The Manhattan Yankees? Planning Objectives,City Policy,and Sports Stadium Location in New York City

The owners of the New York Yankees professional baseball team have claimed that they are dissatisfied with the location of the team's current ballpark in the economically depressed South Bronx. To appease them, Mayor Giuliani proposed constructing a new stadium for the Yankees in Manhattan, prompting a city-wide debate over whether the team should stay in the Bronx or move to Manhattan. This article outlines the two competing proposals and evaluates their claims. The Manhattan site is linked to the image creation of New York's downtown while the Bronx site sees the stadium as part of a broader regeneration scheme for a deprived part of the city. This article discourages a blind acceptance of Manhattan-centric planning, and presents the argument that the Bronx site is in the best interests of New York.     

Séances in the City: The “Operational Aesthetic” and “Modern Spiritualism” in the Popular Culture of New York City, 1865–1870

This paper will demonstrate that spiritualism became a significant element of popular culture in New York City between 1865 and 1870 because it catered to the “operational aesthetic” so prevalent in urban entertainments. The historian Neil Harris invented the term “operational aesthetic” to denote the spirit of playful inquiry common to the urban culture of mid-nineteenth-century America. By the 1860s, urbanization had undermined the social transparency so integral to the American Republic, causing cultural anxiety about the fraud and deceit, which was thought to thrive on urban anonymity. Several cultural genres, including detective fiction and urban guides, not only reflected, but also invited the investigation into, the divorce between the “superficialities” of the city and the “processes” driving criminal behavior. Spiritualism featured regularly in these genres, particularly the urban guides, as it was appealing to people eager to uncover another instance of urban deceit. Similarly, spiritualists attracted skeptical and agnostic audiences who shared this interest in investigation. Apparent “exposés” of spiritualism, therefore, as well as the mediums themselves, reached out to skeptical audiences, drawn to the “operational aesthetic” inherent in spiritualist demonstrations.     

Receiving Royals in Later Medieval York: Civic Ceremony and the Municipal Elite, 1478–1503

Abstract

This article examines the later medieval royal entry ceremony in York from the perspective of the social groups that designed and produced the spectacle. Deliberations of York's civic council comprise the main body of evidence for this study. It is argued that a mercantile oligarchy controlled the production of ceremony at every level. York's merchants dominated the design of civic receptions by excluding other secular and ecclesiastical groups native to the city from the decision-making process, and by resisting external interference by groups such as the nobility. The civic council made use of the topography of the city to reinforce the mercantile dimensions of the ceremony and to create a ceremonial space where they could communicate with the royal visitor. The merchant élite also adapted the form and content of the city's nuanced Corpus Christi celebrations to the royal entry. By these means they displayed and consolidated their position at the pinnacle of urban society at a time when their dominance over the city's economic, social and political structures was weakening.