Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square

Design for the Crowd

Design for the Crowd

Patriotism and Protest in Union Square

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in China

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08082-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60490-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226604909.001.0001

This publication is made possible in part with a grant from Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Merwood-Salisbury, Joanna, author.

Title: Design for the crowd : patriotism and protest in Union Square / Joanna Merwood-Salisbury.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018054732 | ISBN 9780226080826 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226604909 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Union Square (New York, N.Y.)—History. | City planning—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century. | City planning—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Plazas—Social aspects—New York (State)—New York. | New York (N.Y.)—History.

Classification: LCC F128.65.U6 M47 2019 NA9127.N5 | DDC 974.7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054732

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1  An Ornament to the City, 1811–1850

2  The Altar of Patriotism, 1856–1865

3  Olmsted and Vaux’s Plaza, 1865–1872

4  The People’s Forum, 1872–1886

5  The Home of Discontent, 1886–1917

6  City Beautiful Civic Center, 1898–1933

7  Cold War Park, 1934–1965

8  Renewal, Revitalization, and Place Making, 1966–1998

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Figures

1.1.  New-York. Print by John Bachmann, 1849. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection. From the New York Public Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-7ca9-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

1.2.  Southern section of the Commissioners’ Plan for New York City, 1811. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection from the New York Public Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-7a92-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

1.3.  Commissioners’ Plan for New York City, 1811. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection from the New York Public Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-7a92-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

1.4.  Valuable building lots in and near Union Place in the 16th Ward of the City of New York, ca. 1838. Hayward and Co. / Museum of the City of New York. 38.253.3.

1.5.  Union Park New York [East side]. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection. From the New York Public Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-251f-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

2.1.  Calvin Pollard, Proposal for a Washington Monument in Union Square, 1843. Calvin Pollard architectural drawings and papers, ca. 1830–1850, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library.

2.2.  Henry Kirke Brown, Statue of Washington, 1856. George R. Hall, engraver, 1903. Wallach Division Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

2.3.  The ‘Union’ Mass Meeting Held in Union Square, New York on the 20th of April 1861, Illustrated London News (May 18, 1861). Wallach Division Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

2.4.  The Twentieth United States Colored Troops Receiving Their Colors on Union Square, March 5, 1864, Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization (March 19, 1864). Wallach Division Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

2.5.  The Metropolitan Fair Building, Union Square, 1864. Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-stereo-1s04949.

2.6.  Lincoln Statue, Union Square, ca. 1917. William Davis Hassler / Museum of the City of New York. 2001.35.1.100.

3.1.  Headquarters of the Fenian Brotherhood, Union Square, New York, 1865. Art and Picture Collection: Wallach Division Picture Collection. From the New York Public Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-10dd-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

3.2.  A. T. Stewart Department Store, Broadway (West 9th–10th Streets). Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

3.3.  Tiffany and Co., Union Square and 15th St., ca. 1903. Irving Underhill (–1960) / Museum of the City of New York. X2010.28.510.

3.4.  Domestic Sewing Machine Building, Broadway and 14th Street. Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

3.5.  Proposed Plan Improvements of Union Park, New York City Department of Parks Annual Report, 1870 (New York: [s.n.], 1871). Art and Picture Collection: Wallach Division Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

3.6.  The new form of Union Square following Olmsted and Vaux’s 1872 alteration, as depicted in Atlases of New York City, Section 3, Plate 44 (New York: G. W. Bromley and Co., 1916). Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division. From the New York Public Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-091b-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

3.7.  Anarchism in New York: The Cottage in Union Square from which the Open Air Meeting of the ‘Unemployed’ Was Addressed, 1893. Art and Picture Collection: Wallach Division Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

3.8.  Design for Laying Out the Grounds Known as Fort Greene or Washington Park, in the City of Brooklyn, 1867. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division. From the New York Public Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c4a7eec9-fc01-2f88-e040-e00a18066e0c.

4.1.  Union Square, New York, July 4, 1876. Art and Picture Collection: Wallach Division Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

4.2.  The Red Flag in New York—Riotous Communist Workingmen Driven from Tompkins Square by the Mounted Police, Tuesday, January 13th, 1874, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (January 31, 1874). Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-111180.

4.3.  New York City—Grand Demonstration of Workingmen, September 5th: The Procession Passing the Reviewing Stand at Union Square, Frank Leslie’s Newspaper (September 16, 1882).

4.4.  Labor Day Parade, Union Square, 1887. L. G. Strand / Museum of the City of New York. X2010.11.3444.

5.1.  Socialists Meeting in Union Square, New York, May 1st, 1908. Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ggbain-00337.

5.2.  Girls in Labor Parade, May 1st, 1909. Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ggbain-03327.

5.3.  [Alexander] Berkman [speaks at the Socialist meeting], Union Square, May 1st, 1908. Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ggbain 00334.

5.4.  Taken 20 Seconds after Bomb Thrown, March 28, 1908. Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-23413.

5.5.  Recruit, Union Square, ca. 1917. Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ggbain-24411.

5.6.  USS Recruit in Union Square, ca. 1917. Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ggbain-24400.

6.1.  Union Square West, Nos. 31–41, Manhattan, 1938. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection. From the New York Public Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4f22-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

6.2.  Everett Building. Fourth Avenue and E. 17th Street, ca. 1910. Wurts Bros. (New York, N.Y.) / Museum of the City of New York. X2010.7.1.1099.

6.3.  Walker Evans, Street Scene in Front of S. Klein-on-the-Square Department Store, Union Square East, New York City, September 1937. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Artstor.

6.4.  Communist Party Headquarters and the Daily Worker newspaper, 26–28 Union Square East, ca. 1930. New York Daily News Archive/ Getty Images.

6.5.  Unemployed American protestors running through Union Square pursued by tear gas–wielding police, March 6, 1930. Rolls Press/ Popperfoto/ Getty Images.

6.6.  Union Square, aerial view, ca. 1944. United States Office of War Information / Museum of the City of New York. 90.28.38.

6.7.  Celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding on Union Square, April 1932. Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

6.8.  Base of Flagstaff looking toward Union Square West. Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

7.1.  Vehicles lined up at the auto pound along the edge of Union Square Park, 1949. New York Daily News Archive/ Getty Images.

7.2.  Union Square. East Side between 14th and 16th Streets. Samuel H. (Samuel Herman) Gottscho (1875–1971) / Museum of the City of New York. 39.20.8.

7.3.  Clown Frankie Saluto races children in Union Square during USA Day celebrations, 1955. New York Daily News Archive/ Getty Images.

7.4.  Veterans and reservists on a platform in Union Square, awaiting their turn to burn their military discharge/separation papers. Bettman/ Getty Images.

8.1.  Parsons’ student project to redesign the facade of S. Klein Department Store on the east side of Union Square, 1973. The New School Archives and Special Collection. The New School. New York, NY.

8.2.  Union Square Greenmarket, ca. 1976–78. Edmund Vincent Gillon / Museum of the City of New York. 2013.3.1.528.

Acknowledgments

This book would not exist without the help of many colleagues, friends, and family. At Parsons School of Design my thanks are due to Peter Wheelwright and David J. Lewis, who asked me to teach a graduate seminar on the history of New York City urbanism; and to Kent Kleinman, Bill Morrish, Brian McGrath, Joel Towers, and Nadine Bourgeois, for their ongoing support of my research into Union Square. Brian, in particular, was helpful in conceptualizing the idea of urban design at the small scale. At Victoria University of Wellington I am grateful to Michael J. Wilson, Robin Skinner, Marc Aurel Schnabel, and Morten Gjerde for allowing me the time to complete this long-gestating project, and to Selena Shaw for helping me balance writing and academic administration.

An early version of some of this material appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2009. I am grateful to then editor David Brownlee and the anonymous reviewers for their perceptive editorial suggestions. The work of turning a short article into a book was greatly enabled by a Summer Stipend award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I wish to acknowledge that any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I am indebted to Robert Devens, who helped me develop the book proposal when I first approached the University of Chicago Press. At the press, Susan Bielstein has provided invaluable editorial advice and been generous and patient through the process of writing and revising. I would like to thank the press’s external readers for their very helpful feedback; James Toftness, who has ably managed the manuscript; Susan Karani, for her expert editing; and Gerry Van Ravenswaay, who prepared the index. My thanks are also due to the J. M. Kaplan Fund for awarding the press a Furthermore grant to support the production of the book.

Throughout the process of research and writing, Joanie Meharry, Hannah Wolter, and Akari Kidd acted as my research assistants during different periods; I am grateful for their time and talents. My thanks are also due to Carol Willis, to Wendy Scheir of the New School Archives and Special Collections for showing me design projects made by Parsons students, and to Brian Sholis for sharing his unpublished essay on the patriotic monuments erected around New York City during World War I. The final manuscript benefited hugely from a thorough editorial review by Hamish Clayton. Many friends and colleagues have contributed their ideas and expertise; I wish to especially acknowledge Michael Lobel, Gabrielle Esperdy, and David J. Smiley. Special thanks are due to Tom Weaver who, at different times, provided much-needed critique and ably steered me back on course, and to Mary Atwool and Brent Southgate, who made me a reader. Finally I am extremely grateful for the unwavering support of Ned Salisbury, who showed me his New York, and Calum Salisbury, who was born there.

Introduction

Union Square took on a special role following the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Thousands gathered in the Square to leave flowers and messages of remembrance and to affirm communal feelings of grief and anger. The violence effected on the Twin Towers and its occupants brought home the privileged significance of public architecture, in this case as a symbol of Western global dominance. In the months and years following the attacks, the Square served as a counterexample. A place of openness and inclusion rather than privilege and exclusion, it affirmed the importance of physical public space in an age where much political discussion and protest had moved into the ephemeral space of the media. For the anthropologist Setha M. Low, the Square served as a positive model of a postindustrial plaza, one to which the designers of the new World Trade Center should pay special attention.¹ For Low, it was an essential referent, countering what she describes as the new defensiveness of public space in the post-9/11 era, a tendency to barricade and guard the common spaces of the city, in doing so denying the civil and political freedoms they represent.

In 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to affirm the importance of the mass gathering as a political statement. Even though the movement had no simple, consumable message to convey, images of the encampment at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan were powerful because they made manifest a deeply felt dissatisfaction with the economic and political status quo.² At the same time the movement revealed strict limitations on public use of public parks in New York City and other highly regulated urban centers. Zuccotti Park was chosen as the central protest site not only because it is near Wall Street, the site of economic power, but also because, as a privately owned public space (POPS) it is not subject to control by the Police and Parks departments. Ironically Zuccotti Park had fewer restrictions on its use than city-owned public land. In the wake of that protest, the city and private landowners tried to close loopholes in local zoning law, making POPS liable to greater oversight and constraint.

Even as public parks and squares are affirmed as important places of political expression, they are subjected to new tools and methods of control, both visible and invisible. The embedding of digital sensing in urban streetscapes, the sublimation of physical mechanisms of surveillance to more subtle forms of environmental monitoring, and the resultant transformation of urban and architectural form owing to the introduction of digital technologies, has emerged as a major source of anxiety.³ For the political and social commentator Naomi Wolf, Union Square is notable not as a positive example of the persistence of traditional public space, but as a site subject to sinister new methods of covert observation. In 2012 she noted that after the Occupy crackdowns . . . odd-looking CCTVs had started to appear, attached to lampposts, in public venues in Manhattan where the small but unbowed remnants of Occupy congregated: there was one in Union Square, right in front of their encampment. . . . These are enabled for facial recognition technology, which allows police to watch a video that is tagged to individuals, in real time. When too many people congregate, they can be dispersed and intimidated simply by the risk of being identified—before dissent can coalesce.⁴ For others, such technologies have a positive benefit when they are used, as at Zuccotti Park and in the Black Lives Matter protests, not to separate but to include, not to record but to broadcast. Enhancing traditional forms of protest involving physical encroachment into, and appropriation of, public space, they have the power to escalate protest beyond the limited scale of a particular geographic site, creating a complementary and scaleless public forum within the digital realm.⁵

Debate about the proper form and use of public places is not new: it is as old as the city itself. Created by early nineteenth-century planners who placed little value in such urban devices, Union Square illustrates how abstract ideas of public space are both deformed and reformed by the idiosyncrasies of place and time. The Square occupies a central place in both the geography and the history of New York City. In one sense it is a counterexample to Central Park, both formally and symbolically. While Central Park is an expansive terrain, an American version of the romantic, pseudo-natural landscape popularized in England during the eighteenth century, Union Square is small and formal in its design. Where Central Park was purposefully designed to foster American democracy, Union Square began as an elite enclave on the edge of the city and only later assumed a prominent place as representative of the political life of the nation. But this small area of parkland has assumed an identity far larger than its diminutive size. Unconventional in shape and continually in the process of being reconstructed, it has never been an example of polemical or iconic urban design, and yet it expresses, perhaps more than any other urban landscape in the country, how political ideals are realized, imperfectly, in reality.

Within the enduring framework of the Manhattan grid only a few places are impervious to economically driven cycles of physical transformation. While a few monumental nineteenth-century buildings such as City Hall remain, most others have fallen under the wrecking ball. Legislation aimed at landmarks preservation can ensure that the physical fabric of certain neighborhoods, like parts of SoHo, remain intact, but even here the individual buildings are shells filled up with new uses and exhibiting different associations. Within this relatively young city, constants are few. Union Square appears to be one of those rare places. Despite its renovations, its form remains essentially true to its nineteenth-century origins. A green oval defined by trees and statues of American heroes, it has survived in more or less the same composition for nearly two hundred years. Located on Broadway between Fourteenth and Seventeenth Streets, Union Square includes both a major subway interchange and a landscaped park. The Square (which is not a square at all, but an irregular oval) is a glitch uneasily embedded within the pattern of regular blocks. It owes its existence to a moment of incompatibility: it marks the spot where the path of colonial Broadway fails to mesh with the early nineteenth-century republican street plan. As a figure it is a bridge and a node, a link between east and west, between downtown and midtown, as well as the terminus and interchange of several transit lines. In the lexicon of popular association, it is a place for public expression, both collective and individual. This book will show that Union Square, though apparently impervious to change, has borne and continues to bear a social and political meaning that is constantly being enacted, through both daily activity and the slower processes of design and construction.

From the time they were first projected in the early nineteenth century, Manhattan’s parks and squares have been considered inadequate for a major urban center in a country founded on the principle of democracy, where the provision of spaces for the public to gather is presumably essential. In this way this book takes as its subject an urban element considered insufficient or negligible. Despite its apparent deficiencies, I argue, Union Square is an important landmark, one that has contributed significantly to the public life of the city and the nation. Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square traces the history of the Square from its formation as a residential square modeled on European precedents during the 1830s through to the turn of the twenty-first century, with a special focus on the ways in which small changes have impacted its use and meaning. This choice of subject—the historical life of a public park—opens up a range of different ways of writing, from the literal to the metaphorical and allegorical. The intent is to understand Union Square as both a geographical location with real, formal characteristics and also as a stand-in for larger social and cultural concepts. I investigate the history of the Square as both a real public space and the symbol of competing ideas about the operation of democracy in the United States. From the mid-nineteenth-century real estate developer Samuel Ruggles’s championing of Union Square as a theater adequate to the national voice, to the first Labor Day parade of 1882 and Depression-era demonstrations organized by the Communist Party of the United States, the Square has been a physical manifestation of the uniquely American enactment of democratic citizenship and a test case for ongoing debates about the freedoms of speech and assembly guaranteed in the Constitution.⁶

While sited primarily in relation to architectural and urban history, this book is informed by the voluminous scholarship on the subject of public space from diverse fields including history and geography as well as law and political theory. Drawing on historical materials from the New York City Parks Department Library, the New York City Municipal Archives, and the New York Public Library (including official documents, plans, and photographs, as well as reports in mass-market periodicals and newspapers, and descriptions in popular guidebooks and niche-oriented publications such as professional architecture magazines and union newspapers), I examine large-scale proposals made for the Square (both built and unrealized), alongside representations of the events that took place there (lithographs, news photographs, and cartoons, for example), paying attention to the ways in which the Square has been described and depicted at different moments in its history.

The genesis of this project lies in my teaching. Around 2004, I went looking for a history of Union Square to include in the reading list of a course on the history of New York City urbanism. I was teaching graduate architecture students at Parsons School of Design in a converted loft building at 25 East Thirteenth Street, just a block away from the Square. As the public space most immediately available to them, Parsons students were drawn to it for lunchtime and late-night excursions, and it was a frequent site for their speculative design projects. In their analyses they emulated the influential urban sociologist William H. Whyte, observing and documenting the routine pathways of commuters and shoppers, the temporary resting places of office workers, the ritual theatrics of soapbox orators, and the otherwise unstructured forms of contemporary flânerie. Beside these day-to-day activities, the Square also hosted larger and more significant events such as protests associated with the anti-Iraq War and Occupy movements. The form of these events was not left to chance: on these occasions the New York City police department employed a mixture of sophisticated (digital surveillance) and unsophisticated (portable fences known as jersey barriers) methods to control the crowd. The rawness of these actions, and the sense on the part of participants and spectators that the messages being communicated were immediate and urgent ones, seemed to confirm that Union Square’s historic identity as a site for political speech and action was still relevant.

Classroom conversations about the design and use of Union Square in the early 2000s were framed by academic literature on the importance of streets and squares as places of urban sociability, on the historic role public spaces have played in the performance of democracy, and on the ways in which capital has reshaped such spaces in the modern era. My students read Don Mitchell on the importance of public space in democratic societies. They read David Harvey and Richard Sennett on the reconstruction of urban form and the turmoil of public life in the nineteenth century. They read Jane Jacobs on the uses of sidewalks and Elizabeth Blackmar, Roy Rosenzweig, and Galen Cranz on the politics of park design. Many contemporary texts presented the current moment as one of crisis: public space was dead or dying, its social and political function was in decline, it had become the realm of the spectacle, an illusion of openness and inclusiveness maintained only in the service of capitalism. Of particular concern to many authors was the privatization of public space associated with neoliberal governance practices, when the requirements of the global marketplace came into conflict with desires for openness and accessibility, leading to the segregation of urban populations, accompanied by explicit or implicit restrictions on the provision, design, and use of public space.⁷ As a result architects became complicit in the creation of inauthentic enclaves where the imperative of consumption replaced that of citizenship. Proponents of this view warned of an imminent point of no return, one in which true public space, and along with it the opportunity for free speech, for face-to-face political expression and discourse, would be erased once and for all. In these texts the POPS (privately owned public spaces) program instituted by the 1961 revision to the New York City zoning law, where real estate developers are given height variances in exchange for the provision of quasi-public space, was often employed as a defining example. Similarly, commercially driven practices of urban renewal dating to the 1980s and 1990s were subject to particular criticism, with sites such as the South Street Seaport, Battery Park City, and Times Square cited as sinister examples. This view persists in contemporary academic writing where the argument that access to public space is often in jeopardy and at times threatened by public and private policies is commonplace.⁸ I want to emphasize that I do not refute this statement. Rather my aim is to test a presumption that lies behind the claim of the inevitable extinction of public space as it has been traditionally constituted; this presumption is that public space became especially precarious at the end of the twentieth century. The art critic Rosalyn Deutsch has argued that conflict is a defining characteristic of true public space—conflict about how it should be used and by whom⁹—to which I would add, conflict about how it should be formed or shaped in order to facilitate or represent those uses. In looking at the history of Union Square, I am interested in the changing parameters of this conflict, understanding it as a dynamic process informed by both abstract philosophies and actual events. This is not a relativist argument in which all social and political beliefs and actions are viewed as equivalent; rather it is an attempt to lend historic context to present-day debate.

Situated in a scholarly framework, a study of the history of Union Square could be nostalgic (here is an example of real public space), hopeful (see how it persists), or despairing (observe how it is increasingly limited, deployed for ideological purposes). While different sections or chapters of this book might be used to support these various arguments, my aim is to hold none of them absolutely. Rather it is to reveal the complexity of the question at hand beyond the shorthand binaries of public and private, freedom and restriction, authentic and inauthentic. Although the idea that public space has always been a site of conflict is constantly acknowledged in contemporary literature, the argument about its present decline sometimes seems motivated by a sentimental or simplistic view of the history of cities and society. Running through this book is a test of the contention that public spaces are under special threat today, that in the contemporary era they are in the process of eroding completely and permanently away from their earlier, more perfect, incarnations. In fact, as this book shows, despite the rights to free speech and public assembly guaranteed by the Constitution, the distance between the ideal and the real is ever present.

Free access to public space has been constantly precarious throughout the history of the United States. The debate about the true nature and correct use of public places is a long-standing one in this country, beginning with the foundation of the republic. As historians Mary Ryan and Lisa Keller have shown in their essential histories of civic parades and demonstrations, New York City has always been an important archetype in these debates.¹⁰ When it comes to systems of regulation, the mechanisms of control are many; they include not only laws and police practices, but also the material arrangement of a space: its shape, enclosure, access points, and internal components. In other words, its design. As an architectural historian, design is always my primary subject. However, in this book I define the word in the broadest terms, not just through the traditional forms of architecture and sculpture, urban design and planning, but also through patterns of everyday use, and the choreography of special events such as holiday celebrations, parades, and political demonstrations. In relation to Union Square, the creation and deployment of a series of modest fixed and moveable design elements—sculptures, fences, seating, flowerbeds, and bandstands, along with rostrums, banners, flags, and garlands—is meaningful. Taken together, these design elements and the way they are used give us clues to changing ideas about the purpose of public space over the course of time.

Among the writers whose work laid the ground for the academic understanding of public space a generation ago, two continue to be relevant to this study: the sociologist Henri Lefebvre and the literary critic Roland Barthes. Both authors were concerned with everyday urban landscapes and rituals; they understood that a study of what is right in front of you can be as rich or richer than arcane information gleaned from deep in the archive or from analysis of unbuilt design speculations. Both recognized the significance of histories, thematics, and ideologies radiating out of objects and spaces hiding in plain sight. Both recognized that occupying something is a way to begin talking about it. Guided by these thinkers, I have developed a broad understanding of design that recognizes the actions of multiple actors and agents along with many scales and temporalities of engagement. It acknowledges not only grand-scale sculptural monuments created by professional artists, but also ephemeral formations of bodies created by everyday users, both habitually and occasionally. Here my approach is informed by Lefebvre, who understood public space as a social construct, a conjunction of conceptual idea and physical place with particular formal attributes. He argued that space is permeated with social relations; it is not only supported by social relations but it is also producing and produced by social relations.¹¹ In other words, the design and use of public space is always ideological, providing tangible evidence of how various social groups see themselves and wish to be seen by others; and how they understand the concept of publicness differently at different times.

This social approach to urban design history inevitably creates a tension between reporting important historical events that took place in the Square and concentrating on efforts to shape it through formal processes of planning and design. While the primary focus is on the physical landscape, it is difficult if not impossible to understand decisions made about shaping that landscape outside of their broader cultural context. Hence I focus the first half of this book on the role of public space within an emerging industrial metropolis, New York City, from the early to the late nineteenth century, recognizing the ways in which the social relations of industrialism and capitalism were played out in public. During these years Union Square was an important site on which conflicts between the working and other classes were spatially enacted. I also touch on, in less detail, the different ways in which the city was experienced according to race and gender. The second half of this book, then, concentrates on the social life of the city in the wake of deindustrialization: as the metropolitan landscape became increasingly decentralized and new sub- and ex-urban hubs appeared to challenge the status of a once-vital urban center, I explore how it was reimagined so as to ensure its enduring importance.

Concerned as it is with the complex relationship between the use and symbolism of public space, the city is not only a form of social product, but also a form of text, a legible object-space whose meaning is constantly being rewritten. In 1967 Roland Barthes proposed the possibility of an urban semiology, or the application of methods of linguistics to help study the social meaning of cities.¹² For Barthes, figures such as public squares and monuments play a central role in the way we navigate, understand or read the city, their images literally impressing themselves in our minds. In this way Barthes understood them as elements of communally constituted language, designed not only for functional purposes but also as signifiers of broader cultural and political ideas. As with texts, he believed, their accepted meanings are fluid, changing over time and sometimes coming into conflict. (Famously, he cited the example of the Eiffel Tower, which began as a symbol of technological progress, and now signifies the city of Paris and France as a nation).¹³ Crucially for historians of architecture and urban design, Barthes notes that there is frequent disagreement between the pragmatic use and symbolic association of a particular urban space. In other words, there is often a misalignment between the purpose for which it was designed and the cultural meaning it acquires over time.

Employing Barthes’s strategy loosely, I have chosen to focus not only on Union Square itself, an opening in the Manhattan grid that creates its own unique figure, but also on a series of elements built within it. Since it was created, the Square has been occupied by a series of small constructions: first an ornamental fountain erected to commemorate the opening of the Croton Aqueduct, and then a series of statues, the most significant of which depict Presidents Washington and Lincoln. In 1872 the Square’s silhouette changed when landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux reconfigured it, lopping off the northernmost part of the oval to create a supplementary open space adjacent to the landscaped park. This paved rectangular area, known as the plaza, was specifically intended for public meetings, and was accompanied by a small pavilion that was itself reinvented in the early twentieth century. Throughout this book I give particular attention to the meanings attached to these figures, as well as to the numerous actors engaged in a struggle to control their use and to define their significance. These actors include civic authorities, private citizens’ organizations, labor unions, members of various political groups, and self-appointed community representatives. This reading of Union Square supports Barthes’s view that the meaning of urban texts is both dynamic and contentious.

Design for the Crowd comprises eight chapters arranged chronologically. Each chapter focuses on a particular moment in the life of Union Square, framing it in the context of historic ideas about public and urban life. The first chapter tells the story of the creation of the Square in the 1830s: its improvement or landscaping following lobbying by private citizens, including the lawyer and real estate developer Samuel Ruggles; the capitalist impetus underlying its conception and production; and the challenge it presented to the vision of the gridded city, at a time when that city had barely begun to be constructed. Chapters 2 and 3 describe the way in which Union Square came to represent a different kind of democratic public space in the mid-nineteenth century, a counterpoint to Central Park. Chapter 2 explores the transformation of the Square from the centerpiece of a fashionable residential area into a civic and even national arena during the Civil War. Following the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, it was the location of a mass rally; huge crowds gathered in support of the Union cause around a statue of George Washington located in the southeastern corner. The stirring image of this enormous flag-waving crowd was captured using the newly developed process of wood engraving and quickly disseminated around the world through newspaper and magazine articles. Near the end of the war, Ruggles described this rally and others inspired by it as evidence that the Square had realized its potential as a spacious national opening. The third chapter then addresses the attempted realization of Ruggles’s vision for Union Square through Olmsted and Vaux’s 1872 redesign, countering the perception of Olmsted as promoting only naturalistic city parks. His work on Union Square shows him to have been acutely attentive to the need for other kinds of city squares and parks—not those associated with individual leisure and respite