City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York

by David M. Henkin

Cultural historian David Henkin explores the influential but little-noticed role played by reading in New York City's public life between 1825 and 1865. From the opening of the Erie Canal to the end of the Civil War, New York became a metropolis, and demographic, economic, and physical changes erased the old markers of continuity and order. As New York became a crowded city of strangers, everyday encounters with impersonal signs, papers, and bank notes altered people's perceptions of connectedness to the new world they lived in. The 'ubiquitous urban texts'--from newspapers to paper money, from street signs to handbills--became both indispensable urban guides and apt symbols for a new kind of public life that emerged first in New York. City Reading focuses on four principal categories of public street signs and store signs; handbills and trade cards; newspapers; and paper money. Drawing on a wealth of visual sources and written texts that document the changing cityscape--including novels, diaries, newspapers, municipal guides, and government records--Henkin shows that public acts of reading (to a much greater extent than private, solitary reading) determined how New Yorkers of all backgrounds came to define themselves and their urban community.

Genres: History, American History

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 2, 1998

About the author

David M. Henkin is Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous books include The Postal Age, City Reading, and (with Rebecca McLennan) Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century. He lives in San Francisco, CA, and Bozeman, MT.

Reviews

[Camille · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the public written word in the form of banknotes/paper currency, signage, banners, and newspapers of NY during the period from 1820 or so to 1865. A very readable, yet scholarly look at public reading in a large metropolis. If you are interested in city history, especially NYC history, or the history of the written, public word, then this is the book for you.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a compelling look at how city spaces--New York in particular--came to be saturated with print in the latter half of the 19th century. Signs, posters, even paper money -- all things we don't even notice reading -- drastically changed the public life of the city when they first appeared. Most notably, Henkin argues, they made it easier for people to navigate the city anonymously. Additionally, they democratized discourse to the extent that many signs and posters were not "authorized."

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wish he had talked about litter, oh well, guess that's my job

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don’t be fooled by this brevity of this book. Though a mere 177 pages in length, it’s extremely dense. Henkin’s piece is well-situated in the historiography of urban political culture, but this makes for a book that requires considerable familiarity with this literature if you want to knock this one off in an afternoon. If you aren’t that person, beware that you will re-read many parts of the book to make sure you have all the pieces.

Henkin’s book argues that “city reading,” or the reading in pubic places of texts on signs, newspapers, and currency 1) “produced and reinforced a profound democratization of authority in the city’s public life (173)”; 2) created conditions such that “politics, entertainment, and consumption shared a common stage of appeal (174)”; and 3) extended connections between urban dwellers.

This argument is important because Henkin wants to go against Habermas’ idea of 19th century political culture. For Habermas, the Enlightenment “public sphere” developed via the broadening community of letters. Bourgeois letter reading and exchange created an imagined sense of community and later, a space for public political deliberation. For Habermas, the 18th century public sphere disintegrated into a privatized, capitalist mass society in the 19th century. Enter Henkin, who says "no"! Actually, if we focus on reading as an increasingly public activity, we see that the public sphere expanded in the 19th century, despite (or in part because of) the concurrent rise of mass consumer culture. At its most basic, consumer culture was not inimical to democracy.

Henkin’s main line of argument for this has to do with an increase in the anonymous authority of texts. For example, instead of knowing that Harry’s tires are the best, urban dwellers would increasingly get their information from public signs not associated with any particular author. Henkin makes a particularly good case for this in the context of the switch from bank notes to paper money during the Civil War. Equally fascinating was the fact that after Lincoln’s assassination, people all over NYC hung signs of mourning- what a moment! Henkin has many equally interesting examples (one of my favorites being a pair of ladies who cut up street signs to display naughty words on their front porch to passers-by).

As a slight aside, imagine what it would be like to visit a strange city that had no consistent street signs or stable maps! Navigating the city would be an activity reserved for those especially in the know. Think of all the people you would have to meet and ask how to get around and where to go. Contrast this with the fact that if you don't know anything about Berlin, you don't even have to speak German to get where you want to go. Pretty amazing and important difference right there.

I think this is a good book, but there are a few things (aside from the superdense writing) that I found troublesome. First, while Henkin is careful to emphasize the fact that anonymous authority is at best unstable (fake articles in the penny press, counterfeit money, etc), he doesn’t tell us anything about the conditions for the acceptance of anonymous authority. For example, what did readers do to decide whether a source was credible? Were there rules of thumb? This story would have been much more deep if we had some notion of the everyday practices for coping with authoritative instability. This brings me to my next point about actor’s categories. Reading this left me wondering how accurately Henkin’s interpretation matched the experience of urban readers. For example, when he talked about advertising space as homologous to real estate, I sort of wondered to what extent that was just a cool concept that Henkin came up with and to what extent the urban readers thought of the two as related. I’m just not sure he made the case. One of the deepest parts of the Habermasian argument has to do with changing subjectivities of political participants. I don’t think Henkin’s book sufficiently explored those changing subjectivities from the actors’ points of view.

As a final point I want to say something about how Henkin used the notion of “print culture” fairly idiosyncratically. I think that Henkin generally avoids the pitfall of calling print the causal factor in the making of the modern city, unlike some others using the catch-all of “print culture.” Instead he says, very carefully, that “together these developments suggest a powerful connection between the rise of public reading in the city and the emergence of modern ways of voting, shopping, moving, participating in popular culture, and forming public opinion (176).” So long as we maintain our caution about the allowing pieces of paper to act as frictionless billiard balls moving around causing things to happen, I totally agree.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent assessment of the effect of ephemeral and fragmentary texts on New York City selfhood and public life in the early 19th century. Ignoring books, Henkin examines four kinds of texts: signs (street signs, storefront signs, house numbers), ephemera (trade cards, handbills, posters, parade banners), newspapers (especially the penny dailies), and paper bank note currency. He argues that these texts served to depersonalize authority in the city, creating a uniform marketplace in which individuals related to each other as points on a (literal as well as figurative) grid rather than as members of a hierarchy. They allowed newcomers, of which there were so many by the 1840s, to make their way in a world of strangers and to imagine that they nevertheless had a place in the public sphere. But Henkin complicates the Habermas model of the decline of the public sphere, arguing that New York commercial print culture did not replace "the public" but rather, in a paradoxical way, privatized it. The uniformity of design within New York's apparent advertising chaos, coupled with a comparative lack of official signage before the Civil War, meant that commercial signs actually took on the mantle of public authority in the city. I find the argument entirely persuasive.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book discusses the importance of public reading in antebellum New York. It's fairly dry and the information covered is very specific. It's interesting how the book presents the development of cities, things we take for granted now like street signs and national currency didn't exist. I would definitely say that this a more academic book for a serious student of the place and time period, less of a casual read.

[Mike Emett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Required reading for the "US History, 1787-1877" graduate seminar.