City Stories

In his memoir recounting his boyhood in Istanbul, Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk describes the power of visual images in shaping his sense of his city’s history. “To see the city in black and white,” he explains, “is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world.” ¹ In fact, Pamuk points out that many of the visual images of the city he holds dear were produced by Westerners, outsiders who relished certain “exotic” elements of the once great Ottoman Empire. These images created narratives of Istanbul’s past that shaped the way many Turkish residents ultimately remembered their past and their city, as well as the expectations that foreign visitors brought to their tourist experience. Pamuk muses that perhaps some of what he believes to be his own personal memories of particular places throughout the city really are just images from much-reproduced line drawings and photographs that have been imprinted in his mind.

Like Pamuk, the articles in this Special Section address the multiple ways in which visual images and narrative texts, especially impressions by outsiders, play a vital role in shaping perceptions of place. Each article explores the art and business of place-making, highlighting the complex process by which city boosters, journalists, travel writers, and photographers create and sell certain images of cities that have the potential to promote renewal, growth, and allure but just as often evoke decay, devastation, and decline, or what Pamuk calls the “melancholy of the ruins.” ²

These articles are part of the growing and vibrant historiography on urban tourism and place-making. Scholars have traced the history of methods used by city boosters to promote their city’s world-class status and first-class amenities and attract travelers and permanent residents alike. ³ Yet even as official booster literature helped fuel the rise of urban tourism in the nineteenth century, the emergence of voyeuristic portraits of ethnic enclaves and the danger and decay of certain neighborhoods also helped shape travelers’ perception of urban America. Both articles in this section highlight the ways in which the promotion of urban tourism over the last two centuries, whether through promotional literature, reformist tracks, or guides to the urban underworld, often veered between warning travelers about potential urban dangers and enticing them to seek out these “marginal” spaces. They also illustrate how, despite the best efforts of city boosters to promote a narrative of progress, critical observers were able to undermine that rhetoric and expose elements of urban development and public policy that were less than flattering.

Richard Gassan’s article examines the emergence of urban tourism in mid-nineteenth century New York. He explores the ways in which various literary depictions of the city, especially those by Londoner Charles Dickens, helped frame urban tourism as an opportunity to engage in voyeurism, where mystery and danger shaped every turn in one’s journey. Gassan points out that urban tourism emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a way for travelers to partake in elements of urban life that were part of “official” narratives of the city, including attending theater performances on Broadway, eating in fine dining establishments like Delmonico’s, and lodging in new hotels like the Astor House. He effectively shows, though, how these expectations could quickly be eclipsed by the dark underbelly of urban life, with riots and rowdy mobs disrupting the genteel urban experience travelers hoped for.

Yet as Gassan argues, the darker, more “exotic” elements of urban life became part and parcel of the tourist experience. Indeed, legions of guidebooks similar to New York by Gas-Light emerged in the 1850s, suggesting that from a fairly early period, the promotion of exoticism and potential for danger, or “urban slumming,” played a significant role in shaping narratives of urban tourism. Gassan demonstrates how the reformist strain in urban writing, along with the selling and promotion of licentious urban experiences, collided in guidebook literature and created dramatically different portraits of American cities that at once frightened and yet also enticed potential visitors. That police officers became paid tour guides in Five Points, for example, illustrates the ways in which the urban underworld became commodified and partially sanitized for the pleasure of well-off travelers in much the same way that luxury hotels and fine dining establishments were meant to entice them.

Official booster narratives of urban development, therefore, were unstable and subject to multiple uses and interpretations. Mark Souther’s article shows how civic leaders devised strategic responses to perceived decline in postwar Cleveland. The protagonists in Souther’s story are explicit in their desire to market the city by creating the right tagline and imagery so that the photographic representation of the burning of the Cuyahog River would no longer be etched upon people’s minds whenever they thought of Cleveland. Souther looks at the rhetoric surrounding decline and revitalization as a vehicle for “place-based storytelling to grapple with urban problems.”

Souther’s story highlights how a variety of groups promoting and responding to various postwar urban renewal projects utilized the rhetoric of both booster branding slogans and critical journalistic rebuke. While politicians, developers, and architects could speak about Cleveland as “the best location in the nation,” groups critical of the expenditure of federal dollars for downtown redevelopment instead of neighborhood housing and public services made regular reference to Cleveland as “the mistake on the lake.” The destabilization of booster rhetoric happened not only as a result of critical responses to perceived policy failures but also as a result of shifting historical realties. The “Best Location in the Nation” slogan was less convincing in the 1970s than it had been in the 1950s, given the number of people and jobs leaving Cleveland and flooding Sunbelt cities. Instead, new ad campaigns touted medical and recreational benefits of the city and its metropolitan region, with the goals of encouraging residents to stay, tourists to visit, and businesses to relocate.

Yet promotional rhetoric can go only so far in masking urban inequality and resource disparities in the city. Souther’s article demonstrates how promotional campaigns shifted from a focus on urban attractions to “metropolitan” quality of life offerings by the 1970s. These campaigns in many ways white-washed and sanitized the failures of urban renewal, the legacy of race riots and segregation, and the devastation of deindustrialization by shifting their focus to suburban amenities. Yet the booster slogans also gave critics the opportunity to challenge the redevelopment priorities and resource expenditures that were encapsulated in the “Cleveland’s a Plum” campaign by creating a play on words—the “Cleveland’s a Slum” bumper stickers—that exposed the grim realities of postindustrialization in the city.

The end of Souther’s article hints at the rise of “ruin tourism,” the twenty-first-century version of “slumming,” whereby curiosity-seekers search out the remnants of the decaying and abandoned infrastructure of industrial America as a source of artistic expression or thrill-seeking. Yet while some photographic examples of so-called “ruin porn” can be exploitative and insensitive, there are scholars and journalists who are documenting the process of postindustrial decline and the urban ruins it has left in its wake. These images and stories take into account not only the physical toll of the deindustrialization process but also the human toll, and the devastating impact that the loss of manufacturing jobs and the politics and policies that enabled the decline have had on cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Gary, to name just a few. Yet, as Souther points out, some of these ruins have the potential to become the basis of yet another wave of urban revitalization that, if done right, could incorporate the physical fabric of once-mighty cities into the blueprint of their renewal. ⁴

These articles point to the role of photographic, journalistic, and literary depictions of cities to shape perceptions of urban life for locals and outsiders alike. They also highlight the variety of ways that selling or branding a city can have both intended and unintended consequences. These authors recognize the potential for limitations and distortions in both visual and narrative evidence, yet also see in the process of shaping urban stories the possibility of crafting a new view of the city as exotic, dynamic, and contingent. Like the photographs of Istanbul that shaped Orhan Pamuk’s memories of his past, the photographs, literary narratives, and promotional rhetoric presented here expose the ways in which our images of cities are shaped, mediated, and refracted through multiple lenses and subject to shifting interpretations as fresh eyes take to city streets in search of new urban experiences.