Industrial NYC tour - Art Scenes

NYC

Industrial

New York City went from being the capital of the United States to becoming the factory of the western world, embracing the Second Industrial Revolution with: elevated trains, cast iron factories and hundreds of docks where European and Asian refugees arrived to make their dreams (companies and businesses) come true — so get ready to travel in time when Lady Liberty welcomed millions who were looking for religious, ethnic and economic freedom.

Time period: 1790s-1880s

Movie/book: Hester Street (1975)/How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis

Soundtrack: Stephen Foster/Scott Joplin’s music

Fashion:

Budget: 138$ (88$ museums + 50$ food)

J Calvin Smith: New Map of the City of New York with Brooklyn & Williamsburg; NYC, 1840

John Randel Jr.: The Commissioners Map of the City of New York, 1807 (but put in place in 1811)

This tour would take through the streets of downtown manhattan where warehouses and docks got built along the Hudson and East river during the 1800s; and where the uniforms of the Civil War’s soldiers got mass produced in factories during the 1860s. The area is characterized by cast iron buildings, dirty streets and restaurants from around the world. After the completion of the Eirie Canal in 1825 NYC got connected to the Great Lakes area through water — and the city boomed! Docks and warehouses started being built by merchants along the Hudson River, turning New York City the biggest port in the US (and latter on the third in the world below London and Liverpool). The British practices of the First Industrial Revolution: machines power by steam or coal, factories, and transportation through railroads or canals migrated to the Americas. The first thing to get mass produced in New York was printing media: book publishers like Harper & Brothers (1833) and Scribner’s (1846); plus magazines like The Saturday Evening Post (1821) Scientific American (1845) or Harper’s Bazzar (1867); and “penny papers” like the New York Sun (1833) or the New York Times (1851) made the city the U.S. Media Capital. A new job appeared thanks to the printing press: the illustrator, with artists like J.C. Leyendecker (know for his fashion images), N.C. Wyeth (who did colorful baroque compositions of rural America), and Maxfield Parrish (famous for his natural landscapes) defining American visual culture. The spark of the American Civil War (1860-1865) over slavery turned New York City on. Hundreds of factories opened up in the lower east side to produce the uniforms and weapons of the soldiers; and more railroads got built to transport the ammunitions to the mid west. After the war Thomas Alba Edison changed everything when he moved to city in 1869. He gave us the light bulb, the kinetoscope, and the phonograph (along other 1093 pattents); inventions that would consequently creat electricity, the film industry and the radio. The United States experienced an economic boom financed by opium giving us the Second Industrial Revolution: machines power by electricity, the assembly line and communication through the telegraph and latter on the telephone (all American innovations) made NYC with the mid west the factory of the western world. What now is SoHo and TriBeCa used to be an industrial hub with factories that mass produce all types of products in premade Lego-like cast iron buildings that were fast and easy to build. The population of the city exploded from 800,000 to 1.5 millions thanks to immigrants from all over world: Southern Italians, Southwestern Germans and Russian Ashkenazi Jews came in boats; while thousands of Cantonese Chinese came through the transcontinental railroad fleeing California. These groups lived “on top of each other” in tenement buildings around the lower east side in deplorable conditions, with entire families sharing one room. The Commissioners Plan got put into place and the city expanded in its iconic rectangular gridiron pattern to the west sparking the Gilded Age with offices and mansions replacing the factories of manhattan. The tour suggests visiting the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island plus brunch in the morning; 3 museums: a historical boat, a synagogue and an apartment building in the afternoon; and to end the day a walking tour around Little Italy and Chinatown.