Category: Visualizing Urban Poverty

Blighted: Slums, Renewal, and Photographic Depictions of New York’s Poor

Post author By mlennon10
Post date March 5, 2021

Ryan Sullivan

Introduction

For many years, West 98^th and 99^th Streets between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West was the site of a vibrant African-American quarter known as the “Old Community.” The area started out as a small settlement, but by the 1920s, had blossomed into something of a miniature Harlem with its own Renaissance. Billie Holiday, Arturo Schomburg, and the actress Butterfly McQueen of “Gone with the Wind” fame all called the Upper West Side neighborhood home. After the Second World War, the Old Community was still populated by African-Americans, but bohemians and free spirits had given way to poor and working-class families. Despite their lack of wealth, residents possessed a tremendous amount of comradery, togetherness, and local pride. It was the type of place where households relied on their next-door neighbors as much as they did each other. As Jane Jacobs would say, there were “eyes on the street,” her metaphor for the natural protective surveillance that occurs on vibrant city blocks. Jim Torain of the West 99^th and 98^th Street Old Community Association described the area as “like a big extended family.” Linda Burstion, who grew up on 98^th Street recalled; “it was just a great neighborhood to live in, I remember playing jacks, eating ices, playing stickball and dodgeball, jumping double Dutch and when it got really hot out, they would open up the fire hydrants.” This is not to say that the Old Community escaped the problems that plagued minority enclaves, but communal bonds and kinship ties provided residents with a strong sense of hope for the future. Then, almost overnight, the Old Community was gone.

The Old Community’s disappearance was the product of mid-century urban reform and slum clearance which culminated in the sweeping 1949 Federal Housing Act. The bill’s infamous Title I clause, “Slum Clearance and Community Development and Redevelopment” federally authorized $1 billion in loans to help cities acquire “slums” like Old Community for public or private use. The law did not, however, require that affordable accommodations be built for ousted tenants, and many of those who lost their homes to demolition were not re-housed at all. The few that did get relocated found themselves in massive housing projects, cut off from the intimacy of street communities and segregated as never before.

Renewal advocates relied on the word blight more than anything else to secure public and political approval for their efforts. Blight, they explained, was a malignant disease that threatened to turn healthy areas into slums. But lawmakers included no legislative definition for blight, which allowed these local leaders and developers great discretion about where and what parts of the city were suitable for clearance and replacement. To demonstrate blighted conditions to a wide audience, Title I proponents used a range of visual aids including brochures, maps, and most importantly—photographs. Examining these images reveals a great deal about the attitudes and presumptions held in postwar America about the urban poor.

The Birth of City Planning

To understand how blight emerged as a concept, we must understand the professionalization of city planning. In its modern form, city planning is very much a response to the changing dynamics of urban America in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century. Rapid urbanization, immigration, and industrialization created lamentable living conditions which shocked middle class onlookers. Most agreed with pioneering documentary photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis when he said, “cities had become nurseries of crime, and of the vices and disorderly courses which lead to crime.”

Riding the wave of popular urban reform movements, institutions like Harvard and Yale began granting degrees in city planning, urban design, and architecture. By the 1910s city planners were building a new lexicon of terms filled with quasi scientific metaphors. The first use of “blight” to describe urban areas is uncertain, but scholars have pointed to the area around the Brooklyn Naval Yard which was described in a 1911 edition of the New York Times, as “a blighted neighborhood.” In the mid-1920’s, C. Earl Morrow and Charles Herrick, two students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Landscape Architecture published an influential article in City Planning. In the essay, they defined blight as “… a district [where] normal development has been frustrated. Ordinarily property values are an index of the situation: wherever property values fail to keep pace with the increase in other similar districts in the same city, or have decreased, the district may be termed a blighted district” Therefore, blight is defined as slowing of the property values in one portion of the city when compared to other parts of the city, the result of which is a hindrance to “normal development.” While Morrow and Herrick’s definition of blight has several weaknesses, it stands as a landmark. It is the first serious attempt to give a precise, scientific, urban definition to the word—and it placed the meaning of blight firmly within a capitalist framework that defined good and bad areas of a city narrowly on property values alone.

Despite the efforts of city planners to define blight using scientific and empirical data, the term remained vague and amorphous throughout the first half of the 20^th century. The slum, being the ultimate nadir of physical urban conditions, was relatively easy to define, but blight was something that existed in the eye of the beholder. Without a universal definition, the only metric to judge blight was perception. In other words—we all know it when we see it. With the term almost always applied to spaces where Anglo-American families did not live, blight became infused with racial and ethnic prejudice. By mid-century, most city planners could not—or did not care to—distinguish blighted areas from minority areas and vice versa.

Photographs as Conveyors of Truth

The birth of the modern city planning profession coalesced with the rise of documentary photography in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. During this time, many in the public believed photographs were inherently true and that cameras presented subjects as they really were. This credence also dominated Progressive reform and intellectual settings. Pictures thus became a reliable form of qualitative research and were used as evidence to advance the specific ideological underpinnings of the reformist vision in the areas of housing, philanthropy, education, and public health.

Despite the insistence that photographs represented objective conditions, photographers and social reformers found themselves working harder and harder to establish the ideological meaning of the photographs they took. Jacob Riis, who made a career out of exposing urban conditions is an example of how ideology and photography are interconnected. Riis never allowed ambiguity to creep into his photos, not wanting his audience to draw conclusions that did not align with his reformist agenda. In lectures, Riis frequently included anecdotes about his subjects to advance ideological narratives that included the people photographed as well as his audiences. The result was a combination of entertainment and morality with photographs functioning as the mediated visual truth. Even when he was not lecturing, Riis always presented his photos with captions and text, making sure that his interpretation was always clear.

Policymakers discovered the power of photographic interpretation when they sought to portray the poor during the Great Depression. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) desperately wanted to legitimize many of its controversial programs such as the resettlement of landless farmers, the building of model towns, and the establishment of rural cooperatives through publicity. FSA officials made calculated decisions over which photographs to include, how to present them, and what captions to write. The FSA documentary photographer thus became not only a cameraman “but a scenarist, dramatist, and director as well,’’ aiming at ‘‘not only the influencing of the subject before the camera, but also the influencing of the person looking at the finished print.” According to Tim Cressel, author of The Tramp in America: “FSA photography was an important propaganda tool that served to legitimate the New Deal . . . they [the photographs] were part of a national attempt to order society and nature through the application of rational scientific principles during a chronic depression . . . The images of migrants were a way of saying that things need to be made better for these people living disordered lives. They needed migrant camps—nicely ordered, geometric simulations of ‘normal life’, which the FSA also photographed.”

The photographs used by urban renewal advocates may not have been as prominent as those of the FSA, but it is likely that Title I proponents were aware of the influence photographs had on the public. By employing this medium, they sought to combine scientific objectivity and rationalism with emotional appeal and popular understandings of the meaning and conditions of poverty to shape public opinion and further their ultimate agenda.

“Demonstrations of Blight”

An invigorated push for urban redevelopment gained political steam once the Second World War ended. When President Truman signed the 1949 Housing Act, he proclaimed that the legislation “opens up the prospect of decent homes in wholesome for low-income families now living in the squalor of the slums”, and will equip “the Federal Government, for the first time, with effective means for aiding cities.” Idealists hoped the bill would uplift the poor, eliminate unsanitary conditions, and bring order to the messiness of urban life. But others, specifically businessmen and civic leaders, saw an opportunity to redevelop areas in strategic parts of their city that had experienced undesirable demographic and racial changes.

The Title I provision delegated leadership to local municipalities to acquire local lands for the purpose of redevelopment, and Robert Moses was soon named chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance. Between 1949 and 1960, Moses made New York City the capital of renewal, planning thirty-five slum clearing projects, completing seventeen, and receiving $65.8 million in Title I funds. To justify and promote these urban renewal projects, Moses published brochures for each renewal site (See Figure 1 for an example). These brochures were made of glossy paper and filled with statistics, graphics, charts, and photographs. According to historian Samuel Zipp, “the clean, orderly feeling of the designs, bold titles, seemingly objective amassing of data and photographs bled to the edges of the page.” This made for a heightened sense of contrast with the dark, seemingly all-pervasive decay on display in the uncaptioned photos. Moses instructed his underlings that he did not want long texts in the slum clearance publications: ‘‘It’s the schedules themselves, the plans and pictures that count with the statement that we mean business, that the procedure will be entirely fair and orderly and that hardships will be, so far as humanly possible, avoided.” Moses’s direction gave the impression that the brochure’s photographs captured objective slum conditions that could be universally understood and accepted.Taking cues from both Riis and FSA photographers, these brochures presented a powerful visual argument and further demonstrated how a sophisticated use of visual material can shape perceptions.

Given that the brochures were intended to justify the clearance of areas designated as ‘‘slums,’’ the most important section was entitled ‘‘Demonstration of Blight” (Figure 2). Here, the authors described matters such as land use, the condition and age of existing structures, zoning, and population density. The photographs that displayed ‘‘blighted’’ conditions in the most persuasive manner explored three themes: empty lots, back alleys, and abandoned buildings. Empty lots (Figure 3) appeared twenty-two times in the brochures and represented the most popular depiction of blight. Moses and his team implied that when a building was missing, that space was underutilized and would eventually be filled by garbage. Back alleys appeared twenty times. Mostly dark, these photos indicated that portions of the buildings did not receive proper sunlight. Abandoned buildings appeared seventeen times. Once again, abandoned buildings were viewed as natural statements of urban blight. They had a similar representational function as empty lots; abandoned buildings were uneconomic and the fact that their owners had not repaired them meant they were beyond repair or that their owners were not optimistic about the profitability of these buildings.

Race equals Blight

Many images included in “Demonstration of Blight” emphasized elements that made the built environment appear disorderly, obsolete, and beyond repair. Squalor and idleness were often associated with Black and Latino neighborhoods. But surprisingly, people are centered in only a few photos. According to urbanist Themis Chronopoulos “in these types of photographs, the presence of people is incidental,” because Moses and his staff members viewed “blight as a physical problem that required physical solutions.”

But upon closer look, the human subjects included in the photos are much more than incidental passersby. In one photograph, two Black men appear to be chatting on a stoop (Figure 4). At first glance, one might think the picture is meant to show the decay of the townhouse behind them. But there is a more coded message being relayed. The two Black men appear to be conversing in broad daylight, implying idleness or even unemployment. In another image, a young man is pictured crossing the street (Figure 5). This photograph was intended to show that commercial establishments existed in residential buildings and that the people frequenting these stores were doing so in a disorderly fashion. Although this photo is meant to demonstrate blight, the neighborhood appears to be quite vibrant, active, and safe. Taken on West 63^rd street, this area was once called San Juan Hill— a minority community made up of Black and Latino residents. The only evidence of blight in this photo is its subject’s apparent ethnicity. In a third photograph, also taken in San Juan Hill, a grocery store is shown with a soft drink sign on the ground floor of a brownstone (Figure 6). This image made the point that commercial establishments existed in residential streets, which according to modernist planning theories was unacceptable. Further, there is a sign advertising furnished rooms and apartments in the photograph. This detail implied that some of the buildings had been converted into single-room occupancies, attracting low-income and possibly homeless people. A caption for this photograph asked the question: ‘‘Is this a place for a woman and her child?” Although the picture is not in focus, the woman and boy’s dark features and complexion is meant to reinforce blight.

For the people who resided in these neighborhoods, the 1949 Housing Act destroyed lives and broke up families. In San Juan Hill, more than 7,000 lower-class families were displaced. Few, if any, of the 4,400 new housing units were intended for the area’s previous residents. Similar demolitions occurred in the Bronx, Stuyvesant Town, East Harlem, and Manhattanville. The ousted population was 40% Black or Hispanic at a time when those demographics made up only a little over 10% of the city’s overall population, meaning that a large proportion of evicted tenants faced extreme discrimination in finding new housing. Today, most experts believe that the 1949 Housing Act and its urban renewal programs were in fact fostering the slums they were meant to erase. Although policy makers abandoned the methods of the bill, the widely viewed images created by Title I proponents made a lasting impression on the American public by reinforcing negative racial stereotypes.

Conclusions

In postwar New York, renewal advocates used photographs and visual aids to show blight. Images of empty lots, abandoned buildings, and nonwhite subjects were all used to demonstrate malignant urban decay and disease, and harmful visual depictions have continued to plague communities of color. In the 1990s, Rudolph Giuliani campaigned on the “broken windows theory,” which suggested that cleaning up the visible signs of disorder — like graffiti, loitering, panhandling and prostitution — would prevent more serious crimes. Such tactics did not make crime go down, but they helped minority incarceration rates go up.

As for the term blight— it is still used by those in power. In 2017, President Trump delivered his “New Deal for African Americans” at a Black church congregation in North Carolina and said: “I will … propose tax holidays for inner-city investment, and new tax incentives to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods. I will further empower cities and states to seek a federal disaster designation for blighted communities to initiate the rebuilding of vital infrastructure, the demolition of abandoned properties, and the increased presence of law enforcement.” His repeated use of the word blight is telling.

Epilogue

The neighborhoods destroyed by Title I were not slums or blighted areas, and many former residents recall vibrant and supportive communities. The Old Community was one of the first neighborhoods to be destroyed by the 1949 Housing Act. But for the actual people who lived on blocks like 98th Street, the old neighborhood was never far from their minds. Sixty years after displacement, a bit of a reunion took place. A handful of former residents happily gathered and laughed at Frederick Douglass Center on Columbus Avenue (Figure 7). It seems all the seams all that was missing was the block, cleared long ago.

Bibliography

Chronopoulos, Themis. “Robert Moses and the Visual Dimension of Physical Disorder: Efforts to Demonstrate Urban Blight in the Age of Slum Clearance. ” Journal of Planning History 13, no. 3 (2014): 207–33.

Craghead, A. B. “Blighted Ambitions: Federal Policy, Public Housing, and Redevelopment on the West Coast, 1937-1954.” UC Berkeley. (2020) ProQuest ID: Craghead_berkeley_0028E_19828. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5m09ndm. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33c953w2

Cresswell, Tim. The Tramp in America, London, UK: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2001

Forest, Steven C. “The Effect of title I of the 1949 Federal Housing Act on New York Cooperative and Condominium Conversation Plans.” Fordham Urban Law Journal, 13, no 3. (1985): 723-61.

Harry Truman, “Statement by the President Upon Signing the Housing Act of 1949” ( press release, Washington, DC, July 15, 1949), https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/157/statement-president-upon-signing-housing-act-1949

Hoffman, von Alexander. “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 2 (2000): 302-338.

Mock. Brentin, “The Data Can’t Be Ignored: ‘Stop and Frisk’ Doesn’t Work.” Bloomberg CityLab, August 2016.

Mock, Brentin, “The Meaning of Blight.” Bloomberg CityLab, February 2017.

Riis, Jacob. How The Other Half Lives. New York: Garrett Press, 1970.

Schweber, Nate. 2017. “A Community Erased by Slum Clearance Is Reunited,” New York Times, Oct 2017.

The American Housing Act of 1949 (P.L. 81-171), https://legcounsel.house.gov/Comps/81-171.pdf

Williams, Keith “How Lincoln Center Was Built (It Wasn’t Pretty)” New York Times, December 2017.

Zipp, Samuel Taylor. Manhattan Projects: Cold War Urbanism in the Age of Urban Renewal, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Figure 1 Excerpts from the Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan released by Robert Moses’s Committee on Slum Clearance in 1956. Images courtesy of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., Archives.

Figure 2 Buildings demonstrating ‘‘blighted’’ conditions in the Manhattantown slum clearance site in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Manhattantown: Slum Clearance Plan Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949.

Figure 3 Empty lot with children playing in the Lincoln Square site. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square: Slum Clearance Plan Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 as Amended (New York: The Committee, May 28, 1956)

Figure 4 Buildings that were viewed as obsolete in the Pratt Institute slum clearance area. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Pratt Institute Area

Figure 5 Commercial area in Lincoln Square. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square

Figure 6 Brownstones with rooming houses and a grocery store in Lincoln Square. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square

Figure 7 West 99th and 98th Street Reunion, Circa 1981. Photo courtesy of John Cornwall Collection

Tags 20th Century, New York City, Photography, Race, Urban Environments

Visualizing Urban Poverty

ALMOST BEAUTIFUL: The City Beautiful Movement’s Attempt To Fight Urban Poverty

Post author By mlennon10
Post date March 5, 2021

Christopher M. Talarico

Seeing the “Other Half” Through Jacob Riis’s Lens

J.R. Lowell of Cambridge, Massachusetts could hardly keep the sadness he felt to himself. Having just read Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, which depicted in vivid detail the crowded tenement neighborhoods of New York City, Lowell was compelled to write directly to the author, detailing his personal anguish in seeing the squalor, decay, and poverty that was rotting the nation’s cities:

21st Nov: 1890
Dear Sir,
I have read your book with deep and painful interest. I felt as Dante must when he looked
over the edge of the abyss at the bottom of which Gorgon lay in ambush. I had but a vague idea of these horrors before you brought them so feelingly home to me. I cannot conceive how such a book should fail of doing great good, if it move other people as it has moved me. I found it hard to get asleep the night after I had been reading it.
Faithfully yours
J. R. Lowell

Lowell, like so many Americans, was dismayed as to how such conditions could exist; after all, America was becoming the beacon of prosperity and innovation around the world. The nation’s newfound industrial and economic success — producing sixty-seven percent of all manufactured goods sold around the world — was in many ways the greatest thing to happen to the country, and America’s urban centers were often considered the crown jewels of America’s new “gilded” image. New technologies and innovations, such as Edison’s electric light bulb, teemed across America’s cities, forever leaving behind the “head-ache” of gas lamps, and giving a “soft, mellow, and grateful” peek into a shining new future. But what most Americans did not see — or perhaps, chose not to — was lurking in the tenements untouched by Edison’s “wizardry.” The overcrowding, the stench, the buildings that crumbled only blocks away from the grand mansions of New York’s Madison Avenue were too much for people like Lowell to handle or accept. How could the buildings of America’s great cities be in such disrepair? How could Americans ever allow such conditions to be acceptable to live in? How did the nation’s cities become cesspools of inhumane poverty?

Figure 1: Jacob Riis, Dens of Death, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

Figure 2. Jacob Riis, Survival of the Unfittest, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

Figure 3: Jacob Riis, Bandits Roost, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

The sketches and eventual photographs of Riis’s work stirred the public (some believed Riis’s project to be revealing and genuine; others thought Riis to be exploitative) while also inspiring some government action. The State of New York, for example, formed a special Tenement House Committee in 1894 to report first hand to the state assembly the social conditions of the nation’s largest city. What they determined to be the root of the social problems made public by Riis was familiar: overcrowding into narrow spaces and lack of open areas and facilities. This physical environment generated “unhealthy growth” and living conditions which were the primary causes of the city’s impoverished state:

The conditions affecting tenement-house life in New York are unique and render especially difficult the correction of existing evils. The ample waterways which surround the city, while they give it commercial supremacy… at the same time crowd the chief part of its population into extremely narrow limits. Ferries, bridges, and transit facilities have not kept pace with the growth of population. In consequence land is held at high prices…[and] landlords are driven to pile story upon story upon narrow lots leaving on each lot insufficient uncovered area; and…authorities neglect to supply the necessary open spaces…making it the most crowded on the face of the earth.

Figure 4:Jacob Riis, Arch & Alley at 55 Baxter Street, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

Figure 5. Jacob Riis, Bona Alley Park Site, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

Addressing the Urban Sprawl: The City Beautiful Movement Successfully Fails

These reactions, investigations, and changes were the point of Riis’s photographic work: to create discomfort and to stir a desire to humanize and improve the cities and their inhabitants. As Lowell predicted, How the Other Half Lives “moved other people” to do good and change the state of the nation’s urban sprawl. One of those people “so moved” was Charles Follen McKim, one of three partners whose name christened one of the nation’s leading architectural firms: McKim, Meade and White. McKim saw in Riis’s photographs a need to restore American cities by reestablishing them as centers of splendor, dignity, and order. McKim’s vision of cities reborn with “palaces for the people” and large open-air public spaces became the hallmark of a massive architectural movement which engulfed America’s urban centers in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. From New York to Harrisburg and from Chicago to Detroit, the City Beautiful Movement drew on classic European design and philosophy and adopted new techniques of city planning to make America’s urban centers competitors to the great metropolises of old.

With the partnership of “politicians, social workers, civic leaders, philanthropists, and of course architects and city planners,” the City Beautiful Movement would create some of the nation’s most renowned urban spaces, structures, and cultural institutions of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. But would this “dream of a beautiful, ideal city” actually assist in the extinction of inconceivable urban poverty? This is a critical question to ask of this architectural crusade.

Often, the City Beautiful Movement is studied narrowly for its artistic value — particularly, its widespread adoption of an Ecole des Beaux-Arts style that drew inspiration from imperial France and ancient Greece and Rome. However, beyond its artistic merits, the City Beautiful Movement was first and foremost a movement, a philosophy of urban planning carefully crafted and executed to meet the needs of a crumbling and crowded urban space and the subsequent social issues that followed in its wake. It was often the assumption by proponents of the City Beautiful Movement that spacial limitations and lack of “noble architecture” combined in creating impoverished urban communities. Simply, the movement posited that it was the space itself and its lack of aesthetic culture and beauty, that allowed poverty to expand and not the social and economic conditions of the time. The gatekeepers of alleviating this city/ urban poverty would be trained architectural professionals such as McKim. Architects dominated discussions of city beautification efforts, from the heavy reliance on the testimony of architects like David W. King during the Tenement House Committee Report to the inclusion of architects like McKim, Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Augustus Saint-Guadens during the 1901 redesign of the National Mall in Washington, DC.

What historically hangs over the City Beautiful Movement is its misguided assumption that “noble architecture, heroic sculptures, refreshing fountains and lovely landscape parks” were the solution to fixing the nation’s urban economic and “moral” decay. Notwithstanding these serious oversights, the City Beautiful Movement’s analysis was nearly universally accepted by reformers and capitalists alike. Yet, despite success in creating new cultural institutions and public spaces that now accommodate millions of visitors and generate millions of dollars per annum, the City Beautiful Movement’s legacy in combating and eradicating the very poverty that spurred its existence is complicated and incomplete. Despite the enormous union and investment of public and private enterprise in the construction of new urban spaces, the movement focused too narrowly on the classical European concepts of being “changed by culture,” often at the expense of real opportunities to create improved living spaces and conditions for residents who suffered most.

Combatting the Penn Legacy

As mentioned in the Tenement House Committee Report, poor living conditions were a product of “narrow” streets, cramped spaces, and few open areas for wellness. These issues were all characteristics of the “grid-system,” the popular urban design of most major cities, and, in the eyes of architects, city planners, and reformers alike, a major contributor to urban poverty.

Throughout the mid-19th century, William Penn’s Philadelphia 1682 grid system served as the standard for urban layout. While initially designed by Penn to accommodate green spaces, shrubs, and lawns, the grid system had also inadvertently promoted — and accommodated — unhealthy population and infrastructural growth in America’s major cities. By creating streets and residential neighborhoods that required little physical space to construct, cities began to adopt this method of urban design as the cheapest and expeditious way to create housing to accommodate the mass migration to urban centers, often at the expense of parks and open spaces thought to be required for health and wellness. As H.W. Brands notes in his book American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900, cities exploded in population as more individuals flocked to America’s urban centers in search of better wages and job opportunities than had been available in America’s countryside. This explosion of urban centers occurred not only because of migration within the United States, but also because of the massive influx of “new immigrants” coming from Europe who arrived in American urban centers in hopes of finding steady work and prosperity otherwise unavailable to them in their native countries.

It was these poorer “new immigrants” who were the primary subjects of Riis’s work, and for those who espoused the merits of the City Beautiful Movement, these urban poor were only able to live in the cities because of a blind adoption to a grid system and the ease to which — as the Tenement House Committee explained — landlords and developers could build more using less space, thus creating the “narrow,” “uncovered” living spaces. Furthermore, it was the grid system itself that was causing and perpetuating their pain and suffering. The grid system virtually imprisoned the urban poor into cramped streets and neighborhoods, and the conditions of poor sanitation, limited natural ventilation, and crumbling facades were all pieces of evidence that pointed to a dire need to revamp grid system layouts. Thus, to reverse the “evils” of such a design, the City Beautiful Movement focused on a new form of arrangement, one that would take the convenience of a grid system but refashion it in a way that allowed for grand vistas and open spaces.

The World’s Columbian Exposition

The first and perhaps most famous attempt to show the merits (and subsequent limitations) of such a concept was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the world’s fair commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World. In addition to the symbolic nod to American exceptionalism and a city reborn from the ashes of the devastating 1871 fire, a consortium of the nation’s foremost architects, including Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Richard Morris Hunt, Frederick Law Olmsted, and McKim’s partners William Mead and Stanford White, presented to the nation the possibilities of a new American city, one that would leave behind the overcrowding, disease, crime, and social inequity of Riis’s tenements. The strategically designed “city from scratch,” however, showed more than just an urban space of beautiful buildings; it also displayed an active desire to transform America’s “ugly cities” into places where a well-organized environment with careful considerations of public spaces and structures that could promote civic and urban prosperity.

Figure 6: “World’s Columbian Exposition: exterior view, Chicago, United States, 1893”, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2183l01_SL1.jpg) <em>"World's Columbian Exposition: Court of Honor, Chicago, United States, 1893"</em>, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2165l01_SL1.jpg

Figure 8: “World’s Columbian Exposition: Horticultural Building; Illinois State Building, Chicago, United States, 1893”, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2213l01_SL1.jpg)

Figure 11: Plan of 1901 for City of Washington D.C. from the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. Cornell University. Department of City and Regional Planning.

Figure 12: Plan of 1901 for City of Washington D.C. from the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. Cornell University. Department of City and Regional Planning

Figure 13: Plan of 1901 for City of Washington D.C. from the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. Cornell University. Department of City and Regional Planning

The McMillan Commission Report provided a picture for a Capitol City that was “restored, and developed,” a city where the “wretched slums” and incoherent public buildings had destroyed the great potential of the city, but now was to be renewed with scientific buildings and “parterres of green forming an organic connection” within the city. The results of the city’s construction were staggering in comparison to its state before the project’s undertaking. The plan of creating a well-ordered, well-designed city was successful in the eyes of architects and city planners. Not only was the new national Mall successful in its adoption of classical Roman and Greek architecture for government and cultural buildings that adorned the new public space, but the smaller neighborhood parks were soon ornamented with trees and statues that emphasized a more “humanistic” and “high culture” expression made popular in Europe. The European Classicism that the commission observed in the great European cities and that had dazzled the country at the Columbian Exposition had finally come to life. Not only was this project created with the betterment of the city’s citizens in mind, but it was almost entirely propelled and funded by the federal government. The City Beautiful Movement not only showed the nation the possibilities of a new grand urban space, but also emphasized that the government was playing a critical role in providing a better quality of life for its citizens. In a moment in history when President Theodore Roosevelt was calling for a “square-deal” for the nation, this instance of the government helping to create a truly “humane” cityscape did not go unnoticed.

However, despite the relative success of revamping the nation’s capital, those architects who contributed to the city’s redesign did not consider the other social conditions that were plaguing the city. The great consistent flaw in the City Beautiful Movement creed was that it focused too greatly on the city’s overall physical layout, the ultimate value of cultural institutions, and the overall aesthetics of a city. While the City Beautiful Movement aimed to achieve social improvement through such transformations in the physical surroundings of a city, on a practical level, the movement never thought to take into consideration areas that would more immediately address the poverty within the city. In the example of Washington, D.C., the Senate Commission repeatedly emphasized a city of magnificence, splendor, and dignity akin to what they had observed in Europe. Yet, at no point in the Commission report was there any mention about creating a city where new living accommodations would be built or how stricken areas of the city would be aided through new planning design and construction. There was additionally no mention or consideration as to what would happen to those mostly non-white city residents who were subsequently dispossessed by the demolition of their neighborhoods in order to accommodate the now open space around the mall. With the destruction of slums with dehumanizing titles such as “Murder Bay,” “Louse Alley,” and “Rum Row,” thousands of African Americans, along with Irish and Italian immigrants, were forcibly removed from their neighborhoods. While the city was designed to create an area of harmony and enjoyment, it became very clear through the destruction of immigrant and black neighborhoods that race and ethnicity were qualifying criteria as to who was “worthy” of not only enjoying, but of being in the urban space. The City Beautiful Movement, despite all of its philosophical merits in “humanizing the urban sprawl” and providing “wellness” to its citizens, declined to take the opportunity to go beyond the public space and address the needs of the most vulnerable and consider the well-being of those most affected by the redesign. What instead occurred was a city in which carefully crafted open spaces were intended for all, but in reality were mostly enjoyed by those who had been less, if never, afflicted by poverty.

Conclusion

When looking at the urban design crafted under the City Beautiful banner, it is easy to stay narrowly and pragmatically focused on whether this movement actually addressed the social and economic issues that spurred its existence. Despite the impact this movement had in cities all over the country, it could not adequately address the rise and expansion of industrialization and laissez-faire capitalism, racial tensions, and machine politics corrupting city offices that contributed heavily to the conditions of city slums made famous by Riis’s camera. As the movement reached all corners of America’s urban centers, those for whom the movement was most designed to help found very little in the way of practical change to their social conditions. The benefit of this new urban design was predominantly enjoyed by the middle, and upper (mostly white) classes unaffected by poverty. The movement, despite the creation of popular public areas and institutions, did not on a practical level solve the poverty problems in America’s city as it intended to do.

This is not to say that what the City Beautiful Movement did improve over time –the cultural experience of the nation’s cities– is not of import. Washington, D.C.’s renaissance, for example, had a great impact on other cities, becoming the framework by which more expansive and handsome designs would be created. The openness of the National Mall and the construction of the Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Smithsonian Museums, Union Station, the Library of Congress, et cetera, allowed for an increase in public activity and a renewed emphasis on an “American Culture” that was thought to be significantly lacking by reformers and architects alike; it was this “lack of culture” that was as much to blame for urban poverty and poor urban planning. This tradition of promoting cultural structures and institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York Public Library, Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Hall, has long-enduring impacts on the arts, music, and literature today. Not only have these institutions and spaces been beneficial to America’s cultural fabric, but they have provided millions of dollars in economic impact in some cases within the cities in which they rest. In 2015, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — a City Beautiful project — estimated that the museum generated nearly one billion dollars in economic impact to the city of New York. In the example of the National Mall, the National Park Service in 2016 estimated that the National Mall and Memorials contributed over half of the estimated $1.6 billion in economic impact to the D.C. area. With the current Covid-19 crisis threatening the health of these same City Beautiful projects, this cultural and economic impact on America’s cities cannot be ignored.

But while these are impressive economic contributions, these same City Beautiful spaces and institutions provide no evidence that the communities of the cities most in need of economic generation are reaping the benefits of this impact. This issue is not too dissimilar to the issues plaguing this movement at its inception. Additionally, a majority of those “residents” enjoying these City Beautiful projects are not the local populations for whom these projects were designed. The same 2015 survey by the Metropolitan Museum of Art estimated that only twenty-eight percent of those visitors contributing the nearly one billion dollars in economic impact were actually from the five boroughs of New York City. While there was no evidence in the 2015 survey to certify it, it is not also unreasonable to hypothesize that of those New York residents who did visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a majority of the visitors were not residents that the City Beautiful Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were aiming to help. After over 100 years, the City Beautiful Movement only partially fulfills its promise of creating a city for the people, or perhaps better put, for all its people.

In the modern context of city planning, urban construction and design today try to mimic much of the mission of what the City Beautiful Movement hoped to accomplish at the turn of the century. New spaces and structures are often conceived as being for the public good, allowing for an opportunity for city dwellers to increase their health, wellness, and quality of life. As Richard Klein suggests:

Prior to [the City Beautiful Movement] planning was based almost exclusively on the needs of individual patrons who often responded to local economic, political and social pressures. Perhaps the greatest contribution…of the City Beautiful Movement was to get architects and planners to reconsider what constituted good design and think of the long-term ramifications of their efforts. Modern urban development is an outgrowth of this earlier planning form…and how rational design…can be successfully incorporated into…contemporary urban settings.

This tradition established by the City Beautiful Movement has left a permanent mark on architecture and urban planning. Although the City Beautiful Movement remains the blueprint for future urban construction, what cannot be forgotten is the impact that civic design possesses for the fabric of the city. Despite its positive impact on the urban space today in the form of public spaces and grand cultural institutions, the City Beautiful Movement was born out of an idea that urban squalor could be resolved through a vision of a city where the physical structures, parks, and spaces could help lift society out of the impoverished conditions they experienced. In many ways, it failed; in some, it succeeded. But what future architects and city planners must ask is: why do they build, and for whom do they build? Careful city planning and design cannot be rigid and for specific citizens. As the climate crisis, emphasis on “sustainability,” and the nation’s economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic become critical to city planning, the City Beautiful Movement can give some practical insight into how public spaces can be configured to last and prosper. Planners and architects today must still consider however the city at large and ways to which that city in its entirety can thrive, prosper, and, in the true memory of the City Beautiful Movement, be grand.

Tags 20th Century, Chicago, Photography, Urban Environments

Visualizing Urban Poverty

Gentrification Lesson Plans

Post author By nthomas37
Post date February 18, 2021

Lesson Plan 1: Gentrification and Wealth Inequality

Lesson Plan 2: The Representation of Gentrification in New York City and in Harlem

By Katie Shine

Audience:

University Undergraduates

Course:

American History Introductory Course and/or Seminar

Timeline for Two Sequential Lessons:

2 lessons of 60 minutes each; 2 hours total

Format:

This document includes my suggestions for instructions, materials, and activities for two sequential lesson plans.

The first lesson plan addresses the understanding of wealth inequality and gentrification, particularly in New York City and in the neighborhood of Harlem. The second lesson plan allows students to apply their understanding of gentrification specifically to an analysis of media representations of gentrification.

To accommodate those instructors and students that are currently engaging in online classes, I placed notes throughout this document if the instructor would like to modify the class activities and materials for two virtual lessons.

Please note that a virtual lesson does require that the instructor is familiar with the basics of remote teaching with a digital platform, such as Zoom. Instructor ideally can: create a Zoom session; send an invitation link to the class prior to the lesson time; act as the host of a Zoom session and monitor students’ participation during the lesson; and create breakout sessions for groups of students during the lesson.

Essential Questions for Lessons:

Question for Lesson # 1: What is gentrification? What is wealth inequality?

Question for Lesson # 2: How has the process of gentrification been portrayed by different media sources, particularly online newspapers and magazines? What do the media’s different portrayals of gentrification potentially reveal about the representation of wealth inequality in terms of race and gender?

Context for Lessons For Instructors

Political commentators, local governmental officials, journalists, historians, and other scholars have frequently written about and analyzed gentrification in the U.S. in many history books, cultural criticism, and newspaper and journal articles. They have represented gentrification as either a positive or a negative force that has affected urban metropolises, such as New York City, especially in the decades from the 1970s to the 2010s. Mass media sources, particularly news and magazine articles, frequently characterize gentrification as a process that has a multitude of effects. The authors of these mass media sources write about the challenge that gentrification poses to both the socioeconomic status, mobility, and livelihoods of individual residents; and to the intra-community relationships, average income level, and/or racial and cultural diversity of the greater neighborhoods that these individuals have resided in for many years.

Despite substantial funds and significant governmental attention directed towards affordable housing solutions in New York City by its mayoral administrations in the previous three decades, affordable housing and the impact of gentrification on specific neighborhoods remains a concern for many residents. Many New Yorkers were displaced from their neighborhoods as rent and housing prices rose in neighborhoods across the city, such as in Harlem, and have struggled to access new affordable housing located near their workplaces and family members’ schools. Women of color are more likely to be adversely affected by gentrification. These lessons’ assigned readings and media sources both explain in further detail how women of color have been historically discriminated against when it concerns equitable access to opportunities for wealth and fair housing in New York City. These conditions often occurred against a background of macro-level processes such as real estate development, urban planning and profitable partnerships between local politicians and leaders in the real estate and business industries.

Journalists, historians, and other scholars have also referenced wealth inequality in their discussion of the representation of gentrification. As the media sources in the second lesson’s class activity indicate, journalists and writers have represented gentrification as either a beneficial force to reform a neighborhood and bring more economic opportunities to low-income or middle-class residents, or as a harmful process that permanently displaces these same long-standing residents, especially women of color, from their neighborhood. When long-standing residents are negatively affected by gentrification, they are more likely to have increased difficulties in accruing more wealth than their counterparts: the new, more affluent, incoming residents to the gentrifying neighborhood.

However, media sources often do not provide a concrete definition of the process of gentrification itself. The definition of gentrification is more likely to be oversimplified, vague and open to interpretation by the media outlet’s particular audience. This ambiguity has led journalists and other writers to present gentrification in a variety of misleading ways to the public.

When confronted with defining gentrification for academic purposes, students find it difficult to think about the process in terms of its explicit history. The instructor’s responsibilities for these two lessons include: assigning pre-class readings that analyze the historical context of gentrification and wealth inequality; guiding a class discussion that prompts students to critically analyze various media representations of gentrification; and helping students to consider the role that the discussion of gender and race serve in the representation of gentrification.

The following two sequential lesson plans will allow students to collaborate to consider a variety of perspectives regarding gentrification in New York City and particularly, in the neighborhoods of Central Harlem and West Harlem in northern Manhattan.

Note:

As a disclaimer, please keep in mind that some of the reading material and discussion questions may be sensitive for students. Some students may react to gentrification, and debates about race, gender, and economic dislocation in different ways. This particularly may apply to students that are either originally from New York City: or are living and/or studying currently in New York City. As an instructor, I suggest that you prepare for class discussions and student reactions accordingly. I encourage the instructor to consciously adjust the lesson plan, discussion questions, and monitoring of the lessons according to the instructor’s specific knowledge of their particular students’ learning and emotional needs.

The goals of these lessons are to: foster critical thinking, debate, analysis of historical events, and inclusion of students’ diverse views about gentrification and wealth inequality. I also suggest that the instructor consider collaborating with another teacher and/or administrator at their university. This could allow the instructor to acquire feedback and insight to deliver these lessons to the students in their particular university in an optimal manner.

Pre-Lesson Questions for Instructor:

What does the term gentrification mean to you as an instructor of students of American history? How would you define gentrification?
How would you define wealth inequality in terms that are comprehensible for your undergraduate students based upon what they have learned in the course thus far?

What are the historical macro-level processes that have propelled gentrification to change the living conditions of residents in New York City, especially in Harlem?
Why has gentrification affected certain communities and not others in New York City? Which groups of people, based on their gender and/or race, have been most affected by gentrification?
As an educator and historian, what impact has the discourse of gentrification, especially from various news outlets, had on your understanding of the process of gentrification and its potential beneficiaries?

Learning Objectives for Two Sequential Lessons

Students Will Be Able To:

1) Understand the definition of gentrification and apply that definition to the analysis of change in neighborhoods in northern Manhattan.

2) Apply the understanding of gentrification, with Harlem as an example, in their responses to the discussion questions and during participation in the group activities.

2) Compare and contrast the representations of gentrification between various media sources.

3) Use detailed examples, such as historical facts, theory, arguments or data, from the assigned readings to support their explanation of the changes in housing in New York City.

4) Evaluate a variety of media representations about gentrification in New York City and their implicit discussion of race and gender.

5) Synthesize their understanding of the material with a post-class assignment.

Instructions for Instructor: Preparation and Materials for Two Lessons

Pre-Class Reading Materials for Lesson # 1:

Instructor can view the full list of recommended assigned readings at the end of this section. Instructors should make every effort to ensure that the students can access these materials.

For each lesson, Instructor can assign students about 50 pages of reading material and up to 20 minutes of listening and/or visual material as a target goal for the class to review. The lists of assigned readings are recommendations based on the material’s content, the author’s level of analysis, and its relevance to the discussion questions and activities. There are also additional suggestions if the instructor would like to review more options.

Instructor can notify the students of the assigned readings in one of the following methods, ideally at least one week prior to the lesson:

1) Include the list of readings on the syllabus.

2) Email the students the list of assigned readings with the appropriate attachments or instructions to access the materials online.

3) Post the readings and their links and/or attachments in the course’s classroom tool that is visible to all students (i.e. Google Classroom).

Recommendations:

“Gentrification and the Increasing Significance of Racial Transition in New York City 1970-2010” by Stacey Sutton in Urban Affairs Review v. 56, iss. 1, pgs. 65-95 (January 2020)

Location: Online Academic Journal. Abstract available here.

Total Pages: 30

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (2019)

Read: Chapter 5 (“Unsophisticated Buyers”) or Chapter 6 (“The Urban Crisis Is Over-Long Live the Urban Crisis!“)

Location: E-Book and Print Book Available for Purchase.

Total Pages: 43 (Chapter 5) or 41 (Chapter 6)

Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol edited by Andrew M. Fearnley and Daniel Matlin. New York: Columbia University Press (2019)

Read: Introduction

Location: E-Book and Print Book Available for Purchase.

Total Pages: 25

Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State by Sam Stein. Verso Books (2019)

Read: Chapter 2 (“Planning Gentrification”)

Location: Link can be provided by Instructor prior to the lesson. Print Book Available For Purchase.

Total Pages: 43

“Thomas Piketty’s “‘Capital in the Twenty-first Century”’ Explained” by Mike Llewellyn. Ideas.Ted.com (October 2014)

Location: https://ideas.ted.com/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-twenty-first-century-explained/

Total Pages: Approximately a 10 minute read

“The Threat of Gentrification With Rezoning in East Harlem” by WNYC Radio with Jennifer Levy and Kat Meyers (January 2018)

Listening Time: Podcast of 16 minutes

Location: https://www.wnyc.org/story/legal-aid-society-enters-fight-affordable-housing-nyc/

Additional Suggestions:

“The Gentrification of Harlem?” by Richard Schaffer and Neil Smith. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76, no. 3 (1986), pgs. 347-363

Location: Online Academic Journal. Available in select university libraries and on JSTOR.

Total Pages:16

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. New York: Vintage Books (1992)

Read: Introduction (pgs. 3-25)

Location: E-Book and Print Book Available for Purchase.

Total Pages: 22

Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol edited by Andrew M. Fearnley and Daniel Matlin. New York: Columbia University Press (2019)

Read: Ch. 11 (“Race, Class, and Gentrification in Harlem since 1980”)

Ch.12 (“When Harlem was in Vogue Magazine”); and Conclusion (“Harlem: an Afterword)

Location: E-Book and Print Book Available for Purchase

Total Pages: 43

Pre-Class Reading Materials for Lesson # 2:

Instructor can assign these media source readings and group assignments to the students before the start of Lesson # 2.

For a virtual lesson, Instructor can send an email providing the students with their group assignment and the corresponding assigned media sources that they will read for homework before Lesson # 2.

For an in-person lesson, Instructor can either email the media sources to the students or print the appropriate number of copies of media sources for each member of every group and hand out to the students at the end of Lesson # 1.

Class Activity: Suggested Groups and Assigned Sources

Group 1:

Benjamin Schwartz, “Gentrification and its Discontents” The Atlantic, June 2010

Beth J. Harpaz, “Harlem getting its first major hotel since 1967” NBC News, October 12, 201

Christopher Bonanos, “From Alligator Shoes to Whole Foods:Watching One Harlem Corner Over 28 Years” New York Magazine, July 13, 2017

Sam Roberts, “No Longer Majority Black, Harlem Is in Transition” The New York Times, January 5, 2010

Group 2:

Soni Sangha, “Gentrification in Washington Heights forcing out longtime mom and pop shops” Fox News, Published December 29, 2015, Last Update January 11, 2017

Michael Henry Adams, “The End of Black Harlem” The New York Times, May 27, 2016,

AND

New York Times Editorial Board, “How Gentrification is Changing the Face of Harlem” The New York Times, May 31, 2016

Talmon Joseph Smith, “We’ve Seen New York’s White Flight Before” The Atlantic, August 26 202

Group 3:

Richard L. Cravatts, “Gentrification is Good for the Poor and Everyone Else” American Thinker, August 1, 2007

Elizabeth Kim for WNYC Public Radio, “Rezoning and future of Harlem” , published October 10, 2019, by The Brian Lehrer Show, video, 7:00

AND

Jessica Gould, “The City’s Top Gentrifying Neighborhoods” , published May 9, 2016, WNYC News, video, 1;00,

Stacy M. Brown, “For People of Color, gentrification is more a curse than a blessing” New York Amsterdam News, February 19, 2020

Group 4:

Leani Garcia, “El Barrio Tours” Americas Quarterly, October 19, 2013,

Justin Davidson, “Is Gentrification All Bad?” New York Magazine, January 31, 2014

Denver Regine, “Ethnic Cleansing, aka gentrification, debate rages” New York Amsterdam News, June 21, 2018

Class Agenda For Lesson # 1:

Part 1: Opening Discussion

00:00-2:00

Instructor will introduce the lesson by stating the “Essential Question” for Lesson # 1 and providing excerpts from the “Context” section of the lesson plan if needed.

02:00-10:00

Instructor will open the conversation with these discussion question:

Based upon our reading of the assigned materials and knowledge obtained in the course thus far, how would you define wealth inequality? In American society, who is more likely to have difficulty accessing and maintaining wealth? Why is that?

Inform the students that they may use notes from their reading of Mike Llewellyn’s article about Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century.

Allow at least 3-4 students to respond.

10:00-19:00

Instructor will commence the following activity by sharing this discussion question with the students:

How does our definition of wealth inequality shape how we define or evaluate gentrification?

Class Activity:

Instructor will place the students into groups of 2-3 students each or Zoom Breakout rooms (for a virtual lesson). Instructor should use their phone or another device to keep track of time for this activity.

For 1 minute, students will reflect on the question and individually write down their response.

For 3 minutes, students will briefly share their responses with their group members. Instructor will then bring the students back to the classroom or Zoom meeting.

For 5 minutes, the students will share with the rest of their class what their groups discussed. Instructor can extend the discussion here if it needs additional time.

19:00-25:00

Instructor will convene the class to discuss these questions:

If gentrification can be evaluated as a historical process, what are some of the historical factors that have contributed to gentrification in New York City that we can identify as a class? Do the forces that drive gentrification benefit only certain people, based on their income level, gender, and/or race? Or can gentrification benefit all New Yorkers?

Allow several students to give their brief responses to this question.

Transition: Inform the students that we will be now playing the role of historians to define gentrification. The goal is for the students to create a definition of the term as a process that they can experiment with for this lesson and the next lesson.

25:00-40:00

Class Activity Instructions:

Divide students into 4 or 5 in-person groups or Zoom breakout rooms (for a virtual lesson) to collaborate on a definition of gentrification.

Inform students that they will be assuming the mindset and role of a historian. Remind them to consider the historian’s intended audience and use of evidence to support their statements. Circulate the room in person or pop into Zoom Breakout rooms (for a virtual lesson) to answer questions and address any roadblocks.

If students are struggling with defining gentrification, the instructor can offer this definition by a social scientist from one of the suggested pre-class readings to get them started.

“The theft of space from labor and its conversion into spaces of profit”

(Ipsita Chatterjee in“Gentrification and the Increasing Significance of Racial Transition in New York City 1970-2010” by Stacey Sutton).

Give the students 7-8 minutes to come up with a definition, or at least a set of words and/or terms that are associated with gentrification.
Instructor will then ask 1 student from each group to write the definition, or a collection of words associated with gentrification, on the classroom board.
For a virtual lesson, Instructor can create a Google Doc and share it with the entire class. Students can post their definition or word association on the document.
Allow the students 7-8 minutes in total for each group spokesperson to share their definition.
Ask the students to write all of these definitions or word associations because the class will be revisiting these definitions later in the lessons.

Transition: Instructor will introduce a series of discussion questions that draw upon the assigned readings and incorporate the class’s definitions of gentrification.

Part 2: Discussion Questions

40:00-1:00:00

Instructor can ask 2 of these suggested discussion questions based upon the students’ comprehension of the topic and individual interests.

I suggest that Instructor asks Question #4 in order to transition the discussion to the next lesson about the media’s representation of gentrification.

What has physically been taken from gentrified neighborhoods? How can we describe the products, processes, profits, or other social or economic entities leaving the neighborhood?

In contrast, what types of products or processes are arriving in the neighborhood? What is the perceived value of these products or processes to current residents in comparison to possible future residents?

Who are the historical actors shaping gentrification in New York City? What is their identity in terms of their gender, race, access to wealth, and/or profession? Are there specific people who have historically benefitted from gentrification and accrued significant amounts of wealth as a result?

Based upon your assessment of the assigned readings, how did the media specifically work to influence the conversation surrounding gentrification? Were certain Americans, such as women of color, specifically mentioned regularly as either ideal or ill-suited homeowners?

In closing, Instructor will allow a few minutes to assess the students’ understanding of the concepts thus far and address their concerns or questions. Instructor can inform the students that the next lesson will address the representation of gentrification and that they will be placed in one of four groups. The students will receive their assigned group and three media sources to review shortly after this lesson.

Class Agenda for Lesson # 2:

Part 1: Extended Class Activity

00:00-05:00

Instructor will introduce the lesson by summarizing the students’ definitions of wealth inequality and gentrification from Lesson # 1; stating the “Essential Question” for Lesson # 2; and providing excerpts from the “Context” section of the lesson plan if needed.

Notes for Instructor for Extended Group Activity:

Learning Objective for Students: Utilize the information learned from the previous lesson and assigned media source readings to analyze the representation of gentrification in New York City.

For an in-person lesson, Instructor should give the students the two parts of the activity, Key Aspects and Discussion Questions, in written form. Instructors can write these on the board or print out copies of this information for all of the students.

For a virtual lesson, Instructor can share the Key Aspects and Discussion Questions in a shared Google Doc or in the Zoom Chat function. Instructors will need to create several breakout rooms for the groups. Instructor can provide the assigned media sources (that the students received prior to the lesson) in a shared Google Doc as well, just in case the students need a reference while they answer the Key Aspects and Discussion Questions.

Instructor should answer any questions and inform students that there is no “wrong” answer in this activity. They can answer the questions to the best of their abilities based upon their reading of the media sources prior to this lesson.

05:00-10:00

Activity Instructions for Students:

Instructor will deliver the following instructions.

“Prior to this lesson, I have assigned you to a group with a few assigned media sources to review. Each of these 4 groups is responsible for relying on their definitions of gentrification, wealth inequality, and knowledge from the assigned readings and previous lesson to complete two tasks. You will have 15 minutes in total to review and analyze the sources to complete two tasks.”

Tasks:

Delegate among your group to determine which group members will address the Key Aspects of your assigned sources. 1-2 people or so can present this information to the entire class.
Delegate among your group to determine which group members will address the Discussion Questions. They can respond to the questions with a few sentences or bullet points. 1-2 people or so can present this information to the entire class.

Key Aspects of the Source:

Content
Author, Publication, and Publication Date
Type of Source and Purpose of the Source
Tone and Perspective of the Author
Source’s Historical Significance

Possible Discussion Questions:

Who is the target audience for each of your assigned media sources?

Are there any conflicting messages about gentrification either within one source or between the two or three sources? Who do the authors suggest is being either positively or negatively affected by gentrification? Do they mention specific groups of New Yorkers, based on their race and/or gender? Why do you think that is?

Imagine that the authors are in dialogue with one another. What would they say to each other about gentrification? Would they agree or disagree on one issue in particular?

10:00-25:00

Students will work together in their four in-person groups or Zoom breakout rooms (for a virtual lesson) to complete the instructions as a team.

25:00-50:00

Instructor will convene the students either in-person or in the general Zoom meeting (for a virtual lesson) to check in with the students and answer any urgent questions before they present their findings.

Remind the students that all groups will have no more than 6-7 minutes to present their findings to the class. Inform the students that this is meant to be a challenging activity and their attempts to be concise and accurate are all appreciated!

Part 2: Closing Discussion Question and Post-Class Assessment

50:00-55:00

Instructor will convene the class to assess what they learned from the group activity and give students an opportunity to ask any urgent questions.

Instructor can follow up with these discussion questions:

Based upon our class readings and the group activity, how do newspapers, magazines and/or journals portray gentrification in New York City? How does the media specifically operate to develop ideas about neighborhoods? Did you notice any instances when the media employed certain representations, language, or images to emphasize a particular belief about communities based upon the residents’ socioeconomic status, race, or culture?

55:00-1:00:00

In closing, Instructor can choose 1 of the following discussion questions to ask the class.

How does your analysis of the assigned readings and/or the media sources affect how you, as a student of American history, evaluate gentrification? Do we want to keep or revise our historical definitions of gentrification from the previous lesson?

What responsibility do we have as both students of history and regular consumers of mass media information to present an accurate view of gentrification?

As historians, what do we need to keep in mind about the media’s portrayal of gentrification? Is it possible that even trustworthy media sources can deemphasize factual information to build certain ideas about a neighborhood, its residents and perceived culture?

Instructor ends the lesson and informs the students of availability to answer questions or concerns by email and/or during office hours.

Instructor informs the students that they will receive an email after this lesson with all of the media sources that each group received. Their reading of these sources is recommended.

Assessment Options after Lesson # 2:

Instructor can choose 1 option to assess the students evaluation of the material.

Option 1:

Instructor can assign one of the remaining final discussion questions to the class for their consideration. Students can pick 1 of the questions to explore in a brief response essay of 1-2 pages. Properly cited outside source material can be used to support the student’s response. Students can email the assignment to the professor no later than 2 days after Lesson # 2’s conclusion.

Option 2:

Instructor will send the students all of the media sources that each group received. Instructor will ask the student to choose another group’s assigned media sources (i.e. Group 2 if the student was in Group 1), read the materials, and analyze the sources for their audience, content, and context.

Students will then holistically evaluate both the media source group that they selected for this assignment and the media sources that they were originally assigned during the class activity.

Students will write a brief reflection response of 1-2 pages based on their evaluation of this larger set of media sources about gentrification. Students will email the assignment to the professor.

Optional: Instructor can provide students with 1 of the following discussion prompts to help them focus their written response for Option 2.

What overall message about gentrification are these sources sending to the reader? Who are the authors arguing that gentrification is helping and/or hurting?

Do the authors clearly define gentrification for their audience or is its meaning and impact on New York City and/or Harlem ambiguous?

Is there 1 media source that you selected that has an argument that persuades you most effectively? Why? What is the journalist specifically doing with the evidence, historical context, or visual presentation of the material? Does his or her argument about gentrification influence you to revise your own definition of gentrification, as an aspiring historian?

Tags 21st Century, Lesson Plan, Neoliberalism, New York City