No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Though historians of technology generally work toward detailed case studies of individual machines or industries, a few voices have lately been raised in a call for broader perspectives. In a recent review essay, Josef W. Konvitz, Mark H. Rose and Joel A. Tarr urge an intellectual history of urban technologies. The discipline that treats the spinning jenny and the cotton gin must also equip itself to analyze the varied and complex technological systems present in the modern city. Only with such a broad vision will the relationships between technology and culture become clear. One helpful version of such an overview has been offered by Rosalind Williams's historical and literary meditations on underground technological environments. But Williams's focus upon nineteenth-century culture has led her to ignore the American experience almost entirely. Bound by Leo Marx's paradigmatic “machine in the garden,” Williams dismisses America in favor of Britain and France, where underground technology first entered the modern landscape. A twentieth-century focus, however, reveals a rich and complex intellectual history of urban technology within the American scene. The built environment of New York City, in particular, has dominated contemporary American expressions of the relationship between culture and technology.
1 “Technology and the City,” Technology and Culture 31 (1990), 248–94.Google Scholar See also Tarr, and Konvitz, , “Patterns in the Development of the Urban Infrastructure,” American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review, eds. Gillette, Howard Jr., and Miller, Zane L. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987) 195–226.Google Scholar
2 Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).Google Scholar
3 Penkower, Monty Noam, The federal Writers' Project: A. Study in Government Patronage of the Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 186–91.Google Scholar Though a detailed study of the New York City FWP remains to be done, Penkower gives an overview, as does Mangione, Jerre, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935–43 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972).Google Scholar
4 The New York Times 1 10 1936, p. 16Google Scholar; 21 Nov. 1956, p. 21; 4 Dec. 1936, p. 4.
5 Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States; Hearings Before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities: Executive Hearings House of Representatives, 76th Congress, 3rd Session (1940) Volume 3, pp. 1183–1203.Google Scholar The unnamed witness can be identified from context as Ralph De Sola, who appeared before the committee on other occasions.
6 Mangione, , 335.Google Scholar One WPA employee, Harry Granick, later published a work entitled Underneath New York (Rinehart & Company, 1947)Google Scholar, lifting some of his material from the FWP's effort without acknowledgment. Jacket copy for a new edition of the book (Fordham University Press, 1991) states mildly, “The author conceived it while working for the WPA.”
7 Federal, W.P.A. Writers' Project (N.Y.C. Unit), 1936–1943Google Scholar, “Underneath New York,” New York Municipal Archives. Unless otherwise indicated all direct quotations in the text below are from this source. Additional material may exist with the FBI and elsewhere, though personal correspondence with the National Archives (28 February 1991) indicates no further records in that WPA repository.
8 Oxford English Dictionary.
9 Daley, Robert, The World Beneath the City (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959), 182, 208.Google Scholar Daley gives two examples of gendered infrastructure.
10 Michael Kucher has suggested to me that these gender identities are currently in flux; New York's failure to maintain its bridges, for instance, was a short-sighted dismissal of housekeeping in favor of the (masculine) glamours of erection.
11 For an introduction to women and technology see Ruth Schwartz Cowan's 1979 article “From Virginia Dare to Virginia Slims: Women and Technology in American Life,” collected in LaFollette, Marcel C. and Stine, Jeffrey K., eds., Technology and Choice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 291–303.Google Scholar Cowan's notice of the nonefficiency of household technology bears out my point: Technology in the home didn't have to be efficient because the house-bound woman remained part of the machinery.
12 A sampling of GE advertisements for these years can be found in The Atlantic Monthly.
13 This forgotten tunnel has been remembered so frequently, it seems to me, that “forgotten spaces” may merely suggest spaces that are unused or are being used in unintended ways. Many of New York's forgotten people, the homeless, today reside in forgotten infrastructure.
14 Daley, , 11.Google Scholar Further references to this work will be included parenthetically in the text above.
15 Jones, Pamela, Under the City Streets (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), 7.Google Scholar Of course “WPA style” is subjective category, yet Jones's brusque, verb-oriented sentences probably seem as familiar to readers of the WPA Guides and other FWP works as they do to me.
16 I have found no evidence that either author worked on Underneath New York directly, but both men's fiction presents this as a distinct possibility. The New York FWP was undoubtedly the FWP's most racially integrated unit, which is not saying much.
17 “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Eight Men: Stories by Richard Wright (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1987), 27–92.Google Scholar Maria De Sands suggested this Exodus allusion to me. I would also like to thank Dr. Sandra Govan; her interest in the Dies Committee led me to Underneath New York.
18 Wright, , 92.Google Scholar
19 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 6.Google Scholar
20 Notes on the Underground, 4, 52.Google Scholar Williams's meditations on the thematics of the underground are excellent, though her focus on the nineteenth century leads her to dismiss the American experience (pp. 18, 115). New York Panorama (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)Google Scholar; see pp. v, 397–422 for Mumford's influence.
21 In this context the underground and the prison cell (“the belly of the beast”) operate as antitheses. The third term in their dialectic may well be the courtroom, that ubiquitous locale of American fiction and film.