Each chapter in this edition of New York, the Nation’s Metropolis has been annotated individually. I have used these annotations both to supply historical context for the structures depicted in the drawings, and to direct readerly attention towards crucial passages, images and patterns. What the chapter annotations do not provide is a single image of the book as a whole – which would focus not on the specific details of any given chapter but on the narrative, aesthetic, and philosophical trajectories along which they are situated.
The main text has two obvious structural divisions; it is the segmented into twenty-five numbered sections (which I have called chapters) each of which is further divided into a prose vignette (on the left page) and a charcoal drawing (on the right). Both struggle with what might be characterized as a precisionist impulse. Marcus was one of many intellectuals in New York – some of whom came to be known as precisionists – who saw the demands of the new city upon the artist as having everything to do with, on the one hand, the ridged quantitative science of building and, on the other, the cool realism of the photograph. Exemplified by Charles Sheeler and Charles Demouth in the visual arts and William Carlos Williams in the literary, precisionism interested itself in representing industrial and mechanical forms in the terms of the new world which they seemed to herald. The images they produced appear unmediated and photographically accurate, minimizing the perceptibility of the artist’s intervention; the painter in precisionist painting seems to have made no formal or aesthetic decisions, except in deciding to represent the thing "the way it really is." An automobile production plant, for example, was thought to be best represented by contours as smooth and clean as those of a fender. As a finished product, the precisionist painting sought to be as anonymous and seemingly artless as the product of a Ford assembly line.
The precisionist aesthetic assumed that the twentieth century’s new technologies had fundamentally transformed the human world. Built environments, labor, art, and subjectivity itself were all restructured in ways that made the world of the nineteenth century not simply irrecoverable, but difficult even to remember. The nineteenth century came to be regarded in a way not unlike the way in which certain psychoanalytic models of development regard pre-linguistic consciousness. It seemed to many that the old world could not be remembered, recovered, or even rejected, because the imposition of a new symbolic order disallowed its very representation. Precisionism was not certain in its relation to the new age, but it was certain that art in the 1920s had no choice but to speak through the new language which that age made available. These paintings used the modes of representation afforded by the machine age to represent its astonishing and unfamiliar beauty, but also – through their anonymous photo-realism – its dehumanizing potential.
Marcus’ drawings bare almost no obvious relation to the paintings of the precisionists in the sense that his drawings and their paintings look almost nothing like one another. Marcus tends to draw with extraordinarily soft lines, blurred shadows, and inexact contours. His drawings present New York frequently as though it was being viewed through a distorting fog. In more than one drawing the streets are wet with a rain that seems to have just stopped – the humid air working to dull the city’s sharp angles. Dark masses and forms tend to blend into one another, coagulating as a jumbled, murky monolith. Like the drawings, the prose vignettes tend to be more meditative than explanatory, more impressionistic than precise. The New York they represent is more remembered than it is recorded.
The drawings make only limited use of hard, crisp lines until the final chapter, where Grand Central Station is articulated through a grid that looks as if it were drawn with an architect’s straight edge. The book’s prose pieces, however, struggle more obviously with precisionism’s quantitative impulses, and they do so in ways which seem to affirm the precisionist’s insistence that the twentieth century demands of art a sharpness and clarity which the nineteenth century did not demand. As New York, the Nation’s Metropolis moves through the city, it is constantly renegotiates its relation to a compulsion to measure and quantify. Statistics and numerical figures populate the prose sketches first like unwanted pests, but they are eventually acknowledged to be among the constitutive discourses of any modern aesthetic.
Marcus returns continually in this book to a sense of shock over the rapidity and finality with which the twentieth century had erased the discourses of the nineteenth. Like the precisionists, he understood the twentieth century to insist that art could be possible only once the artist had abandoned any hope of recovering those discourses. New York, the Nation’s Metropolis is in part, then, an attempt to give up that hope, and to begin producing within the visual codes of the machine age. While the book never articulates these codes in any exhaustive or definitive pronouncement, it appears especially concerned with two features of the modern world – the enormity of its structures and the efficient photographic technology which allows it to reproduce mechanically the entire seen world. The book suggests that the skyscraper and the modern photograph reflect not only a new aesthetics, but a new politics as well. Both modern inventions constitute strategies by which the aesthetic may be subsumed – in ways that Marcus believes are wholly unprecedented – within the interests of profit. This increased dependence of the aesthetic upon the capitalist economy is a development which Marcus regards with a great deal of anxiety, and it is largely in his suspicion of these two modern forms – precisely those so readily appropriated by the precisionists – that he is such a hesitant participant in modernity. Where the precisionists embraced the twentieth century’s visual language, using it to articulate the very ambivalence they felt toward it, Marcus is both more reluctant to accept that language, and more interested in representing his reluctance as an attempt to refuse it.
It would be a mistake, however, to read that attempt as a sincere one; Marcus is ultimately destined for precisionism’s of resignation to the inevitable machine age. He is convinced that the age’s quantitatively crisp aesthetic is the only one available to the twentieth century artist – that the modern way of seeing cannot be refused, and that it can be resisted only in the terms which it makes available. But while he is sure that the old language is absolutely gone, he is unable to adopt the new one, and this is because of the unprecedented haste with which he believes the twentieth century has done away with the nineteenth. Old New York had been lost, but that loss happened so quickly that it was never fully experienced; those who had loved the old world it had not been allowed time to grieve for it. It resembled not so much a relative dead and buried, as one who had simply disappeared, remaining in the limbo of a death without a funeral, perhaps alive and planning someday to return. Marcus stages an attempt to refuse the twentieth century, one which he knows in advance to be doomed, hoping that this frustrated attempt will serve as a language through which the New York of the nineteenth century might be elegized.
I have therefor read New York, the Nation’s Metropolis as primarily an attempt to write a conclusion for an incomplete narrative of mourning, but before it can begin this work it must invent some language though with to do so, because the modern world offered no such language. The codes through which mourning could take place were incompatible with some of the basic assumption of the skyscraper era, and era that (in the book’s understanding) fetishized the new and the newly possible, and which understood beauty as a byproduct of extravagance and affluence. In order to perform their work, the builders of tall buildings needed to naturalize their authority to demolish and overshadow older buildings within narratives of progress and obsolescence. Those narratives were threatened by the possibility of melancholia or of nostalgia.
Marcus’ most explicit representation of this threat takes place is chapter twelve, in which he compares the new city to a cycle of regal usurpation. The metaphor emphasizes Marcus’ understanding of modern architecture’s power as – like that of a monarch – at once arbitrary and absolute. In a new monarchy grief gestures toward treason because it draws necessarily upon a symbolic order that no longer exists. Grief is an affective language through which the grieving subject can allude to the old regime in ways which do not consolidate the power of the new one – as would, for example, a narrative of progress. Grief allows the past and present to speak to one another while at the same time recognizing their overwhelming difference. The possibility of grief always makes way for the possibility of counterrevolution. Any affective relation to loss – any melancholia – suggests the instability of the narratives through which a new order naturalizes its authority. To grieve is to know that things have not always been as they are. So, like a revolutionary government installing a new calendar, the machine age imposed a new way of seeing; a closed and self-supporting lexicon of the visual that privileged the new and erased the mournful and the obsolete. If New York, the Nation’s Metropolis seeks to answer one overwhelming question, it is: how does one mourn, when the very discourse of mourning is among the things to be mourned?
The early chapters answer this question primarily by staging the kind of failed resistance I discussed above. Chapter two, "Lower Broadway" is representative of the failure narrative that dominates the first half of the book. The drawing presents a view of lower Broadway showing Trinity Church, the Singer Building, and the Woolworth Building – each taller and more recently built than the last. The buildings are shown from the south, however, with the newer buildings further in the background than the Church. Trinity Church is made to appear the tallest among them, followed by the Singer Building and finally the Woolworth – the tallest structure in the world in 1921, but the shortest of the three as it appears in the drawing. The chapter aggressively inverts the privilege accorded the three structures, asserting that it is the smaller older buildings, not the skyscrapers, which are of greater value. But the drawing can articulate its position only through a vocabulary it borrows from the skyscrapers. In order to argue that the Church is of greater value, it must represent it as greater in size. The book can reject the skyscraper only by affirming height as the ultimate signifier of worth.
Two other chapters – best understood as a related pair – are of critical importance in the book’s first half, chapter four, "Looking West on Brooklyn Bridge," and chapter twelve "New York from Fulton Ferry." Both represent the Brooklyn Bridge and Woolworth Building, but the representations present dissimilar aesthetic agendas; their significance is constituted not so much by what they represent as by their contestation of one another’s representational schemes. Like chapter two, the pair narrate a sequence of futile resistance and subsequent resignation to machine age aesthetics, but where in chapter two rise is the exemplar of modernity’s way of seeing, these chapters discuss something more directly pertinent to the visual. Chapter four presents lower Manhattan seen from the Bridge as a "View of New York." The capitol V signifies both the authority and the static institutionallity of the scene. It may have offered a sublime vista at one point, but the view has been rendered trite and cliched by the imposition of a new structure of the visual. Chapter four suggests that the process by which a view becomes a View is among the major components of modern seeing.
If it is not clear by this point that Marcus is referencing technologies of mechanical image reproduction, his subsequent discussion of the photograph removes all doubt. A photograph (or a presumably photographic reproduction of a painting) is understood as inferior to the "real" experience, and yet to be in the corporeal presence of the city is not necessarily to see it. The "amateur photographer" (a designation which Marcus seems to regard as deplorably dilettantish) does not look at (or "know") the city so much as s/he looks upon the View which has been presented though countless other photographs, postcards, souvenir and guide books. Inexpensive mechanical reproduction of images is understood to have coded the city itself; Manhattan can no longer be seen, except through the lens of a postcard View. The prose sketch encodes this failure to see beyond the View within a rhetoric of distance and proximity; New York as "seen from a distance" affords an aesthetically satisfying panorama, but within the economic structures of mass culture that panorama inevitably becomes a veil of familiarity which serves to put greater and more troubling distance between the city and the person who sees it.
Much like Walter Benjamin, Marcus senses that the unprecedented availability, efficiency, and profitability of the mechanically reproducible image has utterly transformed the ways in which the world can be looked at. The rise of mass culture saw the postcard absorb most of its referent’s authority; the copy governed, for the first time, the codes by which its original could be seen.
Marcus attempts, in drawing four, to subvert the codes of the postcard – among them panoramic distance and the ease of recognition which that distance makes possible. He obscures the scene’s most recognizable features, depriving the View of its familiarity. The drawing would be utterly useless to a casual tourist or a postcard vendor, both of whom require for their purposes an image which shows the most widely legible signifiers of New York City – those known even to people who have only seen the city in photographs. The drawing in chapter four refuses to make itself legible to anyone who has seen only the Views of New York.
There are a number of possible reason for the fact that, in chapter twelve, Marcus retracts almost completely the position he takes in chapter four. The most obvious of these is his book’s fundamental reliance on the same technologies from which he distances himself in chapter four. New York, the Nation’s Metropolis is made possible by the same tools of mechanical reproduction used in making postcards. Furthermore, there is no reason why the book could not serve the same purpose as a postcard or souvenir book – it is no more likely to be read by a nostalgic New Yorker than it is to be bought by a tourist and used to show friends at home the "Views of New York." The drawing in chapter twelve shows precisely the "lower Manhattan as seen from a distance" which chapter four had refused. Its depiction of the Brooklyn Bridge is the most sharply defined and photographic rendering in any drawing until the book’s conclusion.
Chapter twelve is also the first chapter to name the Woolworth Building. In previous chapters the name had been a notable absence, particularly in chapter nine. Old Father Knickerbocker is, in chapter nine, wholly unable to account for the building – awestruck by its enormity. Father Knickerbocker’s stupor, it seems, is no better than the twentieth century’s precisionism. It is the only alternative Marcus can present to the twentieth century, and it is but an imaginary projection of the nineteenth – a projection which is itself part of a twentieth century mind, and is not truly an alternative at all. Even if the world of Father Knickerbocker were more than mere modern fantasy, it would not allow any real refusal; Father Knickerbocker is paralyzed by shock and incomprehension. He is unable to believe modernity, and is therefor no more able to resist it than any modern New Yorker. Even the precisionists’ reluctant acceptance of the machine age is better able to critique the modern landscape than is the stupefied Father Knickerbocker.
With chapter twelve’s gesture of resignation the book is free to move on, and it does so both in the project of mourning and in its geographical survey of Manhattan. Where eleven of the first twelve chapters focus with intense concentration on lower Manhattan (which features both the oldest and the newest structures in the city) the following thirteen progress quickly up the island, exhibiting varying degrees of unease with the aesthetic demands of the postcard and the skyscraper. It is not until chapter seventeen, "Hell Gate Bridge," and eighteen, "The Soldiers and Sailor’s Monument," that a third section of the book begins. Having struggled up much of Manhattan with the ambivalences introduced in the first half of the book, the book uses "Hell Gate Bridge" to introduce a wholly new concern – nationality. Its sudden appearance so late in the book seems to call awkwardly upon a set of concerns which, the book’s title suggests, should have been present from the very beginning. Nevertheless, the theory of nationality towards which the book's concluding chapters gesture is constituted in part by the temporal and affective relations represented by the earlier ones. New York City – shattered by its the irreconcilablity of the relentless modern world and the fragments of the past for which it cannot and will not account – is itself the between the oldest and newest portions of the country. New York may have come to resemble the Inferno (to which chapter seventeen demands that the reader compare it), but it is New York’s hellishness – its freakish inconsistency – which allows it to provide for America a coherent and unifying narrative of national identity.
The book concludes by revisiting the neighborhood at which it began, calling upon the reader to reflect upon the book’s journey from its first to its last chapter. Both Times Square and Grand Central Station are located on Forty-Second Street – and their chapters are the only two in the book which focus on that well-known thoroughfare. In that focus the two chapters are diverge significantly from the book's otherwise unbroken movement from down- to uptown. Furthermore, the Station and Square are sites which had been accorded "grand centrality" in city life since the turn of the century. Chapters two through twenty-four did not, to be sure, limit their scope to the marginal or forgotten; but chapters one and twenty-five are the only ones to focuses on the city’s machine age centers – the Square an entire district devoted to the distribution of mass culture, and the Station a virtual temple built in honor of modern engineering.
If the chapters’ similarities are apparent enough to warrant the reader’s comparison of one to the other, the act of comparing them reveals some striking dissimilarities. Chapter one is both pictorially and linguistically the most impressionistic of any in the book. The prose concerns itself with the sensory experience of the Square; it names no building and supplies no history. The only numbers it uses are those of the streets. Neither the Square nor its buildings are considered in terms of their size until the chapter’s last word – "enormous." Sights and sounds are privileged over any of Times Square’s quantifiable features. The drawing in chapter one is just as inexact as the prose. Every one of its lines is soft and diffused – the lower stories of the Times Tower blend almost completely with the surrounding buildings, appearing as an amorphous mass.
Chapter twenty-five’s drawing of Grand Central Station is, in contrast, the most precisely rendered structure in any of the book’s drawings. The detail in Marcus’ presentation of the Station’s grid-like façade is so fully and sharply rendered that it appears to have been drawn with some kind of straight edge. It appropriates, as none of the previous drawings have, the mathematical exactness characteristic of architectural drawing. Out of one hundred sixty-five words in the chapter’s prose, eight are suggestive of impressive size (extends, gigantic, hundreds, greater, mass, great, millions, outnumber). Grand Central "extends" over the land on which it was build, whereas Times Square is simply "at" its location.
While they compromise the book’s otherwise consistent south-to-north sequence, chapters one and twenty-five are fully consistent with the book’s aesthetic transformation. Taken together, they represent the parameters within which the book’s aesthetic transformation takes place. They frame the entire text within its narrative which starts with attempted resistance to the modern, progresses through the thwarting of that resistance, and ultimately concludes with a resignation to a more precisionist project, one that problematizes modernity through – rather than against – the symbolic order it imposes. Just as do so many of the individual chapters, the progression from the first to the twenty-fifth suggests the possibility of continued allegiance to what it believes to be nineteenth century culture, only to assert the compulsory nature of participation in codes of the machine age.
The book presents this inevitability as an occasion for great sorrow, it has – after all – succumbed to a force which it continues to look upon with great mistrust. In this defeat, however, the text wins a greater victory. In representing its thwarted attempts to stand outside the discourses of modernity it represents the impossibility of doing so. Marcus’ representation of that impossibility enacts a space within the machine age’s language which allows him to represent the sorrow which that language was meant to erase. The book stands, therefor, not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as an assertion of the centrality of melancholia – and the instrumentality of failure – to any aesthetic treatment of the machine age that would seek to do more than blindly affirm its ideological investments.
My focus on precisionism in this introduction nessesitated some lamentable exclusions; indeed an exhaustive account of the book's participation in the lines of argument regarding the aesthetics of the modern city would require the book's examination within a far more multi-faceted context. In order the sketch a faint outline of what that context might look like (and perhaps also to suggest opportunities for further research) I offer the following paralipomena.
Marcus' representation of New York City is decidedly organized around white (and perhaps less decidedly - male) experience. It seems to me that a project as expansive as this one, even if it focused exclusively on the race and gender politics of the book, would only begin to explain these exclusionary acts in a satisfactory manner.
The book's 1921 publication positions it just after the dominance of the Ashcan School of naturalist painters, and just before precisionism's rise to prominence. For scholars interested in looking at the ways in which American artists and writers begain working within modernism (in the strictest sense of the term) the book is among those richest in meaning. It is positioned, as is perhaps no other single book, at the very precipice of the modern both as a pictoral and as a linguistic text. One needs only examine Hugh Ferris' The Metropolis of Tomorow (a book which has recieved immesurably more critical attention) to become convinced of the remarkable ways in which New York, the Nation's Metropolis anticipates much of what would become the most canonical modernist gestures. For scholars working on the history of modernism in Manhattan, the book is something of a proverbial missing link. It has made itself as scarce as the fabeled Sasquatch, and offers analagous information about the transition from the aestheitc assumptions of the picturesque of the Ashcan School, to those of the modernists in the 1920s.