The Extra Woman by Joanna Scutts

Author:Joanna Scutts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

6

MAD ABOUT NEW YORK

Marjorie Hillis wrote Live Alone and Like It for all the girls and women who, like Kitty Foyle, dared to leave their hometowns for the thrilling, anonymous city, a city that was an idea more than a place. The book’s case studies might play out in Chicago, Boston, or St. Louis, but the arc of each story remained the same: a young, or not-so-young, single woman escapes the scrutiny and expectations of her family by moving to a place where her unfortunate singleness can be made over into a lifestyle choice. Wherever they actually lived, the myth of urban reinvention, the city as a place of opportunity and anonymity, resonated with readers. But it was New York where the pattern was laid. As a hybrid of New World energy and Old World glamour, New York shaped the look and the ethos of the twentieth-century American city. During the Gilded Age it was defined by the extremes of fabulous wealth and the abject poverty into which it crammed its dreaming newcomers, who came in waves from Europe and China, the Caribbean, and the rural South, fleeing abuse or exclusion or poverty, or simply chasing a dream. For those women who were allowed through the door, the city’s proliferating offices, factories, schools, hospitals, and department stores held out a chance at respectable work, romance, and reinvention.

During the 1930s, the physical appearance of New York City changed dramatically, and was captured in the photographer Berenice Abbott’s 1939 book Changing New York—a striking record of new buildings under construction, older structures awaiting demolition, and the men and women who witnessed the changes without, perhaps, quite seeing them. The city’s first skyscrapers, like the Flatiron and Woolworth buildings, had been built in the neo-Gothic style, with its frills and adornments in stone. But when the Chrysler Building’s gleaming Art Deco arches rose above the city, heralding the new decade, its aesthetic was triumphant. In the cabarets designed to look like cruise ships, in cars and women’s dresses, in the fourteen buildings that made up Rockefeller Center and finally opened at the end of the 1930s, the new New York style—sleek, steely, and streamlined—was visible everywhere. New bridges spanned the rivers; new subway lines linked far-flung neighborhoods, and a sense of expansive growth marked the city—even as, at street level, its citizens still struggled to get by.

The World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park ran from April 1939 to October 1940 and formed a capstone to the disparities of the 1930s. Attended by forty million people over eighteen months, it was planned as a triumphant sign that the city was emerging from the Depression, under its slogan “Building the World of Tomorrow.” At the same time, it looked backward at the nation’s founding, and the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration on Wall Street, with an enormous statue of the first president looming over the grounds. The twelve-hundred-acre grounds in Queens were, Marjorie Hillis wrote, “crammed with inventions and discoveries and designs and theories to make the future a better and more exciting and beautiful place.

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