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• MODERNITY

• 1. Modern Youth
• 2. Modern Woman
• 3. Modern Democracy
• 4. Modern Faith
• 5. Modern City
• 6. Modern City in Art
• 7. Modern City in Film

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MODERNITY

5. Modern City

The MODERN CITY—epitomized by Manhattan's skyscrapers, bridges, neon lights, and 24/7 vitality—was the single most dominant icon of America in the 1920s. It lured many, repelled others, and fascinated all. What was lost and what was gained in the expansive, all-encompassing wonder-ful metropolis? Could the modern city herald man's ascendancy and nurture the human spirit? And just what made the modern city . . . modern?

• Lewis Mumford, "The Intolerable City: Must It Keep On Growing." New York native Lewis Mumford was a thirty-year-old literary editor and architecture critic in 1926 when he published this piece for Harper's, a seminal work in his long career as the critic-philosopher of the modern American city. "The mouths of our great cities," he declaimed, "are gigantic hoppers" that devour the human spirit, a process he dramatized in the first half of this article (presented here) through three typical New York City residents—office worker "Mr. Brown," millionaire "Mr. Smith-Robinson," and suburbanite "Mr. Jones." The suburbs could provide only a temporary respite, Mumford insisted, and despite the bold futuristic visions of architects in "Cloudcuckooland," nothing could make the sprawling urban centers "fit for permanent human habitation." For the rest of his life, Mumford promoted the creation of new moderate-sized communities, surrounded by agricultural green space, designed to nurture the best that life had to offer homo sapiens. What makes the modern American city a "giant hopper" into which we pour food, energy, metals, and people? Why did Mumford reject the favored alternatives? What did he promote in their stead? (7 pp.)

  
  


• Collected commentary on the skyscraper. In the American self-image of the 1920s, the icon of modern was the modern city, the icon of the modern city was New York City, and the icon of New York City was the skyscraper. Love it or hate it, the skyscraper symbolized the go-go and up-up drive that "America" meant to itself and much of the world. A sampling of Twenties commentary on the architectural phenomenon that still captures the American imagination is presented here. How did the skyscraper epitomize what was modern in America? How was it idolized and demonized? How did foreign observers respond to American skyscrapers? (Also see skyscrapers in art and film in the sections Modern City in Art and Modern City in Film.) Selections can be divided among students for research and classroom discussion. (10 pp.)

  
  

• Silent newsreels. What better subject for live action news in the Twenties than the construction of ever-taller ever-more impressive skyscrapers in American cities. These two newsreels differ widely in tone: why?

  • - "Old and New Detroit," 1923 (~2:20). In this low-key newsreel, the transformation of downtown Detroit over fifty years is depicted in five then-and-now sequences.
    DETROIT NEWS PICTORIAL/WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY
    
    
  • - "905 Feet High," 1929 (1:56). "Final steelwork completed on Bank of Manhattan—World's highest building. Our cameraman was there—of course!" With dramatic flourish British Pathé News reported the vertical dominance of 40 Wall Street (now the Trump Building)—the world's tallest building for a few days in 1930 until the completion of the Chrysler Building.
    BRITISH PATHÉ NEWS
  
  


• Poets and the modern city. Man's awe of his technological feats, and his ambivalence toward their consequences on his spirit and culture, fueled much literary exploration in the twentieth century. These two poems explore man's response to the modern dilemmas created by his technological dominance. Will it dominate him? What aspect of the modern city is central in each poem, and how does the poet use it as a metaphor for man's relationship to nature and his civilization? How is man accommodating to modernity? What future does modernity offer man, if any, that sustains the scaffolding of mankind's past? You might compare these poems with Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856) and Carl Sandburg's "Skyscraper" (1916). (2 pp.)

  • - Robert Frost, "A Brook in the City," 1921. Not a nostalgic pastoral poem as its first words suggest, "Brook" reverberates with the submerged fury of a farmland brook cemented over by a "new-built city." Although imprisoned for no fault other than, perhaps, failing to submit to the city's imperious advance, the brook is not impotent. Its water, an "immortal force" that man has deemed superfluous, may already be haunting the city, depriving its residents of the equanimity they would have known if living, still, in an old farmhouse in an old meadow. What are its "thoughts [that] may not have risen," and what is their power? Read "Brook" aloud to hear the restrained ire in the meter (iambic pentameter). The rhyming couplets end in terse one-syllable words; of the 193 words in the poem, only three have more than two syllables (and those have only three syllables). Compare "Brook" with the similar-themed Frost poem, "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" (1920).
    
    
  • - Hart Crane, "To Brooklyn Bridge," 1930. In the introductory "proem" to his dense epic-length The Bridge, Crane addresses the Brooklyn Bridge, the engineering marvel completed in 1883 that connects Brooklyn and Manhattan Island. As the Statue of Liberty a few miles away symbolizes American independence and promise, the Brooklyn Bridge epitomizes America's technological and continental dominance—and its refusal to cower to natural limits. Bridges, by connecting, destroy isolation; by towering, they touch the heavens; by rooting deep in the waters, they affirm immortality; and by dominating any landscape they inhabit, they rule. In Crane's poem, the Brooklyn Bridge anchors America's past while connecting it to the undefinable but promising future. How does the bridge make the harsh city beautiful and sublime? How does it buoy optimism and exuberance (despite the suicide in stanza five)? How does it approach divinity, and offer "reprieve and pardon"? Although a product of man, what does it offer man that he cannot provide himself? (Crane intended The Bridge to offer a more optimistic and spiritual vision of American modernity than T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.1) For guidance in interpreting the poem, see Hart Crane's The Bridge: A Digital Resource, and other supplemental sites below. It is essential to read the poem aloud.

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See also Modern City in Art, Modern City in Film, and City & Town.

Supplemental Sites