1893), Decorum: A Practical Treatise on Eti-quette and Dress of the Best American Society (NewYork, 1878) and Margaret Cockburn Conkling(pseud.), The American Gentleman’s Guide to Po-liteness and Fashion . . . (New York, 1857). For amore thorough analysis of these etiquette manu-als, see Kasson (1990).

10. The New-York Illustrated News tried unsuccessfullyto compete with Harper’s Weekly but was onlypublished for four years. It would seem from ananalysis of its articles and images that the news-paper was Republican in leaning (see Mott[1957]). My method is informed here both byRobert Darnton’s incredibly rich book, The GreatCat Massacre (1984), where singular depictions ofwhat seemed to Darnton “odd” behavior in sev-enteenth-century France were explored in alltheir complexities in order to gain insight into thesocial history of the past, and by Mary Poovey’sbook Uneven Developments (1988), where sheclaims that the richest of insights come from ex-ploring “border cases”—those that do not quite fitinto what we expect of the past—and followingwherever they lead us. These three images struckme as the most interesting I had seen in severalweeks of examining mid-nineteenth-century il-lustrated newspapers, and I knew that there wereinsights to be gained from a close examination ofthem.

11. This generalization is based on my reading of theunpublished diaries of five New York women writ-

224 Domosh


ten between the years 1854 and 1898, and fromsecondary accounts by Abelson (1989), Boyer(1985), and Smith-Rosenberg (1985). Three ofthe diaries, by Sophie C. Hall, Elizabeth W. Mer-chant, and Caroline A. Dunstan, are at the NewYork Public Library. The other two, by Mrs.George Richards and Clara Burton Pardee, are atthe New York Historical Society.

12. For analyses of the class dimensions of street cul-ture in New York City, see Boyer (1985), Scherzer(1992), and Rosenzweig and Blackmar (1992).

13. Her recollections of the Draft Riots of 1863 arethe only known contemporary document writtenby an African-American. She and her family livedon West 29th Street, between 8th and 9th ave-nues, surrounded by white people. See “Recollec-tions of the Draft Riots of 1863 New York City”by Lucy Gibbons Morse, New York HistoricalSociety, Miscellaneous Manuscripts, 1927.

14. Ignatiev situates New York’s Draft Riots withinthe context of how the Irish “took up arms for theWhite Republic” and became “white,” whetherthey were fighting in the U.S. Army or in thestreets of New York. Their desire to become“white” was rooted in the very American contextof a racism born of miserable economic conditions(see Ignatiev [1995]).

References

Abelson, Elaine S. 1989. When Ladies Go A-Thieving:Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian DepartmentStore. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bernstein, Iver. 1990. The New York City Draft Riots:Their Significance for American Society and Politicsin the Age of the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Blair, Karen. 1980. The Clubwoman as Feminist: TrueWomanhood Redefined, 1868–1914. New York:Holmes & Meier.

Blumin, Stuart. 1990. George G. Foster and the Emerg-ing Metropolis. In New York by Gas-Light andOther Urban Sketches by George G. Foster, ed.Stuart Blumin, pp. 1–62. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Boyer, M. Christine. 1985. Manhattan Manners. NewYork: Rizzoli Press.

Conkling, Margaret C. (pseud.) 1857. The AmericanGentleman’s Guide to Politeness and Fashion. NewYork.

Cope, Meghan. 1996. Weaving the Everyday: Identity,Space, and Power in Lawrence, Massachusetts,1920–1939. Urban Geography 17: 179–204.

Cowling, Mary. 1989. The Artist as Anthropologist.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cresswell, Tim. 1996. In Place/Out of Place: Geography,Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minneapolis Press.

Darnton, Robert. 1984. The Great Cat Massacre andOther Episodes in French Cultural History. NewYork: Basic Books.

Davis, Mike. 1991. City of Quartz: Excavating the Futurein Los Angeles. New York: Verso.

Davis, Susan G. 1986. Parades and Power: Street Theaterin Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press.

de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Decorum: A Practical Treatise on Etiquette and Dress inthe Best American Society. 1878. New York.

Domosh, Mona. 1996. Invented Cities: The Creation ofLandscape in 19th-Century New York and Boston.New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ellington, George (pseud). 1869. The Women of NewYork or the Under-World of the Great City. NewYork: New York Book Co.

Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches and Bases:Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Lon-don: Pandora Press.

Fisher, Sue, and Davis, Kathy, eds. 1993. Negotiating atthe Margins: The Gendered Discourses of Power andResistance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-sity Press.

Foster, George G. 1990 [1856]. New York by Gaslightand Other Urban Sketches. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse,and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 1992. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Con-tribution to the Critique of Actually Existing De-mocracy. In Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed.Craig Calhoun, pp. 109–42. Cambridge: MITPress.

Freeman, Rhoda Golden. 1994. The Free Negro in NewYork City in the Era before the Civil War. New York:Garland Publishing.

Goheen, Peter. 1994. Negotiating Access to PublicSpace in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Toronto. Jour-nal of Historical Geography 24: 430–49.

Habermas, Jurgen. 1993. The Structural Transformationof the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hammack, David. 1987. Power and Society: GreaterNew York at the Turn of the Century. New York:Columbia University Press.

How to Behave: A Pocket Manual of Republican Etiquette.1872. New York.

Ignatiev, Noel. 1995. How the Irish Became White. NewYork: Routledge.

Jaher, Frederic Cople. 1982. The Urban Establishment:Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chi-cago, and Los Angeles. Urbana: University of Illi-nois Press.

Kasson, John. 1990. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in19th-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford:Blackwell Publishers.



Lockwood, Charles. 1976. Manhattan Moves Uptown.New York: Barnes and Noble.

Mandelbaum, Seymour J. 1965. Boss Tweed’s New York.New York: John Wiley.

Mann, Patricia S. 1994. Micro-Politics: Agency in aPostfeminist Era. Minneapolis: University of Min-neapolis Press.

Marston, Sallie. 1990. Who are “the People”?: Gender,Citizenship, and the Making of the AmericanNation. Environment and Planning D: Society andSpace 8:449–58.

Martin, Edward W. 1868. The Secrets of the Great City.Philadelphia: Jones Brothers.

McCabe, James D. Jr. 1872. Lights and Shadows of NewYork Life. Reprinted by Andre Deutsch, London,1971.

Meehan, Johanna, ed. 1995. Feminists Read Habermas:Gendering the Subject of Discourse. New York:Routledge.

Mitchell, Don. 1995. The End of Public Space? Peo-ple’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democ-racy. Annals of the Association of AmericanGeographers 85:108–33.

Morse, Lucy Gibbons. 1927. Recollections of the DraftRiots of 1863 New York City. New York HistoricalSociety, miscellaneous documents.

Mott, Frank Luther. 1957. A History of American Maga-zines. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. 1993. Public Sphereand Experience, toward an Analysis of the Bourgeoisand Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minneapolis Press.

Poovey, Mary. 1988. Uneven Developments: The Ideo-logical Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Robbins, Bruce. 1990. Intellectuals in Decline? (reviewof Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: AmericanCulture in the Age of Academe). Social Text 25/26:254–59.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and Elizabeth Blackmar. 1992. ThePark and the People. New York: Henry Holt.

Rowe, Stacy, and Jennifer Wolch. 1990. Social Net-works in Time and Space: Homeless Women inSkid Row, Los Angeles. Annals of the Associationof American Geographers 80:184–204.

Rules of Etiquette and Home Culture. 1893. Chicago andNew York.

Scheiner, Seth. 1965. Negro Mecca: A History of theNegro in New York City, 1865–1920. New York:New York University Press.

Scherzer, Kenneth. 1992. The Unbounded Community:Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New YorkCity, 1830–1875. Chapel Hill: Duke UniversityPress.

Scobey, David. 1992. Anatomy of the Promenade: ThePolitics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York. Social History 17: 203–27.

Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: EverydayForms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press.

Smith, Matthew Hale. 1868. Sunshine and Shadow inNew York. Hartford.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1985. Disorderly Conduct:Visions of Gender in Victorian America. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Soja, Edward. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reas-sertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London:Verso.

Sorkin, Michael, ed. 1992. Variations on a Theme Park:The New American City and the Decline of PublicSpace. New York: Hill and Wang.

Spann, Edward. 1981. The New Metropolis: New YorkCity, 1840–1857. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Squires, Judith. 1994. Private Lives, Secluded Places:Privacy as Political Possibility. Environment andPlanning D: Society and Space 12: 387–402.

Veness, April. 1995. Designer Shelter as Models andMakers of Homelessness in Urban America. Ur-ban Geography 15: 150–67.

Wharton, Edith. 1968 [1920]. The Age of Innocence.New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

———. 1984 [1905]. The House of Mirth. New York:Bantam Books.

White, Shane. 1991. Somewhat More Independent: TheEnd of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810. Ath-ens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Wilson, Elizabeth. 1991. The Sphinx in the City: UrbanLife, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Winter, James. 1993. London’s Teeming Streets1830–1914. London: Routledge.

Correspondence: College of Liberal Arts, Florida Atlantic University, Davie, FL 33314, email [email protected].

226 Domosh


Public Space in 19th Century in NY

Documents

Transcript of Public Space in 19th Century in NY