The creative destruction of New York City: Landscape, memory, and the politics of place, 1900-1930

This dissertation is a study of the process and experience of destruction and rebuilding in early-twentieth century New York City. By examining debates surrounding aspects of citybuilding such as private real estate development, slum clearance, the demolition of historic buildings, and the elimination of street trees, I describe an urban development process whose central dynamic was not defined by simple expansion and growth but rather by a vibrant and often chaotic "creative destruction." I apply the concept of economic creative destruction to the literal, physical destruction and creation of buildings and natural landscapes, and thereby show how capitalism inscribed its economic and social processes into the physical landscape of the city, and then into the minds of city people. It was this process--celebrated and decried, encouraged and resisted--that defined the experience of the city and posed in the most jarring manner the dilemmas of modernity.;One of these central dilemmas was the role the past would play in the modern world. Contrary to the sense of New York as an ahistorical city, I show how central the past--as recalled, invented, and manipulated by powerful New Yorkers--was to defining how the city would henceforth be built. Collective memories were fashioned and used with abandon by the city's builders, in complex and sometimes contradictory ways: by real estate developers hoping to enhance the prestige of Fifth Avenue; by historic preservation advocates seeking moral inspiration and assimilationist lessons by saving and promoting historic landmarks; by tenement reformers eager to expunge deplorable memories of slums; and by street tree advocates who saw in nature a link to a more stable pace of change which would serve as a palliative for the ills of the modern city. The "politics of place," that is, the centrality of the nature and sense of place in urban development debates, was the product of citybuilders setting the tool of memory to the substance of landscape in order to transform the metropolis.