Memory infrastructure: Preservation, 'improvement' and landscape in New York City, 1898--1925

This dissertation explores, conceptually and empirically, the role of collective memory in modern urban development.; Urban development involved the cultural production as well as economic production. The ideal of "improvement," a watchword for urbanism from the 1890s to the 1920s, had many aspects: economic, cultural, political, aesthetic, natural and sanitary. Imagining and creating an infrastructure for collective memory---literal memory-sites such as restored buildings, preserved parks, monuments, public art---was one facet of "improved" urban development and cultural production. Through the production of memory infrastructure, historical memory was used by historic preservationists, reformers and city-builders in early-20th-century New York to animate and temper urban development.; Historic preservation and other efforts to spatialize public memory were essential elements in building the modern New York metropolis. While creative destruction was the dominant metaphor of urban development, collective remembering of the civic past was among the canon of Progressive, social-environmental reforms undertaken in this era. The same civic leaders, reformers and politicians who orchestrated the massive rebuilding of metropolitan New York led the way in historic preservation and building a sense of the past into its urban landscape.; Theories of urban development consistently underestimate and blur the role of culture. This study proceeds from the argument that collective memory is a key aspect of cultural production and of urban development. Historic preservation is an obvious means of constructing collective memory both materially and ideally, and it is foregrounded here as a practice focused on producing landscapes of remembering. Other urban practices---architecture, public art, urban design, landscape architecture---also were means of constructing memory-sites and landscapes. The emergence and flourishing of these practices, and the building of memory infrastructure, are analyzed here as signal features of early-20th-century New York City.; The role of memory in urbanism is examined in this study through two linked methodologies: narrating the history of building of memory infrastructure in early-20th-century New York, highlighting three sites in particular; and constructing a theoretical argument through which collective memory is understood as an essential cultural and social-environmental process enacted as part of modern urban development. The three case history sites are St. John's Chapel, City Hall Park, and the Bronx River Parkway.