The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875
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The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875
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Overview
After a critical examination of recent historical renderings of neighborhood life, Scherzer focuses on the ecological, symbolic, and social aspects of nineteenth-century community life in New York City. Employing a wide array of sources, from census reports and church records to police blotters and brothel guides, he documents the complex composition of neighborhoods that defy simple categorization by class or ethnicity. From his account, the New York City neighborhood emerges as a community in flux, born out of the chaos of May Day, the traditional moving day. The fluid geography and heterogeneity of these neighborhoods kept most city residents from developing strong local attachments. Scherzer shows how such weak spatial consciousness, along with the fast pace of residential change, diminished the community function of the neighborhood. New Yorkers, he suggests, relied instead upon the "unbounded community," a collection of friends and social relations that extended throughout the city.
With pointed argument and weighty evidence, The Unbounded Community replaces the neighborhood of nostalgia with a broader, multifaceted conception of community life. Depicting the neighborhood in its full scope and diversity, the book will enhance future forays into urban history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822398752 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 375 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
Read an Excerpt
The Unbounded Community
Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830â"1875
By Kenneth A. Scherzer
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1992 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9875-2
CHAPTER 1
Toward an Historical Understanding of Neighborhood
As he looked back to his early years in New York's Lower East Side, where he had lived before his family moved to the "soulless wasteland" of Queens in 1949, writer Morris Dickstein remembered a small world, "remarkably self-contained" despite its lack of homogeneity. "Was there anything ... that couldn't be bought within a five block radius?" "Everything seemed close by," and the "borders of the neighborhood were sharply defined," so that other nearby areas were "alien territory to my parents and off limits to me." This sense of growing up in a nurturing, supportive, and closed neighborhood community mirrored the sentiments of countless other New Yorkers whose childhood memories conjure a lost world. Yet for Dickstein, these memories meant something more, representing "not only nostalgia for one's formative years" but also an appreciation of "the role neighborhoods play in the life of a city like New York." Urban dwellers in New York had long seemed to identify "less with the city than with their own neighborhood," and Dickstein noted how his life had "always been mediated by the neighborhoods I've lived in."
Such is the "neighborhood of nostalgia"—candy stores, corner green grocers, stick ball, and fraternization on high stoops. To Jewish and other European immigrants, it is the tenement "world of our fathers" in which the "immigrant experience provided a set of common bonds: a shared culture, common religion, family ties, and similar hopes for a better future." This reminiscence of pickles from a barrel, "thick-crusted pumpernickel and bottles of milk that had a generous head of cream" is accompanied by and often masks a grief over lost innocence as the fear of crime and the influx of desperately poor newcomers, many of whom were Hispanic and black, prompted flight to distant boroughs and suburbs. Heightened economic and racial polarization intermingles with a declining sense of community as Americans moved to suburbs in which social life became "privatized." For black New Yorkers who predate the postwar waves of migration, the neighborhood of nostalgia is the Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s where a golden age of culture, supported by vibrant social and familial institutions, now seems a tattered memory amongst the rubble of abandonment. Areas like the Lower East Side have been left to newer groups or abandoned in the final stages of decay. Other less blighted areas have been "rescued from decay" through gentrification, and the result has been neighborhoods that while richer are "less humane, less concerned with the community, glitzier, and increasingly less interesting." Less fortunate areas like the East Tremont section of the Bronx, so nostalgically evoked by Robert Caro, were simply bulldozed.
With this erosion of former communities, the neighborhood of nostalgia has become a powerful cultural image. The sentiment grows that "everywhere we turn, the fabric of community life seems threatened." Filmmakers have rediscovered and now celebrate even the "mean streets" of New York "as if they could disappear any moment." Nor is it surprising that political culture has attempted to tap the strong emotional currents underlying these sentiments. Politicians of varying ideological stripes have come to the rhetorical rescue of the neighborhood as if it were an endangered species. Ronald Reagan launched his bid for re-election by elevating "the strength of neighborhood" to the pantheon of "great American values" that he saw himself restoring, and Jesse Jackson recalled growing up in a housing project where "we didn't have a neighborhood, we had a community." These subjective and idealized conceptions of neighborhoods sharply underscore the extent to which the concept of the neighborhood of nostalgia resonates throughout popular and political culture.
The Historians' Nostalgia
The idealization of neighborhood community has seeped into the writings of American historians as well, particularly recent studies of social and working-class history. Just as politicians have exploited the neighborhood of nostalgia for its appeal, so for many historians class-segregated neighborhoods embody a political question in the deepest sense.
Much social history over the last two decades has arguably been a reaction to the "end-of-ideology," consensus school of history that dominated scholarship over the preceding several decades (1930s–1950s). In proposing the existence of a unique American "liberal" ideology, consensus historians argued that historical circumstances—the abundance of land, the shortage of labor, and the gulf between America and Europe—spared American colonists and their descendants the class divisions and denied them the traditions of European working-class socialism. With such narrow social differences, it was argued, rich and poor Americans, native and immigrant alike, shared the same political spectrum and thus an ideological community. Debate over the validity of consensus has served to heighten the importance of neighborhoods for the two principal movements in recent social history: the "new urban history" of the late 1960s and 1970s and the "new social history" of the 1980s. That both seek either to uncover or to deny the existence of community in the past has produced something of a consensus regarding the importance of neighborhood-based community. All these historians, whatever their ideological perspective, seem to agree that neighborhood community is a vital institution to urban democracy that determines how well urbanites adjust to their environment. The disagreements lie in whether neighborhoods were constructed out of class or ethnic ties or whether transiency actually prevented the formation of neighborhood communities.
In recent years historians influenced by work on class formation in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Great Britain, particularly that of E. P. Thompson, have challenged the assertion of the consensus school that American workers lacked a distinctive class-consciousness or tradition of radicalism. Much of the resulting new social history has illuminated previously overlooked facets of the making of an American working class, and this has helped revitalize American social history by focusing attention on changing social modes of production, the emergence of industrial capitalism, and, in particular, the cultural lives of the urban working class. As one scholar has noted, class relations have begun to be appreciated "as part of a human achievement in which men and women struggle to comprehend the social relations into which they were born (or entered involuntarily) and in which, by collective exercise of power, they sustain or challenge those relations, in every phase of social life."
For several analysts of early industrial capitalism, neighborhoods have held a special importance in defining working-class community. It is widely argued that neighborhoods are as much a material manifestation of class formation as the division of labor and the debasement of crafts are in the workplace. Marxist historians have even claimed that "tightly knit units like the family and community neighborhood remained immune to the culture of capitalism and thus served as counterhegemonic enclaves." In the case of New York City the retreat of the "haute bourgeoisie" to exclusive enclaves and the emergence of impoverished areas like the Five Points, which housed practitioners of debased crafts, produced neighborhood divisions that paralleled those of class. "Navigating a course through the uncertain waters of Manhattan's real estate" that separated the wealthy "inner Republic of the Fifteenth Ward" and Broadway from the "artisan republic" on the Bowery required, in the words of Peter Buckley, "a relocation of consciousness as well as bodies and belongings" to deal with "new distinctions between work and leisure, between areas of masculine and feminine power, and between public and private action." Location therefore provides the historian of the nineteenth-century city "convenient access into the lived experience and consciousness" of both the elite and the workers.
Elizabeth Blackmar's detailed study of early patterns of residential development, for example, challenges Sam Bass Warner's essentially consensus view that "spatial concentration and integration" in the preindustrial city "encouraged and supported social cohesion, cooperation, and deference." By the end of the eighteenth century, Blackmar counters, traditional household modes of labor organization that integrated work and living space were in decline as master craftsmen ceased to provide accommodations for their workers. This gave rise to a bifurcated housing market in which large property owners were increasingly separated from their tenants. Displaced journeymen and unskilled workers experienced increasing "detachment" and "transience." "The interchangeability of rental housing as a commodity, like the interchangeability of labor power to capitalist production, forced working-class tenants to move around in order to find accommodations within the price limit set by wages." The result was the emergence of "class neighborhoods" in the "form of 'class streets' or even parts of streets divided into 'respectable' and 'nonrespectable' blocks." Tenant areas came to be collections of slums while genteel districts of middle-class houses arose that promised "convenience to a separate workplace, healthfulness, and family comfort." While "Manhattan did not develop a highly differentiated class geography reinforced by transportation systems," the "relations that could not be defined through physical distance" came to be expressed through new ways of asserting social distance. This gradual "melding of social and spatial neighborhoods" in turn "laid the ground for new modes of class interaction."
The existence of class-segregated neighborhoods has became for historians of nineteenth-century New York the sine qua non to any understanding of social geography. A few notable enclaves of wealth and of poverty show New York's underlying class polarization in the 1840s: For the rich, there were the "residential enclaves along Broadway at the southern portion of the city," places where "they dined in each other's homes and married into each other's families." For the laboring poor, there were areas such as Bancker Street in the Fifth Ward where "poor blacks crammed into tumbledown houses, where overcrowding and poor sanitation led to periodic outbreaks of disease and fever"; Corlears Hook, to the east, where "the sailors' resort became a lower-class haven"; and most infamous of all, the Five Points district, where the abandonment of clapboard homes by their "original artisan owners" produced a "vaporous neighborhood" constructed upon the soggy fill of the former Collect Pond.
To be sure, such studies eschew the rosiness of the modern neighborhood of nostalgia. It is difficult to be nostalgic for cellar apartments, high mortality, and ramshackle tenements—although Dickstein's reminiscences were actually triggered by a reminder that the beloved neighborhood of his youth was (as it had long been) a slum. Still, life in nineteenth-century working-class neighborhoods has been romanticized by scholars who emphasize the strength of working-class community. This is true of a recent study by Christine Stansell that seeks to integrate the evolution of class relations in New York under industrial capitalism with the gender relations of the working poor. Like many labor historians, she dates the increased segregation of New York's neighborhoods to the Federalist era when the city began to separate into two areas: the "small, self-enclosed enclave of the wealthy and urbane" and the "riotous world of the laboring poor" located in the "dark, dirty, overcrowded little plebeian neighborhoods along the East River." By the 1830s "the enclaves of laboring people were coming to constitute separate territories, so extensive and distinct that they seemed to genteel observers something like a foreign domain." The strength of working-class communities combined with class-based patterns of gender relations to produce a peculiar "moral economy of the tenements." The disappearance of urban domestic production in nineteenth-century slums pulled men further out of the household and allowed poor women to create a new and unique form of women's community. Thus "even within the male-dominated structures of tenement life, married women found in the urban neighborhoods a female milieu that offered help in their dealings with men." They were, in other words, "shifting communities of cooperation and contention" counterpoising a "sexual delineation of urban geography" with one based purely upon class.
This special concern of labor historians with neighborhood communities has much in common with that of the earlier historiographic movement, the new urban history. Like other "new" histories of the 1960s, this movement reflected optimism about the possible merger between history and the social sciences. However, its hope of treating the city as "an arbitrary container of some socioeconomic activity" ended in failure, and "what looked like the wave of the future in the late 1960s began to resemble," in the words of Charles Tilly, "spent foam on a littered beach only a decade later." Yet it is easy to forget that both labor history and the new urban history both tackled the same fundamental question of whether America had developed a class conscious radicalized working class. Unlike those who essentially sought to Americanize the findings of E. P. Thompson or retroactively search for communal institutions, historians like Stephan Thernstrom and Peter Knights accepted the basic premise of consensus historians and utilized new methodologies and quantitative tools borrowed from sociology to explain why America had failed to develop the radicalized working class that it should have under industrial capitalism. Where labor historians assigned a crucial role to neighborhoods in cementing class-consciousness, many urban historians denied this role; they concluded from high rates of geographic mobility and unexpectedly low rates of residential segregation that neither stable, cohesive neighborhood communities nor meaningful working-class radicalism had any chance to form for most Americans. Socialism was in effect stillborn through a combination of transiency, the satisfactions of home ownership, and incremental upward mobility. Thus the new urban history also embraced elements of the neighborhood of nostalgia by assuming, like many sociologists from whom they drew their methodological inspiration, that stable neighborhoods were prerequisites for community and that high levels of transiency invariably produced alienation and anomie.
Its failure to handle the question of social inequality has unfortunately obscured what should have been its most durable contribution: the use of successive manuscript censuses to trace individuals, allowing historians to uncover high levels of geographic mobility in nineteenth-century America. In a path-breaking study, Thernstrom estimated that 157,862 families moved into Boston during the 1880s as 138,572 simultaneously left, which suggested that upward of 800,000 people might have passed through the city in a single decade. While these estimates were flawed by inadequate attention to mortality among out-migrants and by some inaccurate data, the volatility of populations in eastern cities was nonetheless remarkable. Yet, while the quantitative extent of mobility and the role of kinship in directing it are now better understood, its qualitative meaning remains largely a matter of conjecture—fed by suppositions linking mobility to social disruption. One scholar noted that the "restless and footloose" character of American city dwellers produced a "felt lack of community" and a sense of rootlessness, while another argued that transiency "worked against the development of a local sense of community cohesion and integration." If the constant flow of newcomers sometimes fostered cosmopolitanism, its chief effect may have been to promote anomie which in turn "contributed to the inward concentration—the intensification of domesticity—that became the hallmark of the modern family." The picture presented by urban historians portrayed migrant Americans as uprooted souls—the products and prisoners of a disrupted social environment more likely to create alienation, isolation, and apathy than solidarity, community, and resistance.
Other findings about immigrant ghettos compounded this already gloomy picture. Since the early twentieth century, writers had characterized these neighborhoods as a "closed unchanging space, symbol of immigrant isolation for a few months, a few years, or life." Having lost their village-based communities when they left Europe, these uprooted inhabitants huddled together in festering slums until upward socioeconomic mobility or assimilation into American culture allowed them to escape. In more recent years, this depiction had been revised to stress the function of residential communities in the sheltering and socializing of immigrants with the aid of kinsmen, countrymen, ethnic institutions such as churches and local voluntary associations, and, in politics, through the ward leader. But with the discovery of geographic mobility, it seemed that newcomers moved too often to develop either the negative effects of "ghetto culture" or, for that matter, the positive effects of neighborhood-based institutions in fostering group cohesion. Furthermore, ecological studies of residential patterns in nineteenth-century cities indicated that many if not most immigrants actually congregated within small residential clusters rather than large homogeneous neighborhoods. These findings suggested that urban neighborhoods played little more than a symbolic role in the transmission and preservation of ethnic culture, by housing institutions that seemed to foster solidarity and by helping to define the alien culture to both group members and the wider society. The question of how social cohesion could have been maintained was never adequately answered.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Unbounded Community by Kenneth A. Scherzer. Copyright © 1992 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Tables and Figures,Preface,
1: Toward an Historical Understanding of Neighborhood,
PART I THE ECOLOGICAL NEIGHBORHOOD,
2: Moving Day,
3: Patterns of Neighborhood Change,
4: Children and Boarders—The Familial Basis of Neighborhood,
PART II THE SYMBOLIC NEIGHBORHOOD,
5: The Discovery of the Neighborhood—The Symbolic Community in New York,
PART III THE SOCIAL NEIGHBORHOOD,
6: Communities Out of Weak Ties,
7: Conclusion,
APPENDICES,
A: A Note on the Method and Sources Employed in Data Selection,
B: A Note on the Presentation and Analysis of Contingency Tables,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,