Industrial Sublime: How New York City’s Bridges and Rivers Became a Muse of Modernism

How a city of contrasts inspired a generation of artists.

When the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, a cathedral thirteen years in the making permanently changed the riverscape of New York City. In a short period of time, three other major bridges would join it — the Williamsburg Bridge was begun in 1896, the Manhattan Bridge and the Queensboro Bridge in 1901. The waterway was now a river of canyons, and the city became a spectacular form of natural and manmade wonders. Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York’s Rivers, 1900-1940 (public library), the book companion for the Hudson River Museum exhibition of the same title, reveals how in the first half of the twentieth century, these manmade marvels embracing New York’s river banks enthralled a generation of influential artists who had once turned to nature as their muse.

'East River From the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel' by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1928 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

For a youthful America in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the painters of the Hudson River School created a vision of arcadia in the new world, with the waterway at its very heart. The Catskill Mountains and the New Jersey Palisades became as worthy of contemplation as any poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge or William Wordsworth.

America, with its vast frontier, could be a place of Romantic wonder.

'A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning,' by Thomas Cole, c. 1844 (Brooklyn Museum)

But what some Hudson River painters delicately left out of many of their views were the encroaching factories and docklands on New York’s picturesque rivers. In Samuel Coleman’s Storm King on the Hudson, a factory competes with a local mountain called Storm King for sublime attention: one is submerged in clouds, the other creates its own industrial cloud.

'Storm King on the Hudson' by Samuel Coleman, 1866. (Smithsonian American Art Museum).

'The Hudson River from Hoboken' by Robert Walter Weir, 1878 (Detriot Insitute of the Arts)

The river itself became a place of business as sailboats, steamboats, and tugboats crowded the water like a highway. But the success of a city could be defined in the image of its bustling waterway, and artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and John Sloan became fascinated with the intersections and collisions of nature and industry: the edge of a dock, the darkness under a bridge, the lights along the span of Queensboro at night.

'The East River' by Carlton Theodore Chapman, 1904. (New York Historical Society)

At the turn of the century, Gotham was a city of stark visual contrasts: the brightest day could be met with a shadow from a building that could cast a viewer into night, and electric lights might turn the blackest city park into a bright new square. Sublimity could be found in these contrasts, where joy could turn to fear along any street.

'The Bridge: Nocturne' by Julian Alden Weir, 1910 (Smithsonian)

By 1920, life in America had become primarily urban; according to the census, for the first time more people lived in cities than in the country.

'Office Buildings from Below,' photograph by Paul Strand, 1917. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Even in the 1930s, fifty years after its completion, the Brooklyn Bridge remained a source of inspiration. More architecturally beautiful than its East River counterparts, it was the first hint of the industrial sublime in New York, and its most enduring symbol.

'Brooklyn Bridge' by Ernest Lawson, c, 1917. (Terra Museum of Art)

Hart Crane’s The Bridge became an American response to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, with the East River and Brooklyn Bridge as its inspiration:

A tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam
Lunged past, with one galvanic blare stove up the River.
I counted the echoes assembling one after one,
Searching, thumbing the midnight on the piers.
The blackness somewhere gouged glass on a sky.
And this thy harbor, O my city, I have driven under….

'Power' by Edward Bruce, c. 1933. (The Phillips Collection)

Industrial Sublime is a vision of New York that recounts a time when artists reconceived the beauty, terror, and awe of the place they called home, as the city’s rolling hills could no longer resist the greatest grid amidst a city at the height of metamorphosis.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

“To you the Cathedral is dedicated. The individual side chapels are to other saints…”

London in the 1880s was a city where a woman could create a life of her own, socially, intellectually, and artistically. Art schools and galleries began to fill with young women, no longer satisfied with simply playing the muse, who desired to create. For a middle class of women who were neither required to work nor aristocratically obligated to marry, art offered both intellectual fulfillment and the possibility of a career.

These women were encouraged by the Aesthetics, a fashionable social set that included painters James MacNeil Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, actress Ellen Terry, and poet Charles Swinburne. It was a circle in which young Constance Lloyd found herself enthralled and seduced by its rising star, the critic, poet, and playboy Oscar Wilde, the twentieth century’s first pop culture celebrity.

Constance’s life with Oscar was brief — a little more than ten years as London’s most famous literary couple — when in 1895 the secret life he led with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas exploded publicly, first in a libel suit, then in a criminal suit for sodomy that sent Wilde to prison for two years. But as Franny Moyle reveals in Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde (public library), Constance Lloyd was a driven, creative, passionate, humorous, and fiercely modern woman, both when she wed Wilde and when she separated from him.

Constance in her early-twenties, before her marriage to Oscar Wilde. She is wearing controversial “aesthetic” dress, with a loose-fitting blouse and sleeves for extra movement.

With a comfortable income provided by her grandfather, Constance Lloyd had the luxury of viewing marriage as a choice. In the fall of 1880, twenty-one-year-old Constance was living apart from her mother and experiencing London life fully for the first time. She wrote to her brother:

I cannot say I prefer the life I am leading at present. If I eventually do not marry, I will not live with Auntie all my life, I shall do something… I want something specific to do to prevent my continually dreaming ‘til I get perfectly morbid.

London in the 1880s was a place where women could increasingly roam freely among certain artistic circles, especially among the Aesthetics. Grosvenor Gallery welcomed women and their friends to converse with artists and sometimes show their own art. London’s first restaurant for women, Dorothy’s, opened on the highly-trafficked Oxford Street with a radical proposition — a place for women to sit and eat alone.

William Powell Firth, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. To the right, Oscar Wilde and his set are portrayed in aesthetic dress while listening to his lecture.

In these new places, Constance found like-minded men and women with whom she could converse and engage with socially and intellectually. In her first letters to her new beau Oscar, she dared to disagree with his opinions on art:

I’m afraid you & I disagree in our opinion on art, for I hold that there is no perfect art without perfect morality, whilst you say they are distinct & separable things.

When she married Oscar, Constance had only experienced the creative half of bohemian life — the sexual side remained the domain of Oscar alone, first with women, and then passionately with men.

In 1882, the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act was an improvement on the previously nonexistent legal rights held by married women. When Constance married Oscar in 1884, a woman could now own, buy, or sell property, was responsible for her own debts, and was her own legal entity, separate from her husband. (In 1858, Isabella Robinson, on trial for adultery, wasn’t even allowed to be present in the divorce court — her only voice was her diary, read aloud by the prosecution.)

Archibald Grosvenor, an idyllic poet, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 'Patience.' The hit musical, was a satire on the Aesthetic movement and its most famous members, including Oscar Wilde.

In a letter after their engagement, Constance was nothing but smitten with her love:

How can I answer your letters, they are far too beautiful for any words of mine, I can only dream of you all day long…If you had your magic crystal you would see nothing, believe me, but your own dear image there forever, and in my eyes you shall see reflected nought but my love for you.

But over the next ten years, Constance and Oscar shared a life of increasing public fame and domestic sadness. The pair had two children immediately after their wedding, but as Constance labored hard through her second pregnancy, Oscar began to reconsider the romantic and sexual nature of their life together. He wrote to a friend:

There are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance—that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are mere shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or what we long someday to feel…Sometimes I think the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am sorry that it is so.

By dividing his devotion to marriage with his romantic pleasures, Oscar and Constance experienced a partnership that expanded the definition of what it meant to be independent, and what it meant to be alone. Constance became a champion of dress reform, and a figurehead of Oscar’s new women’s magazine, in which he advocated that “we should take a wider range, as well as a high standpoint, and deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think, and what they feel.” Less generous admirers saw Constance as a fanatic, dipping her toe into whatever cause was fashionable, from votes for women to spiritualism.

Oscar Wilde, photographed by Napoleon Sarony in New York in 1882, two years before his marriage to Constance.

Perhaps her interests were wide-ranging because unlike a conventional married woman of the time, she didn’t simply live one life, with one devotion to house and home. Oscar taught her the ways of a divided love, as freeing or as painful as that might be. In his second book of fairy-tales, Constance was surprised to read Oscar’s dedication to her:

To you the Cathedral is dedicated. The individual side chapels are to other saints… The candles that burn at the side altars are not so bright or beautiful as the great lamp of the shrine which is of gold, and that has a wonderful heart of restless flame.

Constance lived at the edge of what was fashionable and what was acceptable. A champion of women’s rights, she used her place as the queen of London’s literary society to accomplish social and political reform. When she died in exile in Italy at the young age of forty, she was separated from Oscar and living under a pseudonym. Her grave had no mention of her famous husband until many years later, when her brother added the no-longer-tarnished title, “Wife of Oscar Wilde.”

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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Falling Upwards: An Illustrated History of the Golden Age of Hot Air Balloons and How We Conquered the Skies

How scientists, explorers, and daredevils risked their lives so we could see our world from above.

It was Louis XVI who suggested that they first send two criminals aloft. The prospect of sealing an innocent human into a basket, lighting a flammable gas above his head, and propelling him skyward with no clue as to how high, how far, or how fast he would go, was clearly a death sentence. When the Montgolfier brothers famously launched their first balloon in front of the king at Versailles in September of 1783, it was not men that flew but animals: a sheep, a duck, and a rooster — the symbol of France. All survived the successful flight, landing in a nearby field.

The first truly manned balloon flight took place only a few months later, on the first of December, when Dr. Alexander Charles and an assistant launched their balloon from the Tuileries with almost half a million Parisians watching, including American ambassador Benjamin Franklin. Charles wrote of the experience:

I felt as if I were flying away from the earth and all its troubles and persecutions forever. It was not mere delight, it was physical rapture….I am finished with the Earth. From now on our place is in the sky!

Charles would later ground his assistant and head up alone, reaching ten-thousand feet to watch the sun set. Benjamin Franklin was also enraptured by the sight. It was hard to tell what practical purpose this balloon might achieve, if it was a mere curiosity or the beacon of a new era of manned flight, but Franklin knew what he had just witnessed:

Someone asked me “what’s the use of a balloon?” I replied—what’s the use of a new-born baby?

In Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (public library), Richard Holmes — who gave us that fascinating exposé on Coleridge’s plagiarism — offers an extraordinary account of the first giddy years of manned flight by balloon, journeys that were sometimes rapturous but often deadly. The dream of flight, he explains, was not simply to launch oneself into the sky like Icarus, but to look back upon the Earth, “to see the world differently.”

The launch of the first manned flight by Dr. Alexander Charles, 1783. From 'The Dream of Flight' collectors cards, c. 1890. (Library of Congress)

What was the use of the balloon? What was the purpose of hurling oneself into the air to “fall upwards” at an alarming rate, guided by the wind over land or far out to sea? The French army at once saw the balloon as a military apparatus, able to view the entire battlefield with eagle-eyed precision. During the Revolutionary Wars, balloons were launched for the first time during battle and instantly became a target for heavy artillery. Nevertheless, the balloon made itself known as an all-seeing eye — its very presence suggested mastery over the field.

A military balloon in use against the Austrian army at the Battle of Fleurus, 1794. From 'The Dream of Flight' collectors cards, c. 1890. (Library of Congress)

For Napoleon, the balloon was both a weapon of military action and of propaganda. He would bring balloons with him to Egypt in 1797, hoping to frighten his Arab opponents. He even launched a balloon during his coronation as emperor in 1804 that would travel from Paris to Italy, and he was delighted to hear that it crashed in Rome, his imperial model.

The balloon launched for Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor in 1804. From 'The Dream of Flight' collectors cards, c. 1890. (Library of Congress)

But ballooning was not just the domain of scientists and emperors — it was the apparatus of adventure, and those willing to go aloft were often reckless showmen and women, willing to risk their lives to thrill an audience. Long before Amelia Earhart, female aeronauts were some of the most famous performers of their day, riding aloft in beautiful silk balloons loaded with fireworks to perform acrobatic tricks thousands of feet above the ground. Napoleon’s favorite daredevil was Sophie Blanchard. The young woman had learned the trade from her older balloonist husband, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, who died of a heart attack during a damaged balloon descent.

Sophie Blanchard in her signature balloon and gondola during a launch to celebrate the birth of Napoleon’s son in 1811.

Sophie devised a special balloon for her ascents, which featured a tiny festooned gondola that could hardly fit one standing person. She would float above the crowd as if standing on air, fireworks trailing behind, often wearing a signature white dress with a colorfully plumed hat. During a nighttime display in 1819, one of Blanchard’s fireworks ignited her hydrogen balloon, causing her to fall to her death in front of a horrified crowd in Paris.

The death of Sophie Blanchard, 1819. From 'The Dream of Flight' collectors cards, c. 1890. (Library of Congress)

Balloons were also a dangerous method of travel. Some aeronatus launched successfully only to be dragged out to sea. Others flew too high and passed out. In 1836, balloonist Charles Green achieved the most famous journey of his day, traveling 480 miles in eighteen hours, from England to north Germany. Much of his trip took place at night, without a light to be seen for hours, “cutting a path through an immense block of black marble.”

Portrait of Charles Green by Hilaire Ledru, 1835. (National Gallery, London)

In 1897, S.A. Andrée attempted a fateful journey into the unknown, launching a balloon to travel to the North Pole and crashing along with his companions, freezing to death in the arctic. In his essay about balloons for Household Worlds, Charles Dickens found in the practice much in common with the public hanging: both were a spectacle in which an audience was waiting for a deadly fall. “Their pleasure is difficulty overcome. . . . They do not go to see the adventurer vanquished, but triumphant.”

Andrée's balloon leaves for the North Pole on July 11, 1897. (Courtesy of the Grenna Museum, Sweden/The Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography)

Despite the dangers, however, the intoxication of seeing the world anew sent men and women aloft. Balloons tethered to the ground became popular attractions at fairs. Surveyors, and soon photographers, would fly low over the city, revealing an entirely new human map. The bird’s-eye view, or panorama, became an extraordinary new way to envision the city and its people. The photographer Nadar would famously take flight over Paris with his camera, taking the first aerial views of the city, mapping its unprecedented transformation by Baron Haussmann into a modern metropolis — the birth of modern aerial photography.

Nadar in his balloon, taking the first aerial photographs of Paris. Illustration by Honoré Daumier, 1869.

Falling Upwards is a history of men and women who launched themselves into the complete unknown. They traveled up without the certainty that they would safely come down. But they did it to look back upon the world, and to find their place in it. It was the same immutable longing that the Apollo 8 astronauts captured in December of 1968 when they took the iconic photograph that made the world understand why space was worth the race: the bright blue earth rising above the moon, far away and fragile.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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The Story of Benjamin Franklin’s Sister and How Women Are Sidelined in History

Exposing the subjectivity of history’s substance.

“I Read as much as I Dare,” Jane Franklin once wrote to her older brother Benjamin. Jane was the youngest daughter of the Franklin family, and Benjamin the youngest son. Both were members of an undistinguished lineage of Francklynnes, then Francklins, and eventually Franklins, none of whom established themselves as much more than the name suggested — blacksmiths, tinkerers, experimenters—until Benjamin made their name one of the most famous in America.

The story of Jane Franklin is the story of a woman living on the fringes of recorded history. We know her only through the letters responded to by her brother, and a small book — a “Book of Ages” — which lists no more than the dates of births, marriages, and deaths for her children, her husband, and herself. It is this tiny work that Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore places at the center of her fantastic biography Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (public library), which she describes as “a book of remembrance”:

[Jane Franklin] had no portraits of her children, and no gravestones. Nothing remained of them except her memories, and four sheets of foolscap, stitched together. The remains of her remains.

Jane Franklin spent very little of her life with her now-famous last name. She became Jane Mecom at fifteen, married to an unremarkable and increasingly troublesome saddler of twenty-two, Edward Mecom, who simply moved himself into the Franklin home and began attempting, unsuccessfully, to find himself a job. Benjamin’s married life also began with little fanfare as he entered a common-law marriage with his landlady’s daughter Deborah — who was already married to a deserting husband — at twenty-four, after fathering an illegitimate child with another women. This, however, did not define the course of his life.

The birthplace of Jane and Benjamin Franklin. Jane would live here for most of her life, while Benjamin would leave to pursue his apprenticeship.

Their educations were typical for common men and women of the time, and yet vastly different. Jane was proficient at reading and writing, her entries in her Book of Ages involve an elaborately looped and fashionable form of handwriting. But her letters would surely disappoint a modern reader, as they did Jane herself, with their poor spelling and often indecipherable sentences. Nearly every letter begins with an apology for the spelling or the grammar therein — and yet this wasn’t something to hold against her: As Lapore explains at the beginning of the book, “all original English spellings have been retained. Spelling is part of the story.”

Spelling was not as rigidly defined in the education of women, who would write their family members and keep household accounts. Jane knew what good writing was, for she read it as much as she dared, and she received it from her brother. Benjamin wrote formal, “polite” letters, as Lepore describes it. Jane wrote as she talked — how would she know any differently? In her letters, she apologized for their content, for their form, for their grammar, for their penmanship — ”Dont let it mortifie that such a Scraw came from your Sister.”

Letter-writing wasn’t only a primary form of communication, it was also a rare chance at self-expression. To spell badly and be misunderstood was a constant source of frustration between sister and brother: “I know I have wrote & and speld this worse that I do sometimes but I hope you will find it out.”

Yet Jane was more literate than most women of her stature. She herself was poor, in trade, relying on a husband who was increasingly in debt, but she had two brothers who were printers, and who printed some of the most popular tracts and journals in the colonies. Her education consisted of the scraps of Benjamin Franklin’s own haphazard and self-directed education, to which he was entitled as a man in the world of the day.

Spelling and punctuation were irregular habits for most — something only standardized among printers and readers. Benjamin Franklin was one of the most prolific printers in all the land and spelling was his profession, which only served to illuminate for Jane how little she had been taught. Jane’s education was one of knitting, sewing, cleaning, and learning to make soap — the Franklin family trade.

Jane Mecom’s copy of The Ladies Library, 'written by a lady,' edited by Richard Steele, 1714.

When she turned twenty-one, her brother gave her a book, The Ladies Library. Meant to encourage her reading, the book was mostly a screed on virtue, duty, a woman’s place as wife and mother, piety, and repentance. In Philadelphia, Benjamin had begun the Free Library as a means of repairing “in some Degree the loss of the Learned Education my father once intended for me.” The three volumes of The Ladies Library were not meant to repair — they contained no history whatsoever — but were instead considered a complete education.

In 1750, the year she turned thirty-eight, Benjamin sent Jane a copy of Experiments and Observations on Electricity, which she read modestly. She often read his work, “as far as my capacity Enables me to understand it.” “His books,” Lepore writes, “her capacity.” She had been pregnant twelve times in twenty-two years before she gave birth to her last child at thirty-nine. Benjamin had three. Benjamin’s life was measured in worldly accomplishments — new employment, a controversial essay, a promotion, a successful experiment; Jane in the most harrowing of life’s beginnings and endings — the birth and death of her children. In between is the stuff of life, of keeping house, attempting to get her husband out of debt, to keep their tallow-trade afloat, of scrambling for money, taking in rags, starting a new business, failing, starting another. Yet her days were no less worth recording than her brother’s, Lepore argues.

Jane Mecom’s copy of Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, 1750.

Her days were days of flesh: the little legs, the little arms, the little hands clutched around her neck, the softness. Her days were days of toil: swaddling and nursing the baby, washing and dressing the boys, scrubbing everyone’s faces, feeling everyone’s hunger, cleaning everyone’s waste. She taught her children to read. She made sure they learned to write better than she did.

Book of Ages is a remarkable biography of a woman whom no one considered remarkable, a woman who lived on the fringes of history. That Lepore chooses to shine her historian’s light on Jane Franklin is itself a remarkable act, for this is a book with a ghostly heroine at its center, better described by her outline and the negative space shaped by those who surrounded her.

But this is a biography about the substance of history: who gets to write it, who gets to choose what is written. Should Jane Franklin’s small book of deaths and births sit on the same shelf as her brother’s collected work? It is by all accounts minuscule, insubstantial, but Lepore reveals the deep intelligence behind each carefully looped letter. “The Book of Ages was her archive,” Lepore writes. “Behold the historian.”

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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