Session Abstract

Cities exist in a state of constant reinvention.  Urban change shapes how people view cities, but the reverse is equally true.  Image, reputation, and identity play signal roles in driving the development of cities.  Image emerges from the cultural work of artists, writers, photographers, and civic boosters, to name but a few.  Image, in turn, shapes cities’ reputations as well as locals’ sense of place, or place identity.  Collectively, the three papers in this panel explore the visual and written narratives that define and redefine American cities.  The papers span a century and a half, focus on three cities at three distinct stages in their urban development, and probe the implications of three distinct types of narrative vehicles:  literature, photography, and boosterism.

Richard Gassan’s paper analyzes how early nineteenth-century New York City’s self-definition sprang to a great extent from the presence and actions of a small but influential group of outsiders.  In the antebellum era, the age of the first tourists to the city, a growing cultural response to these well-heeled visitors helped create a new genre, “city fiction,” which in turn transformed how New Yorkers saw themselves, and how the country saw the city in the years just before the Civil War.

Nalleli Guillen’s paper examines photographic portrayals of San Antonio, Texas, for tourists in the late nineteenth century.  She highlights the ways in which late-nineteenth-century San Antonians’ identity molded itself along the lines of the city’s visual self-representation to attract tourists and explores the resistance that emerged among Mexican-American residents to cultural images that distorted their image to serve elite economic interests.  Her work underscores the role of storytelling—in visual form—in forging an image in a multiethnic milieu.

Mark Souther’s paper examines how Clevelanders responded to Cleveland, Ohio’s post-World War II economic and social decline, both through local boosterism and local reaction against that boosterism.  He demonstrates the importance of revising not only outsiders’ but especially locals’ attitudes toward a city that had by the 1970s plummeted out of the ten largest American cities from its onetime top-five national rank.

Together these papers analyze placemaking narratives during a crucial time in each of these American cities.  New York City was early in the most dramatic ascendancy in its history; San Antonio stood on the cusp of its transition from an almost foreign frontier outpost to a thoroughly modern “American” city, albeit one that continued to bank on its cultural exoticism; and Cleveland, having slipped into a long decline, was in need of either a reinvigoration of its status as an industrial powerhouse or a new economic engine.  They also demonstrate the complex interplay between image and reality and show that narratives created for either locals or outsiders have implications for each other.   The attitudes and perceptions that emerged have come to shape how those cities developed and were seen not only by their residents but by the nation as a whole.