Deconstructing the Obvious

...The movement to protect the Common from the commercial encroachments...

...is not entirely unfamiliar: Elites in different cities have been studied and characterized by Digby Baltzell, Fred Cople Jaher...

...Boston has far fewer, though in recent decades it has substantially expanded its downtown skyscraper area...

...The elite, she says, was trying to place them far away from the Irish...

...It is reasonable to ask how these differences came about, as Mona Domosh does in this book, and to go beyond some of the most immediate answers...

...The last study deals with Boston's parks, from the creation of the Common and the Public Garden to the full string of spaces known as the Emerald Necklace...

...I think the department store owners had as little need to leant about catering to the custom of buying new outfits for Christmas and Easter as one needs a theory to explain why they did...

...The author further tells us...

...We are instead treated to a discussion of "the reigning gender ideology of separate spheres," and are told that "in order not to disrupt the established gender categories, the store had to build in the qualities associated with 19th-century femininity...

...The twist Domosh gives them is her emphasis on the character of the elites in the two cities: In New York the upper classes are diverse, constantly changing as a result of new infusions from the hinterland and abroad, and driven by economic interests...

...And so it goes, with much "uncovering" of "complicit" motives when it seems perfectly clear that the publicly stated reasons for undertaking particular projects were the real ones: to serve the common interest, to beautify the city, to provide parks for the immigrant poor, etc...

...What does this add to the older discarded explanation?the one on the surface, that does not have to be disinterred by arcane theory?which had it that the boulevards were simply expressions of civic pride...

...Those stories are interesting, but they have been told before, and more than once...

...New York's tall buildings seem to define the city—they are certainly its most remarkable feature...

...The proposition that New York and Boston were shaped by their elites is fair enough, since they had in mind not only the protection of their economic interests but also the protection of their customs and symbolic values...

...Harvard BOSTON LOOKS very different from New York, as anyone can see...

...The streets of New York form a great grid...

...Although no great harm is done by the book's cloak of currently voguish "theory," it becomes tiresome...

...The uncovering of secret and disreputable motives seems to be the main impulse driving current "theory," and it unfortunately leads its practitioners into unsupported and unsupportable assertions...

...The first traces the establishment, expansion and perpetual northward drift of New York's retail district, through the creation of the Manhattan's "Ladies' Mile" on Sixth Avenue...

...Boston's downtown includes the relatively large open spaces of the Boston Common and the Public Garden...

...According to Domosh, the building of the Back Bay meant "many of the city's...

...Invented Cities can be profitably read for its factual research, its narratives of 19th-century urban development in two cities, and its large number of illustrations closely tied to the text...

...Martin Green, and others—all of whom are referred to and leaned on in this book...

...Thus, when A. T. Stewart builds a particularly grand department store, apparently it is no longer enough to explain this mattcr-of-factly as owing to his desire to build the grandest department store in the city and appeal to the wealthiest patrons, who have the time and money to shop...

...What, then, is new in Invented Cities...

...She pays little attention to the role of the rate of population growth, although she asserts, without specifics, that Boston's was slowerthan New York's...

...Yet the map does not suggest that Copley Square was any greater distance from the West End or the North End or other areas of immigrant settlement than where such institutions were previously situated...

...The third chronicles the development of Boston's Back Bay area following the draining and filling of the huge marsh west of the city...

...One might attribute the emergence of skyscrapers in New York City to the narrowness of Manhattan's tip...

...New York's downtown has much more restricted public spaces, and it isn't until one gets to Central Park that an extensive community space appears...

...those of Boston are more irregular...

...Reviewed by Nathan Glazer Professor of education and sociology...

...cultural institutions were located at Copley Square...

...The social structure of 19th-century New York was fundamentally implicated in shaping [its] development...

...As for the wide boulevards laid out in Boston's new Back Bay, "they acted," we read, "as material forms for group representation—arenas for display of civic power and group wealth...

...Then we are informed that the skyscraper, aside from its practical uses, "served as the symbolic expression of the power of New York's emerging merchant and entrepreneurial class...

...Instead, she concentrates on the 19th-century elites in both metropolises and how they wanted their cities to reflect their tastes, ambitions and lifestyles...

...where the city began and where the tall building first appeared, but of course Chicago, with no such land constraints, lays equal claim to the birth of the skyscraper...

...Domosh presents her arguments in four case studies...

...So Stewart's did not look like a corner saloon or cigar store: I think we already knew that...

...This is as popular a term in Postmodernist discourse as "complicit," or "discourse" itself...

...We are also told that the department stores tried to link themselves with religion in order to become more acceptable to women, and therefore called themselves "cathedrals" and "learned to schedule the openings of their collections at Christmas and Easter...

...Okay, but what is the crime one should start looking for when one comes upon the word "implicated...

...used recourse to the public interest as a justification for that protection...

...Well, the chief innovation appears to be applying the language and theory of Postmodernism to rather familiar material with no great flair...

...Yet that contrast, too...

...not readily accessible to the city at large...

...Was it not in the public interest, however defined...

...She pays no attention to the possible significance of the specialized economic functions of the two cities...

...If that is dispensed with...

...The second looks at the fashioning of New York's skyline...

...Despite many discussions about why and how American cities acquired their distinctive characteristics, the main explanations tend to stress economic factors, on the one hand and, on the other, the absence of a powerful aristocracy or monarchy that could impose its traditional notions of what a city should be...

...in Boston they are more homogeneous and historically continuous, and their economic interests are modified by, or at least coexist with, a strong commitment to cultural concerns...

...Economic considerations, important as they may be, clearly are not the whole story...

...Anyone who is not attuned to this wavelength and ready to respond favorably will read Domosh with a good deal of annoyance...

...Most strikingly...

...Domosh pays little attention to individual economic elements—land prices, returns on investment, and the like—and no attention at all to technical matters, such as the state of building engineering science...

...Moreover, in prairie cities where land stretches out on all sides skyscrapers still spring up...