Dancing in the Streets

If Detroit exemplifies the worst decline of the post–World War II U.S. city in its economic, racial, labor, and political calamities, perhaps we need to add the collapse of the arts to the list as well. Detroit embodies the many tangled ties between the arts and cities, from the peak of cultural production in the Motown years to the proposed sell-off of the museum’s art collection to pay its debts. Even as it has served as a compelling case study for policy and politics gone madly awry, the desperate city now has become a common object of artists who have been photographing the ruins of abandoned houses, narrating stories of decline in documentaries, and fueling anger in hip hop songs. Perhaps the best barometer of saturation, the satirist publication The Onion captured the ongoing artistic use of Detroit in an article titled “Artists Announce They’ve Found All the Beauty They Can in Urban Decay” from July 2011. The article quotes an (presumably fictional) artist as saying “I made my career portraying the plight of the homeless, but now I’m starting to wonder whether they’d prefer it if someone just helped them find a place to live.” Amid the dilapidation, there has even been hope that the arts could provide the turnaround the city needs. Cheap places to live! Soul-crushing stories! Dancing (and rioting and repression) in the streets! Humanity exposed! All the city needs is a little SoHo-like gentrification to boost the economy and draw residents back to Detroit. ¹

Such beliefs beleaguer Detroit in their brusque irony and disregard for both the extent of the problems as well as considered debate over what the arts contribute to cities. The essays in this collection suggest we look again at both an easy dismissal of the arts’ importance as well as an easy embrace of their salvation. In the past decade or so, cities around the United States and the world have looked to the “creative class” to revitalize the urban core in technological, service-driven economies. Richard Florida has received notable attention for his ability to synthesize and sell ideas that tie cultural innovation to urban vitality. ² Policymakers have taken note. Denver installed a plan to promote “creative spaces” that turns abandoned factories over to artists; Michigan boasts of a “cool cities” initiative to draw young professionals to Detroit and other cities in the state; Peducah, Kentucky’s Artist Relocation Program transformed a run-down neighborhood into a lively one by offering empty lots for sale for one dollar. Artists themselves have been drawn into these plans by providing the hinge between banks, funders, and government in initiatives such as ArtPlace America, which develops “integrated strategies that can drive vibrancy and diversity so powerful that it transforms communities.” That effusive and diffuse swagger builds on longer standing notions of “creative placemaking” by recognizing that a positive, knowable sense of place has tangible and intangible benefits in everyday life, economic sustenance, and community cohesion. ³

In most of these scenarios, however, the arts are a kind of subdued, nondescript background upon which coffeehouses, boutique stores, and residential lofts are built to attract young, up-and-coming professionals. And there are plenty of places that have seemed to follow exactly this plan, from Williamsburg in Brooklyn to Portlands, Oregon and Maine, and Wicker Park in Chicago. ⁴ The creative class argument has received criticism for its perpetuation rather than dissipation of affluence and inequality, but it has less rarely been judged for its understanding and use of the arts. In fact, the concept depends on an economic valuing of the arts, promoting them for ties to creative industries such as design and advertising, lifestyle choices, and a kind of vitality that attracts tourists and residents alike. There is little—or, more accurately, sometimes nothing—about the arts as a cornerstone of knowledge, ethics, identity, debate, or even that rarely mentioned notion, beauty.

The essays in this collection seek to redress that oversight in the creative economy theories as well as in urban history overall. Much attention to the arts still reverts to discipline-specific perspectives, from art history and musicology to film studies while, in history, the field of cultural history has subsumed research on the social and political factors fueling the arts. ⁵ What urban historians can offer is a grounding of this research into the dynamics of place. That the arts and artists most often live in cities is a truism. But how did that intersection occur? And with what consequences for the arts, for artists, and for cities?

The articles in this collection explore a particular moment in that longer entangling: how an embrace of the arts came about in post–World War II U.S. cities. They trace changes in the status of artists in cities, moving from being ancillaries of cultural authority to more influential constituents themselves. Scholarship on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of American cities has demonstrated how arts institutions conveyed prestige, both to a city and to its elite, and often in competition to European counterparts. ⁶ The arts settled into cities in multiple ways in the first part of the twentieth century: institutions matured, municipal policies began to incorporate aesthetic concerns, and the arts of modernism gathered intellectual and political grist. The policies of the New Deal solidified the arts’ significance, perhaps even more in federal policy and national interest than in local arenas.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, though, the arts took on an increasingly visible and central role in U.S. urban centers. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan was only the most prominent example of the tie of urban renewal, in its plans and its rhetoric, to cultural institutions. As Samuel Zipp has argued persuasively, the arts became an enticing cover for the more destructive aspects of dislocation, discrimination, and upheaval. ⁷ And, in the midst of changing demographics, places like Lincoln Center became a prominent plea for what cities could offer that the suburbs could not. The arts reveal complicity in and push against urban renewal but also much beyond that focus, in large part because artists, the arts, and institutions remained committed to the city core as attention turned to metropolitan regions. Artists themselves moved from handmaidens of an elite to institution builders, policy makers, and new kinds of urban seers and preservationists. This is not to say that certain realms of the arts are not still handmaidens to the elite—ever more the corporation than the individual patron—but the number of roles artists play in the city has expanded over the twentieth century, with perhaps the largest change in those roles in the 1960s. So artists-as-residents reclaimed neighborhoods and buildings; artworks made visible changing racial and ethnic differentiation; institutions played new roles in the urban economy as both beacons of tourism and attracting settled residents; neighborhoods that congregated artists created and held on to more amenities as city budgets crashed; and the arts worked alongside efforts in urban planning and mapping that increased attention to visuality, spatiality, and design.

Susannah Engstrom and Joanna Dee Das investigate the rise of cultural institutions in Minneapolis and East St. Louis, respectively, showing how urban renewal plans prompted pushback and counterproposals that included different uses of cultural institutions. In Minneapolis, Susannah’s account of the Guthrie Theater conveys the close connection of arts institutions to the city’s identity and vitality at a time when urban renewal projects such as the Gateway Center had drained the downtown area of any distinctiveness. City elites began to look for ways to re-inscribe a unique identity by noting their white-collar industries and relatively homogeneous population. Minneapolis elites hooked on to creativity as a distinction decades before the creative economy became a buzzword. So leading professionals jumped at the chance to enter a bidding contest in 1959 for a group of theater professionals who wanted an artistic home outside of New York. We know of bids for the World’s Fairs, Olympics, for sports teams—but a theater? The audacity of director Tyrone Guthrie and his collaborators was as impressive as Minneapolis’s boldness in seizing the opportunity to define itself as a cultural capital. Susannah traces what may be a broader historical change in the postwar period of artists and arts institutions seeing their home as an opportunity for competition rather than arising from a rootedness to and expression of place, although the birth that could have been elsewhere has since become a defining element of Minneapolis. Within the arts field, the Guthrie may be even better known for its lead in defining corporatism and professionalism in the arts. The theater helped broadcast the city to outsiders but the city’s priorities also shaped this prominent cultural institution.

Joanna Dee Das looks at another midwestern city in which a fragile arts institution attempted to combat poverty and discrimination. The dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham moved to East St. Louis in 1967 to realize her beliefs about the humanizing effect of the arts. Joanna argues that Dunham found a middle ground between the war on poverty, which often deployed the arts for ameliorative ends, and the Black Arts Movement, in which the arts of the African diaspora defined difference. Dunham played both sides to her benefit, using arguments from either to gain funding for her Performing Arts Training Center. For philanthropic institutions, she argued for the arts’ ability to counter violence and despair; to those involved in the Black Arts Movement, she pushed them to move toward universality and connection across difference. The Center enacted this debate, where the arts formed not only a foundation of identity but of knowledge and ethics. Dunham’s actions in East St. Louis—and her limited success in attracting sustained funding—reveal the quandary of the era for urban African Americans, condemned to poor, desperate living conditions, seeking resilience and survival. Joanna’s investigation of Dunham in this passed-over place details an urban-level analysis of cultural activity that needs to be added to an urban-level analysis of poverty. In this analysis, Joanna also follows Dunham’s insistence on the arts’ impact on individuals, even if anecdotal and diffuse. What mattered to survival may not appear on policy indices or in institutional outcomes.

Aaron Shkuda and Jeffrey Trask take up this focus on artists: in particular, though, artists-as-residents in a city that attracted most of them, New York. Aaron explores the historical transformation of SoHo, looking at how that neighborhood became a new kind of arts district, one less distinguished by arts institutions such as museums and concert halls than artists’ residences. SoHo has had resonance as both an urban development model and a cautionary tale. In reconstructing this transformation, Aaron shifts our attention from the place and the buildings to the people, showing how artists became players in politics, policy, and real estate as population loss in the city began and urban renewal programs floundered. We need the past to remember that artists were not always embraced as welcome city residents. Instead, their use of large spaces for various functions—creation of big artwork or spontaneous performance—flustered city officials enough so that they realized little policy dealt with artists’ needs. Artists then advocated to reform zoning and building laws. In a counter to much of the literature about the transformation of SoHo—Sharon Zukin’s Loft Living being the most prominent—neither real estate developers nor state involvement fully explain this change in the neighborhood. Artists were workers with particular spatial needs—those wide-open industrial floors helped with large minimalist canvases, multimedia sculptures, and gallery and performances. They were residents with skills—they built walls, stripped floors, and rewired electricity. And they were advocates with more and more political power and, eventually, real estate speculators themselves.

SoHo reigns as the prime story of artists’ residences, but, shortly after SoHo’s transformation, another place in New York presented a different model. In 1970, the former Bell laboratory buildings in the West Village opened as a new site of artist residency, one in which philanthropists and the federal government funded the transformation of these buildings into living and working spaces for artists. Here lived artists of even less fame and wealth than might reside in SoHo, with the idea that a few years of government-supported residence in Westbeth would allow them to move their way up and out of the building. Jeffrey’s article traces the beginnings of Westbeth in the ongoing consequences of urban renewal, as philanthropists, neighborhood activists such as Jane Jacobs, and governmental officials looked to ease housing shortages without engendering local unrest and pushback. Westbeth generated local interest—its waiting list is notoriously long—even if, initially, few were pleased with it. Artists thought the spaces inadequate and it appeared to have little effect on the neighborhood. Like Aaron’s historical view of SoHo, the story of Westbeth questions the inevitability of artist-led gentrification. In fact, the distinctiveness of Westbeth is its legacy. With few exceptions, there is little support for artists’ housing that is not associated with gentrification, aesthetic amenities, and high rents. (In an exception that may become an increasingly popular model, the artist Theaster Gates has spurred on such development on the south side of Chicago, transforming an abandoned housing project into a community of artists with much of his own money. ⁸ )

The articles by Matthew Reynolds and myself move from artists to artworks themselves as artifacts of urban history. This has not been an approach common among urban historians and yet both the filming of West Side Story and the books of the visual artist Ed Ruscha on Los Angeles are artistic approaches to understanding cities. I believe artists should be added alongside urban planners, theorists, and historians, to build a dense, layered view of how cities operate. They make up another realm of debate. And, perhaps more subtly, many artworks themselves are constitutive of the meanings and workings of cities. They depend on, reveal, symbolize, and call to change how cities function.

The film West Side Story (1961) was that kind of artwork. Ostensibly an updated version of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story—especially on film rather than stage—was a story of New York. Set at the disappearing–appearing moment of urban renewal, the film built up a city in color, light, and design, and then song and dance made it come alive. It revealed the marginalization of Puerto Ricans and juvenile delinquents by placing the story in the leftover spaces of a refurbishing city—alleys, rooftops, and caverns below highways. The film also arrived in the middle of a debate about how the city worked, expressed in the extremes of the birds-eye mechanic circulation of Robert Moses or the street-level harmonious ballet of Jane Jacobs. West Side Story did not endorse one view over the other, instead insisting on their mutuality, on the grand vision and aspirations of seeing the city from above, and the violence, tragedy, and daily battle of the streets. In this, the film abetted the growing visualization of the city in mid-century propelled by urbanists as diverse as Kevin Lynch and Guy Debord. For a large global audience, West Side Story screened New York in blood red, running leaps, and yearning voice.

In a similar fashion, Matthew Reynolds adds Ed Ruscha to the list of urban planners and theorists who have analyzed Los Angeles. Ruscha’s visions of Hollywood Boulevard evolved at the same time as postmodern spatial theorists, many of whom used Los Angeles as a model to think through the lengthening of the landscape engineered by the automobile and the highway and the visuality that conveyed place, direction, and distinction, such as food stands made in the shape of hot dogs. The image-making industry of Los Angeles is key to its prominence in these theories, and Ruscha is no exception in concentrating on that part of the myth. What distinguishes Ruscha’s perspective, however, is his consideration of nostalgia. He counters an easy nostalgia in redevelopment rhetoric by forcing viewers to see Hollywood Boulevard across time, in 1973 and 2004. He employs the techniques of panorama—broad vistas—and palindrome—seeing in forward and reverse—to know both the city and its driving ideologies. This stands out from a more documentary approach to the past, which would slice one picture from one moment to compare it with a contemporary picture of the same place. Ruscha’s moving forms do not allow that kind of inertness, where nostalgia can settle in. From Ruscha’s perspective, Hollywood Boulevard is ever in decline, and making conditions better should not be a matter of reclaiming a never-has-been past.

These articles display the rich variety of research that awaits those seeking to understand the intersection of arts and urbanization. And as much as the essays counter the contemporary narrow tie of the arts to urban economic growth, they also provide a historical perspective on how that has come about in the postwar period. The arts in postwar cities became enmeshed in the larger shift to neoliberal policies and governing through their embeddedness in real estate development and city branding, the growing professionalization of artistic production, and the burgeoning of community centers beholden to foundation and corporate support. If the finance, real estate, and insurance industries structured the modern city, it is now the intellectual, creative, and educational sectors that wield authority in the postmodern one—from FIRE to ICE, as the president of New York University has niftily summarized. ⁹ That shift has a longer and more uneven history than what those touting the creative economy acknowledge. Perhaps more important, the shift should not disguise the ways that the arts can still be an alternative—a freedom from regulated economic habits, inflexible schedules, and confining norms. In searching for the appeal of the creative sector and neo-bohemias amid obvious complicity with corporate dominance and the commodification of aesthetics, we should not forget the arts’ animating, expressive dimensions. Cities are not only markets, the artist Anton Vidokle reminds us; they are places of conversation and congregation, flexibility, and exchange, and most artists are reluctant to abandon them. ¹⁰ In the artistic renderings of the ruins of Detroit, a film or photograph or musical or institution could instill will in the despair, or whimsy in the face of implacability. The arts in the city, then and now, provoke seeing and knowing beyond the limits and the categories that order so much of urban life.

For urban historians, the arts—as defined by artworks, genres, audiences, institutions, neighborhoods, policy, politics, funding, economics, and tourism—are only beginning to attract the attention they deserve as an indelible part of urban life. Perhaps even more important, though, urban historians’ research on the arts could have an impact on contemporary policy. Many studies of arts and cultural policy have focused on federal intervention, arguing for the need for greater support from the federal government in an era when that funding has continued to diminish. This may be a useful, if ineffective, advocacy, partly because of the intransigence of the cultural wars on the federal level but, perhaps more important, because both state and municipal levels of support are far more plentiful. New York City currently gives more to the arts than the National Endowment of the Arts. Looking at municipal legislation, funding, zoning laws, and boosterism reveals broader support, commitment, and effect of the arts than any view of national policy suggests. Urban historians have the opportunity to uncover and understand that story, perhaps starting with dancing in the streets of Detroit.