I spent the month of June touring New York City. Of course, there’s great theatre, restaurants, and museums to be enjoyed on their own terms. But I also wanted to experience Manhattan as a communication scholar and, from that somewhat atypical perspective, the Big Apple still has a lot to offer.
In Lower Manhattan’s financial district, the architecture itself communicates specific arguments about NYC’s early self-concept. The classic Greek-style structures, such as the former
U.S. Customs Building, expressed the grandeur and greatness that the planners hoped lay ahead for the United States—suggesting a civilization as magnificent and durable as ancient Rome. The architecture also communicated the arrogance and affluence of the robber barons—the Morgans and Rockefellers who developed Manhattan. Their buildings bore no names, because they genuinely believed that everyone who mattered should already know who and what were inside their buildings. J.P. Morgan excelled in that regard. Not only was his bank unnamed, but it stood only a few stories tall to show that HE did not need to develop the air space above his business—he was rich enough. Later, after a massive bomb explosion on Wall Street inflicted only superficial cracks on Morgan’s bank building, the financier left the pock marks to show the world how indestructible he and his building were. The marks remain to this day.
Other Manhattan structures did not make arguments but rather provoked arguments, particularly about the conflicting values of historical preservation and economic development. At one point in its history,
Carnegie Hall, the legendary performing space, was almost demolished and replaced with a red skyscraper.
Grand Central Terminal, another architecturally-rich and historically significant edifice, also almost fell prey to the wrecking ball to be replaced by another anonymous skyscraper. The very fact that these landmarks still stand is a testament to the rhetorical skill of many preservation activists, including Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who played a key role in saving Grand Central. Many important arguments and ideas used to bring about landmark preservation around the country emerged from NYC’s struggles to preserve its own history.
The architecture of the Lower East Side provoked arguments of a different nature. A tour of the
Lower East Side Tenement Museum is like stepping back in time. We walked through the old tenement apartments of two immigrant families, one from the 1870s and one from the 1930s. The cramped, sweltering abodes made for very difficult living for NYC immigrant families. However, our guide also informed us that for many families the tenements actually were a good option, because it kept them out of the shantytowns that became the fate of so many others. However, most fascinating were all of the arguments made against immigration during the previous two centuries. Those arguments sound very familiar if you’ve followed our country’s current immigration debate. Those opposed to Irish, German, and Jewish newcomers also expressed concerns about disease, jobs, crime, immigrants’ refusal to assimilate, and the changing of our national character. The objections to the Germans seem particularly relevant to the current concerns about Mexican immigrants—many believed the Germans were so different from “us” and so immersed in their own culture that they would never assimilate and speak English.
Manhattan also houses some U.S. presidential rhetorical history. Most significantly, George Washington delivered the
First Inaugural Address at Federal Hall on Wall Street in 1789. Unfortunately, the building's interior currently is closed for renovation, but you can still see the spot where Washington took the oath of office. I also visited
Theodore Roosevelt’s Birthplace on 20th Street. It’s actually a 1920’s reconstruction of the original house. The house provides a wealth of information about TR, but the front exterior is being restored and is completely obscured by scaffolding. While I knew that the Teddy Bear was named after Teddy Roosevelt, I didn’t know that the name derived from an incident when Roosevelt refused to kill a bear captured in a trap. And in a pre-radio/television example of the news media actively shaping a politician's image, the media quickly embraced the story, leading one political cartoonist to regularly use a small bear as a symbol for Roosevelt in his drawings. Not long after, small stuffed bears were being marketed and sold as
“teddy” bears.
The Great Hall at
Cooper Union in NYC’s East Village was the site of Abraham Lincoln’s important
“Right Makes Might” speech, the speech in which Lincoln laid out his anti-slavery position. The address catapulted him into the Presidency and put the nation on a track toward Civil War. Unfortunately, this site is also one of the trickiest to visit, taking four visits to finally get in. On one attempt, the building was closed. On the second attempt, the security guard expressed confusion and annoyance that we would want to see the historic hall and told us that it was closed in the mornings. We returned on a later afternoon and the security guard refused to let us go down into the auditorium, because “it’s pretty dark down there.” Luckily, on the fourth attempt, Bard College was holding its commencement ceremony in the Great Hall, so we were able to sneak in. The exhibit outside the auditorium describes the Great Hall as a bastion of free speech at which many significant figures, including Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass also spoke, making Cooper Union a genuine landmark of rhetorical history.
So it’s very interesting and fun to experience a city from a communication perspective. However, not all of the experiences were stimulating or enlightening. For example, if you visit CNN’s New York bureau, the official tour includes a glass exhibit case containing a pair of Larry King’s suspenders. Whatever….
