seeing modern day New York through nineteenth century eyes

Today I stumbled on a New York Times story about Duane Michals, a photographer who wanted to see modern day New York City through nineteenth century eyes. He did as much by gathering images of the city after-hours. The photos brought memories of my colleague Bart Elmore's own fascination with the tensions between electronica music and photographs of present day Tuscaloosa. If observed closely, numerous buildings that existed in Tuscaloosa during the nineteenth century feel very Old World because of their European-styled architecture. Elmore pushed the envelope on such aesthetics by creating a mash up of very modern music for the soundtrack of a short students enrolled in this class last fall produced with my assistance.

Back to the New York Times story though, I was particularly struck by this image of Coney Island by Michals. It reminded me of how leisurely moments figured into the arrival of urban life. In cities like New York, people increasingly worked a set number of hours in factories and had time to do such things as visit Coney Island. Numerous individuals began to travel to the Brooklyn park, which sits on the coast of the Atlantic. As early as  the 1830s and 1840s steamships and streetcars helped reduced travel time to this part of New York.

The park's first carousel was built in 1876. This tourist attraction became  less popular after the Second World War. I have only seen it once in my life. Upon moving to the city in 2000, I wanted to drive to Coney Island. My memory is faulty, but I mostly recall seeing Russian-owned businesses, gold jewelers and dollar stores.

Brooklyn's Coney Island, 1917. Perry Casteneda Library Map Collection. University of Texas-Austin.

 

 

juxtaposing a New York mansion against DePalma's building

This multi-million dollar New York mansion was built in 1871.

DePalma's restaurant sits in a building also constructed in 1871.

Ian Crawford leads the students on a tour of  Jemison Mansion.

Architecture is not my area of expertise, but I have learned more about it than I expected while teaching this class. Indeed, it was interesting to read this evening an article in The New York Times about an Upper East Side mansion that was completed in 1871, the year that the building in which Tuscaloosa's Depalma's Italian restaurant sits was constructed. At the time, the building housed, as one of the students in this class has written in a short essay, Tuscaloosa's First National Bank. In this instance, it is apparent again that Tuscaloosa posed tensions with another "urban" space during the nineteenth century. Notably, the New York mansion and Depalma's  were both constructed in the Italianate style,which was popular in the United States from the mid-19th century through the 1890s. Like numerous other architectural styles, the Italianate style receives inspiration from a more distant past, specifically the Italian Renaissance architectural period some three centuries earlier. If memory serves, Tuscaloosa's Jemison-Van de Graff Mansion, which the students visited earlier this semester, was built in the same style. As an aside, that mansion was constructed about ten years earlier on the eve of the Civil War.