Sarah Burns, "Barefoot Boys and Other Country Children: Sentiment and Ideology in Nineteenth Century America," American Art Journal 20 (1988): 25 -50; Burns, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

The rise of urban cityscape painting among French Impressionists has been explored in depth by Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). On the "painting of modern life," see T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). The connections between French developments and American artistic production with regard to urban-scene painting have been examined in several recent studies, most notably H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994); William H. Gerdts, Impressionist New York (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995); Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 220 -290; Rebecca Zurier, "Six New York Artists," in Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1996), pp. 62, 73.

For discussion of the New York dealers, galleries, and markets for painting, see Linda Henefield Skalet, "The Market for American Painting in New York, 1870 -1915" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1980); Gwendolyn Owens, "Art and Commerce: William MacBeth, the Eight, and the Popularization of American Art," in Elizabeth Milroy, Painters of a New Century: The Eight and American Art, exhibition catalogue (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1991), p. 65; Doreen Bolger, "William MacBeth and George A. Hearn: Collecting American Art, 1905 -1910," Archives of American Art Journal 15 (1975): 9 -14; Saul Zalesch, "What the Four Million Bought: Cheap Oil Paintings of the 1880s," American Quarterly 48 (March 1996): 77 -109. On Impressionism, realism, and other artistic developments at the turn of the century, see Saul E. Zalesch, "Competition and Conflict in the New York Art World," Winterthur Portfolio 2 -3 (Summer - Autumn 1994): 103 -120; Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, American Impressionism and Realism; Gerdts, Impressionist New York; Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Zurier, Snyder, and Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives.

Elizabeth Milroy, "Modernist Ritual and the Politics of Display," in Painters of a New Century, pp. 21 -51; Virginia M. Mecklenburg, "Manufacturing Rebellion: The Ashcan Artists and the Press," in Zurier, Snyder, and Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives, pp. 191 -213. On Stokes and Davies, see Max Page, "The Creative Destruction of New York City: Landscape, Memory, and the Politics of Place, 1900 -1930" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995), pp. 246 -260, 332 -370, revised as The Creative Deconstruction of Manhattan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Angela Miller, Alan Wallach, and Elizabeth Johns have compellingly shown that landscape and genre painting, respectively, both commissioned and hailed as a national art, were, despite their non-urban subjects, distinctively New York products in terms of their patronage, display, motivations, and significance. See Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 65 -105; Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 1 -23; Alan Wallach, "Landscape and the Course of American Empire," in William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 33 -49.

All the biographical and provenance information in this chapter comes from the artists' files and accession files of the Museum of the City of New York, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

Kenneth John Myers, "The Economics of Arts Patronage in Jacksonian New York: The Example of the Stevens Collection," paper delivered at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, March 19, 1995.

Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression, pp. 92 -99; Skalet, "The Market for American Painting in New York"; Owens, "Art and Commerce." See also provenance information on Childe Hassam's paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Doreen Bolger Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 3 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), pp. 353 -356.

For discussion of Shahn's New Deal Paintings, see Diana Louise Linden, "The New Deal Murals of Jewish Identity, Social Reform, and Government Patronage" (Ph.D. diss., Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, 1992).

For the years before about 1960, the artists represented in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York are fairly representative of the range of ethnic groups engaged in professional art practice, with the notable exception of African Americans, many of whose activities paralleled those of white artists. Because of racial biases and the color line in the job market, however, many African American artists experienced greater overall hardships not only in finding exhibition venues and patronage but in finding regular work. Painters such as Beauford Delany (1902 - 1977), Palmer Hayden (1890 -1973), and Malvin Gray Johnson (1896 -1934) worked at a range of menial jobs to support themselves. All of them received awards from the New York City - based Harmon Foundation. Johnson, who painted Harlem rooftops and other street scenes, was one of the few of these artists who depicted New York subjects. Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, both of whom achieved broader recognition in the art world, were also painters of life in New York. See Gary Reynolds et al., Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation (Newark, N.J.: Newark Museum, 1989).

The term sites of memory derives from Pierre Nora's Lieux de mémoire. Nora's phrase refers to self-conscious efforts to represent memory within contexts in which "true," living memory no longer exists or governs people's lives. Although Nora applied the phrase specifically to the French context, and the need for such images arose from circumstances different from those in the United States, it is nonetheless viable to use the term with reference to representations of New York. See Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7 -25.

Recent comparative discussions can be found in Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 79 -110; Ellen Wiley Todd, The "New Woman" Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Zurier, Snyder, and Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives; Whitney Museum of American Art, City of Ambition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996); Page, "The Creative Destruction of New York City"; Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, New York, 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), pp. 48 -89; Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York, 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Centennial (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), pp. 1155 -1211. For comparison with visual culture of an earlier period, see Joshua Brown, "Reconstructing Representation: Social Types, Readers, and the Pictorial Press, 1865 -1877," Radical History Review 66 (1996): 5 -38.

Page, "The Creative Destruction of New York City," p. 257; see also his important chapters on the Museum of the City of New York and I. N. Phelps Stokes on pp. 214 -260 and 332 -370. Page attributes the phrase "creative destruction" to economist Joseph A. Schumpeter's 1942 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. On J. Clarence Davies, see also J. Clarence Davies files, Museum of the City of New York, and Jan Ramirez, "Painting the Town: Collecting Cityscapes and Urban Character at the Museum of the City of New York," in this book.

On City Hall Park, see Michele H. Bogart, "Public Space and Public Memory in New York's City Hall Park," Journal of Urban History (January 1999); Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785 -1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 89 -94.

New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, The African Burial Ground and the Commons Historic District Designation Report (New York: City of New York, 1993), pp. 35 -36.

Early courts had been housed in the City Hall, the Rotunda, and several other structures in City Hall Park (see fig. 30).

Robinson's outlook was hardly unusual. In 1885 a national poll of architects named the Courthouse as one of the nation's most beautiful buildings; see Margot Gayle, "Jefferson Market Courthouse," in Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 616 -617.

On the old Tombs, see Eric Homberger, Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 14 -16.

Such juxtapositions between past and present were typical of Warner's work. See Gerdts, Impressionist New York, p. 170.

On the dangers of modern urban life, see Ben Singer, "Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism," in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 72 -99.

On the traffic towers, see Henry Collins Brown, Fifth Avenue Old and New (New York: Fifth Avenue Association, 1924), p. 116; "The New Bronze Traffic Towers on Fifth Avenue, New York," Architecture 42 (February 1923): 46; Stern, Gilmartin, and Mellins, New York, 1930, p. 696.

The first, temporary arch, built in wood one hundred feet north of Washington Square, proved so popular that elite homeowners around the square sponsored a campaign to reconstruct the arch in more enduring Tuckahoe marble. On the Washington Arch, see Michele H. Bogart, "Historical Background," in Swanke Hayden Connell, "Washington Arch Survey of Existing Conditions," report prepared for the Department of Parks and Recreation of the City of New York, January 1992, pp. 4 -12; Mindy Cantor, "Washington Arch and the Changing Neighborhood," in Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture, ed. Rick Beard and Jan Seidler Ramirez (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 83 -92; Donald Martin Reynolds, Monuments and Masterpieces: Histories and Views of Public Sculpture in New York City (1988; reprint, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), pp. 356 -366.

On the tension between mobility and stasis, the ephemerality of sensation, and the efforts to freeze those sensations as a peculiarly modern urban phenomenon, see Leo Charney, "Introduction," and "In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity," in Charney and Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, pp. 6, 279 -294. On the Dewey and Victory arches, see Michele H. Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890 -1930 (1989; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), pp. 97 -110, 271 -292.

On the destruction of the aquarium, see Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 678 -682; Gregory F. Gilmartin, Shaping the City: New York and the Municipal Art Society (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1995), pp. 325 -330.

The 1965 establishment of the Landmarks Preservation Commission helped to fulfill this mission. On the postwar preservation movement in New York, see Gilmartin, Shaping the City, pp. 344 -424; Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York, 1960, pp. 1091 -1153.