Bums, Slummers And Swells -- American Social Class And The Birth Of Popular Culture On The Lower East Side, 1825-1855
Thursday, April 26, 2012, at 7:30 pm
East 54th Street Recreation Center
348 East 54th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenue
artsculturefun@parks.nyc.gov
(212) 408-0276
This talk describes the development of the class structure that we still live under in the United States, the beginnings of what we now call Pop Culture, and the creation of immigrant culture. These transformations happened simultaneously, in the Lower East Side of nearly two centuries ago.
In the early 19th Century the Five Points, a tiny area in the general vicinity of today's Chinatown, became America's first slum. There immigrants, craftsmen and former slaves developed their own identity, language and entertainment, rather than striving for respectability. Five Pointers ad the elites learned to regard each other with a still-familiar mixture of fear and curiosity. They set the pattern for class relations in America. At the same time, massive immigration from Germany and Ireland -- the first of many waves of immigration to the United State -- established a pattern of settlement, enculturation and innovation that would guide later immigrant groups.
What's more, the roots of American Pop Culture -- from slang and superheroes to Hollywood action blockbusters, from rap to rock 'n' roll and tap dancing -- can be traced to the pastimes and diversions of the Five Points. Their flash talk, gang violence, and sensational theater became part of American cultural bedrock, and helped make the Five Points the most culturally fertile land in the United States.
With Technology's Trumpet: How New Immigrants Nationalized The Lower East Side, 1890-1930
Thursday May 10, 2012, at 7:00 pm
Tony Dapolito Recreation Center
3 Clarkson Street
artsculturefun@parks.nyc.gov
(212) 408-0293
The raw material of American Popular Culture developed in the first half of the 19th Century, distilled out of the aspirations and experiences of immigrants, craftsmen, and former slaves. But it was their turn-of-the-century successors who completed this cultural revolution and broadcast it outward, first across the nation and, eventually, across the globe.
Millions upon millions of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe revamped political and class boundaries in new York CIty and elsewhere From their stronghold on the Lower East Side, the new immigrants created the beginnings of the modern labor movement, legitimized the idea of public health reform, and seized the cultural stage with powerful new works in music, theater and print which built upon their predecessors' forms and archetypes.
At the same time, a truly national economic network came into being, thanks in considerable measure to the revolutionary power of electricity. Beginning with the telegraph and later spreading into radio ad the movies, electricity knit the nation into a single real-time community. The Eastern European immigrants took hold of these new resources and created continent-sized tools for transmitting and promoting their artistic and cultural ideas.
By the time the immigrant flow was bottled up by restrictive quota laws in the 1920s, American had been remade. The cultural forms of the Lower East Side had been enlarged, modernized and amplified to an industrial scale, and they seized a commanding power over the national consiousness which persists right down to the present day.
From The Triangle To The Tiger: New York's Garment Center In American Popular Culture, 1920-1970
Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 7:30 p.m.
East 54th Street Recreation Center
348 East 54th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenue
artsculturefun@parks.nyc.gov
(212) 408-0293
A multimedia examination of a completely overlooked aspect of Popular Culture -- the popular take on New York's Garment Center during its peak years.
From the 1920s through the 1970s Seventh Avenue was the undisputed center of American garment-making. During these years the industry shook off its sweatshop roots, and owners worked tirelessly to promote an aura of glamour and confidence. From the industry's remorseless waves of success and failure, garment workers created some of the great rhythms of the City, while the lunchtime oceans of streetside workers, models, designed and owners made up one of New York's daily spectacles.
But in the 1960s the ground began to shift. Rising costs and other factors drove a growing share of manufacturing abroad -- first to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, then to the South and West, to the Caribbean and around the world. A fatal combination of increasingly national-scale retail, heavily-promoted competition from Western companies like Levi's, the fashion-spurning "Youthquake" or counterculture, and the aging-out of many of the old firm owners, all rang down the curtain on the Garment Center's mid-century dominance. By the 1980s Seventh Avenue's proud place as the foremost emblem of the City's economy had been taken over by real estate developers -- and by Wall Street.
Learn about the Golden Age of the Garment Center, and its Pop Culture artifacts -- the novels, plays, songs, films, advertising and other popular imagery that tells the changing fortunes of the Garment District. By turns informative, campy, bigoted, and just plain naive, this imagery is deeply evocative of a once-vital City sector, now more a tourists' lure than a force in New York's life.