The most important material in my research for this project was Kenneth T. Jackson’s The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995). With very few exceptions, all names of architects and builders, dates of construction and completion, and historical narratives regarding New York City sites and structures, were drawn from this book. All twenty-five chapter annotations draw in some way – often extensively – on at least one entry in Jackson’s expansive volume.
In the rare case where the material in the Encyclopedia was insufficient (it does not include, for example, an entry for Peck Slip) I consulted two New York guidebooks old enough to describe something more like the Manhattan of 1921. A modern reprint of The WPA Guide to New York City (New York: The New Press, 1992, original published in 1939) was extraordinarily useful for its detailed maps, each of which marks the locations points of interest. These maps, and the directions to the points of interest, where invaluable in deserting point of view in Marcus’ drawings as they frequently provide such information as on which face of a given building is its main entrance. A smaller guidebook, the Famous Guide to New York (New York: Manhattan Post Card Publishing Company, 1937) was an important barometer of middle-brow architectural taste in the early twentieth century. Its recommendations for which structures were and were not essential on a tourist’s itinerary were invaluable descriptors of what I have called understood as a postcard aesthetic. A few other recommendations for visitors to Manhattan were found in a 1927 Red Book Information and Guide to New York: Manhattan and The Bronx (New York: Interstate Map Company, 1927). This is the book to which I make explicit reference in my annotation for chapter thirteen.
Other books of photographs were useful in my analyses of Marcus’ drawings, particularly in my efforts to determine point of view. A modern reprint of Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York (New York: The New Press, 1997, original published in 1939), Edward B. Watson’s New York Then and Now (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), Mary Black’s Old New York in Early Photographs (New York, Dover Publications, 1973), and Frederick S. Lightfoot’s Nineteenth-Century New York in Rare Photographic Views (New York: Dover Publications, 1981) were all of great value. Two books were of particular use because of their near contemporaneity with New York, the Nation's Metropolis, New York in Pictures: Reprinted from the Sun of New York, Vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Sun Printing and Publishing Association, 1928), and New York in MCMXXIII (New York: The Marchbanks Press: 1923). The latter bares some remarkably similarities to Marcus' book; it features perhaps one hundred ten photographs of Manhattan landmarks, accompanied by quasi-poetic captions, loosely sequenced from south to north. Where material in the site has been reproduced from one of these sources I have credited the source just below the image.
My thoughts on pricisionism were guided by two books, Karen Lucic's Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) and Richard Guy Wilson, et al, The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941 (New York : Brooklyn Museum in association with Abrams, 1986). Lucic's book also provided information on photographer Paul Strand which I included in my annotation for chapter six, "Wall Street."
In order to decode the books use of what is probably Masonic symbolism, I consulted Daniel Béresniak's Symbols of Freemasonry (Paris : Editions Assouline, New York : Distributed to the U.S. trade by St. Martin's Press, 1997). I draw particularly on the section describing the "two pillars" which I believe to resonate with Marcus' representation of the Brooklyn Bridge in chapter ten, "The Pier."
Facts about Brentano’s, the company that published New York, the Nation’s Metropolis, were gathered from two sources. The more informative of them was the short narrative of the company’s rise and fall included in American Literary Publishing Houses 1638-1899, volume 49 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1986). I also consulted the William Stanley Braithwaite Papers, Box 19 at University of Virginia Special Collections in Alderman Library, which contained Braithwaite's correspondence with Brentano's, but I found these letters only limited use in my research on the publishing firm.
For the USS Oklahoma's dates of construction and service, which I provide in chapter twenty-two, I consulted the United States Navy's online Navel Vessel Register at http://www.nvr.navy.mil . The page which details the Oklahoma is http://www.nvr.navy.mil/nvrships/details/BB37.htm .
I have resisted, in my editorial work on this text, the temptation to make extensive explicit use of theoretical material, but my readings of New York, the Nation’s Metropolis have been shaped by certain assumptions of "theory" in fundamental ways. In particular, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), and Walter Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (reprinted in Illuminations, originally published 1936) exercised profound influence on my interpretation of Marcus’ work. I believe that Marcus would have agreed emphatically with Berger’s assertion that the visual does not precede the cultural, and that the experience of seeing is always an experience which at once describes and produces specific relations of psychology, politics, and power. Marcus clearly understands the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as constituted by differences in the "ways of seeing" which they allow. I have borrowed much from Berger in arguing that New York, the Nation’s Metropolis is best read as an attempt to look mournfully upon a lost way of seeing with twentieth century eyes – eyes which would seem to render the lost world of the old century invisible, and the visual codes of grief inaccessible.
Borrowing from Benjamin, I have argued that Marcus understands the visual to have undergone a fundamental change when mechanical mass reproduction made possible the transformation of any sight into an inexpensive commodity (e.g. the postcard, illustrated guidebook, or souvenir photo-album). Modernity’s way of seeing seems to Marcus to have been installed at the moment when the photograph comes to usurp the authority of the object photographed. Marcus voices a great deal of anxiety about this new "age of mechanical reproduction," but the book through which he voices it is as dependant upon its technologies as any book of postcard views. It is a product of precisely the world it holds in such suspicion.
Two other theoretical works occupy an essential, though less central, place in my thinking about New York, the Nation’s Metropolis. One – another Benjamin essay – is his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (also in Illuminations) which is not too unlike Marcus’ book in that it presents a series of short prose meditations which discuss the inevitability of historical change, the dangerous reductionism of reading those changes through narratives of progress or improvement, and the possibility of refusing those narratives (though not the changes themselves) though melancholia and mourning. The other essay is Jaque Lacan’s "Mirror Stage" essay (in Ecrits: A Selection, New York: Norton, 1977). The points at which I compare Marcus’ understanding of history to the developmental narratives of "certain schools of psychoanalysis" it is primarily to this essay that I refer. While the notion of development I have drawn upon is a greatly abstracted version of Lacan’s, it retains certain features of his work. In particular, I have read Marcus’ infantalisation of the past as an attempt to represent it as a lost mode of experience which cannot be mourned because a newly imposed symbolic order (in Lacan, language acquisition – in Marcus, modernity) has rendered it impossible to represent.
Locating biographical material about Peter Marcus was by far the most difficult part of this project. He is mentioned in the New York Times only once, on June 9, 1934 in a notice of his death. The few publications of the Architectural League of New York that contain his name list only his address and his status in the league. I found only one substantial recrd of Marcus’ life – a research file compiled by Mary M. Thatcher, the librarian of the Stonington Historical Society in Stonington, Connecticut (unpublished, 1998). The file contains the longest obituary of Marcus I have seen, that published in The Stonington Ledger and Mystic Journal on June 15, 1934. Marcus’ Will, summarized in the file, makes no mention of any works of art and leaves all of his property to his wife Joan. The couple had no children, and after Joan Marcus’ death in 1936 the Peter Marcus estate was dispersed throughout their large extended family.
Even if the succession of hands though which Marcus’ estate passed formed a single unbroken line, it is unlikely that this line would lead to the personal papers relevant to his book. The Stonington file contains an unidentified article, perhaps from the same local paper as the obituary, published November 21, 1924. It describes a fire at Mystic’s "Old Stone Mansion" which had been leased to Marcus and his wife and at which they were then living. While neither was hurt, the fire destroyed the mansion and everything in it. The article reports that "the contents of the house… contained many articles of historical value, [which] cannot be replaced, and the loss caused is greatly regretted." As there is no evidence that he was in possession of any other historically important materials, I assume that the personal papers and original artworks which eventually took shape as New York, the Nation’s Metropolis were the "articles" destroyed in 1924 by this fire. If the papers still exist they have been hidden quite well; despite my best efforts I was unable to locate any archive of material related to the production of this – Peter Marcus’ one published work. I was equally unable to locate a photograph of the man, though I suspect that somewhere in the archives of one of the many associations to which he belonged (the Architectural League of New York, the Mystic Masonic Lodge, the Mystic Hook and Ladder Company, the Mystic Art Association) one is waiting to be found.
In my Historical Introduction I discuss The League's inclusion of two drawings which also appear in New York, the Nation’s Metropolis in its 1921 Annual Exhibit. The most specific facts regarding this inclusion I garnered from the Year Book of the Architectural League of New York and Catalogue of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Exhibition (New York: Architectural League of New York, 1921). The yearbook also listed Marcus' 1921 address - 30 E. Seventy-Forth Street - which I draw upon in my reading of chapter sixteen. All other information regarding the book's reception and production – excluding that which could be ascertained by looking at the text itself – comes from several issues of Publisher’s Weekly from 1921 (that being volume 99).
The copy of New York, the Nation’s Metropolis from which I scanned the electronic version and on which I relied for a reading copy is my own copy, among those printed in 1921. The books relative scarcity has led me to believe myself quite fortunate in obtaining a copy, and that good fortune has been the catalyst for this project. It has been my hope from the time I began work on this project that electronic publication would render the book - in theory at least - universally available; at present it is available to relatively few, particularly if many readers need access to the book at the same time. According to OCLC World-Cat the book is held in only twenty-four libraries. There is also one microfilm, produced in 1990 and held by the New York Public Library; the microfilm is apparently a preservation copy, the existence of which allows the Library to limit access to the paper text.
This microfilm is the only evidence of which I am aware that there has been any previous attempt to reproduce the book for any reason. There is no record that it has ever been considered for large-scale republication. Like its author, New York, the Nation’s Metropolis has attained an obscurity which one scarcely believes any book could achieve in only eighty years. It would seem to require more than just one lifetime for a published work to be so completely, and so universally forgotten. I hope this project has, if nothing else, prevented the permanent disappearance of what I believe to be among the most subtle and most vexed theories of 1920s Manhattan. Made, for the first time, readily available to modern scholarship at large, this page is only the platform from which substantial research on Peter Marcus and his work might begin. There is still a great deal to be done.