New York City, a city of Creative Dissonance

New York City, nation’s economic and cultural capital, is well known for its cultural and ethnical diversity: The “Big Apple” is also known as a “Melting Pot”. Not only traditional Immigrants population groups such as, Italian, Irish, and Polish, but also, Hispanic, Latino, Chinese, Indian, Korean and other Asian, have already been settled as a major ethnical population decades ago. Today, nearly 180 languages are spoken within the New York City area and 36% of its population (approximately 2.9 million out of 8 million people) is foreign- born residents.[1] Throughout the history, New York City has always been a city of immigrants. Those poor and discriminated immigrants from all over the world spent their settlement periods in the United States living in densely-packed tenements and row houses. While working their way out from those ghettoes, they left their remarks on New York City near their residential districts. Various ethnic groups have largely represented their cultural communities like Chinatown, Little Italy, and Spanish Harlem. As a result, New York City became as a cultural mecca as it is today. Despite all of the diverse racial populations and various languages spoken, people who live in the New York City believe there is one thing that all of those different people have in common: They are all New Yorkers. From the yuppie Jewish businessperson who works in lower Manhattan to poor Jamaican hip-hop artist live in the Harlem, they are all the ingredients of the stew, known as New York City.

Figure 1. Little Italy, NYC. c. 1900.

However, those ethnical seasonings (the lives of specific individuals or groups and their related public history) gradually dilutes as time goes by. The Harlem, formally a home of African Americans’ heart and soul, has been gentrified, and lost its odor. Now, 125th street became a safe tourists’ attraction. In Manhattan Korea town, generally bordered by 31st and 36th streets and between 5th and 6th avenues, all we can find there now is Korean restaurants and karaoke. Most of the Korean people who used to live there, moved out to Flushing, Queens, Fort Lee, NJ and other adjacent cities. This phenomenon also applies to Little Italy, where former Italian territories had mostly encroached by Chinatown. Yet, Chinese are not the top of food chain. An excessive real-estate bubble of early 2000’s overheated real-estate developers and they started to build luxury condos in adjacent borders between Chinatown and SoHo. The ethnical communities’ histories are depended on how members of a group succeeded in American society and replaced or assimilated by a larger history of how groups survived or failed. In this circumstance, we are confronting a series of social and cultural shifts; therefore, redefining social recognition of ethnic groups and their communities based on approaches to "place" on different scales within urban space are strongly required.




Figure 2. China Town, NYC

Figure 3. Korea Town, NYC

In her book, The Power of Place (1995), Dolores Hayden situates her thesis of preserving the built environment, and makes an effort to trim down separations between architectural and landscape history and cultural and sociological theory.[2] First, she talks about the notion of place memory, and explains how place and place experiences could contribute to the formation of memory. Then, she describes how the place memory enables us to interact with the built environment, and how important it is to the power of historical buildings and neighborhood communities: authorities with the political power to preserve the urban environment and with the cultural power to preserve the sense of place and the place-specific memory. As an example, she explains her eight years of dedicated service, begun in 1984, as a founder and director of “The Power of Place,” a nonprofit organization intended “to situate women's history and ethnic history in downtown, in public places, through experimental, collaborative projects by historians, designers, and artists”. Power of Place focused on central Los Angeles and its aim was to link the public and social history to the interpretation of specific places through such visual presentation as public art and signage, and furthermore, to research the experiences of ethnic minorities and/or working-class women as well as their distinctive cultures. In sum, she claims that to locate a sense of place, the politics of identity takes primary importance, and the identity is built with a process of collusion between the surrounding environment of a location and the culture which occupies it: “Cultural identity, social history, and urban design are here intertwined.”

Henry Glassie, a distinguished folklorist, supports Heyden’s argument of “place attachment”. His idea of material culture explains that all physical objects in the environment are intimately related and strongly influential to those people in particular culture. That is to say, human beings learn their way of living from their own culture and produce materials they live with, while they perceive and understand from the material things to regenerate the culture. Therefore, he claims that the material culture forms an essential part of cultural identity and by studying the materials throughout the historical focus; we can fully understand one’s culture. In his well-known book, Material Culture (1999), he describes how history and art/folk art/ architecture are interconnected in the study of material culture.[3] He claims that the cultures are created by people; thus, if someone wants to deeply understand the culture, the history and the people, one should actively get involved among the people, experience their culture and appreciate their provinciality. The book mainly follows on his intellectual footstep. He describes a story of his own experiences of foreign cultures and encounters with artists in different parts of the world. For instance, he talks about nonacademic historians, such as Ahmet Balci of Turkey, Hugh Nolan of Northern Ireland, Haripada Pal of Bangladesh, and Siraj Ahmad of Pakistan about their own people, places, cultures and the way they approach for writing a history. Also, he argues that “every building is a cultural fact, the consequence of a collision between intensions and conditions,” and gives several examples. For one case, he compares the bari – a cluster of houses of Bangladesh – and the Dalarna –old Swedish house – and describes how they used their own local materials, adapted to their harsh whether, and arranged their plans according to social relations.

Both Hayden and Glassie strongly emphasized relationship between culture and environment of place. Their point is exceptionally clear and it is not only a useful method to understand the traditional/foreign/rural based cultures, but also a very effective and meaningful way to approach the diverse ethnic cultures within the contemporary cities. However, in such an extensive multicultural society as today, mega cities like London, New York, L.A., Toronto and etc., have inevitable conflicts among different groups and communities, as briefly mentioned previously. Not only there is cultural heterogeneity, but also diversity in the language, religion, education, economy, and so forth; it is not easy to achieve the coexistence and furthermore, growth of several cultures in one boundary. The “creative dissonance” is hard to get.

Marshall (1998) suggests a clue for solving the problem of integration among diverse ethnicity: “In plural societies, people of different ethnic origins meet only in the market-place, where the various groups must trade and exchange goods and services with each other. No common ‘social will’ therefore develops to restrict the exploitation of the members of one group by members of another.”[4] Even though I am partially agreeing with Marshall (I think as generation goes down the boundaries will get blurred and the distances will get closer among different ethnic groups), I believe that one way to tear down the barrier is using a food. Once people start to like each other culture’s food, it indicates that they have already lowered their guards and gradually became open-minded to other culture. In the same context, I see New York City as a “Heterotopias” of creative dissonance. In Manhattan, American fast-food restaurant, Italian pizza parlor, Japanese sushi bar, and Chinese take-out are all in the same block, sometimes even in the same building. There is neither Middle-eastern food district nor Southeast-Asian food district. It is just New York City.

Figure 4. Greenwich village, NYC

Figure 5. Korea Town, NYC

Building a creative dissonance does not have to begin with a giant step. We can gradually achieve it within our everyday life. As Hayden explains, “we then further cement the(se) relations, the(se) flows of power, through a tendency to preserve ‘major architectural monuments’ over neighbourhoods perceived as having little importance to public history.”

NOTE

[1] New York City Department of City Planning Population Division, The Newest New Yorkers 2000, Briefing Booklet: Immigrant New York in the New Millennium (New York: New York City Department of City Planning, 2004).

[2] Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995).

[3] Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).

[4] Gordon Marshall. “plural societies.” A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998.