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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
How do we visualize our large cities? What kinds of shapes, overall, do we imagine them to have? These questions would have brought different answers in each major period of urban change in our country's development. Each period seemed to develop a favored perspective. Eighteenth and early-19th-century New Yorkers thought of the city as it looked when one approached it by sea from the harbor. Mid-19th-century viewers imagined a city seen from a bird's eye view like that provided by the Latting Observatory on 42nd Street, stretching to the north. By the end of the century, the approach to the city by rail and road began to encourage a new perspective on the city, silhouetted against the skywhat we have come to know as the skyline view. Each of these perspectives on the city reflects something about the urban culture of the period that created and favored the perspective. In the values and meaning that have become associated with it, the skyline is no exception.
1. For an interesting discussion of the evolving conception of the port city, see Konvitz, Joseph, Cities and the Sea: Port City Planning in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
2. The best source for studying such conventions, and the most comprehensive discussion of them to date, is I. N. Phelps-Stokes's monumental The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, 5 vols. (New York: R. H. Dodd, 1915–1928)Google Scholar. Plate 7 is PL 93 in Phelps-Stokes, vol. 3; “New York From Heights Near Brooklyn” by William G. Wall; engraving by I. (J.) Hill, issued 1823.
3. Phelps-Stokes, vol. 3.
4. Ibid., plate 111.
5. Kouwenhoven, John A., The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: An Essay in Graphic History (New York: Doubleday, 1953), p. 394Google Scholar. Kouwenhoven's claim is carefully qualified: “The first use of the word ‘skyline’ in a picture title.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites earlier instances when the word is used in the description of rural panorama or landscape: “The line where earth and sky meet,” as in the quotation of 1860: “The blue hare … running up hill, and seating himself on the skyline.” (OED, vol. 9, p. 182Google Scholar.) Kouwenhoven's book, for those unfamiliar with it, is perhaps the most comprehensive compendium of graphic and photographic representation of New York City in print. The accompanying text, moreover, is a careful and informative guide to the illustrations, a virtual treasure of historical information.
6. The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner's, 1925), p. 69Google Scholar. See citation below, p. 295.
7. Harper's Weekly, 03 20, 1897, p. 295Google Scholar. Part of this statement by Schuyler was cited by Kouwenhoven (p. 394), but the whole article is worth careful consideration.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Kellogg, Paul U., The Pittsburgh Survey, 6 vols. (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1909–1914.Google Scholar
13. Ivins, William M. Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 135.Google Scholar
14. Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), p. 85.Google Scholar
15. Harris, Neil, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Half-Tone Effect,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. Higham, John and Conkin, Paul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 196–211.Google Scholar
16. See the author's “Psyching Out the City,” in Bushman, Richard L. et al. , eds., Uprooted Americans. Essays to Honor Oscar Handlin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 245–289.Google Scholar
17. Norman, Dorothy, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 45Google Scholar. I owe the discovery of this extraordinary quotation to a former doctoral student, Terry, James S., who cited it in his dissertation, “Alfred Stieglitz: The Photographic Antecedents of Modernism” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1979).Google Scholar
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. For an interesting discussion of this point, see Sontag, , On Photography, pp. 153Google Scholar ff. She notes that Feurbach, writing a few years after the invention of the camera, had made a similar point, saying that his era knowingly “prefers the image to the thing, appearance to being.”
22. Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, p. 69.Google Scholar