Date

Topic

Readings

Week 2:
March 10-14

Introduction
& The City as a Place

• Tim Cresswell, “Defining Place,” in Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004), 1-12

Week 3:
March 17-21

The African Burial Ground

• Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL, “The African Burial Ground” (NB Map of Historic Sites – scrolls)

• Anne-Marie Cantrell and Diana diZerenga Wall, “ ‘We Were Here’: The African Presence in Colonial New York,” Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City (2001)

• “Remembering Africa under the Eaves,” Archaeology 54, 3 (2001)

• “Slavery and Servitude at the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House,” and “Slave Housing in New York’s Countryside,” Slavery in New York, ed Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris (2005)

• African Burial Ground National Monument

Week 5:
April 7-11

The Five Points

• Images

• Maps

• Charles Dickens, “New York,” American Notes (1842)

• George Foster, “The Points at Midnight,” New York by Gaslight (1850)

• Rebecca Yamin, “New York’s Mythic Slum: Digging Lower Manhattan’s Infamous Five Points,” Archaeology (March/April 1997)

Week 6:
April 14-18

Central Park

• Central Park Virtual Tour

• Frederick Law Olmsted, “The Plan for the Park’ (1865), “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (1870)

• Helen Conant, “A Ramble in Central Park,” Harpers 59, 523 (October 1879): 689-701

• New York Times stories, 1870, 1880s

• Images

Week 7:
April 21-25

Lower East Side Tenements

• The Lower East Side Tenement Museum Virtual Tour

• Andrew Dolkart, Biography of a Tenement House in New York City (Santa Fe, 2006), 36-58, 65-72, 82-94

• Jacob Riis, “The Blight of the Double Decker,” The Battle with the Slum (1902)

• Images

Week 8:
April 28-May 2

Subways

• “The Route of the Road; Passenger Stations and Tracks,” The New York Subway (1904)

• Images

• Clifton Hood, “The Subway and the City,’ and “The Subway Crush,” 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York, 91-101, 113-119

• Michael Brooks, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick, NJ, 1997), 158-189

Week 10:
May 15-19

Skylines & Skyscrapers

• William R. Taylor, “New York and the Origin of the Skyline: The Commercial City as Visual Text,” In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (1992)

• Empire State Building Official Website Virtual Tour

• Manhattan Timeformations: Mapping Manhattan’s Skyscraper Districts Through Time

• David Nye, “The Sublime and the Skyline: The New York Skyscraper,” The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories, ed. Roberta Moudry (2005), 255-269

Week 11:
May 19-23

Expressways & Swimming Pools

• Marta Gutman, “Equipping the Public Realm: Rethinking Robert Moses & Recreation,” in Robert Moses And the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, eds Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson (New York, 2007), 72-85

• “Pools,” in Robert Moses And the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, eds Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson (New York, 2007), 135-150, 153-56

• Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air (New York, 1982), 290-296

• “Crosstown Expressways,” in Robert Moses And the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, eds Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson (New York, 2007), 212-227

Week 12:
May 26-30

Greenwich Village

• Jack Kerouac, “New York Scenes,” Lonesome Traveler (1960)

• Images from Fred W. McDarrah and Gloria S. McDarrah, Beat generation: glory days in Greenwich Village

• Luther Harris, Around Washington Square: An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village (2003), 264-274

• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), 38-41, 50-54

Week 13:
June 2-6

The World Trade Center

• Images: WTC

• Images: Freedom Tower & WTC Memorial

• Marita Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero,” American Ethnologist (August 2004): 311-325