Urban Space as a Primary Source: Local History and Historical Thinking in New York City

Abstract

This article discusses how local history can be used by teachers to help develop historical thinking skills such as source analysis, the collection of data, and the creation of historical arguments. Using New York City as a case study, this article argues that urban spaces and local communities provide historical evidence that can be read and analyzed. It uses different streets, buildings, and neighborhoods from New York City to show how historical conclusions can be drawn from those resources. It also discusses instructional ideas that teachers can develop in their classrooms.

Keywords:

• historical thinking
• local history
• New York City
• primary sources
• urban history

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Mr. Lawrence Stelter for graciously allowing this article to include a photograph (Figure 7) from his book By the El: The Third Avenue Elevated at Mid-Century. See www.bytheel.com for further information. The author also wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

1. Figure 7 is dominated by the shadowy presence of the Third Avenue Elevated Railroad. At one time elevated trains (“Els”) ran up 2nd, 3rd, 6th, and 9th Avenues in Manhattan. The Els impeded auto traffic and were thought to depress property values and inhibit growth. Privately owned when they were built, the refusal of the city to raise the nickel train fare (considered a form of social welfare) drove them into bankruptcy and receivership. Residents and businesses also campaigned heavily for the removal of the Els, and they were systematically demolished, beginning with the 6th Avenue El in 1937 (Stelter 1995, 9). The Third Avenue El survived until 1955, when it, too, was removed. The last of Manhattan's streetcars were eliminated by 1957. The move to accommodate cars at the expense of mass transit is reflective of the beliefs that drove the actions of civic leaders across American cities at this time.

2. One writer (Glazer 1991, 165) calls 96th Street “the most sharply divided border between poverty and affluence, urban misery and urban elegance to be found in New York City, or perhaps anywhere else.” Several explanations help account for this reality. First, the area bounded by 96th Street to the north, 86th Street to the south, Lexington Avenue to the east, and 5th Avenue to the west is called Carnegie Hill and was developed in the late nineteenth century as an area of expensive housing for the super wealthy. Mansions owned by Gilded Age tycoons such as William Frick, Andrew Carnegie, Otto Kahn, and Archer Huntington still stand in the neighborhood, for example. Indeed, the area took its name from the elegant Carnegie Mansion (now a museum) on East 91st Street. Carnegie Hill was in turn surrounded by the neighborhoods of Yorkville to the east and East Harlem to the north. These areas were built to house working-class immigrants (largely Italian and Eastern European) and consisted almost exclusively of tenement apartments. Later, the area north of 96th Street was heavily redeveloped as a result of urban renewal, which prevented the gentrification that occurred in Yorkville. As a result, 96th Street became an invisible barrier separating the vast wealth of the East Side of Manhattan from the poverty of East Harlem.

3. Title I was a component of the National Housing Act of 1949. This law provided federal assistance to states and cities to “clear” (meaning, demolish) areas with housing deemed substandard. Private developers were then contracted to build on the empty space. Although the law was intended to cure the housing crisis that arose after World War II, it precipitated the destruction of many viable neighborhoods and dislodged many poor and working-class residents from their homes and communities. As Samuel Zipp (2010, 5) notes in his recent study, urban renewal came to be seen by many as “a travesty of democracy [and] more suited to a totalitarian regime than the United States.” Additionally, much of the land that was cleared was home to factories and manufacturing concerns, and the loss of those facilities helped precipitate the slow decline of northeastern and Midwestern cities, as these businesses largely relocated to the south and southwest (Freeman 2001).

4. The construction of Lincoln Center was a controversial undertaking involving the displacement of thousands of residents and the demolition of their homes and apartment buildings. At the time, the area was considered a run-down area of grimy tenements that could be rehabilitated through the construction of a world-class music venue. For urban planners of the period, city spaces served as blank canvasses through which they could enact their own ideals about how to reconfigure and reorder life in cities. These beliefs were heavily influenced by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and LeCorbusier, who favored isolating the residential, commercial, and recreational areas in cities from one another (Flint 2006, 31). The classic argument against these ideas can be found in the work of Jane Jacobs (1961), whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities stressed the benefits of traditional urban life. Since the 1960s, Jacobs's views have become widely accepted. A recent retrospective about the area around Lincoln Center notes that “today, that 19th-century housing would be gentrified before you could say Jane Jacobs, but in the 1950s, tabula-rasa development was standard operating procedure” (Gratz 2010, 207).

5. Even today the West Village contains numerous Italian bakeries, meat markets, restaurants, and grocery stores, in addition to Italian churches, community centers, and other businesses. The famous German delicatessen Schaller and Weber (opened in 1937) is still open on the Upper East Side, and the churches in the area (both Catholic and Protestant) continue to offer mass in German.