Imagining New York City: Literature, Urbanism, and the Visual Arts, 1890-1940

Using examples from architecture, film, literature, and the visual arts, this wide-ranging book examines the significance of New York City in the urban imaginary between 1890 and 1940. In particular, Imagining New York City considers how and why certain city spaces-such as the skyline, the sidewalk, the slum, and the subway-have come to emblematize key aspects of the modern urban condition. In so doing, Christoph Lindner also considers the ways in which cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for more recent responses to a variety of urban challenges facing the city, such as post-disaster recovery, the renewal of urban infrastructure, and the remaking of public space.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction Archive City Changing New York Modern City, Urban Imaginary Skylines and Sidewalks After City Part 1 - Skylines New York Vertical The City from Above Requiem for the Twin Towers Building the Skyline: A Brief Architectural History Text and the City New York Dreamscapes Fantasy Island After-Images of New York Revisioning the Skyscraper Cinema and the Vertical City The City from Greenwich Village Metrotopia The Empty City New York Undead Part 2 - Sidewalks New York Horizontal Sidewalks and Public Space A Short History of the Grid Street-Walking Broadway Promenade Manhattan Flanêuse Blasé Metropolitan Attitude City of Slums Sidewalks and Fear Tales of the Tenement New York Underground Elevated City High Line, Lowline Subway City Underground Fantasies Slow Street Afterword Bibliography

About the Author :
Christoph Lindner is Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam.

Review :
"This wonderfully rich and engaging book focuses on a transformative period in New York City's history to explore how and why it has so thoroughly captured modern urban imaginations." --David Pinder, author of Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism "An exciting and compelling book, Imagining New York City provides a major contribution to the study of cultural Modernism and urban visual culture. With a richly drawn narrative and a deft interweaving of texts and images, this is clearly a first class writer at work." --Joseph Heathcott, Associate Professor of Urban Studies at The New School and President of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History "Drawing on a rich array of literary, visual, and urbanistic materials, Christoph Lindner offers an intellectually playful, theoretically incisive guide to the cultural history of modern New York. Taking us up skylines and down sidewalks, Lindner makes it clear that imagining New York has been a crucial way of understanding urban modernity." --David Scobey, author of Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape