The Sociable City
THE ARTS AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN MODERN AMERICA
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 America. The series is meant as a bold intervention in two fields of cultural inquiry. It challenges scholars in American studies and cultural studies to move beyond sociological categories of analysis to consider the ideas that have informed and given form to artistic expression—whether architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature. 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
Printed in the United States of America 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 America.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Series: The arts and intellectual life in modern America | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: 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 ecology (Sociology)—United States—History—19th century. | Urban ecology (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.
Classification: LCC HT167 .R69 2017 | DDC 307.1/216097309034—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050508
CONTENTS
Introduction. Finding Fellow-Feeling in the City
Chapter 1. The Settlement Movement’s Push for Public Sympathy
Chapter 2. New Deal Urbanism and the Contraction of Sympathy
Chapter 3. Literary Urbanists and the Interwar Development of Urban Sociability
Chapter 4. The Ecology of Sociability in the Postwar City
Chapter 5. Jane Jacobs and the Consolidation of Urban Sociability
Conclusion. The Future of Urban Sociability
The Sociable City
INTRODUCTION
Finding Fellow-Feeling in the City
On February 25, 1870, Frederick Law Olmsted addressed the American Social Science Association at Boston’s Lowell Institute. As a result of his leadership 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 processes 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 fix these problems. He expressed much more concern for the city’s corrosive effects 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 movements.” Such navigational wariness demanded of urban pedestrians a careful “consideration of [others’] intentions, a calculation of their strength and weakness, which is not so much for their benefit 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 flowing toward them, but rather a drawing from them.” The 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 confining conditions” of the city he had just described compelled city dwellers like themselves to “look closely upon others without sympathy.”1
Olmsted was simply telling his audience what many had already been saying, and would continue to say, about urban life—that the city dramatically changes the way individuals interact with and feel toward one another. In expressing their deep concerns about the ability of city dwellers to connect with one another in emotionally and socially satisfying ways, Olmsted contributed to an increasingly robust antiurbanist discourse that would pervade American culture for years to come. Antiurbanism in the United States has always had at its core the accusation that city life