History Of Urban Design. Cored New York

Have you ever been so angry or frustrated that you forgot what even made you upset in the first place? Sometimes, someone might be offering you a legitimate solution to what initially made you upset, but you ignore it because you’re so worked up. This is exactly what happened in the New York draft riots of 1863. The United States has been said to have a history but not a tradition of domestic violence. A history, because violence had been frequent and extensive, but not a tradition, for two reasons: First, the violence lacked both an ideological and a geographical center; it lacked solidarity.

Secondly, there has been an unbelievable lack of memory where violence is concerned. But undoubtedly the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 remain today the single largest urban civilian revolt in the history of the United States. In this essay, I shall provide a basic overview of the economic links between warfare and urban development, and suggest what links may matter in the current crisis.

I will then use a variety of data sources to get an idea of the impact of large-scale violence on urban development in the 20th century.

Cities have a large impact on global growth. This trend seems to continue, and new migrants in cities are expected to create greater economic value than they would have in a rural setting. However, even when cities are successful, the process of absorbing migrants into urban economies is not necessarily smooth. While moving to a city offers individuals more opportunities to improve their living conditions, the high cost of living and competition for livelihoods can also trap people in poverty.

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The rapid and unplanned nature of urbanization can also quickly lead to urban violence and social unrest. Widening inequalities tend to be more starkly visible in urban than rural areas. The combination of inequality, competition over scarce resources, impunity from the law, and weak city governance increases the risk of violence and potential breakdowns in law and order.

New York City was not the sprawling metropolis it is today, yet it was the largest and most prosperous city in the Union. It was reported that almost eight hundred thousand people lived in the city, mostly clustered on the south end of the island of Manhattan. Across the East River, Brooklyn was still considered a city of its own, and the suburbs of Yorkville, Manhattan Ville, and Harlem on the northern end of Manhattan were slowly being developed into what is today called uptown. Even at this time, New York was approximately a grid, with avenues running north-south (starting with low numbers to the east and moving to higher numbers west) and streets running east-west (starting with low numbers in the south and moving higher as one traveled north). Central Park, spanning from Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue starting at Fifty-Ninth Street, was in the center of the island, above the bustle of the developed part of the island that was considered “the city”.

It’s difficult to convey just how precarious, and paranoid, life in New York felt around that time. There was a pervasive sense that the social order was breaking down. Most subway trains were filthy, covered in graffiti inside and out. The trains ran late and were always crowded. The roads were in no better condition. Public restrooms were almost non-existent; dangerous and dirty when they were available at all. Men could often be seen pissing in the gutter down side streets. Times Square’s venerable old theatres and spectacular movie palaces were torn down for office buildings or allowed to slowly rot away, showing scratchy prints of cheesy second-run films or pornography, which any casual visitor might have thought was the city’s leading industry.

The city was further drawn up along lines of race and class. The New York elite, who defined the opulence of the city, made their homes in lavish mansions to the north and west. Fifth Avenue became a center of wealth and decadence, lined with expensive restaurants and mansions. Broadway, an avenue running through the center of the city, became the dividing line between the areas of the poor and the wealthy. South from Forty-Second Street along Broadway and to the East River, the city was lined with slums and shantytowns. In these homes lived immigrants and the native poor. The three largest segments of this population were Irish, German, and black. Because of their abject poverty and social status, the segregation of these groups was minimal. Although they had different characters and cultures, they were united by their situation.

There were several important areas in the slums of the city. One of these was the Sixth Ward. A filthy, low, and marshy place to live, it was dominated by poor immigrant workers, mainly the Irish. A large population of free blacks also lived in the area, as with most of the poorer sections of the city. To the north lay the Bowery, a relatively respectable area, given that it was amid the slums. Many poor German families lived in this area, clinging to some sense of dignity by working hard and abiding by the law. Southeast of the Sixth Ward was the Fourth Ward, an area similar to the Sixth save for its heavy commercial involvement in the waterfront. The Upper East Side of the city was home to many of its poor, stretched from Fifty-ninth Street south to midtown. New York was rapidly maturing into an industrial behemoth. From Lower Manhattan to Midtown, the island was an unbroken cluster of homes and businesses. Farther north the grid was only partly filled. Here and there factories and tenements popped up, like pimples on the forehead of the adolescent city.

While New York’s identity has traditionally been understood as a haven for diversity, the racial violence of the 1863 New York Draft Riots perhaps serves as the singular, representative event in the city’s history to counter such a notion. The Draft Riots revealed much about wartime New York City. An angry immigrant working-class had protested violently against the conscription efforts of the federal government; an entrenched business elite fought to maintain its control over the city; Tammany Democrats sought, successfully, although not without resistance, to develop and assert the power of their political machine, aided by their immigrant, largely Irish, the base of supporters; and African-American New Yorkers were harshly reminded that the urban North did not necessarily provide a haven from racial violence. There was a lot of racial tension in New York City during the Civil War. Many poor and immigrant whites, mostly of Irish descent, feared that if slavery ended, more African Americans would move to New York and take their jobs. The draft law brought a lot of simmering racial prejudice against African Americans to the surface. A lot of poor and working-class white New Yorkers were afraid that Union victory would put an end to their jobs, so they did not want to fight in the war. They used their fear as an excuse to commit horrific acts of violence against African Americans. For four days the mob terrorized the city’s African American population, beating and murdering innocent civilians, and destroying their property.

The riots were sparked by the first federal draft in U.S. history. By 1863 the initial enthusiasm for the Civil War had vanished, and the Union struggled to recruit enough soldiers. Therefore, President Lincoln instituted a draft, which went into effect in New York City on, Saturday, July 11, 1863. All men between the ages of 20 and 35 and all unmarried men between the ages of 35 and 45 whose names were selected were required by law to serve in the military unless they paid a three hundred dollar exemption fee. Three hundred dollars might not seem like a lot of money today, but in 1863 it could take the average person an entire year to earn that sum. Many New Yorkers were enraged that the wealthy could buy their way out of military service, while the poor and middle class, and a disproportionate number of immigrants, risked an agonizing death in the war.

Cruelty is located in time dynamicsThe — in the build-up of emotional polarization, and in the process of finding weak victims to keep a crowd mobilized when it no longer can prevail against the official targets with which it began. In fact, the first victims of the crowd’s ritualistic violence were isolated policemen and soldiers, caught away from their mass formations on the first afternoon; it was later, when police in phalanxes were no longer vulnerable targets, that torturing Negroes became the crowd’s chief preoccupation. Cruelty is not constant over time; it has its peak moments. Yet,  although cruelty has its micro-dynamics, there is a structural aspect as well. Not all riots turn to ritual mutilation, torture, and prolonged battles over hangoverhanginging corpses. When it is that violence upon one’s perceived enemies is more prolonged, ritualistic, and pointedly symbolic?

The Irish had endured years of treatment as a despised lower caste, even regarded by the Anglo-American elite as a separate race, the “black Irish” — cut off by their poverty, their Catholicism, their un-puritanical customs, and, even their local success in controlling politics in lower Manhattan. The draft riots from the outset breathed an atmosphere of resentment against hatethehate the d elite. The New York Irish, too, were out of harmony with the moral stance of the social elite engaged in an altruistic Christian crusade to free the slaves. Working conditions provided the riots’ final cause.

EvidencesEvidence suggests that urban growth may contribute to violence as an interactive variable by amplifying the effects of other forces that are potential causes of urban conflict. There are three broad categories of urban violence hasthat are relevant to any discussion of the origins of urban conflict and its effects:

1. political violence, involving both violence directed against the state and violence by the state against challengers;
2. communal and ethnic violence; and
3. criminal and anomic violence.

The study of civil violence have mainly focused on the first category, and almost all of this attention has focused on collective violence directed against the state. Such violence is often the product of mass unrest and dissatisfaction with state performance, and it includes riotriots, insurgency, rebellion, revolution, and civil war. In response, the state may itself resort to violence to address these overt challenges to its authority. Yet states may also use strong-arm tactics, such as intimidation, torture, and assassination, to prevent challenges from ever occurring. The second category is urban violence involving rival ethnic, racial, or religious groups. This appears to be an eveever morermore conspicuous form of violence in today’s world. Such rivalries often involve perceived disparities in access to political and economic opportunities. Racial, ethnic, or religious identities serve as rallying points for political mobilization to address these disparities. Least overtly political are those acts falling under the rubric of criminal and anomic violence.

The developing world offers many examples of the urban violence described above. 1863 draft riots of New York wereurban-born one such example. More than 100 people died and some 50 buildings were damaged or destroyed by fire, S including the Bull’s Head Hotel on 44th Street and the Fifth Avenue home of Mayor George Opdyke. Property damage was estimated at $1 to $5 million. Perhaps more important for the city’s real estate market, the riots led to stricter regulations for tenement conditions. The Tenement House Act of 1867, for example, specified one water tap inside each building, one toilet for every 20 residents, and no occupancy by farm animals.

There are no simple links between urban growth and violence: urban violence is influenced by a wide array of factors that interact in complex ways. Researchers must, therefore, undertake detailed case studies if they are to understand the links among these variables.

Nevertheless, cities will probably be the locus of much of the future conflict and violence in the developing world, particularly in the context of economic recession and readjustment, declining state capacity, and growing demands for democratization. When urban areas and states face converging economic and social pressures, power and privilege centered in the city will be challenged. Although rural-urban migration will continue and will, in many cases, magnify the social and economic problems of cities, it seems likely that the participants in urban violence will be urban born.

BiblographyBibliography:

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