The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of Americanization
Author(s): Carrie Tirado Bramen
Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Sep., 2000), pp. 444-477
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The Urban Picturesque and the
Spectacle of Americanization
CARRIETIRADOBRAMEN
State Universityof New York,Buffalo
BY THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, REGIONALISTS SUCH AS HAMLIN
Garland, as well as literary critics more generally, considered the
adjective picturesqueto mean "superficial,"an overused and commercial mode of representation.This opinion was commonplaceas early as
the 1850s when Hawthorne'sThe Blithedale Romance was criticized
for its "picturesquedetail"and its subsequentlack of "moraldepth and
earnestness."1More concernedwith surfacesthan depths,this aesthetic
continued to fall into disfavor among literary critics in the late
nineteenthcenturywhen the termcompletely saturatedthe marketplace
of guidebooks and travel narratives: common were such titles as
Picturesque America,Picturesque Italy, Picturesque California, and
Picturesque New York to name but a few. Nearly every nation in
Europe,not to mention almost every state in the Union, seemed to have
its own illustratedbook attesting to its regional uniqueness. Despite
this context of critical disrepute and commercial excess, the term
actually played a formative role in the popular representation of
Americanmodernization.In the emergentmagazine cultureof the late
nineteenth century, the picturesque sought to make modernity less
terrifying by making it familiar through a gradualist approach that
linked old concepts with new phenomena. Its hackneyed language
promised to turn the urban realities of class disparity and ethnic
heterogeneity into potentially pleasant aspects of the modern experience.
CarrieTirado Bramen is an associate professor of English at the State University of
New York, Buffalo. She is the authorof The Uses of Variety:Modern Americanism
and the Questfor National Distinctiveness.
AmericanQuarterly,Vol. 52, No. 3 (September2000) © 2000 AmericanStudiesAssociation
444
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THE URBAN PICTURESQUE
445
Of all the Americancities at the turnof the century,New Yorkbest
satisfied the material requirements for the picturesque, namely a
dramaticchasm between rich and poor combined with culturaldiversity. In 1890, it became the firstAmericancity to reach a populationof
one million; and by 1910, over three-fourthsof its inhabitantswere
either foreign-bornor the children of immigrants.In Poverty,Robert
Hunter's 1904 classic about the urbanpoor, he estimated that no less
than 25 percent of the people of New York City lived in poverty.
Among immigrant workers, he claimed that over 40 percent were
unemployed for some part of the year. In 1892, LymanAbbott noted
that New Yorkrepresenteda "microcosm"of "all the contrastsof our
modern life,-its worst and its best aspects."Anxieties about modernity focused on New York;it became the site where the fears of unruly
and polyglot hordes and the "dangerousclasses" were projected and
elaborated.For Josiah Strong, New York signified a "City of Destruction," a bastion of Romanism, socialism and decadence, which threatened the yeoman ideals of an earlier age. For Joaquin Miller in The
Destruction of Gotham, it representeda "new Babel" on the brink of
collapse: "All Europe,all Asia, all Africa, the whole wide earthhas sent
up her best, worst, weakest, strongest,most wicked, wild, and reckless
people, to the building of this new Babel."2GenderingNew York and
presenting catastropheas female hysteria, Miller concluded that the
city's excessive heterogeneity had "made her mad." A generation
before the 1920s, heterogeneityand New YorkCity were alreadyfused
in the American imaginationas "MongrelManhattan,"to borrowAnn
Douglas's phrase.3For some, this fusion inspireddisturbingimages of
bedlam, while for othersit createdthe positive basis for redefiningand
modernizingAmericannationhood.
In contrastto the sensationalfiction of sublime terroror the nativist
anxieties of looming catastrophe,what I call the "urbanpicturesque"
provided another way of representingthe metropolis, one that transformed the everyday marvels of modernity into a "whole wondrous
spectacle." The urban picturesque was the aesthetic expression of
HerbertSpencer'snotion of "progress"as the evolution from "homogeneity to heterogeneity,"which played into a triumphalistnarrativeof
nationaldevelopment.New YorkCity displayedto the nationand to the
At its
world thatits "heterogeneousforeignness"was a "realtriumph."4
most fundamentallevel, the urbanpicturesqueaffordeda new way of
apprehendingurbanspace by making inequality and immigrantdiver-
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sity expected elements of modernity. It signaled a constellation of
aestheticpracticesand meanings thatrenderedthe heterogeneityof the
city as "charming"and "quaint"ratherthan exclusively deleterious.5It
also offered a much needed aesthetic vocabulary for middle-class
inhabitantsof the city who did not resist othernessbut actively pursued
it.
ThejournalistViola Roseboro,for example,enjoyed strollingthrough
Mulberry Bend because she found the Italians "delightfully picturesque." When observing the arrival of immigrantsat Castle Garden,
she admitted that the immigrant "adds to the picturesqueness . . .
throughoutall the lower part of Manhattanisland." For the journalist
John Corbin,the immigrantsubculturesof New York suppliedthe city
with "richness and variety" by bringing a "greatervariety of food
cooked with a finer art than is to be had in any other city the world
over."6In contrastto Josiah Strong and JoaquinMiller, who found the
diverse immigrantpopulations a source of dread, journalists for The
CosmopolitanandHarper's, among otherNew York-basedperiodicals,
configuredthese same subculturesas repositoriesof picturesquepleasure. New Yorkersdepended on its immigrantsubculturesto provide
their city with its "highly distinctive savor."7
I argue that the urbanpicturesqueoperatedas a form of local color,
which capturedthe Old Worldcustoms and peculiaritiesthat existed in
the heartof modernity.But where regional variety consisted of 'native'
voices, picturesquevariety relied on foreign accents. It was part of a
more general attemptto nationalize the transnationalas distinctively
American.The urbanpicturesquewas an importantvehicle for transforming immigrantsfrom social threatsto culturalresources, as signs
not only of an urbanidentitybut also of a nationalone. It was partof a
larger process of urbanizinga national identity by linking New York
cosmopolitanism with modern Americanism. As early as 1882, the
journalist James McCabe considered New York "thoroughlyAmerican." The "people of New York representevery nationalityupon the
globe, and thus give to the city the cosmopolitancharacterwhich is one
of its prominentfeatures.But no city on the continentis so thoroughly
American as this."8The urban-picturesquetried to preserve cultural
peculiarities as distinctively American, by embracing the New York
metropolis as definitive of the nation and even of the world.
The aesthetic discourse of the urban picturesquehelped to equate
ethnic variety and urbanismwith modernAmericanism.More specifi-
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THE URBAN PICTURESQUE
447
cally, this aesthetic operatedwithin a largernarrativeof Americanization, defined not in terms of assimilationbut ratheralong the lines of
RandolphBourne's ideal of "Trans-NationalAmerica."9In contrastto
the melting-pot,the traditionaltropeof Americanacculturation,Bourne's
model of national incorporationwas based on the antithesisof fusion,
namely unity-in-discreteness.According to this model, immigrants
should retain their "foreign savor,"which would distinguish modem
America from the supposedly homogeneous nationalities of Europe.
The main task of the urbanpicturesquewas to convey such peculiarities-to demonstrate to the middle-class reader that "richness and
variety"were part of the metropolitanexperience. To do this, periodicals used a genre that I call the "intra-urbanwalking tour."As the
modem descendentof the eighteenth-centurygenreof urbanspectatorial
literature,which provided panoramictours of London in installments,
the intra-urbanwalking tour provided glimpses or brief sketches of
New York ratherthan elaboratepanoramicdescriptions.For the lateVictorianreaderwhose sense of time was increasinglyinterruptedand
discontinuous, the intra-urbanwalking tour was, ironically, an ideal
sort of genre for the urban commuter.10While sitting on the Third
Avenue "L" or on the cross-town trolley, reading about downtown
perambulationsprovideda sense of contactwith the "other"half, crosscultural encounters that were making more difficult to experience
directly and meaningfullythe new technologies of mobility.The intraurbanwalking tour providedincreasinglybusy readerswith a sense of
"roughandruggedpleasure"at a time when urbanspace was becoming
highly differentiatedaccordingto race, ethnicity and class.
This article has two linked objectives. First, I will demonstratehow
the intra-urbanwalking tours exemplified the Boumean model of
culturalincorporationby casting culturaldifference in terms of unityin-discreteness.As an alternativeto culturalfusion and blending, the
urban picturesque insured that particularitywould be maintainedby
mapping cultural difference onto distinct neighborhoods. It transformed the economic, racial and ethnic divisions that characterized
urban space into an aesthetic spectacle. Second, I will argue that the
urbanpicturesquedid more than simply naturalizepoverty and immigrants as part of the urbanscape.It also formulated a hierarchy of
values in which certaintypes of poor urbanpopulationswere included
at the expense of others. On the one hand, the urbanpicturesquewas
representationallygenerous, expanding the bounds of sympathetic
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depictionto include the visages of impoverishedEuropeanimmigrants
who were more frequently cast as either a threatening mass or a
marginal presence. On the other hand, the urban picturesque rarely
strayedfrom these immigrants,and when it did, as I will laterelaborate,
it turned typically to the Chinese. Omitted entirely from its field of
vision were African Americans, who were also arrivingin New York
City in record numbers at the turn of the century. Picturesque
perambulatorsrarely ventured into the black neighborhoods of the
Tenderlointo comment on the "quaint"atmosphereor the "charming"
visages." Blackness signaled the representationallimit of the picturesque. Concerned with the "smiling aspects" of modem life, the
picturesquecould not addressuncomfortabletopics such as racism and
racial segregation.The picturesquedisavowed the ideological consequences of the nascent black migration northwardby placing them
beyond its field of vision.12
In stark contrast to the urban picturesque'srefusal to "see" blackness, the same aesthetic went to great lengths to present Southernand
Eastern Europeanimmigrantsas "charming."One way in which this
was done was to make swarthiness beautiful. Viola Roseboro, for
example, found the Italians"delightfullypicturesque,"largely because
"the street is full of swarthy,unkemptmen." Even in the fiction of the
period, such as in William Dean Howells's novel A Hazard of New
Fortunes,Basil Marchtook pleasurein the "picturesqueraggedness"of
the Italian immigrants and he especially "liked the swarthy, strange
visages," because "he found nothing menacing for the future in
them."13The urbanpicturesqueemerged at the intersectionof ethnicity
and class, where swarthinesswas inextricablefrom poverty and both
were potentially "delightful."
Making swarthiness picturesque was part of a larger process of
expanding the racial category of whiteness to include its darkerhues.
Althoughthe HarvardscientistNathanielShalerin 1897 lumpedblacks
togetherwith the new immigrantsas permanentlyinassimilable,many
social scientists as well as magazine journalists sought to distinguish
between blacks and those who are now referredto as "white ethnics."
Scholars such as William Z. Ripley, an economist at MIT, spoke of the
"varietiesof whites" as a way to include Alpines and Mediterraneans
with Anglo-Saxons in a discussion about the "races of Europe."
Sociologists such as Henry Pratt Fairchild similarly referred to the
"European varieties within the white race." Another conservative
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THE URBAN PICTURESQUE
449
sociologist and eugenicist, Edward A. Ross, who coined the phrase
"race suicide,"referredto Slavic immigrantsas a "race,"as a "nationality,"and as "white."In his 1914 article"TheSlavs in America,"Ross
commentedon their presence in the United States: "No doubt between
five and six per cent. of the whites in this country are of Slavic
blood."14Although Ross referred to them as a "race," he found no
disturbinginconsistencybetween being white andbeing Slavic. His use
of "race"when referringto Slavic immigrantswas more akin to the
late-twentieth-centurynotion of ethnicity.This understandingof "race"
as a sign of white ethnicity is also seen in Alfred Holt Stone's 1906
article on racial tensions in the U.S.:
We speak loosely of the race problems which are the result of European
immigration. These are really not race problems at all. They are purely
temporaryproblems, based upon temporaryantipathies between different
groups of the same race, which invariablydisappearin one or two generations, and which form only a temporarybarrierto physical assimilationby
intermarryingwith native stock."5
At the turn of the century, there was a growing sense that the
category of "race" was limited, that it could not take into account
differences that were perceived as cultural rather than biological.
Writing before the emergence of the contemporaryuse of ethnicity,
these scholarswere searchingfor a languagewith which to expandand
differentiatewhiteness. In Whitenessof a Different Color: European
Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobson has
argued that during the turn of the century "becomingAmerican"and
"becomingCaucasian"were intertwined.Because of their racial status
as "free white persons,"Europeanimmigrantsbecame the normative
model of assimilation. Their inclusion depended upon "the racial
exclusion of others."As Jacobson writes, "The Europeanimmigrants'
experience was decisively shaped by their entering an arena where
Europeanness-that is to say, whiteness-was among the most importantpossessions one could lay claim to. It was their whiteness, not any
kind of New Worldmagnanimity,thatopened the Golden Door."''16
One
purposeof this essay is to tracehow such a process of Americanization
occurred in aesthetic practices of the period, a process in which
Europeanimmigrantswere deemed "charming"precisely because they
were a different shade of white.
This is not to say, however, that the expansion of whiteness was
entirely a democratizing gesture; race theorists such as Ripley still
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maintainedan internalhierarchywith Nordics at the top. Racialism still
occurred within shifting perceptions of whiteness. The Senate Commission on Immigrationreportedin 1911 thatPoles are "darkerthanthe
Lithuanians"and "lighterthan the average Russian," which suggests
that European immigrants were not perceived as monolithic, but
differentiatedaccordingto racial nuances and phenotypicgradations.17
As whiteness became more inclusive it also became more segmented,a
tension that was at times strategicallysuppressedthroughthe egalitarian rhetoric of variety. When Henry Pratt Fairchild, for example,
referredto the "Europeanvarieties within the white race,"he did so to
consolidate the new immigrants with the already established native
white populationas a way to cohere the racial formationof the nation.
The expansion of whiteness relied on the rhetoricof variety to create a
sense of racial coalition, while at the same time utilizing internal
hierarchies among the different varieties to maintain Anglo-Saxon
supremacy.The revision of whiteness in the urbanpicturesquewas a
response to nativist sentiments as well as their modern reformulation
accordingto a nascent notion of variegatedwhiteness.
Not only did the picturesquejuxtapose swarthy immigrantsagainst
Anglo-Saxons, it also contrastedthe new immigrantswith native born
AfricanAmericans.The rhetoricof picturesquevarietyproducedracial
distinctionsthatultimatelylegitimatedthe new immigrantsas potential
citizens at the expense of African Americans.Where one became part
of the color and variety of the city, the other by implication was
renderedinvisible. By embracingthe good immigrantswhile banishing
dangerouscitizens, the urbanpicturesqueraised questions about what
kinds of variety were considered acceptable within the American
commonwealth. How various could variety be? The answer to this
question was partly the result of a growing economic rivalry in the
early twentiethcenturybetween black andEuropeanimmigrantlabor,a
rivalry that the New Republicdescribed as a "silent conflict on a
gigantic scale."'8 The racial limits of the picturesque were also
determined by the concept's residual meanings. From its temporal
migration from eighteenth-centuryBritain to late-nineteenth-century
America and its spatial migration from the country to the city, the
picturesquebroughtwith it ideological baggage that contained,among
other things, racial prescriptions. The picturesque was, moreover,
highly racializedlong before it arrivedin the United States. In orderto
understandthe residual racial traces of the turn of the century urban
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picturesque, it is important to highlight formative moments of its
eighteenth-centuryincarnation.
The Picturesqueas a TravelingTheory
That a concept which itself migratedfrom Britainto America should
be the aesthetic for Americanizing the European migration to New
York City exemplifies Edward Said's notion of a "travelingtheory."
Accounts of theoretical transplantationand circulation, according to
Said, necessarily involve the acknowledgmentthat movement into "a
new environment is never unimpeded." There are new modes of
representationand institutionalizationthat differ from the original
usage. In regardto the picturesque,this would include the differences
between rurallandscapesand ethnic urbanscapes,between the pictorial
composition of "high"art and the periodical sketches associated with
"low" art. But there are also similarities. A "traveling theory" still
possesses a "discernibleandrecurrentpatternto the movementitself."9
There are two recurrentpatterns that link the eighteenth-century
aesthetic practice with its modern counterpart.First, the picturesque,
whetherin the context of the countrysideor the urbanscape,operatesas
an aesthetic middle-ground.Originallytheorizedin the late eighteenth
centuryby the ReverendWilliam Gilpin, then furtherconceptualizedat
the turnof the nineteenthcenturyby Uvedale Price and RichardPayne
Knight, the picturesque emerged as a third category of aesthetic
pleasure beside the sublime and the beautiful. It includes within its
domain those numerousobjects, such as trees, rocks and groves, that
give delight to the eye but cannot be classified within these two
Burkeancategories.Not requiringthe classically trainedeye necessary
to detect beauty,and not possessing the infinite awe of the sublime, the
picturesqueis somewhere in the middle, a domesticatedsublime that
transforms shock into mild surprise. Lacking the vastness of the
sublime and the smoothnessof the beautiful,the picturesquerepresents
"roughness,""suddenvariation"and "untouchedvarieties."This eighteenth-centuryaesthetic, with its emphasis on vision and on landscape
as an ornamentedsurface,finds in the contrastsbetween streams,hills
and foliage, together with the decayed cottage and disheveled gypsy,
endless occasions for entertainment.
In contrast to the beautiful, which signifies a harmonious and
symmetricalblend of equivalent parts, the picturesqueprefers asym-
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metrical distinctions and hierarchies of preference. Contraryto the
sublime, which suggests "infinity" and a "boundless ocean," the
picturesquedependson bordersor what Uvedale Price describes as the
"shape and disposition of its boundaries."What ultimately distinguishes the picturesquefrom its parent categories is its asymmetrical
composition defined within distinct boundaries.20It does not claim to
include everythingwithin an all-encompassingpanorama,but ratherit
provides modest glimpses and sketches of particularscenes.
The second recurrentpattern includes its racial politics, in which
blackness is the banishedterm that defines "picturesquevariety."In A
Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the
Beautiful (1801), Uvedale Price associates "variety"with whiteness
and "absolutemonotony"with blackness. Whereaswhiteness signifies
a chromatic "union of all other colors," blackness represents the
"extinctionof all colors." He endows these colors with moral significance in which whiteness represents inclusivity and "purity,"while
blackness is pejoratively defined as pure "absence."The allegorical
language of white superiorityand black inferiority, which takes the
form of varietyversus monotony,is ultimatelyabandonedand replaced
with an unabashedlyracist discussion about the politics of hair:
One very principalbeauty in hair, is its loose texture and flexibility; by
means of which it takes . . . a number of graceful and becoming forms,
without any assistance from art;and, like them too, is capable of taking any
arrangementthat art can invent. Add to this, the great diversity of colours,
from the darkestto the lightest in all their gradations;the glossy surface;the
play of light and shadow, which always attends variety of form: and then
contrastall this with the monotony of the black wooly hair of the negro! Its
colour, nearlythe same in all of them, and the form, withoutany naturalplay
or variety, and incapableof receiving any from art!21
Price associates the picturesquewith the "loose textureand flexibility"
of white people's hair, and conversely links the anti-picturesquewith
the "monotonyof the black wooly hair of the negro."The picturesque
in its very origins uses the language of diversity to promote white
supremacy.Its aestheticproclivities highlight a moral allegory:variety
becomes synonymous not only with "beauty in hair" but also with
virtue and probity, while blackness suggests the "absence"of moral
rectitude.The racial aestheticsof hair also suggest two opposing forms
of union. Where white people's hair describes a varied, "loose" and
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453
flexible union, a pluralistic union, the latter implies a union of
sameness, uniformityand "monotony,"a union thatexcludes flexibility
and variety,borderingon totalitarianism.Price's aestheticdiscussion of
hair further develops into a metaphor of civil society: flexible hair
suggests democratic unions, whereas inflexible "wooly" hair implies
an oppressive order.Uniformity,which Price describes as "so great an
enemy to the picturesque,"is given a racial inflection that explicitly
casts democraticvalues and black people as incompatible.
Price's contemporary,Richard Payne Knight, does not define the
picturesqueand its opposite in such blatantlyracist terms, but he does
discern the ideal figure of picturesquebeauty, a figure who encapsulates both the "roughness"and otherness of the English countryside.
For Knight, this figure consists of "gypsies and beggar girls," whose
"dirty and tattered garments, the disheveled hair, and general wild
appearance . . . are often picturesque."22From its beginning, the
picturesquehas included a "variety of tints," which translatesinto a
racial spectrumthat stops with swarthiness.Just as the picturesquewas
interposed between the sublime and the beautiful, so swarthiness
represents that liminal stage between whiteness and blackness. The
aesthetics of landscape descriptionexplicitly and implicitly provide a
racial allegory of civil society, using the language of abundanceand
variety to demarcatethe point of racial exclusion.
From Gypsies to Rag Pickers
If the picturesquewas a traveling theory, then gypsies and beggar
girls were its traveling figures. They were the eighteenth-century
antecedentsof the late-nineteenth-centuryimmigrants,and both were
emblematic of the migratory movements of the dispossessed, the
mobility of those who did not own propertybut went in search of it.
The immigrant traversed the city rather than the pastoral landscape
gleaning the remains of overproductionin the shadows of opulence.
Gypsies and immigrantsrepresentedthe racial limits of the picturesque
with their swarthiness,but they also representedits class limit. Just as
the eighteenth-centurypicturesquetraveler was not interested in the
small farmerwho was working hard to maintaina modest crop but in
the peripateticfigures of the countryside, the late-nineteenth-century
urban picturesque traveler was not intrigued by the economically
mobile immigrantfamily, moving from their downtown tenement to
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their Brooklyn home. Nor were they generally curious about the
working classes. The urban picturesque tended to represent the
Lumpenproletariat,which only seems appropriategiven that lumpen
means "ragsand tatters."23
Rag pickers roamed the city streets searching through refuse for
fragments of clothes and morsels of food that they could either
consume or sell. Throughtheir scrutinousgaze, waste acquiredvalue.
Refuse was recycled into second-handcommodities.Alfred Stieglitz's
photograph "The Rag Picker" (fig. 1) highlights a solitary woman
under a street-lampin the Bowery sifting through the detritus of the
city. As the modem counterpartof gypsies and beggar girls, the
immigrant-as-rag-picker
becamean archetypein the periodicalsketches.
"much
For Viola Roseboro,
of the picturesqueness"of the Neapolitan
immigrants on Crosby Street was that they were "rag-pickers"and
represented"the poorest and dirtiest of their race." In 1892, Mariana
Van Rensselaer explored "Shantytown,"that liminal space of New
York where the ragpickerscongregated,because she found "perpetual
picturesquenessin their tottering,pitiful, vanishing"ways, reminiscent
of those "oftengreenly environed,relics of bucolic days."24Located on
the metropolitanperiphery,Shantytowndesignateda transitionalspace
between the countryand the city, between the residualagrariansetting
of the picturesqueand an emergenturbanone.
The rag picker was also a figurative analog to the picturesque
traveler.The rag picker's search for valuables amid refuse mimicked
the traveler's own quest for unusual sights amid ruins. The urban
picturesquecapturedthe consumerismof the poor, an impaired consumerismthatboth disturbedand fascinatedthe picturesquetraveler,as
a grotesque counterpartto their own pecuniary desires. "Modem
consumption,"according to Rachel Bowlby, "is a matternot of basic
items bought for definite needs, but of visual fascination and remarkable sights of things not found at home." Similarly, Gilpin acknowledged that the "love of novelty is the foundationof this pleasure."25
By
drawing a parallelbetween the rag picker's pursuitfor materialgoods
and the picturesquetraveler'sand reader'squest for visual curiosities,
the picturesque sketches mediated the economic and ethnic chasm
between the abject immigrant-"the poorest and the dirtiest"-and the
middle-class consumer.
By inscribingimmigrantrag picking within the consumeristrhetoric
of pecuniary desire, the picturesque traveler naturalized immigrant
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THE URBAN PICTURESQUE
455
Fig. 1. "The Rag Picker," Alfred Steiglitz, in "Prosperity," Scribner's 33 (Mar.
1903): 268.
poverty alongside their swarthiness. Penury and ethnicity became
linked as familiar sights of modernity; so when late Victorian
perambulatorswitnessed rag picking first-hand,they were remindedof
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the "pictures"from theirparlorroom reading.The picturesquetours of
New York are examples of what Stephen Rachman in a slightly
different context has called "devotional seeing," which is a form of
"culturalrecognition"thattranslatesactualsights into a form of literary
insight, by which "cities are imagined before they are experienced."26
But while Rachmanrefers to "formalliterature,"the urbanpicturesque
relied on representations from the nascent mass media. The late
Victorian flcneur recognized poverty and swarthy immigrants as
familiar sights of modernitypartly on the basis of the textual cues of
intra-urbanwalking tours. By making the alienation of the rag picker
less alienating for the viewer, these tours transformedthe shock of
modernityinto a mild surprise.
Intra-UrbanWalkingTours
and the Rise of Professional Spectatorship
Modernity'sscribe was the journalistwho WalterBenjaminreferred
to as the descendentof the mid-centuryfldneur. But unlike this earlier
figure, who wanderedthe Parisarcadessatisfyinghis appetitefor urban
observationas an end in itself, the late-nineteenth-centuryjournalists
were far more concernedwith pleasing theirreaderswith extraordinary
spectacles amidst the "picturesque decay" of the urban ghetto.27
Pressured by deadlines as well as by sales, the turn-of-the-century
journalistwas far from the leisurely perambulatorof an earliergeneration. In the search for novelty, this journalism,unlike the sensationalism of George Lippardand otherluridaccountsof the mid-centurycity,
unveiled the nooks and cranniesof the metropolisin the daylightrather
than in the more mysteriousgaslight as a way of presentingmodernity
as a curious and picturesquespectacle of wholesome amusement.The
daylight, however, did not make the city any easier to decipher.The
intra-urbanwalking tours were part of the professionalization of
spectatorship,when readers were encouraged to leave the looking to
the urbanconnoisseur.A confidentguide was the key to the picturesque's
success. For the picturesque to work, that is, for the reader to find
pleasure in the seemingly frightening areas of the city, the dauntless
manner of the picturesquetraveler must put the reader at ease. The
tours provideda pedagogy of spectatorship,instructingthe readerhow
to transformthe congested and impoverisheddistrictsof the metropolis
into a sense of "roughand rugged pleasure."After all, how was one to
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overcome his or her own anxieties about immigrationand modernization while accompanyingsomeone equally as nervous?
Because of its emphasis on professionalism,the intra-urbanwalking
tour is the most appropriategenre to look at when consideringhow the
concept of the picturesque was disseminated in turn-of-the-century
America.Not only was it the genre where the actualterm"picturesque"
was used most frequently,but it also accrued the most authorityin
defining what the picturesqueelements of city life were. Confined to
the parametersof a distinctneighborhoodor ethnic group, the walking
tours merely titillated their readers with a brief sketch rather than
overwhelming them with panoramas.Offering only a partial field of
vision, the picturesque was an unabashedly subjective discourse,
characterizedby such terms as "interesting"and "charming."The
power of the intra-urbanwalking tour was derived from its partiality,
both in terms of its limited gaze as well as its predilections.What gave
this partialitycredibility was that it supposedly came from an urban
professional.Not just anyone's opinions mattered,but only those who
possessed the skill, knowledge and confidence of the cosmopolitan
expert.
Spectacles of Americanization
Just as the picturesque as an aesthetic category represented a
domesticated sublime where boundlessness was converted into finitude, so the urban picturesqueAmericanized foreignness through a
notion of narrativeincorporation.Whether it was Viola Roseboro's
study of the Italians of New York or Wong Chin Foo's account of
Chinatown,these intra-urbanwalking tours invoked the picturesqueas
a way to tame the wildness of the other by inscribing foreignness
within the aesthetic parametersof culturalpeculiarities.By converting
the exotic into a mild curiosity, the intra-urbanwalking tours were
narrativesof Americanization,in which descriptionsof the foreignness
of immigrantsbecame a discussion of their potential contributionsas
citizens. These narrativesof incorporation,however, did not define
Americanizationas homogenization or "Anglo-Saxonising."Instead,
they configured Americanization in the vein of Bourne's
"transnationalism,"which imagined American national identity as a
federation of distinct European cultures. "America is transplanted
Europe,"writes Bourne. "Its colonies live here inextricablymingled,
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yet not homogeneous.They merge but they do not fuse."28Reminiscent
of Price's descriptionof the picturesqueas "blendedbut distinct"and
Knight's notion of civil society as divided parts connected to a whole
("Divide the parts,and yet connect the whole"), Bourne'sconfiguration
of a heterogeneous union follows a similar cultural cartography,
namely unity-in-distinctivenessor what Bourne calls a "side by side"
union in which the parts are arrangedas distinct and discreet within a
national whole: "a world-federationin miniature."The urbanpicturesque anticipatedBourne's ideal: that nationalunity can be established
without uniformity.
In order for America to be unified but not uniform, the immigrants
would have to retainculturalmarkersof authenticity.The "dangerous"
Jew, according to Bourne, was one who had "lost the Jewish fire,"
whereas the "good" Jew "stuck proudly to the faith of his fathers."29
Bourne similarly loathed immigrantswho had not "remaineddistinct"
and referredto them as "culturalhalf-breeds,"because they compromised theirauthenticityby adoptingthe tastes of mainstreamAmerican
culture. "Our cities are filled with these half-breeds who retain their
foreign names but have lost the foreign savor."30They now attended
Americanmovies, sang popularsongs, and read cheap newspapers.No
longer containing the traces of the Old World, the assimilated immigrantput the picturesque,and its largerprojectof a revampedAmerican
exceptionalism, into crisis. With the "half-breed"now consuming the
same commercial culture that the picturesquetraveler was trying to
avoid (and which ironically the journalistrelied on to sell sketches to
national periodicals), the question then arose: how could authentic
othernessbe conserved?
The best way to conserve the "foreignsavor"of immigrants,while at
the same time incorporatingthem within a nationalunion, is to adopt a
notion that Bourne called "dual citizenship."This means that immigrants have to be politically and spiritually"welded" as citizens but
remain culturallydistinct. In the intra-urbanwalking tours, the urban
picturesque operates as a textual sign of ethnic distinctiveness and
authenticity;it reassuresthe readerthatothernessstill exists among the
"poorest and dirtiest," and that it is a necessary element of modern
Americanism.Within this genre, the objective of the picturesqueis to
performthis ideal of "dual citizenship"by converting urbandenizens
into nationalcitizens withoutsacrificingthe culturalparticularityof the
immigrant group. Viola Roseboro's "Italians in New York" (1888)
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illustrates the possibility of "dual citizenship" by representing the
Italians as both "picturesqueforeigners"and as good potential "citizens." They are, ironically, both foreign to and compatible with
American democraticvalues.
The tour begins on Crosby Street, the heart of the downtown
"colony," which is described as an "uncommonly foreign-looking"
street because of "its narrowness,together with the height of its big
gloomy tenements."But Roseboro soon admitsthatthe streetis "rather
attractive,"largely due to the fact that the "inhabitantsreturnto their
native habits"in the hot summermonthsof New Yorkand "campout in
domestic platoons on the sidewalk." In describing the Italians going
native, the tour finds much "picturesqueness"in the costumes and
customs of the ghetto: the "big gold rings in their ears regardless of
sex," the women's "flatly braidedhair,"and the peasant "head-dress"
of a linen bonnetthatis "so charminglybecoming to theirdarkfaces."31
This catalog of cultural peculiarities represents an index of their
authenticity:they are "good"immigrantsratherthan assimilated"halfbreeds."
The picturesquedescriptionsof Italianpeculiaritiesare presentedas
a series of "pictures,"synchronicphotographsthat attemptto preserve
these culturaldistinctionsby freezing them in time. Just as thefldneur,
according to Walter Benjamin, establishes tableaux vivants from the
fleeting moments aroundhim, so the urbanpicturesquetravelerstalls
the gradual loss of "foreign savor" by arrangingthe immigrantsinto
various still postures. During one of her tours to Crosby Street, she
"saw one not-to-be-forgottenlittle picture,"which she describes to the
reader:
[I]t was a woman, a beautiful young woman, with a beautiful child upon
her arm,and her dark,coarse shawl drawnover her own head and the child's,
and around him, achieving one of those mysteriously simple and artistic
effects that semi-barbarians,and they only, seem able to master. "Picturesque" and "charming"and "artistic"are words apt to be badly overworked
in writing about the Italians.32
Roseboro, in apologizing for using such a hackneyed word to refer to
the Italians, demonstratesa familiar anxiety surroundingthe picturesque: thatit is both a sign of particularityand a representationalclich6.
It signifies the liminal space between distinctiveness and stereotype,
between specificity and generality.But the overuse of the term has the
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advantageof naturalizingthe Italians' presence:their association with
the city becomes as expected as the word "picturesque"is to describe
them. Yet in an attempt not to make their presence too ordinary,
Roseboro has to depict them as moderately exotic. Exemplifying the
residualmeaning of the picturesque,as the "half-waystation"between
the sublime and the beautiful, Roseboro refers to the Italians, and
particularlythe image of mother and child, as "mysteriouslysimple"
rather than "mysteriously"enigmatic or complex, and in terms of
ratherthan complete primitives.
"semi-barbarians"
Furthermore,Roseboro inscribes the mother and child within a
familiarimage of Catholiciconography.At the turnof the century,there
was a growing enthusiasmfor the premodern,and specifically for the
Catholic objet d'art-as emblematic of ritual and sacrament in the
midst of an increasinglysecularculture.Walkingtours such as this one,
which attempted to incorporate the Italians within a modem and
revised notion of Americanism, also contained elements of
antimodernism,which Jackson Lears has described as a "taste for the
exotic, a desire to preserve the old," which could coexist with "a zeal
for industrialgrowth."33But there is also a more generous reading of
this "picture,"which underscoresthe positive attributesof being cast as
premodem. By inscribing the impoverished Italian mother and child
within the topos of classical renaissance painting, Roseboro converts
the profaneinto the sacred.As an example of "devotionalseeing," with
painting rather than literature as the referential medium, the urban
picturesque sanctifies the poorest of Mulberry Bend by enshrining
Catholic mothers as signs of inviolability in the midst of slum life.
Anotherway in which Roseboro presentsthe Italiansas picturesque
immigrantsand safe potential citizens is by explaining their indifference toward labor unions: a defensive move in a post-Haymarket
climate that associated all immigrantswith radicalism. "The Italians
are generally, and so far remarkably,little influenced by our labor
agitations." The sub-text of this picturesque tour is an attack on
"organizedlabor"and againstthe dangerousimmigrant,who is actively
involved in the "labor question."34Just as the religious imagery
elevates the Italians above the everyday struggles for survival, so this
second use of the picturesquefurtherremoves them from the larger
tensions and conflicts of the city. The Italians, for Roseboro, are
"delightfullypicturesque"not only because the women wear bonnets,
but also because the men and women are "indifferentto politics." As
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Fig. 2. "A Political Discussion at the Independent Cafe on Grand Street," Jacob
Epstein in Hutchins Hapgood, "The Picturesque Ghetto," Century Magazine 94
(July 1917): 472.
citizens, their contributionto the nation will be in terms of culture,in
sharingwith the nationtheir"artisticinstinct."By earmarkingthe Italians
as picturesque,this tour incorporatestheir presence within a national
publiccultureon specific terms:thatthey adda degreeof "foreignsavor"
withoutchallengingthe structuresof class differentiation.
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Wherethe picturesqueoperatesin Roseboro'stour as a way to make
the Italiansless threateningthroughtheirpolitical indifference,it works
in Hutchins Hapgood's "A PicturesqueGhetto"as a way to make the
socialism of the Jewish immigrants benign. In both instances, the
picturesque is a way to de-politicize immigrantcommunities and to
reduce the inhabitantsto specular oddities ratherthan active agents.
This sketch, originally written in at the turn of the century and later
published in the CenturyMagazine, employs the familiar language of
comparison to define the Jewish Ghetto as "richerthan any other."35
The picturesque is synonymous with the rhetoric of subcultural
exceptionalism, where the traveler is on an endless quest to find the
"mostinteresting"immigrantquarters.Like Bourne'stransnationalism,
where subculturaluniquenessreinforces cosmopolitan supremacy,the
Ghetto, we are told, is a metaphorof New York, since both embody
"infinite variety," "vitality" and "picturesqueness."A "picturesque"
attributeof the Jewish immigrantcan be found in the conflict between
the "old culture" and "new ideas." What emerges out of this clash
between residual habits and new ideas are "Socialistic difficulties,"
which seem out of place in "American conditions."36Hapgood expoundsupon the "quaintness"of Jewish socialism in his urbansketches
writtenduringthe turnof the centuryand later collected and published
as The Spiritof the Ghetto.He refersto the "Intellectualsof the Ghetto"
as its "mostpicturesqueand interesting"element, and his entirebook is
a study of this community, which consists of anarchists, socialists,
editors and writers. In assessing the significance of socialism among
Jewish immigrant intellectuals, Hapgood reassures his readers that
"socialism is not a permanentlynutritive element in the life of the
Ghetto, for as yet the Ghetto has not learned to know the conditions
necessary to American life, and can not, therefore, effectively react
against them."37
What is consideredmost dangerous-immigrant radicalpolitics-is
a sourceof "picturesque"pleasure.For Hapgood,Jewish "socialism"is
a residual mode of thought that only serves to make coffeehouse
discussions more engaging. JacobEpstein'saccompanyingillustrations
reinforcethis point by depictingthe intellectualsocialists in passionate
debate in caf6s ratherthan on picket lines (fig. 2). Although the tours
include various scenes of immigrants,few portraythem working.They
may be walking home from work but they are rarely at work. Rather,
they are portrayedas consumers: drinking a cup of coffee, buying a
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463
newspaper,or shopping at the market.The picturesqueis used to take
the sting out of subculturaldissent by reducingopposition to a sign of
culturaluniqueness.Hapgood'sand Roseboro'sintra-urbantoursincorporate Southernand EasternEuropeanimmigrantsinto the American
scene by framingthem as mainly producersand consumersof a distinct
European subculture.Socialism is to Jewish immigrantswhat "bonnets" are to Italianwomen: quaint and charmingindicatorsof cultural
authenticity,which pose no real threatto the cosmopolitannation.
De-politicizing immigrants was the price of the ticket for their
admission into a transnationalAmerica. On the one hand, the urban
picturesquesignified an altruisticaesthetic:it expandedthe bounds of
representation to include "the lowest races of Europe" within a
modernized notion of American nationalism. On the other hand, the
urban picturesque included these newcomers only on certain terms.
First, immigrant cultures had to be depicted as premodern, as the
culturalrelics of an earliertime thatexisted within the belly of the beast
of modernity.Second, the new immigrantswere portrayedprimarilyas
icons of culture ratherthan of work. Culturewas bracketedoff from
politics and reduced to an assortmentof images ranging from lighting
the Sabbathcandles to rag picking in Little Italy. Like the gypsies and
beggar girls of eighteenth century landscape painting, the immigrants
of the late nineteenth century were used to provide an ornamented
surface for the urbanscape. They decorated the street scenes of
Mulberry Bend and Hester Street with a hint of local color that
reassuredreaders that modernizationdid not necessarily mean either
culturalinsipidity or political revolution.
Chinatownand the Racial Limits of Variety
There was one type of intra-urbanwalking tour, however, that did
attemptto expand the racial boundariesto include not just European
ethnicitiesbut also the Chinese. The urbanpicturesque,in other words,
provides a culturalindex of how largerquestions about the boundaries
between ethnicity and race were negotiated. In the late nineteenth
century, the most contested site for negotiating this boundary was
Chinatown. Attitudes toward Chinese exclusion, for example, are
revealed through the aesthetic terminology used to describe these
subculturalcommunities.The flexibility and variousnessof the picturesque, the very qualities that Uvedale Price embraced(and associated
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with white people's hair), find their racial and ideological limit in
determiningwhether the Chinese qualify as a picturesqueimmigrant
group.This is the point at which intra-urbantravelersdisplay theirtrue
colors. As an aesthetic analog to the Chinese exclusion acts that began
in 1882, the picturesque,for some urbantravelers,stops at Mott Street.
For Jacob Riis, the Chinese epitomize the anti-picturesquebecause
"Mott Street is clean to distraction."Contrastingthe Chinese to the
nearby Italians, Riis concludes: "Chinatownas a spectacle is disappointing.Next-doorneighborto the Bend, it has little of its outdoorstir
and life, none of its gaily-colored rags or picturesque filth and
poverty."38
The picturesquewas a highly comparativediscourse, where hierarchies were established among immigrant groups according to individual preferences. The prevalence or absence of such conventional
picturesque markers as "filth," colorful rags and crowded streets
determinedwhetherthe Chinese were considereda legitimatepresence
in the turn of the century urbanscape.Where writers such as Sui Sin
Far,a EurasianimmigrantfromBritain,describethe streetsof Chinatown
as lively and crowded,full of a motley assortmentof pedestrians,Riis's
Chinatown is bereft of street life, a point visually reinforced by the
accompanyingphotographof a lone Chinese man walking toward the
cameraalong an empty street.As an urbansemiotician, Riis interprets
this solitary scene as itself a sign of the "stealthand secretiveness"of
Chinese culture.
Compare Riis's depiction of Chinatown with that by Wong Chin
Foo, an U.S.-educatedChinese immigrantwho was among the first to
use the term "Chinese American."Wong, a journalist, social worker
and civil rightsleader,organized,in the aftermathof the GearyLaw (an
act passed by Congress that renewed Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
for anotherten years), a political association called the Chinese Equal
Rights League, which initiatedthe drive to demandcitizenship for the
Chinese. A political exile from China, Wong was an importantinterlocutor who wrote for the New YorkChinese immigrantpress as well
as for mainstreamperiodicals.As Qingsong Zhang has argued,Wong
launched an internalcritique in the Chinese American( Hua Mei Xin
Bao ), where he tried to eliminate opium smoking, prostitution,and
gambling; at the same time, he attemptedto counter negative racial
stereotypeswith more positive depictions in the mainstreammedia.39
In his intra-urbantour"Chinatownin New York,"which appearedin
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465
The Cosmopolitanin 1888, Wong represents the ideal subcultural
savant, the "native informant"who is prepared to guide the lateVictorian reader through this unfamiliardistrict. Working within the
picturesqueconvention,he begins the tourby accentuatingthe uniqueness of his particular subculture. "Every one knows the French,
German, and Irish districts," but the "most interesting of all to
Americans"is New York's "Little Hong Kong" because it represents
the "exact antipodes of this continent."40At first, Chinatown representedthe urbanfrontier,an anti-touristictouristzone to which only the
adventurousgo. But as the narrativedevelops, its initial sensationalism
is replaced with a tone of ordinariness.The narrativedoes not visit
forbidden places, as slumming narrativesfrequently did. It actually
portraysthe everyday sites of Chinatownranging from restaurantsto
marketsin an attemptto de-mystify the Chinese presence in the city.
Whereas less sympathetic and sensational depictions would have
focused exclusively on the opium dens, as Riis is wont to do, this tour
depicts the occasional man smoking opium, but it is far more interested
in the preparationand consumptionof food (fig. 3). The sketch even
provides a glossary acquaintingthe readerwith translationsof common
menu items. The glossary is an apt metaphorfor understandingthe role
of Wong: he is a culturalmediatorwho translates"foreignness"into
familiarity,and in doing so, he incorporatesChinese culture into the
day to day rhythms of the American metropolis. Although the term
"picturesque"is not explicitly used, the sketch nonetheless follows its
formula in combining foreignness with citizenship, portraying the
immigrantas sufficiently peculiar to be interesting but also familiar
enough to be non-threatening.As a narrative of Americanization,
Wong's sketch referred to what the Chinese could contribute to a
national culture: they are hard-working,"well-educatedpeople" who
write poetry and maxims, and are "very clean in their cooking." In
addition, Chinese men make ideal husbandsfor white ethnic women,
often marrying"Irish,Germanor Italianwives." Most importantly,the
Chinese man "never beats his wife, [and] gives her plenty to eat and
wear."Wong also notes that at the time there were over one hundred
Eurasianchildrenin New York.Whereasmiscegenationwas usually a
source of concern (resultingin a ban in California),Wongreassuredthe
New Yorkreaderthattheir"childrenspeak the English language, [and]
adopt the American ways and dress."41
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Fig. 3. "A Chinese Kitchen," J. Durkin, in Wong Chin Foo, "The Chinese in New
York," The Cosmopolitan 5 (Mar.-Oct. 1888): 303.
AlthoughWong's intra-urbantourAmericanizesthe Chinese through
the common groundof food and family, it also seeks to retaina degree
of local color, a picturesqueelement of distinctiveness:"they can not
be expected to give up . . . peculiar peculiarities." His notion of
Americanizationis based on the belief that Chinese immigrantsshould
not become mimetic reproductions of Euro-Americans but should
retaintheirdistinctiveness,primarilyin the realm of religious belief. In
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a gesture reminiscent of Bourne's contempt for the Americanized
foreigner,Wong abruptlyinterruptsthe tour with the following caveat:
"So long as a Chinamancontinuesa heathenhe is generallyhonest;but
look out for him when he once becomes 'converted.'"42
This admonishing tone seems more characteristicof the picturesque traveler. But
Wong's narrativedemonstratesthat the desire for distinctiveness was
shared by the cosmopolitan Euro-Americanand immigrant alike. A
"sense of specialness,"to borrowTrinhT. Minh-ha'sphrase, was also
cultivated within the subculture.43But specialness and authenticity
signify differentlyfor Wongthanthey do, for instance,for Bourne,who
finds authenticitya sign of modernistresistanceagainstuniformity.For
Wong, the retentionof certain"peculiarities"is a political, culturaland
ethical choice. In contrastto most AmericanizedChinese at the turnof
the century,Wongrefusedto convertto Christianity.As a child growing
up in China, he had been highly influenced by Christianmissionaries
(and as Zhang points out, his education in the U.S. was sponsoredby
Christianmissionaries), but as an adult, exposed to the sinophobia of
the U.S., he was struck by the breach between "brotherlylove" and
racial violence. In "Why Am I a Heathen?"published in the North
AmericanReview in 1887, he portrayedthe varietyof Christiansects as
bewildering, with "each one claiming a monopoly of the only and
narrow road to heaven.""44
He also said that the primaryteachings of
Christianity had already stated by Chinese philosophers such as
Confucius thousandsof years earlier.
Wong embodies the very ideal of Americanizationthathe promotes:
that national citizenship and subculturalmembershipare not conflicting alliances. Equal rights (sameness regardless of race) and subcultural difference are ultimately commensurable.Food and family link
the public and private spheres in two ways: first, they de-mystify the
othernessof the Chinese in orderto claim that political rights must be
multicultural; second, they demonstrate that the private sphere of
domesticity (whether in the home or in the Chinatownrestaurants)is
already multicultural.In his intra-urbantour in The Cosmopolitan,
Wong illustrates this through his discussion of intermarriageand
Eurasianchildren, in which the home is already a site of racial and
culturalblending. He also underscoresthis point of culturalintermingling throughdescriptionsof the interiorsof Chinese restaurants.We
are told, for example, that "[a]tleast five hundredAmericanstake their
meals regularly in Chinese restaurantsin orthodox Chinese fashion,
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with chopsticks."45Chinese restaurants are already heterogeneous
spaces where the American consumer is not a unique presence but a
regularone. Wong uses the picturesqueconvention in his intra-urban
tourto translatethe racial sublimeinto a charmingcuriosity.Chinatown
is not a homogeneous space of hermetic otherness, but a lively and
heterogeneoussite of culinary (read:innocent) encounters.
The urbanpicturesquealso extendedbeyond the parametersof New
York City to refer to the Chinatownsof other American cities. Alice
Harrison, a fldneuse-journalist, published a walking tour of San
Francisco's Chinatownfor the Overland Monthly, a journal formerly
edited by Bret Harteand the originalforumfor his poem "TheHeathen
Chinee." Whereas Harte's poem helped crystallize sinophobia in the
1870s, Harrison,.writing a generation later, explicitly invokes the
language of the picturesqueto cultivate sympathy for this maligned
community.Chinese cultureis synonymouswith gastronomicalexcess,
variety and abundance. In contrast to Riis's emphasis on scarcity,
secrecy and solitude, she notes the "astonishingvariety"of fruits in the
marketsas well as the "bilious pyramidof yellow-green cakes of bean
cheese" and "[e]very variety of fish known to the coast waters."
Contraryto Frank Norris's "The Third Circle," which portrays the
horrors of reversed assimilation when an East Coast middle-class
woman visits San Francisco's Chinatown only to be kidnapped and
made into an opium addict, Harrisonreassuresthe "fairlady" that the
"stoic silence" of the Chinese is not from the concealment of vile
thoughts,but a sign thatthe "epicure[is] serenely full."46As an implicit
critique of the Geary Law, Harrisonand Wong humanize the Chinese
by focusing on those public places conventionally associated with the
domestic: restaurants,markets and kitchens. Where Riis perceives
Chinese culture as impenetrableand indecipherable,Harrison's and
Wong's tours disclose its busy exteriors and interiors. Food and the
picturesque sites of its distribution, preparation and consumption
provide the basis for the Chinese immigrant's inclusion within a
transnationalAmerica.
Food and the (Anti-) Picturesque
That the picturesque and immigrant foods should so frequently
intersect in the intra-urbanwalking tours is not surprising. Both
provide a way of talking about cultural variety in ways that are
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pleasurableand non-threatening.Chop suey, which was a culinaryfad
among the cosmopolitanyouth in the 1890s, was far more palatableto
the middle-classreaderthana discussion aboutsinophobia,laborunion
harassment,and the massacre at Rock Springs.47Although the urban
picturesque and food worked in tandem to define the parametersof
cosmopolitan inclusivity, they also delineated its exclusions. In 1907,
the African American activist and writer,Mary ChurchTerrell,examined the juncture of.food, race and cosmopolitanism in her autobiographicalsketch, "WhatIt Means to be Colored in the Capital of the
United States." Originallypublished in the progressive magazine The
Independentin 1907 and laterincludedin her autobiographyA Colored
Womanin a White World(1940), this narrativeuses the genre of the
intra-urbanwalking tour to create a counter-tourthat underscoresthe
racial limits of the picturesque.48Terrell walks not out of choice, a
prerequisitefor the fldneur, but out of necessity, as she searches for
admissioninto a Washington,D.C. restaurantand hotel for the evening.
The daughterof a wealthy Memphis real estate dealer and educatedat
Oberlin,Terrellbecame the first presidentof the National Association
of Colored Women and a member of the Washington Board of
Education. Married to Robert Terrell, the first black graduate of
HarvardCollege in 1884 and eventually a magistratein the District of
Columbia, Mary Terrell was one of the few black women to win
recognition in both the white and black worlds during her lifetime.
Generally considered to be "middle-of-the-roaders,"
both she and her
husband Robert epitomized talented-tenth leadership in the early
twentieth century.49
Terrell'snarrativedescribes walking in terms of "wanderingabout"
like "a strangerin a strangeland."But unlike Georg Simmel's notion of
the stranger as a "potential wanderer"who willfully perambulates,
Terrellmust wanderthe public spaces involuntarily,since she is unable
to find private interiors that will accommodate her: "As a colored
woman I might enterWashingtonany night,... and walk miles without
finding a place to lay my head . . . [or] without finding a single
In
restaurantin which I would be permittedto take a morsel of food.""50
contrastto the picturesquetraveler,Terrellnarratesnot where she goes,
but where she cannot go, naming places and restaurantsthat exclude
blacks. Whereas Roseboro and Harrisonwalk in and out of various
eateries and coffeehouses, Terrellexperiences the public space of the
streetfar differently,as an internalexile ratheras a curioustraveler.For
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her,the limits of perambulationimplicitly circumscribethe limits of the
picturesque,so that she describes urbanspaces not as colorful but as
"colored."
Terrell's counter-walking tour illustrates how the whiteness of
middle-class Washington establishments produces her blacknessmakingher a strangerin a place, a denizen ratherthan a citizen within,
ironically, the nation's capital. It narrates, in other words, her deAmericanization.Yet Terrell'swalking tour demonstratesnot only the
racializationof urbanspace, and the subsequentproductionof difference but also the racializationof consumption.Like walking,.consuming is a racialized activity, especially for the emergent black middleclass, who have the money but cannot spend it. Terrellis "abundantly
supplied with money,"but she is barredfrom purchasinga meal. The
democratizationof money, heraldedby Simmell among others as the
"great leveler,".finds its point of exclusion with the black consumer.
"Indians, Chinamen, Filipinos, Japanese and representativesof any
other dark race," writes Terrell, "can find hotel accommodations,if
they can pay for them. The colored man alone is thrustout of the hotels
of the national capital like a leper."51
For the AfricanAmericanwalking in the city, "unassimilatedotherness" was not a position of curiosityand pleasurebut rathera mode of
social and cultural exclusion. Urban spaces contain silences, which
become articulateonly when, for example,Terrellrunsacross a "chance
acquaintance"who recommendsa blackboarding-housein the blackpart
of town. She can only eat when she "knowsher place,"when thereis a
one-to-onecorrelationbetweenblack people andblack spaces. Mapping
distinct people onto discrete spaces is the basis of segregation,which
reveals the disturbingundersideof Boume's transnationalism.Whereas
Bourne considereda "side by side" union to be potentially"peaceful,"
Mary Church Terrell devoted much of her life to challenging the
exclusive racial and spatial politics of such unions.52Her countertour
discloses the bordersof the urbanpicturesque,namely the junctureof
class and race. Just as she is unable to be a consumerin the material
sense, a prerequisitefor the traveler,so she is also unableto consume at
a visual level. Her blacknessfurtherprecludesher from being eitherthe
object of the picturesquegaze or the actual figure of the traveler.As a
result, her narrativedelineates the ideological limits of the rhetoricof
variety,since scarcity,ratherthan abundance,characterizesher relation
to the city.
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471
The "transnationalimaginary"and AmericanExceptionalism
In contrast to the model of scarcity that shapes even middle-class
black reactions to the city, an attitudeof abundancecharacterizesthe
relation between the urban picturesque and Eastern and Southern
European immigrants. In 1897, Joseph Senner, an official at Ellis
Island, claimed that "immigrationis welcomed with open arms" as
long as there is "an abundanceto divide" among newcomers and the
"older settler."53The representationalgenerosity of the urban picturesque toward these newcomers is premised on the assumption that
there is plenty to go around.As both a source and a sign of American
abundance,the urbanpicturesqueincorporatedEurope'sswarthierhues
into a national narrativeof Americanexceptionalism.The cosmopolitan practitionersof the urbanpicturesqueparticipatedin this process of
Americanizationby translatingthe process of transnationalmigration
into a distinctively American metropolitanphenomenon. The urban
picturesquerepresentswhat Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayakehave
called in a differentcontext the "transnationalimaginary,"which is the
process by which the practices of everyday life are shaped and
reshaped through a "spatial dialectic" of local and transnational
forces.54But whereWilson andDissanayakeuse this termto referto the
de-nationalizationof local spaces within a world that is becoming
increasingly "borderless,"the early-twentieth-centurypractitionersof
the urbanpicturesqueviewed a transnationalimaginary as a distinctively national project, as a way of inscribing a global process within
the bordersof the Americanmetropolis.
As an aesthetic practice located within a much wider project of
materialand ideological modernization,the urbanpicturesquenationalized the transnationalas a sign of Americanuniqueness.GeorgeYidice
has called this tendency to universalizeAmericandiversity as the "we
are the world complex." Such a complex, Ytdice argues, disavows
class antagonism, social problems and economic disparityin order to
celebrateAmerican diversity.55But this complex is not unique to the
contemporarymoment.It also characterizesthe modernperiodas a lens
through which to reconfigure American nationalism at a time of
internaland internationalmigration,labor strife, and spatialconsolidation within the metropolis. Within this context, the urbanpicturesque
naturalizedethnic heterogeneityand class inequalityas expected signs
of modernity. As the journalist James McCabe noted in 1882, the
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"populationof New Yorkis more cosmopolitanthan that of any city in
Cosmopolitanism
the Union, and the majorityof the people are poor."56
came at a cost, and the best way to mediate this cost was to switch the
focus from concern about the growing economic chasm to celebration
of ethnic variety. The aesthetics of diversity provided an important
palliative that did not deny poverty but made it more colorful. New
Yorkwas exceptional due not only to the fact that it could contain the
world within its borders,but it could also nationalizethe newcomers as
a vital partof the modem scene. Whereassome were concernedthatthe
new generation of immigrants signified excessive heterogeneity,the
intra-urbanwalking tour reassuredits readersthat they were not inherently moredifficultto Americanizethanwere the immigrantsof the past.
The urbanpicturesquereconfiguredthe nationalmotto of e pluribus
unumaccordingto a "transnationalimaginary"that followed a path of
moderation.By trying to find the "half-way station"(William James's
phrase) between excessive heterogeneity and oppressive uniformity,
practitioners of the urban picturesque found that the most stable
formula would be one similar to the sociologist FranklinGiddings's
recommendation:"Somewhere between excessive heterogeneity and
complete homogeneity will be found that precise composition of a
people which ensures progress and is yet compatible with personal
freedom and a liberal social organization."Excessively heterogeneous
societies do not have a common ground,accordingto Giddings, and a
"reallyhomogeneous people" does not encourageprogress.57
Situatingthe picturesqueat the half-way point between the sublime
and the beautifulprovidedan aestheticof moderationin reconceiving a
national identity for the modem period. In an attempt to reconcile
"progress"with nationalunity,it expandedthe parametersof whiteness
to include the "lower races of Europe,"while occasionally admitting
the Chinese but barringAfricanAmericans.The residualracial politics
of the picturesque also informed its modem incarnation. Just as
blackness for Uvedale Price signified "absence,"and specifically an
absence from democraticunions, so the urbanpicturesquerearticulated
this allegory of civil society by excluding AfricanAmericansfrom the
urban scene as well as from a national public culture. Through the
seemingly benign rhetoric of abundance and plenitude, white supremacy was recast and modernizedat the turnof the centuryin more
"generous"terms. The power of this aesthetic was its apparentinnocence, that it could exclude throughcharm.
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473
NOTES
1. Hamlin Garland,CrumblingIdols, ed. Jane Johnson (1894; Cambridge,Mass.:
HarvardUniv. Press, 1960), 60-61. Thomas Woodson, "HawthomesqueShapes: The
Picturesqueand the Romance,"Studies in the Novel 23 (spring 1991): 170.
2. RobertHunter,Poverty (New York:Harper& Row, 1965), 27, 34. LymanAbbott,
"Introduction"to Darkness and Daylight, or Lights and Shadows of New YorkLife. A
Woman's Story of Gospel, TemperanceMission and Rescue Work, by Mrs. Helen
Campbell (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1892), 39. Joaquin Miller, The
Destructionof Gotham(New York:FunkandWagnall's, 1886), 12. JosiahStrong,Our
Country(Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1963).
3. Ann Douglas, TerribleHonesty: Mongrel Manhattanin the 1920s (New York:
Farrar,Straussand Giroux, 1995).
4. H. G. Dwight, "An Impressionist'sNew York," Scribner's (Nov. 1905): 554.
HerbertSpencer,"Progress:Its Law and Cause."On Evolution:Selected Writings,ed.
J. D. Y. Peel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), 38-52.
5. In The Urban Sublime in AmericanLiteraryNaturalism (Urbana,IIl.: Univ. of
Illinois Press, 1998), ChristopheDen Tandt has argued that the turn of the century
markeda time of deep ambivalenceaboutmodernity,where the metropolisrepresented
a space of both wondermentand terror.The urban sublime, which is a revision of
FredricJameson's postmodernsublime, offers a way to understandliteraryresponses
to the late-Victorian metropolis as "radically illegible" and is impossible to total.
Throughthe sublime, Den Tandthas createda critical space to explore urbanpleasure
in the late-Victorianmetropolis, an emphasis that has been traditionallyneglected in
favor of an approach that underscores anxiety and dread. My work on the urban
picturesqueis a complementratherthan a critiqueof Den Tandt's argument.It begins
with the premise that there are a variety of ways to convey urbanpleasure. Not all
accountsof the urbanexperiencecan be slotted into the extremesof the sublime. There
are less dramaticways to express enthusiasm,ways thatrequireless emotionalenergy.
The picturesquerepresentsa more restrainedand composed form of urbanpleasure,
one that experiences the city as "charming."
6. Viola Roseboro, "Down-Town New York." The Cosmopolitan 1 (June 1886):
222. John Corbin,"The TwentiethCenturyCity." Scribner's 33 (Mar. 1903): 270.
7. H. G. Dwight, "An Impressionist'sNew York," 544.
8. By 1890, one of every threeAmericansalreadylived in urbanareas.JamesMcCabe,
New YorkBy Sunlightand Gaslight(New York:CrownPublisher's,1984): 54.
9. RandolphBourne "Trans-NationalAmerica,"War and the Intellectuals, ed. Carl
Resek (New York: Harper& Row, 1964), 107-23.
10. For a discussion of the disjuncturalsense of time in the late nineteenthcenturyin
the context of technological and aesthetic innovations,see Stephen Kern, The Culture
of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1983).
11. One exception is William Dean Howells's An Imperative Duty (New York:
Harper,1892), where the protagonist,Dr. Olney, strolls throughthe African-American
districtof Boston. For discussions of this novel, see KennethWarren,Black and White
Strangers: Race and American Literary History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1993); and Henry Wonham, "Howells, Du Bois, and the Effect of 'Common-Sense':
Race, Realism, and Nervousness in An ImperativeDuty and The Souls of Black Folk,"
in Criticismand the Color Line: Desegregating AmericanLiteraryStudies, ed. Henry
Wonham. (New Brunswick,N.J.: RutgersUniv. Press, 1996), 126-39.
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12. Although the urban picturesque generally excluded African Americans, there
were other culturalforms emerging from the black urbanexperience that captivated
white audiences. According to Richard Newman, minstrelsy in the 1890s was in
decline: "Its sentimentality and nostalgia appeared pass6 and rustic in the more
sophisticatedand urbanizedGilded Age" (465). Modern forms of black performance
includedthefin-de-sidcle craze of ragtimeand the cakewalk, which were transforming
white middle-classculturefrom below. The cakewalkcraze, which reachedits zenith in
1903, fell outside the purview of the picturesque.Given its preferencefor "daylight"
ratherthan "gaslight,"the urbanpicturesquewas more interestedin cafes and markets
ratherthan in nightclubsand dancehalls.See RichardNewman, "'The BrightestStar':
Aida Overton Walker in the Age of Ragtime and Cakewalk,"Prospects 18 (1993):
465-81.
13. Viola Roseboro, "The Italiansof New York,"The Cosmopolitan4 (Jan. 1888):
398. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Meridian, 1994),
259. Amy Kaplandemonstrateshow the "picturesque"providesa familiardiscourseof
tourism within which the Marches can frame new urbanrealities: "by viewing New
York as a foreign country,the Marchescan experience it as familiar.The role of tourist
places them in a known relationshipto the city and allows them to distancethemselves
from the surroundingpoverty by framing it within the secure lines of the 'picturesque.'" Although the picturesquewas not as "secure"as Kaplan suggests, evident in
its contradictoryuse in relation to the Chinese, it did provide New Yorkers (and its
middle-class transplants)with a discourse to express urbanexperience as pleasurable
ratherthan exclusively fearful. Amy Kaplan, The Social Constructionof American
Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), 49.
14. William Ripley, The Races of Europe (New York: D. Appleton and Company,
1899). EdwardRoss, "The Slavs in America,"CenturyMagazine 88 (Aug. 1914): 590.
HenryPrattFairchild,Immigration:A WorldMovementand Its AmericanSignificance
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925), 408. Nathaniel Shaler, "The Summing
Up of the Story," The United States of America, A Study of the American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897).
15. Alfred Holt Stone, "Is Race Friction Between Black and White in the United
States Growing and Inevitable?"The AmericanJournal of Sociology 13 (Mar. 1908):
679.
16. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, Mass.:
HarvardUniv. Press, 1998), 8. RegardingIrish immigrants,Jacobson adds: "No one
who has looked into this country's maze of segregationstatutes,miscegenationcodes,
housing covenants, slavery laws, or civil rights debates could ever suppose that being
a 'Celt,' say, was tantamountto being some kind of European'Negro'" (9).
17. Qtd. in Jacobson, Whitenessof a Different Color, 69.
18. Qtd. in Steven Steinberg,The Ethnic Myth(Boston, Beacon Press, 1989), 201.
19. Edward Said, "Traveling Theory." The World, The Text, and the Critic
(Cambridge,Mass., HarvardUniv. Press, 1983), 226.
20. Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque,vol. 1 (London:J. Mawman, 1810), 5.
For an overview of the eighteenth-centurypicturesque,see ChristopherHussey, The
Picturesque:Studies in a Point of View (London:G. P. Putnam'sSons, 1927); Martin
Price, "ThePicturesqueMoment,"From Sensibilityto Romanticism:Essays Presented
to FrederickPottle, ed. FrederickHilles and HaroldBloom (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1965), 259-92; Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, eds., The Politics of the
Picturesque:Literature,landscape and aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge:Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1994).
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THE URBAN PICTURESQUE
475
21. Uvedale Price,A Dialogue on the Distinct Charactersof the Picturesqueand the
Beautiful (London, 1801), 58.
22. Qtd. in Peter Garside,"Picturesquefigure and landscape:Meg Merriliesand the
gypsies," in Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, 146.
23. For a discussion abouthow Marx and Engels configuredthe Lumpenproletariat
as a racialized nomadic people, see Peter Stallybrass, "Marx and Heterogeneity:
Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,"
Representations31 (summer 1990): 69-95.
24. MarianaG. Van Rensselaer, "PicturesqueNew York," in Gaslight New York:
Revisited, ed. FrankOppel (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1989), 320.
25. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: ConsumerCulturein Dreiser, Gissing and Zola
(London:Methuen, 1985), 41.
26. Stephen Rachman, "Reading Cities: Devotional Seeing in the Nineteenth
Century,"AmericanLiteraryHistory 9 (winter 1997): 663.
27. According to Walter Benjamin in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,"the midcenturyfldneuris the model for the "journalist[who] eagerly learnsfrom him."Walter
Benjamin,Illuminations,ed. HannahArendt(New York:Schocken Books, 1969), 167.
28. Bourne, "Trans-NationalAmerica," 114.
29. Ibid., 113-14.
30. Id., 113.
31. Roseboro, "Italiansof New York,"396.
32. Ibid.
33. JacksonLears, No Place of Grace (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 187.
34. Roseboro, "Italians of New York," 399, 403-4. Roseboro's "picturesque"
Italianswere not as politically apatheticas she suggests. Accordingto Edwin Fentonin
his study of Italian immigrantsand labor unions, many of the immigrants,especially
artisans from northernItaly, were anarchists and socialists already experienced in
unionizing.Italianstone masons, mosaic workers,stone cuttersand brownstonecutters
formed their own unions in the late nineteenthcentury. Prior to 1900, there were at
least seven Italian-languageradical newspapers.And even in the mainstreamItalian
languagepress, there were accountsof union meetings and strikes.But most prevalent
were articlesattackingAmericanunions for discriminatingagainstItalianworkers.For
more on this topic, see Edwin Fenton,Immigrantsand Unions (New York:Arno Press,
1975), ch. 5.
35. HutchinsHapgood,"ThePicturesqueGhetto"CenturyMagazine 94 (July 1917):
471.
36. Ibid.
37. HutchinsHapgood,TheSpiritof the Ghetto(New York:SchockenBooks, 1976),
39.
38. Jacob Riis, How The Other Half Lives (1890; New York: Dover, 1971), 77.
39. Wong Chin Foo, "The Chinese in New York,"The Cosmopolitan5 (Mar.-Oct.
1888): 297-311. Qingsong Zhang, "The Origins of the Chinese Americanization
Movement: Wong Chin Foo and the Chinese Equal Rights League," in Claiming
America: ConstructingChinese AmericanIdentities during the Exclusion Era, ed. K.
Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia:Temple Univ. Press, 1998), 41-63. I am
gratefulto Lisa Botshon for bringingthis essay to my attention.
40. Wong Chin Foo, "The Chinese in New York,"297.
41. Ibid., 308. In 1880, Californialawmakersprohibitedmarriagebetween a white
person and a "negro,mulatto,or Mongolian."For more on this law, see Megumi Dick
Osumi, "Asians and California'sAnti-MiscegenationLaws,"in Nobuya Tsuchida,ed.,
Asian and Pacific AmericanExperiences:Women'sPerspectives (Minneapolis,Minn.:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982).
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42. Wong Chin Foo, "The Chinese in New York," 299.
43. TrinhT. Minh-ha,Woman,Native, Other (Bloomington, Ind.: Univ. of Indiana
Press, 1989), 86
44. Wong Chin Foo, "Why Am I A Heathen?"North AmericanReview 145 (Aug.
1887): 169-79.
45. Wong Chin Foo, "The Chinese in New York," 305.
46. Alice Harrison,"Chinese Food and Restaurants,"Overland Monthly 68 (June
1917): 527-32. FrankNorris, "The ThirdCircle,"The ThirdCircle, A Deal in Wheat,
and Other Stories of the New and Old West, vol. 4 (GardenCity, N.J.: Doubleday,
1928).
47. In 1885, white workersrefused to work in the same mine as Chinese workersin
Rock Springs, Wyoming. In August, white workers invaded the Chinese section of
town and shot Chinese workers as they fled and then burnedtheir buildings. Fifteen
Chinese were wounded and twenty-eight murdered. See Ronald Takaki, Iron
Cages (Seattle, Wash.: Univ. of WashingtonPress, 1979), 248.
48. MaryChurchTerrell,"WhatIt Means to be Colored in the Capitalof the United
States,"Black Womenin WhiteAmerica: A DocumentaryHistory, ed. Gerda Lerner
(New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 378-82.
49. August Meier,Negro Thoughtin America,1880-1915 (Ann Arbor,Mich.: Univ.
of Michigan Press, 1970), 183.
50. Georg Simmel, "The Stranger,"Social Theory, ed. Charles Lemert (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), 200-4. Mary ChurchTerrell,"WhatIt Means,"379. In
an interview with the Pittsburgh Courierin 1944, Terrell explained that in the 1890s
"colored people could dine anywhere in the nation's capital, but near the end of the
century, these rights were wrested away from us." Although the anti-discrimination
laws of 1872 and 1873 required"all eating-placeproprietorsto serve any respectable
well-behaved person regardlessof color," these laws disappearedby the 1890s when
the District Code was rewritten.In 1953, a SupremeCourt, in a decision authoredby
JusticeWilliam O. Douglas, determinedthatthese Reconstructionlaws were still valid
(District of Columbia v. John R. ThompsonCompany, 346 U.S. 100, 1953). For a
biographyof Terrell, see Beverly WashingtonJones, Questfor Equality. The Life and
Writingsof Mary Eliza ChurchTerrell, 1863-1954 (Brooklyn,N.Y.: CarlsonPublishing, 1990), 71-86.
51. Mary ChurchTerrell, "WhatIt Means," 379.
52. Terrelldemandedthat the social spaces of the nation's capital be desegregated.
In 1948, at the age of eighty-five, she led a spiritedcampaignto end discriminationin
the capital's restaurants.She was one of threeplaintiffs in an importantcivil rightscase
thatended with a SupremeCourtdecision to upholdthe rightof all races to equal eating
accommodation in Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson
Company). Food became for Terrell the contested terrain where segregation was
challenged and fought.
53. Joseph H. Senner,"The ImmigrationQuestion,"AmericanAcademyof Political
and Social Science 10 (July 1897): 1-2.
54. Rob Wilson andWimal Dissanayake,"Introduction:Trackingthe Global/Local,"
Global/Local: CulturalProduction and the TransnationalImaginary,ed. Wilson and
Dissanayake (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1996), 2. Not all forms of
transnationalismdeconstruct national boundaries. As Frederick Buell has argued,
transnationalismalso reinscribes national borders within a "hyperdeveloped"global
economy. It is too early, in other words, to be singing the swan song of nationalism.
Globalization does not make "nationalismgo away" nor does it necessarily change
national cultures (580). FrederickBuell, "NationalistPostnationalism:Globalist Dis-
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THEURBANPICTURESQUE 477
course in ContemporaryAmerican Culture,"American Quarterly 50 (Sept. 1998):
548-91. For otherchallenges to versions of transnationalismthat stress borderlessness,
see Roger Rouse, "ThinkingthroughTransnationalism:Notes on the CulturalPolitics
of Class Relations in the ContemporaryUnited States,"Public Culture7 (winter 1995):
353-402; and Nancy Foner, "What's New About Transnationalism?"Diaspora 6
(winter 1997): 355-75.
55. George Ytidice, "We are Not the World,"Social Text 31/32 (1992): 202-16.
56. James McCabe, New YorkBy Skylightand Gaslight, 507.
57. FranklinGiddings, "Sociological Questions,"Forum 35 (1903-1904): 253.
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