The New Metropolis

A Century of Greater New York

NEW YORK CITY -- "The New Metropolis: A Century of Greater New York, 1898-1998," an exhibition marking the centennial of the consolidation of the city, examines its people and places and considers what it truly means to be a New Yorker. "The New Metropolis" continues for the duration of the anniversary year.

It was on January 1, 1898, that the charter forming Greater New York took effect and secured the Big Apple as the most populous place in the nation. The charter, which created a new metropolis by incorporating the area's fragmented local governments into one centralized municipality consisting of five boroughs - the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island (then known as Richmond) - was also responsible for centralizing the region's economy and ultimately transforming the social and cultural lives of all of its residents.

The plan for the new metropolis originated in the minds of New York's merchant and political elites, who wanted to unify and make more profitable the commercial activities of New York harbor, and to transform New York into a shining symbol of American progress and culture. Imbued with the enthusiasm for large-scale organization and rationalization that characterized the era, these citizens, led by Andrew H. Green, launched an extensive public relations campaign to garner support.

A majority of voting New Yorkers approved the plan in a non-binding referendum in 1894. Yet opposition to the plan sprang from all quarters: middle-class Brooklynites complained that consolidation would destroy the religious and ethnic character of their city; poor and working-class immigrants in the tenement neighborhoods of Manhattan feared that consolidation would jeopardize the political power and patronage of Tammany Hall Democrats; and residents of the eastern districts of Queens worried that becoming part of the larger city would ruin their rural way of life.

These and other related concerns lived on as volatile sources of conflict and debate. In the Twentieth Century, New York City became the epitome of the world-class city as well as the emblem of urban disorder and poverty; a place of unprecedented cross-cultural cooperation and invention as well as the site of racial and ethnic conflict; the home of the archetypal cosmopolitan sophisticate and the archetypal urban ethnic.

"The New Metropolis" presents these themes in four sections. "Visions of the New Metropolis" examines New York City at the time of consolidation and introduces the themes and conflicts that characterized public debate over consolidation.

"The Making of the New Metropolis" explores the early years of consolidation, juxtaposing the heraldic declarations of municipal greatness with early problems associated with the new charter. A copy of the original charter of Greater New York accompanies memorabilia, photographs and drawings related to the celebrations marking the implementation of the charter; copies of illustrated picture books of New York City's history and future published at the time of consolidation; and objects and publications from the first mayoral campaign for the consolidated city, which Tammany Democrat Robert A. Van Wyck won.

"The New Metropolis in the Twentieth Century" examines the legacies of consolidation as well as issues crucial to the daily lives of residents through five distinct "stories," which range throughout the century and deal with local concerns in relation to the consolidated city.

"Manhattan: The Imperial Skyline" looks at the city's development as the nation's commercial nerve center by focusing on the evolution of the borough's modern vertical skyline over the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. Two buildings are featured: the Singer Tower (Ernest B. Flagg, 1908) and the Woolworth Building (Cass Gilbert, 1913). Objects include building views and plans, postcards and other souvenirs, song lyrics, and literature that celebrate Manhattan's tallest buildings.

"The Brooklyn Dodgers and Borough Identity" considers Brooklyn, the nation's fourth-largest industrial city at the inauguration of Greater New York. The most populous borough by 1930 maintained its independence not only through its native dialect - "Brooklynese" - but also through its enthusiastic support of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Formed in 1883, the Dodgers joined the National League in 1890. Unlike the New York Yankees or National League rivals, the New York Giants, the Brooklyn team reflected in its name and its unofficial symbol, cartoonist Willard Mullin's amiable Brooklyn bum, the scrappy working-class ethos of its home borough. In the decade between 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the professional baseball color barrier, to 1957, when owner Walter O'Malley moved the franchise to Los Angeles, the Dodgers won six National League pennants, and only one World Championship, defeating the Yankees in 1955. The connection between sporting prowess and borough identity is conveyed through fan memorabilia, cartoons, photographs, and memoirs. The Dodgers Sym-phony Band is highlighted in a video by Pegi Vail.

The most prominent heir to the development policies of consolidation was Robert Moses (188-1981), who engineered the construction of the transportation networks of highways, bridges, and tunnels. Among his more controversial projects was the building of the seven-mile long, six-lane wide, Cross-Bronx Expressway. Planning for the new highway began in 1944; construction started in 1946, crossing through the very heart of the Bronx.

"The Bronx: We Stay! Housing and Highways" focuses on the grass-roots protests of the Crotona Park Tenants Committee. The Committee's unsuccessful 1954-55 efforts to alter the Cross-Bronx Expressway's path reveals the continuing conflicts between massive regional development and the needs of individual New Yorkers.

In the wake of 1965 Federal immigration reforms, the Borough of Queens became a home for new immigrant communities, among them Filipino-, Korean-, and Caribbean-Americans. By 1980, Queens housed a greater number of new immigrants than any other borough. The transformation of Queens from a white, middle-class, residential borough to a center of diverse and vibrant ethnic communities, with varied commercial interests, is documented in the story of the Korean-American community and business organizations in Flushing. The exhibition gives special attention to the efforts of the Korean Produce Retailers Association, which sponsors the annual Chusok Festival of Thanksgiving.

Initiatives for the secession of Staten Island (which, ironically, approved consolidation by an overwhelming four-to-one margin in 1894) from New York City have recurred through the Twentieth Century. Support for secession mounted after the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964, and emerged in full force in the 1980s and 1990s. The primary motivation for the most recent, and still on-going, movement for secession is a widespread belief among Staten Islanders that they lack adequate representation in City government. Moreover, Staten Islanders, who reside in the most racially homogeneous of the City's boroughs, have argued that an exorbitant proportion of their tax revenues has been used to remedy "inner city" problems off the island. "The Staten Island Secession Movement" looks at on-going conflict over the political structure of the City and the issue of home rule.

Dr Deborah Dependahl Waters was project director for the exhibition, Kevin Murphy was the consulting project historian. A scholar advisory panel included Maxine Friedman, chief curator of the Staten Island Historical Society; David C. Hammack, professor of history at Cast Western Reserve University and author of Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century; Ilana Harlow, a folklorist with the Queens Council on the Arts; Thomas Kessner, professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915; Kyeyoung Park, assistant professor of anthropology and Asian studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City; and Carl E. Prince, professor of history at New York University and author of Brooklyn's Dodgers: The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball, 1947-1957.

The museum also worked closely with the City's five borough historians, among them Henry Ludder of Queens, Cal Jones of Manhattan, Richard Dickenson of Staten Island and John Maynard of Brooklyn.

The Museum of the City of New York, at 1220 Fifth Avenue, is open Wednesday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm, and Sunday, 1 to 5 pm. The museum is closed on Mondays and on all legal holidays. Telephone 212/534-1672.