The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition (The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America)

204 Pages·2017·3.947 MB·English

by  Jamin Creed Rowan

The Sociable City
THE ARTS AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE
IN MODERN AMER I CA
Casey Nelson Blake, Series Editor
Volumes in the series explore questions at the intersection of
the history of expressive culture and the history of ideas in
modern Amer i ca. The series is meant as a bold intervention in
two fi elds of cultural inquiry. It challenges scholars in American
studies and cultural studies to move beyond so cio log i cal
categories of analy sis to consider the ideas that have informed
and given form to artistic expression— whether architecture
and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and lit er a ture.
The series also expands the domain of intellectual history by
examining how artistic works, and aesthetic experience more
generally, participate in the discussion of truth and value, civic
purpose, and personal meaning that have engaged scholars
since the late nineteenth century.
Advisory Board: Steven Conn, Lynn Garafola,
Charles McGovern, Angela L. Miller, Penny M. Von Eschen,
David M. Scobey, and Richard Cándida Smith.
THE SOCIABLE CITY
An American Intellectual Tradition
Jamin Creed Rowan
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 - 4112
www . upenn . edu / pennpress
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Rowan, Jamin Creed, author.
Title: The sociable city: an American intellectual tradition / Jamin
Creed Rowan.
Other titles: Arts and intellectual life in modern Amer i ca.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania
Press, [2017] | Series: The arts and intellectual life in modern
Amer i ca | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016050508 | ISBN 9780812249293
(hardcover: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: City planning— Social aspects— United States—
History—19th century. | City planning— Social aspects— United
States— History—20th century. | Urban ecol ogy (Sociology)—
United States— History—19th century. | Urban ecol ogy
(Sociology)— United States— History—20th century. | City and
own life— United States— Psychological aspects— History—19th
century. | City and town life— United States— Psychological
aspects— History—20th century. | Public spaces— Social
aspects— United States— History—19th century. | Public
spaces— Social aspects— United States— History—20th century.
Classifi cation: LCC HT167 .R69 2017 |
DDC 307.1/216097309034— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016050508
CONTENTS
Introduction. Finding Fellow- Feeling in the City 1
Chapter 1. Th e Settlement Movement’s Push for Public Sympathy 15
Chapter 2. New Deal Urbanism and the Contraction of Sympathy 42
Chapter 3. Literary Urbanists and the Interwar Development
of Urban Sociability 75
Chapter 4. Th e Ecol ogy of Sociability in the Postwar City 98
Chapter 5. Jane Jacobs and the Consolidation of Urban Sociability 124
Conclusion. Th e Future of Urban Sociability 154
Notes 161
Index 187
Acknowl edgments 193
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The Sociable City
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INTRODUCTION
Finding Fellow- Feeling in the City
On February 25, 1870, Frederick Law Olmsted addressed the American So-
cial Science Association at Boston’s Lowell Institute. As a result of his lead-
ership in the design, construction, and ongoing operation of New York City’s
Central Park during the late 1850s and throughout the 1860s, Olmsted had
become one of the nation’s most vocal interpreters of urban life. Although
he would eventually try to persuade his Bostonian listeners of the civic value
of building their own version of Central Park, he began his speech by telling
them what they, no doubt, already knew— that the pro cesses of urbanization
that had radically reshaped their city would continue to transform the nation’s
landscape. Unlike many of his fellow urbanists, Olmsted was only mildly
troubled by the “amount of disease and misery and of vice and crime” to be
found in cities, assured that “modern Science” would quickly fi x these prob-
lems. He expressed much more concern for the city’s corrosive eff ects on the
social interactions among its inhabitants. In what may be one of the earliest
and most genteel descriptions of road rage, Olmsted explained that when he
and those gathered to hear him walked “through the denser part of a town,
to merely avoid collision with those we meet and pass upon the sidewalks,
we have constantly to watch, to foresee, and to guard against their move-
ments.” Such navigational wariness demanded of urban pedestrians a care-
ful “consideration of [ others’] intentions, a calculation of their strength and
weakness, which is not so much for their benefi t as our own.” On the city’s
streets and sidewalks, Olmsted fretted, “our minds are thus brought into
close dealings with other minds without any friendly fl owing toward them,
but rather a drawing from them.” Th e city’s built environment encouraged
those who moved through it to regard each other “in a hard if not always
hardening way.” Olmsted despairingly informed those gathered at the Lowell
Institute that the mentally and emotionally “restraining and confi ning