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Editorial
Dancing in the Streets: The
Arts in Postwar U.S. Cities—
Introduction[AQ1]
Journal of Urban History
1–7
© 2015 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0096144215602005
juh.sagepub.com
Julia L. Foulkes1
Abstract[AQ2]
This collection of essays on the arts in postwar U.S. cities offers a historical perspective
on the contemporary embrace of the arts as a tool for urban placemaking, neighborhood
revitalization, economic boosting, and market branding. Urban historians can add a
longer perspective to this trend to explain not only the roots of its current popularity but
also more detailed measures of the arts’ impact. These essays look at arts institutions,
artists as residents, and artworks themselves from the 1950s-70s to uncover the entangled
intersection of arts and urbanization – before the arts became a touted salvation for
stagnant economies and run-down neighborhoods.
Keywords[AQ3]
arts, urbanization, urban history, postwar America, creative economy
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[AQ4]
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, servicedriven economies. Richard Florida has received notable attention for his ability to synthesize
1
The New School, New York, NY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Julia L. Foulkes, The New School, 66 W. 12th Street, 9th floor, New York, NY 10011, USA.
Email: foulkesj@newschool.edu
2
Journal of Urban History
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 rundown 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, upand-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
Foulkes
3
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, artistsas-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
4
Journal of Urban History
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
Foulkes
5
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.
[AQ5] 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.[AQ6] 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.
6
Journal of Urban History
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.
Acknowledgments
This collection owes a great debt to Susannah Engstrom for the initial idea of a conference panel on this
topic and to Aaron Shkuda for his leadership and initiative in organizing the panel and then editing the
essays into a special section. And I owe him personal thanks for the invitation to join the conversation and
for being such a responsive and insightful partner in the editing process.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1.
2.
Detroit is much in the news since its declaration of bankruptcy but, even before then, a number of
artists have depicted the decline including photography by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The
Ruins of Detroit (Steidl, 2011); the documentary Detropia (2012) directed and produced by Heidi
Ewing and Rachel Grady; and hip hop songs of Eminem. The article from The Onion was originally
published on July 23, 2011, http://www.theonion.com/articles/artists-announce-theyve-found-all-thebeauty-they,20973/?ref=auto. In the scholarship on Detroit and the arts, Suzanne E. Smith’s Dancing
in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge: Harvard, 2001) stills stands
out for its analysis of the interaction between cultural production and urban conditions. Mark
Kurlansky’s, Ready for a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem for a
Changing America (New York: Riverhead, 2013) focuses in on the power of that particular song, in
Detroit and far beyond it. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
(New York: Metropolitan, 2007) continues the exploration of the need for joy that dance expresses in
a wide-ranging history that does not focus on urban contexts.
Richard Florida lays out the principles of his theory in The Rise of the Creative Class (New York:
Basic Books, 2002), but two additional books relate the theory more specifically to cities: Cities and
the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2004) and Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy
Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
See also his website that serves as the basis for his wide-ranging consultancy practice:
http://www.creativeclass.com/. There have been a number of responses to Florida’s ideas. Recently
Florida and Joel Kotkin batted back and forth questions about how the creative class relates to
affluency; see articles on thedailybeast.com, March 20-21, 2013; Ann Markusen critiques the ideas
Foulkes
7
from the perspective of cultural policy in “Urban Development and the Politics of a Creative Class:
Evidence from the Study of Artists,” Environment and Planning A 38 (2006): 1921-40. See also the
response by Martha Rosler, an artist who has long criticized the tie of artists to gentrification, both in
her artworks and her writings; “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism” in three parts, e-flux
journal 21 (December 2010), 23 (March 2011), and 25 (May 2011). For an earlier analysis of artists’
implication in recent waves of gentrification, see Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, “The
Fine Art of Gentrification,” October (1984): 91-111.
3. See artplaceamerica.org as well as the Project for Public Spaces (pps.org) for only the most well
known of these initiatives.[AQ7]
4. A number of sociological works have examined the more recent rise of these neighborhoods and
economies: Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995) and Naked City: The
Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); David
Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2000); Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and
Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Richard Lloyd,
Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006). For a
recent memoir on the changes in Brooklyn, see Robert Anasi, The Last Bohemia: Scenes from the
Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
5. My introduction to a special section of essays on “The Arts in Place” attempts to trace the impact of
this disciplinary-specific approach to the arts and why the “high arts” have generally received less
scholarly attention from historians than popular culture; Journal of Social History 44 (Winter 2010).
6. The cultural historians Neil Harris and Lawrence Levine led the way in understanding this shift in,
for example, Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow:
The Emergence of a Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). A
number of more recent books continue this exploration and a few stand out for their research in
urban as well as art history: Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Michele H. Bogart, The Politics of Urban Beauty:
New York and Its Art Commission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Sarah Schrank, Art
and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (2009); Steven Conn, Do
Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Jeffrey Trask,
Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
7. Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Zipp and Michael Carriere’s recent collection of articles
on the intellectual and cultural roots of urban renewal continue to uncover more of this longer
history; “Special Section: Thinking through Urban Renewal,” Journal of Urban History 39 (May
2013).
8. An overview of Gates’ work can be found on the artist’s website, theastergates.com. For more
description of the range of his work, see Kelly Crow, “The Artist Next Door,” Wall Street Journal,
October 25, 2012; Hesse McGraw, “Theaster Gates: Radical Reform with Everyday Tools,” Afterall
(Summer 2012; online journal); and John Colapinto, “The Real-Estate Artist,” The New Yorker,
January 20, 2014.
9. Ryan Reft, “FIRE and ICE: The Realities of 21st Century Urban Development,” Tropics of Meta,
January
5,
2011,
http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/01/fire-and-ice-realities-of-21stcentury.html; see also development consultant Irene S. Leung’s summary of the myopic focus on
economic growth in a blogpost, “A Respite from Justifying Public Funding for the Arts as an
Economic Growth Strategy,” Cultural Capitalists, May 12, 2011, http://culturalcapitalists.
wordpress.com/2011/05/12/arts-economic-growth/.
10. The online journal frieze hosted a wide-ranging roundtable discussion on the role that the arts play in
urban economies with Dan Fox, Nils Forman, Timotheus Vermeulen, Anton Vidokle, and Sharon
Zukin. Vermeulen and Vidokle, in particular, lay out arguments for the alternatives that artists
continue
to
provide;
“Changing-Places,”
frieze,
148
(June-August
2012),
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/changing-places/.
8
Journal of Urban History
Author Biography[AQ8]
Julia L. Foulkes is Professor of History at the New School, where she teaches courses in
urban studies, the arts, and history. She is the author of Modern Bodies: Dance and American
Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (2002); To the City: Urban Photographs of the New
Deal (2011); and the editor of a volume on “The Arts in Place” (Journal of Social History,
2010). Her forthcoming book A Place for Us: A Cultural History of West Side Story looks at
what the musical and film West Side Story reveal about mid-20th century New York.