As a member of the “Blogscapes and Digital Interaction” panel, what was your take on the conference as an occasion to explore material, literary and digital connections in the city? What immediate questions or concerns did you take away from your conversation with Bryan, Teri, Rachel and Maud?

As somebody a little outside the world of academia, I was honored to participate and was interested in academic exploration of the ever-evolving methods of digital information.  If anything, our panel discussion made me realize that the issues I face daily as a blogger and podcaster are similar to everybody else’s issues, no matter the subject matter. It’s like there are two tracks to a blogger’s life these days – the topic they’re discussing and the actual process of blogging itself.  Sometimes knowing how to maximize digital content can take as much intellectual prowess as the subjects of the articles themselves.

One of your most quotable moments from the panel came when you suggested that newspapers are picking up the bad habits of blogs and blogs are picking up the best habits of newspapers.  Can you say more about what you mean by that?  I know that the focus during the panel was driven by the audience’s interest in fact-checking, but I’m curious whether you see other applications/developments in the evolving relationships between New York blogs and New York print outlets.

My background is in magazine journalism, and I studied at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where the study was extremely (some would so overly) focused on newspaper craft. Wrapped within that was a traditional take on journalistic ethics. So when I originally began blogging, I was struck by the seeming lack of such structure to so-called ‘blog journalism’.

Over the past five years, however, that has noticeably changed from my perspective. Blogs have become reliable sources of information as a greater pool of digital source materials becomes available, making it actually irresponsible to be factually incorrect. With a greater cacophony of blogs in the digital universe, factually wrong or poorly written blogs are simply ignored.

I also think basic design has influenced content. There was a very awkward period when digital newspapers tried to convey their information using standard newspaper column design. Academic and library resources also presented their information in ways that was not viewer friendly.

As readers have become comfortable with what might be called ‘standard blog template’ (one or two columns, scrolling, with hotlink and jump buttons to expand articles), those design basics informed newspapers. But in doing so, it changed the content — article length, of course, but also the tone of articles. Perhaps cynically, the writing itself might take reader’s abbreviated attention spans into consideration.

Your podcast and blog speak in a very immediate way to an audience of New Yorkers, but you also noted how they organically generate a community beyond New York through comments, links and other digital formats.  Do you see an opportunity for exchange between these local and global communities? 

The biggest revelation in doing The Bowery Boys, both the blog and podcast, is the profound reach of the internet. We did our first couple dozen episodes completely unaware that anybody outside New York would find them interesting. Today, about half of our listeners live outside of the New York metropolitan area.

This has changed my perspective on creating content, but for the better.  Interacting with a global readership has broadened my personal perspective of the impact of history. Listeners aren’t just interested in the glamour of New York (although tourism is a big driver to our show) but also in how the city influenced the world. As a result we often do shows on larger topics (histories of electricity, radio or film) and New York’s contributions to those fields.

In a real sense, our global community has helped shape the show, but in a way that has only expanded its original purpose. I only hope to explore this further and, one day soon, to take it to another level.

My advice for any blogger: Keep true to yourself and your topic but realize that somebody in Tibet is probably reading you.

Image below: Brooklyn Radio Stores, 33 Flatbush Avenue, September 8, 1936. Wurts Brothers Collection, NYPL.

In your remarks at the conference, you cited the widespread obliviousness of most New Yorkers to the history they’re literally and figuratively inhabiting by living here. Are you an evangelist for New York history?  Does a resistance to thinking of ourselves as “native” New Yorkers (or the very porousness of that identity) contribute to the obliviousness you see?

I am totally a history evangelist, and not just New York history either. Every place on the planet has a story to tell. New York just happens to be very thickly stratified with them.

History enriches people’s lives abstractly, of course, but I argue that it does so practically as well. It’s about context. Your pizza tastes a whole lot better when you realize it’s been made in New York’s oldest pizza kitchen. (Whether it actually tastes good is besides the point.) This is the tourist perspective of New York. But to infuse that perspective into a daily experience here is profound. Suddenly, every street corner, every building, has a particular uniqueness. Everything talks back to you.

But that can be exhausting. The drone of everyday life in a city as difficult as New York blocks appreciation of it. It’s one of New York’s stunning ironies. We live in one of the most history-saturated places in America, but the speed of regular life obfuscates this.

I think the secret to a well-balanced, full-bodied life in New York is to have a little bit of tourist in you. Nobody should ever take our environments for granted. It’s simply too expensive to do so!

Your fellow panelists at Networked New York were all bloggers.  Can you say a word about how the podcast has shaped The Bowery Boys?  What can you do with the podcast that you can’t do with the blog?  Where is this format headed?  What other podcasts do you listen to?

We started the podcast in July 2007, and the blog was started shortly afterward, at Episode 3.  It was literally just started because I heard it was a good way to promote the podcast.  But I’ve always been a writer — always been writing something — and suddenly I realized that a blog could be an excuse to expand my own knowledge while presenting other stories on the periphery of ideas brought up in the podcast. It now seems that the podcast actually supports the blog.

The podcast makes history truly immediate for people. I could get really theoretical and talk about my theories of the oral tradition, of course, but simply put, a podcast is easy for people. As the authors, Tom and I can create a rapport that you simply cannot do with a written blog.

It’s unclear where the podcast as a medium is going. In one sense, this is actually the best time to create a podcast. Quality recording and editing equipment is affordable, and outlets like iTunes and Stitcher continue to support them. However, the medium has not evolved as it should. Some major outlets (like the New York Times) have abandoned it, even as others (like Slate) embrace it. It may turn out that there is a limited audience for podcasts in general, that in the end, for whatever reason, it will be unable to overcome perceived limitations when compared to regular terrestrial radio. But we’re doing our part to push the boundaries as we can.

There are a lot of excellent history podcasts out there. I regularly listen to only few of them! After doing my own, I find my brain almost maxed out on dates and places. I personally love a couple of big film podcasts (Filmspotting and Kermode Film Reviews). The slate of Slate podcasts are all outstanding. In a way, the best podcast in the world is the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day.  One day soon, I hope to work the word ‘incunabulum’ into a sentence.

Frank O’Hara at frankohara.org & at poetryfoundation.org.

By Ted Berrigan

Winter in the country, Southampton, pale horse
as the soot rises, then settles, over the pictures
The birds that were singing this morning have shut up
I thought I saw a couple kissing, but Larry said no
It’s a strange bird. He should know. & I think now
“Grandmother divided by monkey equals outer space.” Ron
put me in that picture. In another picture, a good-
looking poet is thinking it over, nevertheless, he will
never speak of that it. But, his face is open, his eyes
are clear, and, leaning lightly on an elbow, fist below
his ear, he will never be less than perfectly frank,
listening, completely interested in whatever there may
be to hear. Attentive to me alone here. Between friends,
nothing would seem stranger to me than true intimacy.
What seems genuine, truly real, is thinking of you, how
that makes me feel. You are dead. And you’ll never
write again about the country, that’s true.
But the people in the sky really love
to have dinner & to take a walk with you.

For the past couple summers I’ve taught two versions of the same course, though with separate titles and a few tweaks that suggest multiple possibilities for ordering the material we examine. The undergrad version of the course is called Downtown Scenes, 1960-1980. It grew out of a lecture I’ve given several times in the Writing New York course Cyrus and I have taught since 2003. I also used this more specific course — which is a 2-week summer intensive, meeting 4 hours/day for 10 days — to help me prep for writing about Television’s Marquee Moon. The grad version of the course is called Literature in the Age of Warhol. It also focuses primarily on the downtown scene in the 60s and 70s, though in this version Warhol is more pronounced as a defining figure in the era. The first time I taught the undergrad version, Ginsberg emerged as a link between several of our readings. Here are a few links to prior material on the blog, especially about Ginsberg.

So is there something more to be said here about defining these decades variously as an Age of Ginsberg or an Age of Warhol? (For what it’s worth, I think we’re still living in the latter.) Are there other figures you’d suggest had as strong an impact on underground literary and artistic subcultures? I’m just waiting for either one of these fellows to get a cameo on Mad Men.

Though previous critics have touched on the Fruit Festival, your paper insists on a fuller and more complete understanding of its cultural importance.  How would you briefly describe the significance of the Fruit Festival to the 19^th-century literary and cultural history of New York City?

The Fruit Festival wasn’t entirely anomalous. A similar event for literary tradesmen—not involving fruit—was held in the 1830s, and in the decades after the Festival large birthday celebrations were thrown for various authors. But the Festival occurred at a particularly dynamic moment in American literary history. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) had both been huge bestsellers in the years immediately preceding the Festival, and of course there are all of the canonical masterpieces by male authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). There was a lot at stake in literary culture of the period—establishing copyright laws, for example—but managing authorship and the relations of authors, publishers, and readers was, it seems to me, most crucially at the heart of the Festival.

Also especially important for New York City, and another underlying reason for the Festival, was the competition among the big publishing cities—New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—to be the literary capital of America. New York was more or less there by 1855, when the Festival was held, but Boston was still very much alive and vibrant. At the Festival, the Boston-based publisher Uriel Crocker introduced the speech of his colleague, James T. Fields, by saying, “Though we stand on the soil of New York, there is at hand a fine Boston Field, from which we have often reaped great harvests, and as this is a fruit festival, and the fruit gathered from this Field is always pleasant to the taste.” Putnam, in turn, noted in his Festival speech, “The issues of our presses in about eighteen months would make a belt, two feet wide, printed on both sides, which would stretch from New York to the Moon!” New York, mind you—not earth, not America, and certainly not Boston or Philadelphia.

Why fruit and why a Fruit Festival? 

Pragmatic reasons: much of the press coverage notes that absence of liquor, wine, and cigars, all hallmarks of male gatherings, and in their letters, several of the women express anxiety about the dangers of the Festival’s mixed company (female guests were outnumbered 14:1). But also for bigger reasons, related to the Festival’s place in nineteenth-century American literary culture. The publishers organized the event to celebrate the boom in American literature in mid-century, and fruit obviously stands in for that growing body of native-produced books—as professor and encyclopedist Francis Lieber writes in his letter, “The varied fruits on your wide-spread tables . . .  will be fit representatives of our literature.”

But fruit, I argue, also represents women, especially women writers, and is deployed by Putnam and the other publishers to metaphorically circumscribe female authorship. Just as Putnam had the countryside’s finest fruit imported to the city for the Festival—and he did, so much so that twenty-one varieties of pear alone were served—so did he pluck and transport these women writers from the smaller villages, towns, and cities of New England to New York. In the second chapter of my thesis, which I’m just about to finish, I discuss the counter-metaphor of authorship developed by these women in their periodical tales of the 1830s through 1850s, based on the twinned concepts of mobility and home (and working out the dangers and opportunities of each).

How did the Festival provide a space and an opportunity for professional networks of writers and other agents of culture to emerge and become visible, accessible?

In lots of ways. What’s a more visible representation of a professional network—especially as it intersects in one hyper-connected node—than Putnam’s scrapbook? Also, as a number of those scholars mentioned above have noted (for example, Michael Newbury, in Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America), the Festival was one of the first real celebrations of celebrity in America. Authors, especially women authors, weren’t always comfortable with what celebrity meant; like fruit, again, being a literary celebrity meant that you could be commodified and consumed by your audience. But collecting all of these prominent figures in one place meant getting to put faces to names—a literary pantheon made very visible, and almost within reach, of the fans who filled the galleries of the Crystal Palace, where the Festival was held.

What archival materials were most central to your project?  What was your most surprising or unexpected find and how did that shape the story you tell with your project?

I spent a lot of time with the New York Book Publishers Association Records at the New York Public Library—the archive that underpinned my entire project. Basically, and I’m passing along what I’ve been told by the (awesome) librarians there, the NYPL has this small but really terrific collection of papers related to the New York-based publisher George Palmer Putnam. In the 1940s, they acquired a two-volume scrapbook that seems to have been assembled by Putnam himself (he was a huge scrapbooker, and a noted autograph collector as well), containing 190 RSVP letters from notables invited to the Festival. It seems like the scrapbooks were originally intended to be part of the Putnam papers, but eventually became their own archive.

Two of the potentially most important letters for my project are actually missing from the archive—a handwritten table of contents at the beginning of the first volume mentions letters from the writers Sara Payson Willis (Fanny Fern) and Susan Warner, but they’re no longer in the scrapbooks. That being said, there are wonderful letters—letters that help us to approach the Festival from a textual as well as historical angle—from women writers including Sarah Josepha Hale, Sara Clarke Lippincott (Grace Greenwood), Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Esther Beecher. And while this isn’t very professional of me, I’ll admit that I nearly wept when I saw Melville’s letter to Putnam, which actually constitutes its own puzzle.

Photo and quotes from letters courtesy of the New York Public Library: New York Book Publishers Association records. Manuscripts and Archives Division. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Joey says: This letter from Sarah Josepha Hale appears in one of Putnam’s scrapbooks. This photo gives viewers a good sense of the material nature of the archive—you can see the brightly colored paper that comprises the scrapbook, and you can also see that Hale’s letter is firmly attached to the page on the right—but also hints at the relation between New York and the other towns and cities these women writers called home. Hale, from Philadelphia, writes on this page, “I do not like to incur the risk of such fatal accidents as have, of late, happened on the mid-route between the two cities. I should go without fear of danger if duty made it necessary, but in ‘the pursuit of happiness’ I think we should take personal safety into the account.”

Though you were unable to attend in person, you were an active participant in the tweeting of the conference. What immediate questions or concerns did you take away from the conference?

It was pretty surreal to watch responses to my paper—which was read by Annie Abrams, one of the conference organizers—live-tweeted. Presenting a paper to an audience is anxiety-provoking, but your performance can also shield the paper (i.e., maybe if I move through this point quickly, no one will notice the gap in my argument). When someone else reads your paper, and you’re not even there to hear it, you feel naked, like your thoughts and their weaknesses are utterly exposed and vulnerable. That being said, Annie apparently did a terrific job. People laughed, which was definitely one of my goals—if you wrote a paper about the Fruit Festival and it wasn’t somewhat funny, you’d be missing something.

Certainly one question I left the conference with is what constitutes a city—how a city isn’t just constructed from buildings, bridges, or borders, but emerges from networks. Perhaps the city, like Putnam within literary culture, is just a node; that seems obvious when you look at a map but is somewhat less obvious when you live in New York. If you’re a resident here, you feel mutually embedded with millions of other people in this mass of concrete, not necessarily like you’re being connected by it. But that’s what the Festival was meant to do, to make New York the center of a network of authors, booksellers, and publishers. Even the Crystal Palace, which stood where the NYPL and Bryant Park now are, hovered near the midpoint of Manhattan (if not New York as it existed in 1855).

Your paper at Networked New York offered a re-reading of the tableaux vivant in The House of Mirth, which you place in the context of New York cultural institutions established in the final decades of the nineteenth century. What are the key elements of this historical moment and these cultural institutions that you see at work in Wharton’s novel?

I first began considering these ideas after visiting an exhibit at another New York institution this past November: the “Beauties of the Gilded Age” series at the New-York Historical Society, which showcases (on rotation) the miniature collection of Peter Marié. Marié was a bachelor who commissioned miniatures of beautiful New York women (including Edith Wharton) and amassed a collection of over three hundred such portraits. On visiting the exhibit, I was immediately reminded of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and its famous tableaux vivant scene, in which the protagonist, Lily Bart takes part in an “entertainment” staged by a wealthy New York family in their Fifth Avenue mansion. As one of twelve performers in tableaux vivant, she appears as Joshua Reynolds’ painting, Mrs. Lloyd, in a striking display that showcases both her beauty and her ability to become an art object (see image at left). I was struck by the seeming reversal of such a process: photographs of women transformed into miniatures, as opposed to women transforming themselves into paintings.

The cultural context of the novel definitely suggests its interest in cultural institutions, especially given the historical proximity of its publication (1905) to the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1870) and other contemporaneous institutions. On further reading of the tableaux vivant scene, other inversions present themselves: rather than a museum where art objects are displayed, Wharton describes a ballroom transformed, temporarily, into a theater/gallery. And more importantly, rather than directing their money to philanthropic purpose—and particularly, supporting the public arts—her wealthy characters are throwing a private party. When read in light of these broader philanthropic networks, the scene suggests a powerful commentary on an important moment for cultural institutions in America—and an issue that’s continually relevant to today’s debates about the funding of the arts.

What relationships between and among authorship, institutions and philanthropy at the turn of the twentieth century do the art scenes in The House of Mirth establish?

I think that the tableaux vivant scene registers the importance of beauty in the novel, on a much deeper level than Jonathan Franzen’s purely cosmetic interpretation of Wharton in a recent New Yorker piece would imply. By examining this moment in the context of New York’s cultural institutions, I find that this idea of beauty takes on a much broader meaning, beyond the personal beauty of Lily Bart, which extends to interrogations of the city itself and the cultural opportunities that it provided at the turn of the century. In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Wharton laments the “intolerable ugliness of New York” as a creative environment; similarly, Lily famously hates “dinginess” and spends much of the novel trying to avoid it. In her book, The Decoration of Houses and all of her novels, Wharton emphasizes the importance of cultural spaces that encourage creative work, rather than stifle it. This concern was shared with many of her contemporaries, and this context opens up a range of comparisons to other novels that more explicitly consider visual art, connoisseurship, and philanthropy from this era, including Henry James’s The Golden Bowl or William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham.

What immediate questions or concerns did you take away from the conference?

At the conference, I presented with Kristen Highland and Joey McGarvey on the “Institutions and Enterprise” panel. While I was thinking about the museum as a public space in my paper, it was quite interesting to hear about their projects on more explicitly literary spaces, such as a bookstore or a fruit festival. By putting these different projects into conversation, it raised a number of questions for me about the relationship between the visual and literary arts at the turn of the century, especially for realist authors: an idea that was particularly well voiced by Tom Augst in his response to our panel. Additionally, our discussions suggested new ways of considering the role of institutions in creating a newly public, social space for cultural experiences, whether literary, visual, or musical.

The conference as a whole did an excellent job of bringing together a number of different perspectives on the spaces of New York. From our panel on institutions to the closing discussion between New York bloggers, it suggested a number of approaches to understanding how the evolving landscape of a city inspires different forms of written representations. Moreover, the conference demonstrated the variety of approaches to preserving the energy of New York, both within and beyond the traditional archive: architecturally, through preservation, registry, or even re-creation (as in the Vault at Pfaff’s); or interpersonally, through digital maps of nineteenth century networks.

You spoke about some New York City sites as uncurated,non-institutional archives. Does this usage of the word “archive” complicate our usual understanding of it? What do we gain by defining 99 Ryerson and 647 Broadway as such?

I’m not looking to complicate, but test the boundaries of the traditional definition of “archive,” and to inspire fresh thinking about spaces that push the conceptual limits of what is conventionally deemed worthy of preservation. The first SAA definition of “archive”—loosely reinterpreted here—is ‘materials that are preserved because of their enduring value, or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creators and users.’ But what about materials of such value or relative importance that have been preserved by chance or happy accident– collections that lie outside the bounds of institutions or protective agencies and are freely accessed and used? Materials that maintain organic relationships with their environs because they have not been isolated, organized or controlled? Materials of nontraditional mediums or types, such as sidewalk vaults, floorboards, the spirit of place?

99 Ryerson Street, Brooklyn

Whitman’s former residence at 99 Ryerson Street in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and the site of Pfaff’s Cellar Saloon at 647 Broadway in Manhattan, are what I’d like to call ‘living archives.’ Along with other city sites such as Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, and Brooklyn’s Admiral Row, they are unofficial, unprotected treasure troves of one-of-a-kind historical materials. 99 Ryerson is a row house built in the early 1850s; the Whitmans moved into the house in May 1855 and lived there for about a year. 647 Broadway is one of a twin tenement built in the 1840s, with Pfaff’s occupying the cellar from about 1856 to 1875. Both of these sites have operated interruptedly—as a private residence and commercial space, respectively—for more than 150 years in New York City: 99 Ryerson is currently owned by a Brooklyn resident and divided into several apartments, and the basement of 647 Broadway now stores the stock for Zigis Shoes.

What makes these two structures remarkable besides their endurance through more than a century and a half of urban growth and renewal, is their significance in American cultural history— specifically, to the poet Walt Whitman. Though he worked and wrote in New York City for nearly four decades and lived in dozens of places, only two structures with significant links to the poet still stand. 99 Ryerson is not only the single surviving Whitman house in the five boroughs; it happens to be the one in which he completed and published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, and wrote much of the second. In the extraordinarily permissive underground bar known as Pfaff’s, Whitman gathered the forces for and may have even composed parts of the radical third edition of the Leaves. Frequenting what is now recognized as America’s first bohemian bar from 1858 through the early ‘60s, he mingled with outspoken, flamboyant actors like Ada Isaacs Mencken and leftist journalists such as Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press; he also had ties to what may have been the city’s first gay men’s club, the Fred Gray Association. Whitman did not participate in any social or intellectual coterie before or after his years at Pfaff’s, and the relationships he developed there enabled his focus on intimacy as a subject for poetry in the “Calamus” and “Enfans d’Adam” clusters.

Whenever I’ve visited these ‘living archives’, I’ve learned something about Whitman and his New York. Retracing Whitman’s daily

647 Broadway, NYC

two-mile walk from the location of the Rome Brothers Print Shop in Brooklyn Heights (where Leaves of Grass was printed) to 99 Ryerson, the house still feels “fearfully far” from gentrified Brooklyn (as a visitor remarked in 1855) and maintains a working-class vibe. Inside, the hallways and staircases are plain and strong-looking, if a bit shabby. Standing inside the threshold that Emerson and others entered, one faces the fact that this ordinary space was a cradle for extraordinary art. The current owner is ambivalent regarding recent efforts to place a historic marker on the house. But perhaps that is because the house—and in many ways, the poet himself—still belongs to this Brooklyn block. Residents of the other rowhouses on this street take pride in pointing tourists to Whitman’s abode; they come out to chat, show old photographs and share stories, often admitting that they’ve tried their own hand at poetry. 99 Ryerson may not be a traditional archive, but it accomplishes the best of what an archive can do: tell stories, identify relationships, and inspire. (and for an example of this much better than my own, please visit the site dedicated to 99 Ryerson created by my student Jesse Friszell)

What’s to be gained from labeling 99 Ryerson and 647 Broadway as ‘living archives’? First and foremost, a designator for these and similar unrecognized structures that don’t really qualify as ‘historic sites’ or ‘landmarks’. Just because such buildings have escaped official designation should not mean that they should be forgotten. Additionally, the word ‘archive’ calls to mind the questions, what’s worth saving? How do we do it? And what is lost when we can’t? I believe 99 Ryerson and 647 Broadway merit such attentions.

In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman predicts that future New Yorkers will revel in some of the same facets of Brooklyn and Manhattan life that he enjoyed. He asks of his readers, “What is it then between us?/ What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?” Can the sites you discuss help us address these questions? What might it mean to preserve Whitman’s memory in New York in the spirit of his poetry?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.

I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;

I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,

In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,

In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

What’s between Whitman and us in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”? Residents of his city will recognize his references to the spirit of the city—a sort of ‘urban affection’, to use Ed Folsom’s phrase—a feeling of solidarity and support acquired by simultaneously losing and finding ourselves in the great metropolis. It’s this spirit that pulls Whitman out of the poem’s ‘dark patches’: doubts, guilty thoughts, regrets weigh him down (“The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious”), the camaraderie and energy around him buoy him up (as he responds to cries of “Walt!”—his nearest, or nighest name). This spirit is manifested in the faces and bodies around him as he traverses his New York. The divine connective power of the human form is celebrated in so many of Whitman’s poems: “this head is more than churches and bibles and creeds,” he declares in “Song of Myself” (adding, just for fun, “the scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer”). No need for priests anymore when the people of New York City were there to save him.

The poem’s first title—“Sun-Down Poem”— hints that these lines are penned at the end of the narrator’s day, commuting from work in Manhattan back to Brooklyn. As he draws close to his destination, he recognizes those familiar aspects of his trip that signal he’s home: the waving flags and whipping masts, the Fulton Ferry buildings, the church steeples of St. John’s and St. Ann’s and the Holy Trinity (for a look at what Whitman saw, go to “Whitman’s Brooklyn”). These silent ‘ministers’, like the humanity around him, communicate more than any priest possibly could: they have a physical certainty about them that ensures Whitman’s connection with us through time. That certainty is reassuring to him: though he probably realizes we won’t be looking at the exact same ships and seagulls, he’s satisfied that a version of them will enable us to understand each other despite the years between.

So, in Whitman’s view, the survival of 99 Ryerson and 647 Broadway doesn’t really matter. The same spirit imbued in these places can undoubtedly be found in other spots in twenty-first century New York City; as he proudly declares in the middle of “Song of Myself”, he’s “no sentimentalist.” But 99 Ryerson and 647 Broadway should nevertheless interest us because such structures inspired his deep investment in his physical world. What is it about Whitman’s experiences with such tangibles that made him think they had spiritual value, that they could be immortal? Perhaps the secret still lies in the collapsed vault under the sidewalk of 647 Broadway.

Your paper crafts a compelling analogy between contemporary lamentations over the fate of today’s independent bookstores and the mid-19^th century sense that stores like Daniel Appleton and Company’s bookstore sell “more than just books”—that what they offer, such as communal/civic aspirations, transcend the materiality of market commodities.  What motivated your focus on Appletons’?

I should start by saying that my larger research project focuses primarily on the nineteenth-century NYC bookstore. But the Networked NY conference was a great opportunity to begin to think about the relationship between yesterday’s bookstore and the status (often described as the “plight”) of today’s bookstore—point here being that I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on the modern bookstore.  It seems an obvious point to us today to say that the bookstore isn’t just about selling books—it’s about a lifestyle, about values, about community, literacy, culture. Though the loss of any independent store—consider the rapid decline in the family hardware store, for instance—is an occasion for expressing regret over a changing, more corporate retail landscape, the closing of a bookstore (or just the threat of closing) inspires particularly vehement defenses and alarming predictions of the future of neighborhoods, of communities, even of knowledge itself. This emotional investment in the bookstore has always fascinated me. It’s not just about the books; there’s something about the physical space of the bookstore—it’s environment, it’s people—that has such deep resonance.

But was this ‘deep meaning’ in bookstores always there? Certainly, bookshops have been a gathering place for literati to share news, ideas, and conversation for centuries. But with the rise of the dedicated retail bookstore—increasingly, though not always, separate from publishers—in the 19^th century, we have the opportunity to consider how the bookstore imagined and produced itself as a venue for books in an urban landscape that had libraries, reading rooms, and street-corner book peddlers, among other book spaces. I focus on New York specifically because by the mid-19^th century, it had become the national center for the book industry and had a lively, diverse bookselling trade. D. Appleton & Co.’s bookstore [see photograph at left, the facade of the Appleton building in 1854, courtesy of New-York Historical Society], operating from a number of different locations in the decades before the Civil War, seemed a promising case study to examine the forms and “meanings” of the bookstore for a couple reasons. First, a practical one—the Appletons’ success as book retailers and publishers made them very visible in the contemporary media. Each new move prompted energetic press coverage (and not just in NYC), commentary, and detailed descriptions of its space. Along with other surviving resources and unlike the vast majority of 19^th-century bookstores, the archive can support a close analysis of Appletons’ stores. And second, also a result of their success, D. Appleton & Co. had the means to design their own spaces, and after 1860, their own buildings, revealing deliberate spatial strategies for staging the bookstore.

What I see happening in Appletons’ stores is an increasing dedication to investing their bookstore with what we would term today as capital “C” Cultural significance—making it aesthetically impressive, exhibiting books as art (and actual fine art pieces as well), drawing on classical and monumental design, spatially isolating and separating the commercial functions of the store. Designing the bookstore, in other words, as more than a commercial outlet for books—rather, as a space for communal engagement, individual improvement, and for performances of reading and consuming. Of course, this was also a marketing strategy—offer patrons rich, pleasing surroundings, and they will buy their books here. But if we consider Appletons’ in a sort of genealogy of the bookstore, we see an early example of a bookstore aspiring to a position as cultural institution. Over time (and with lots of other variables, of course), we’ve naturalized this cultural-institutional definition and function of the bookstore and further rhetorically and materially separated the cultural and commercial functions of the store.

You ask what it is about bookstores that makes them intensely local but also subject to being abstracted as the “soul” of a community.  How would you answer your own question in the cultural landscape of 19^th-century antebellum New York?  Why do you think such easy resonances emerge between that historical context and the present-day? I’m thinking especially of how you use the comments section from EV Grieve. 

First, I want to thank EV Grieve and the individual writers whose letters to Cooper Union he posted. I probably should have asked for permission to quote from them. They’re such great examples of the passionate defenses of and symbolic significance invested in the modern bookstore.

On the intensely local aspect of the bookstore—One of the dangers in talking about “the bookstore” as a general thing is that it elides all of the local pressures that shape the bookstore and inform our experiences and associations of it. The big box store in Union Square, for instance, occupies a very different historical, physical, and symbolic space than the small neighborhood bookseller, and, as Ted Striphas has shown, different than the exact same big box store in Durham, NC where it is the only bookstore for miles and is enmeshed in that region’s own racial and economic history.  And of course, individuals form their own distinct associations and experiential geographies of bookstores. Nineteenth-century luminary, William Templeton Strong, loved Appletons’ but derided the bookstore just next door as a “citadel of humbug.” One of the appeals, then, of investing the bookstore with the symbolic significance of a cultural institution is that it can both capture the local significance of the bookstore to a certain vision of “community” while also linking one bookstore’s survival to a larger cultural preservation project.

But I don’t think many nineteenth-century New Yorkers would have talked about the bookstore in a similar way, as both locally and symbolically significant. It didn’t yet have the widespread cultural cache (or sentimental attachment?) that it does now. By the early 20^th century, however, trade publications like Publisher’s Weekly reveal a growing panic about the future of the bookstore and attach to the physical space of the threatened store larger concerns about literary values, modes of reading, and cultural authority—not too far from concerns of the “soul.”

 As a “landmark” in the way you describe in your paper, can the bookstore be understood as a civic space apart from its status as a “commercial institution of culture?” When you write of Appleton’s that to “buy books here was to assert one’s own taste and membership in a fashionable community,” are there other acts of civic or public participation that perform a similar membership?  Where else might these members self-identify—or are you arguing that bookstores present a unique and distinct occasion or space for membership or community formation?

I think most people today consider the bookstore a civic space—for participation in a community, for sharing ideas and information—independent of its commercial functions. To the detriment of the bookseller’s bottom-line. That’s the fascinating paradox of today’s bookstore—locating a “higher value” in its role as an enlivening cultural space for readings, conversation, or leisure and not in its more mundane commercial role as a place where books are commodities to be sold, and crucially, bought, risks the bookstore’s survival. Certainly, there are a variety of ways individual booksellers have found to strike a balance between a store’s commercial and cultural functions or to make the cultural profitable. But I wonder, what might the bookstore look like in the future if it was actually classified as a cultural institution and funded primarily by donors or government entities and not solely by the sale of books?

Appletons’ built the cultural significance of their stores on the foundations of its commercial functions. In that way, his stores mid-century and later might be aligned with the emerging department store model. Any act of consumption—buying a dress, decorating a drawing room—could be argued to incorporate an individual into a fashionable community and communicate values through physical objects, but I do think that the bookstore, by nature of the books it sold—objects already circulating in intellectual and social economies, and increasingly in the 19^th century with advances in binding, cover options, and illustration technologies in a material economy—offer a unique and complicated space for individual identification and community formation.

Your dissertation focuses on Los Angeles, while your paper for this conference was on Coney Island. Are there similarities among the networks that form in these urban, coastal spaces known for their entertainment industries? Is this a productive comparison?

I am interested in how different kinds of media inform the ways people experience and remember complex social landscapes.  Not only are Los Angeles and Coney Island major historic sites of mass cultural production, but both places have been obsessively represented by writers, painters, photographers, and filmmakers.  Within the popular American imagination, these seaside metropolises have assumed the status of romantic fantasy as well as nightmarish dystopia.  Artists working across media have also looked to these urban sites as ways to understand and comment on broader tensions, anxieties, and opportunities in the United States associated with immigration, race relations, leisure culture, and trends in city and regional planning.  While there are a lot of connections and resonances between Los Angeles and Coney Island, I also try to remain sensitive to crucial differences: the former dwarfs the latter in terms of scale; each region saw different kinds of infrastructural development and fragmentation due in part to the efforts of particular boosters and power brokers; and of course, the kinds of entertainment and media industries located in Los Angeles are quite different from those located in Coney Island.

Can you talk a little more about the connections and differences between Singer’s Coney Island and ours? Do you think literary and film criticism focusing on Coney Island should inform the ongoing debates over the future of the site?

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote about Coney Island at a time when it was sliding into its socioeconomic nadir.  In a sense, urban renewal de-socialized the geography, and for many, the demolition of Steeplechase marked the end of an era.  There were a lot of wistfully nostalgic portraits made about the area in the 1960s-1970s, but there was also a first wave of critical and in-depth Coney Island historiography.  Today’s Coney Island faces a lot of the pressing questions that the site did in the 1970s; for example, how to revitalize the amusement district and encourage greater crowds.  However, there is more of an effort today to make “history” part of people’s everyday Coney Island experience.  This is a very exciting initiative.  Reasserting Coney’s identity as an entertainment destination through new roller coasters, theatrical performances, and attractions is certainly an important positive step forward.  At the same time, lobbying support for major architectural structures’ landmark status and sustaining a variety of institutions for helping people learn about Coney Island of yesteryear is central for attracting new visitors, and for creating a richer collective historical consciousness about the area.  While Coney continues to experience socioeconomic challenges on multiple fronts, embracing its past offers some strategies for development.

Artistic representations of all varieties can help contemporary audiences to better understand Coney’s past.  Singer’s 1970s accounts of his 1930s saunterings through Sea Gate, the amusement park core, and Brighton help map and illuminate the social texture of the urban environment during a major period of transition.  His writing registers the pedestrian rhythms of daily life and shows how private memories can serve as innovative forms of public history.  One gains an intimate understanding of how Coney Island was much more than just a day trip for tourists.  Coney Island was a landscape of firmly rooted communities and a cultural point of passage into the United States for immigrants.

You spoke briefly about your work on the Yale University Art Gallery’s upcoming traveling exhibition “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008.” Can you talk a little bit about the curatorial process? What sort of story does the exhibition seek to tell about Coney Island? How has your work on that project informed your thoughts on Singer?

It has been a pleasure to serve as a Research Fellow on the exhibition, “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008.”  The exhibition is divided into five sections and explores how artists have taken Coney Island as their subject from the Civil War to the 21st century closing of Astroland.  Scheduled to open at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT in early 2015, the exhibition will then travel to the San Diego Museum of Art as well as the Brooklyn Museum.  It has been a true learning experience working with head curator Robin Jaffee Frank.   I’ve found out about all sorts of connections and points of collaboration between individuals and groups.  American impressionists such as William Merritt Chase and John Henry Twachtman vividly captured the first major thrust of the amusement industry at Coney in the late 19th century.  So many of the great Photo League photographers trained their artistic eyes down at Coney Island.  And many prominent authors and filmmakers such as Herb Gardner (Thousand Clowns, The Goodbye People) and Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) are Coney natives.  The exhibition has given me a chance to connect my scholarly pursuits with the public humanities.  Planning for the exhibition has made me more aware of what it means to present material to different audiences and to think about how people encounter artifacts in real time and within a confined space. 

Research for this project has helped me to see Singer and his Coney-related articles, novels, and memoirs as part of a cultural moment.  He was not just an isolated voice waxing poetic about his own career, but really part of a broader group of figures who dug deep into excavating Coney’s past.  Still, I have not come to fixed conclusions about the implications of his work.  I am wondering if instead of further historicizing Singer’s literary practice, I might embrace some of the techniques of fiction to help people understand the 1930s era of culture in which Singer first encountered America.  This methodology follows some efforts by scholars such as the brilliant historian Norman Klein (A History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, 1997).  I am currently writing a short story based on the premise that the writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin had made it beyond the French-Spanish border, briefly re-located in New York, and met Singer on the Coney Island boardwalk.  Imagine the dialogue!  What kind of conversations might they have had about the possibility and peril of American popular culture, about politics abroad, and transnational modernism?  They probably would have had a lot to say about Coney’s wax museum…

You can reach Josh at joshua.glick@yale.edu.