Reading New York City

The exhibit is up, and it looks terrific! It brings together student work from seven first year "Reading New York City" courses (Natural History of NYC, Nueva York, Photographic New York, Poet in New York, Psychology in a City of Immigrants, Scenes of Recognition: Philosophy in the City, and my own Religious Geography of New York), and three of us faculty assembled (curated!) it pretty much from scratch over 5 hours today. It came together beautifully, capturing the variety and interplay not only of courses and of the aspects of New York City explored in them, but of student perspectives - which, in a seminar college, is what it's all about. The most compelling piece in the exhibit is the table below - made wholly of material salvaged from the Meadowlands Park in New Jersey, whose hills are composed almost entirely of NYC garbage. The student, Zackary Lauth, wanted to find a way to capture the spirit of that place - its reeds had sustained a wicker furniture industry and its clay produced bricks in the 19th century - and so decided to carpenter a piece of furniture using only what he found there as raw materials. But he was struck also by the beauty of insouciant nature making a home in our waste (he showed the class a photo of a wild bird's eggs in a nest furnished of old plastic bags!), and so filled his table with a miniature Meadowlands, with bits of broken brick and marble (perhaps from the old Penn Station, whose rubble was dumped there?), oyster shells and worn glass - and seeds of grass and oregano.

He dropped the table off in my office last week waterlogged from recent rain and smelling like freshly turned soil. Over the weekend, the grass sprouted. And just today tiny little leaves of oregano appeared.
Don't you want to come explore this city with students like these?

Repeating cycle

Took one of my two Religious Geography of New York classes on a field trip to Eldridge Street today. Our ostensible destination was the Museum at Eldridge Street, the recently restored landmark synagogue with the lovely chandelier at right (see the stars of David?), but my purpose was actually more ambitious. A few weeks ago we spent a good amount of time making sense of a map of the early 20th century Jewish Lower East Side from Eric Homberger's Historical Atlas of New York (below) which shows several shuls (synagogues) on each block of tenements. Theses weren't buildings, but just rooms in apartments. The Eldridge Street Synagogue was the first purpose-built synagogue - indeed, as our docent guide told us today, nobody knew what such a large Jewish house of worship was supposed to look like, neither the Presbyterian architects nor the poor Eastern European congregation! Now anyone can tell you that Eldridge Street's Jewish life is long past - the street's so full of Chinese stores that it's used in film shoots! But what you need your professor of religion for is to show you that the story is repeating itself. There are no purpose-built Chinese houses of worship yet, though there are many adapted buildings. But if you know to look for them, you'll find the neighborhood is crammed with religious places - like the tiny Pure Land Buddhist temple advertised by the yellow sign at left - making a home in the same inhospitable tenements.

A place for us?

Behold the results of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2008 which (together with the Pew Religious Landscape Survey) set so many tongues wagging recently: nonbelief is the fastest growing religion in the land!, 10% of all Americans are ex-Catholics!, "the decline and fall of Christian America" (as Newsweek put it), etc., etc. I used it in class today (Religious Geography of New York) for other reasons. (I've put it in two pics so you get the effect of having it fill the entire overhead screen with numbers; you're more likely to be able to read it, too!)
The points I was making were two. First, that statistics are hard to read - and in the case of religion also very hard to generate: "self-identification" turns out not to correlate with religious membership, and neither of those lines up as you might wish it did with attendance at houses of worship, reported belief in God (!), plans for a religious funeral, etc. Religious demography is a minefield. ARIS is as good as they get, asking about far more than beliefs and identifications and allowing interesting cross-referencing, but even it has no categories for those between religious traditions, those committed to more than one, and the "spiritual but not religious," etc. Most of my students (this class confirmed) fall into at least one of those categories, so it hit home.

My second point had to do with two important themes from earlier in the course, and let the densely-printed tables stand in for The City: (1) Robert Orsi's insistence that urban religion is particularly interesting because the new arrival in a city can't simply build a new religious center, and probably can't continue her practices from before unaltered - the landscape is already built up, and with other people's religions - so is forced to innovate. (2) The view summarized by Anna Karpathakis: Soon after they arrive, immigrants learn that Americans are more tolerant of religious diversity than they are of ethnic diversity. Accordingly, immigrants use religion as a socially tolerated mans through which they can construct their own culture and identity.... In this sense, then, religious institutions serve different functions for immigrants than they do for white middle-class American Catholics and Protestants.” (“Conclusion: New York City’s Religions,” New York Glory: Religions in the City [NYU 2001], 390)

Imagine you're an immigrant, recently arrived in the city, I said. Someone from ARIS contacts you - you're in! you get to be part of America! But where do you fit? You do want to fit, to find a place for you! We'd been reading about non-religious Jews from the ex-USSR, who have started to construct their identity in pseudo-religious terms here. If you were one of them you could choose "No Religion/None" from the many many options. But - especially as you think of the legions of Christians in America (the interviewer's form has 47 varieties) - wouldn't you more likely pick "Jewish" out of solidarity with your religious confrères? A fit or a fiddle?

I could see all sorts of things falling into place. Who knew you could learn so much from a wall of numbers!

Shiloh

In Religious Geography of New York we've just covered the 19th century, and I have students trace the outline of Manhattan and come up with their own grid. (The famous grid was imposed in 1811.) On the board I draw some schemata of street constellations - the tangle of an ancient old town, étoiles as you find in Paris (or Washington DC), a generic grid, and the beveled grid of Barcelona's Eixemple, which makes a square of every intersection. Only after students had shared their plans with vast parks, circles, museum districts, numbered neighborhoods, canals, submerged highways and the like, did I recall that we've just seen an example of regridding NYC with some of each on TV. The new NBC series "Kings" (which I checked out because it's based rather explicitly on the Biblical story of David and Saul) takes place in a new city called Shiloh, rebuilt on the ashes of what must have been New York. Scenes of Shiloh are of Midtown Manhattan only, the most famous buildings (Empire State and Chrysler) removed by computer, and towering at the center a shiny glass pyramid based on the Freedom Tower planned for the site of the World Trade Center. Can a gridded city like NYC tolerate a center?

Reading NYC in old pictures

In Religious Geography of New York today we started our historical overview. Our text is Eric Homberger's wonderful Historical Atlas of New York, but I started our discussion by handing out copies of two interesting early pictures of the city not in that book. Look at them yourself - click the pics for detail: what's so interesting about them?Let's start with the top one, which dates from 1672. What's wrong with it? Everything - including the name (the city had by that time been renamed New York, though it was a year from being briefly restored to New Amsterdamhood until the Brits traded Surinam to get it back). There are place names one might expect - a Chateau de Nassau along with other city fixtures like a Grand Rue, a Hopital, a Place de la Bourse and a commanding Maison de Ville - but the Québec perched atop the hill on the right should tell you something's very wrong. But what?

Look at the second picture. It's from 1700 and shows New York (still remembered by the old name as well) as it probably looked. What rings false here are the noble savages, and the palm trees. Palm trees? Hadn't the artist seen New York? Of course not. Like printmakers before him, he was working from descriptions, including sketches, from people who had - but it was his task and his specialty to fill them out credibly. Presumably none of his sources had bothered to note what kinds of trees covered the island of Manahato, or how the natives looked, so he inserted stock savages and palm trees he surmised might belong from similar places (or rather: images of other places). (You might still wonder why Mme Savage is holding so tight to that tree; perhaps she senses that her people will be plucked from the picture along with it.)

The arist behind the top picture was doing the same - but starting with even less. He didn't just fill in people and flora from other pictures - he imported, wholesale, a city: Lisbon. The printmaker Jollain's Parisian customers, eager to know what the new city looked like, wouldn't know any better!

My point was not that you have to take historical representations with a grain of salt. It was, rather, that artists - like historians, anthropologists, journalists - fill in the gaps of their sources to make their representations seem complete and credible. In some cases, like the top picture, they knew they were fabulating; in others, they were venturing their best guesses. A pretty standard point about reading historical materials (nay, any materials by human beings), but rather a neat way of making it, no?

Source of both pictures: Impressions of New York: Prints from the New-York Historical Society, ed. Marilyn Symmes (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)

Faith in the city

For Religious Geography of New York, I'm having students read Robert Orsi's introduction to his pioneering anthology, Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (1999). It's an amazing synthesis of history and urban studies, which argues that American religion - which tends to celebrate the rural - shaped and was shaped by a love-hate relationship with the urban. It's a complicated argument, full of ironies. Here's a taste:

For two hundred year, despite (or perhaps because of) the ceaseless urbanizing of the population, the city was cast as the necessary mirror of American civilization, and fundamental categories of American reality - whiteness, heterosexuality, domestic virtue, feminine purity, middle class respectability - were constituted in opposition to what was said to exist in cities. (5)

[C]ity people in the United States have always had to live in other people's ideas of where they live as well as in real places on the ground... Spaces on the urban landscape are both geographical sites where real people live and constructions of terror and desire among those who live elsewhere, including elsewhere in the city. (6)

Mainline American religion worries that people lose their moorings in the welter of diversity and temptation of the city. In fact, Orsi suggests, cities are sites for religious innovation and exploration - in part precisely because they provide so highly ramified an experience. That's sort of the point of my class, so I hope the students get it!

Religion of the open air

Had one of those moments of flow, of synchronicity, of rightness today. I'd taken the students in a Religious Geography of New York class on a short walk through the West Village to Abingdon Square - that's the handout below, tho' the map and picture were on opposite sides of a handbill-sized paper. The map shows our trajectory: I had half the class follow the arrows and the others go the opposite direction, with us all meeting up at Abingdon Square. There we looked at the picture in the handbill, an 1893 "Open Air War Cry" of the Salvation Army (click the pic for detail), and tried to figure out which direction it was facing and which of the buildings remained. "What do you think happened to the cathedral?" I asked coyly. "Burnt down?" No. "Torn down?" Nope. Nothing happened to it - because there never was an actual building! It's the "cathedral of the open air," conjured up by people meeting in and claiming profane public spaces for prayer and proselytizing. (Our reading was Eliade on sacred and profane. Cities are often thought of as profane, with religious sites representing refuges: the Salvation Army was literally on the front lines doing battle with the profane.)

That was fun, but the golden moment was yet to come. I walked back with half the students along 13th Street, where we noticed the Integral Yoga center, the Methodist "Church in the Village" and the beautiful portico - all that's left - of what was the Village Presbyterian Church (which you know). Then, as we waited for the light at Sixth Ave, a student pointed to the sky and asked "What's that?" It was a wire extending diagonally across the Avenue, shining in the sun, which I'd never noticed. "Must be an eruv," I said, and then, "an eruv!!!" (The drawing above is the student's.) And indeed it is, as I learned here, source also of the map at right. (An eruv defines the space within which observant Jews can carry children etc. on the sabbath.)

Now how wondrous this discovery was may not be immediately clear to you. Here are some reasons why:

1) I walk across Sixth Avenue every day, and have for years, and never noticed anything.

2) I tried to find eruv maps for the Religious Geography class in the past but somehow never found this one.

3) It was a student who saw it - confirming in the most splendid way my mantra that the value of the kind of education we offer comes from learning to see through the eyes of everyone in the room, which I'd extended for this class to the claim that we see more of the city if we see it with others.

I set out to teach the class about one kind of invisible religious structure hovering above and challenging profane space (in the past) and, with the help of students, discovered another (in the present!).

Reading New York City

Have I mentioned that my course, Religious Geography of New York, is one of nine courses sharing a rubric called "Reading NYC"? All first-year students have to take one of these classes, whose aim it is to establish a dialectic between the city and the classroom/ discipline we hope students will carry on throughout their years here. As chair of the first year, it's my duty and pleasure to schedule these courses, and I'm having a wonderful time looking through the final syllabi of my colleagues' courses: "Nueva York," "Natural History of New York," "Poet in New York," "Sex Education and the City," "Photographic NYC," "Scenes of Recognition: Philosophy in the City," "Psychology in a City of Immigrants," and "The Visual Landscape: Duality, Difference and the Modern," on whose course page I found the remarkable picture above, "Nkisi Nkonde in a Museum" by Chris Miller (2000).

Religion of progress

A week from tomorrow our classes begin, including my "Religious Geography of New York" for the first time since 2005. Just in time I rediscovered one of New York City's great secular temples, a whole complex of ziggurats to the god(s) of progress: Rockefeller Center. Lee Laurie's compass-wielding Wisdom (quoting Isaiah 33:6) is decidedly not not God... The shiny aluminum messenger below (yes, he's on the phone, with colleagues at typewriter and camera) is surely not not a divine messenger... And the frieze of universal brotherhood through trade and industry is clearly not not inspired by stained glass windows...!

I'm fond of the mosaic at the Sixth Avenue side of the center (apparently called "Intelligence Awakening Mankind" and made by a Barry Faulkner in 1933) where a trinity of THOUGHT, SPOKEN WORD and WRITTEN WORD send out a distinctively 1930s set of angels to bring about (or perhaps I should say engineer) the fall of POVERTY and FEAR and IGNORANCE. Behold people being saved from POVERTY and FEAR by PHILOSOPHY, PUBLICITY and HYGIENE. (They're backed by by PHYSICS, BIOLOGY and SPORTS.) And liberating those threatened by IGNORANCE (and backed up by NEWS, POLITICS, and POETRY) are RELIGION, DRAMA and MUSIC.