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New York City and the Ashcan school

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Virginia M. Mecklenburg

The city was filled with striking contrasts, as motorized transport competed with horse-drawn vehicles, and new arrivals jostled seasoned immigrants (see Pl. VII). This was a city of social shifts, cultural transformations, even changing geography. With the opening of the first subway lines in October 1904 (see Pl. II) and the excavation of the giant pit that became Pennsylvania Station, commercial and residential boundaries changed. The business district gravitated uptown toward the exclusive residential enclaves around Central Park. Department stores moved north from what was known as Ladies' Mile, the area along Broadway and Sixth Avenue from Ninth to Twenty-third Streets. Skyscrapers, including the Metropolitan Life Tower of 1908 and the Woolworth Building of 1913 (which captivated John Marin [1870-1953] and other modernist artists), obliterated views of the church steeples that had defined New York's skyline during the nineteenth century.

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Such was the New York of George Bellows, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan, who later became known as the Ashcan artists. Luks, Shinn, and Glackens moved to the city from Philadelphia in the late 1890s to become illustrators for major New York newspapers. Henri settled in New York when he returned from Europe in 1900. Sloan finally abandoned Philadelphia in 1904, the same year that Bellows left Ohio State University to study art in New York.

The Ashcan artists sought to decipher the excitement of a city where, in the words of the young journalist and poet John Reed (1887-1920), "within a block of my house was all the adventure of the world; within a mile was every foreign country."(1) These artists bypassed conventional panoramas in favor of local landmarks and the people who animated them - a popular bar, a street corner in a red-light district, a newly opened beach, a "club" that sponsored clandestine prize fights. Except for Henri, all were newspaper or magazine illustrators who brought a journalist's concern for topicality and a sharp eye for fleeting detail to their interpretations of the city in flux.

New York's growing size and diverse population provided endless fodder for popular culture. The city's many ethnic groups were the subject of vaudeville songs. Newspaper feature stories took millions who never ventured near the Lower East Side into back streets they had only imagined. Magazines recounted the foibles of the rich and the tragedies of the poor, and popular songs parodied the changing relationships between men and women (see Pl. V). Stories such as "The Cross Streets of New York," for which both Glackens and Shinn (see Pl. IV) drew illustrations,(2) helped guide New Yorkers through the city's odd juxtapositions of people and places. Like their colleagues in the press, the Ashcan artists probed the drama and humor of daily life in the city, and their interpretations reflected their fascination with its constant changes.

All the Ashcan artists were intrigued by the wave of immigrants who streamed through Ellis Island in huge numbers, changing the character of the city. The most likely destination for European immigrants was the Lower East Side, where central and eastern European Jews, Italians, and Chinese each had enclaves. Although it was barely three miles from the commercial center around the Flatiron Building (1902) at Twenty-third Street, the Lower East Side was another world. Sightseeing companies that advertised visits to the city's impressive architectural monuments also promised "authentic" looks at immigrant neighborhoods [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Even Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), the police reporter who became the city editor at the New York Commercial Advertiser, remembered being "as infatuated with the Ghetto as eastern boys were with the Wild West."(3)

For immigrants, the experience could be welcoming (see Pl. III) or alienating. Bartolommeo Vanzetti (1888-1927) remembered his bewildering arrival:

This morning I seemed to have awakened in a land where my language meant little more to the native (as far as meaning was concerned) than the pitiful noises of a dumb animal.... Here was the promised land. The elevated rattled by and did not answer me. The automobiles and trolley sped by, heedless of me.(4)

Lillian Wald (1867-1940), a nurse and one of the founders of the Henry Street Settlement, described what awaited new arrivals:

One night during my first month on the East Side, sleepless because of the heat, I leaned out of the window and looked down on Rivington Street. Life was in full course there. Some of the pushcart vendors still sold their wares. Sitting on the curb directly under my window, with her feet in the gutter, was a woman, drooping from exhaustion, a baby at her breast. The fire-escapes, considered the most desirable sleeping-places, were crowded with the youngest and the oldest; children were asleep on the sidewalks, on the steps of houses and in the empty push-carts; some of the more venturesome men and women with mattress or pillow staggered toward the riverfront or the parks. I looked at my watch. It was two o'clock in the morning.(5)

New York City and the Ashcan school

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Virginia M. Mecklenburg

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