Cityscape
Number 1, July 15, 2019
Cityscape is The Metropole’s twice-monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film.
The City in Print
Animal City: The Domestication of America by Andrew A. Robichaud. Harvard University Press, forthcoming, December 2019.
When residents lived in proximity to pigs, cattle and other animals, cities resembled barnyards. No longer. What happened when only the dog (and cat) remained.
Newcomers: Gentrification And Its Discontents by Matthew L. Schuerman. University of Chicago Press, forthcoming, November 2019.
When the well-to-do settle in working class neighborhoods what are the costs and benefits?
Vice, Crime, and Poverty: How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld by Dominique Kalifa. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Columbia University Press, 2019.
A French social historian explains how the murderous and melodramatic view of the Victorian slum which stigmatized the poor continues to shape popular culture.
Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City by Haydon Cherry. Yale University Press, 2019.
Colonization from the perspective of Saigon’s marginalized and dispossessed.
Neighborhood by Emily Talen. Oxford University Press, 2018.
An exploration by a distinguished student of the new urbanism of the historical meaning of “neighborhood” and an inquiry into the possibility of nurturing vital neighborhoods today.
The City on the Web
How The New York Media Covered The Stonewall Riots
By Chad Painter, University of Dayton
How the alternative press, notably the Village Voice, bested The Times in reporting on Stonewall (6/28/69).
Ancient Poop Reveals Role of Climate Change in Cahokia’s Downfall
By Matthew Taub,
A mound 10 miles from St. Louis, once a flourishing city of tens of thousands, disappeared in the 15th century. What happened?
The Woman Who Fought Transit Segregation in 19th-Century New York
By Nicole Javorksy
Tossed off a whites-only Manhattan streetcar on July 16, 1854, Elizabeth Jennnings not only won a handsome settlement but also the following judgement: “Colored persons if sober, well behaved and free from disease, had the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rules of the company, nor by force or violence” (Judge Rockwell, 1855).
Celluloid City: Flicks and Documentaries
The Florida Project Directed by Sean Baker (2017)
Breaking free from the confinement of their welfare motel, preschoolers roam Orlando strip malls on their way to paradise: Disney World. Academy Award nominee.
Midnight Family Directed by Luke Lorentzen (2019)
Scratching out a living with their privately-owned ambulance, a family races through the nighttime Mexico City picking up the injured and ailing. Brilliant cinematography from the passenger’s seat.
Museum City
New-York Historical Society, May 24 – September 22, 2019
By The Force of Our Presence: Highlights From The Lesbian Herstory Archive
Letting Loose and Fighting Back: LGBTQ Nightlife Before and After Stonewall
Companion shows celebrating the 50th anniversary of the resistance which burst forth on Christopher Street.
Cars: Accelerating The Modern World
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Opening November 23, 2019.
How the auto changed the world.
Overlooked Studies
Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, by D. J. Waldie. Norton [1996], 2005
Poignant, study of Lakewood, the LA equivalent of Levittown, by a life-long resident and former deputy city manager. At once analytical and a moving evocation of suburbia. In 316 paragraph-length sections, it’s a study like no other.
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