| This dissertation explores the significance of the ruin within the social, intellectual, and cultural contexts of United States urbanism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows how the ruin, although most closely identified with the aesthetic discourses and landscape practices of eighteenth century Europe, did in fact come to be embraced, albeit belatedly and ambivalently, by increasing numbers of Americans. Eschewing the rural, picturesque ruins favored by the landscape painters and travel writers of the antebellum period (Chapter 1), metropolitan audiences and readers would become drawn by 1900 to the spectacular and apocalyptic depictions of urban ruin enacted in the commercial sphere of panoramas, amusement parks, nickelodeons, dime novels, and pulp magazines.; Combining cultural readings of those images and texts with detailed social analyses of urban history, while also engaging with theoretical paradigms of the ruin (from Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin to Robert Smithson), I show how, in many of the political debates of the period, this iconographical emblem was able to register the rapid and profound transformations of American cities. Commercial apologists compared the construction of internal communications connecting coastal with inland cities to those that linked the now ruined cities of the Mediterranean (Chapter II). Nativists and conservatives allegorized the influx of new immigrants into American cities as the vandal invasions of imperial Rome, and the labor struggles that broke out in Chicago as the social unrest that weakened Rome from within (Chapter III). Critics of technology exploited the photographic spectacle of San Francisco's recent buildings instantly reduced to archaic looking ruins by the 1906 earthquake, to express concerns about the unprecedented fragility of urban infrastructures (Chapter IV). And architectural commentators warned that New York, with its escalating land values and demolition rates, would offer picturesque ruins for the Gibbons and Volneys of the future (Chapter V). Each of these groups, the dissertation concludes, invoked narratives and images of ruin to dramatize (and resolve) the problems, conflicts, and experiences of urban modernity, by viewing them from the imaginary perspective of a distant and postapocalyptic future. |
