3: Building Print Community

In 1909, sociologist Charles Horton Cooley was investigating social life in America and, in the process, found himself defending the importance of the American newspaper. “The bulk of its matter,” he explained, “is best described by the phrase organized gossip. The sort of intercourse that people formerly carried on at cross-road stores or over the back fence has now attained the dignity of print and an imposing system. . . . We are gratifying an old appetite in a new way.”1 Newspapers’ circulation of seemingly mundane gossip, Cooley argued, served a vital purpose—it bound communities together. “The decried habit of reading the newspapers contributes much to a general we-feeling . . . pervading the world with a conscious community of sentiment.”2 In an era when many Americans worried that big cities would dissolve community entirely, and in which city dwellers hotly debated who belonged in the urban public, newspapers had a vital role to play in creating, as Cooley put it, a “we-feeling” or a “conscious community.”

The ties that bound turn-of-the-century metropolises together necessarily differed from those that bound neighborhoods and towns. In small towns, years of interactions and shared experiences might make residents feel empathetic toward, and responsible for, one another. Daily chats and small favors could bond urban neighbors as well, but such intimate exchanges could not unite entire cities. Metropolitan residents who lived in different neighborhoods, practiced different professions, and moved in distinct social circles might never encounter each other or even walk the same city streets. If urbanites were to feel themselves a part of a metropolitan community, they would have to assemble their understanding of that community out of something other than in-person experience and interaction. Newspapers formed the raw material for that project.3 By distributing shared vocabularies, images, and stories, newspapers could help convince readers that they and their neighbors shared a single urban reality.

Columns of letters to the editor hosted much disagreement and debate. Yet those editorial-page debates often took as their starting point a set of shared interests and investments among participants. Most obviously, readers and contributors might share an allegiance to a particular political party, but more subtly, they might also assume a common future, a sense of mutual responsibility, and an ethic of interdependence. Surprising and varied portions of newspapers—not editorial pages but events listings, muckraking articles, travelogues, and charity drives—built up that sense of common interest and shared fate for hundreds of thousands of city readers.4

The “conscious community” depicted in turn-of-the-century newspaper pages can seem, at first glance, remarkably inclusive. The poor, the rich, immigrants, and even criminals all appeared in newspaper articles as legitimate and permanent members of the urban public. Articles often treated these subjects as readers’ neighbors, about whom they ought to be curious, and whom they might strive to help. Civic campaigns spotlighted issues that concerned (and therefore bound together) all city dwellers, while newspapers’ charity drives created the impression of a cohesive urban community that cared for the city’s neediest. When these articles assumed that readers would take an automatic interest in the state of their cities’ politics, infrastructures, and most vulnerable populations, they fostered a culture of civic stewardship.

A few populations did fall outside the scope of papers’ curiosity and concern, however. The newspapers of many eastern cities remained nearly silent on African American community life, behaving as though that population simply did not exist. Other regions’ papers intermittently excluded Asians and Hispanics as well, either through silence or through vitriolic campaigns. More often, newspapers assigned ethnic and racial minorities specific places in a fairly rigid social hierarchy. It seemed that only the reader, assumed to be white and middle class, could move freely through cities’ varied spaces and populations. Thus newspapers’ renderings of urban communities were inclusive but not egalitarian; they depicted cities made up of actors and subjects, central citizens and peripheral characters.

Judging from the front pages, turn-of-the-century cities were harsh places. Articles showcased the greed, violence, loneliness, and poverty that governed many city dwellers’ lives. Because newspapers reported so much bad news, it is in some ways surprising that they also managed to depict cities as places that readers might want to claim as their own, in which they might even take some pride. But editors and reporters took great pains to emphasize other, less sensational kinds of urban stories, in which city people treated each other with generosity and warmth. The new genre of the human-interest article encouraged readers to empathize with a wide variety of urban lives and to appreciate moments of grace as well as of tragedy.

Newspapers’ sunnier depictions of cities could provide escapes from real life. Readers might take refuge in a print version of the metropolis that was far more knowable, navigable, and welcoming than the real thing. They could feel reassured by portraits of cohesive communities, unrealistic as they were. But newspapers’ sometimes-utopian civic visions did not exist in simple parallel to urban reality. Newspapers had real power to alter how people thought about cities and their places within them. When articles explained the rewards of urban observation and pointed out especially interesting neighborhoods, they could launch readers out into city streets. When they supplied data and some critical distance, newspapers equipped city dwellers to change their cities in systematic and organized ways. Remarkably, news articles taught each reader to think of millions of metropolitan neighbors as members of his or her community. This is evident even in the least knowable, least coherent city in the nation, New York City.

The island of Manhattan alone qualified as the nation’s largest city for most of the nineteenth century. When the city then formally incorporated the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island in 1898, it grew from roughly one and a half million people to three and half million, and from twenty-three square miles to 303 square miles.5 The consolidated city was one of the largest in the world.

New York City’s growth further separated the city into wealthy and poor neighborhoods, into ethnic enclaves and specialized commercial quarters. Well-off New Yorkers moved farther and farther uptown, into ever more exclusive and homogenous districts.6 New immigrants who joined their relatives and countrymen in Manhattan neighborhoods swelled the population of each one, so that by 1890 reporter and photographer Jacob Riis could map out swaths of the Lower East Side that were overwhelmingly Italian, Polish, Jewish, or Chinese.7 The city’s African American center relocated from portions of lower Manhattan to the much larger Harlem, which by the 1920s stretched more than thirty-five blocks from south to north and from Amsterdam Avenue to the East River.8 In New York’s dense yet stratified boroughs, residents living in one type of neighborhood might rarely interact with residents of others.

In fits and starts, New York City’s patchwork of boroughs and islands fused into a more integrated metropolitan region. The monumental Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Queensboro Bridges brought New Yorkers across the East River. Subway lines connected Manhattan to the Bronx in 1904, to Brooklyn in 1908, and to Queens in the 1920s.9 A flurry of construction in the 1910s and 1920s then opened up bridges, tunnels, and roads to automobile traffic. Better transit facilitated urban mixing, in one sense, allowing people to easily visit different areas of the city. At the same time, the room for expansion resulted in even more specialized neighborhoods. Working-class Polish families moved to Sunset Park, middle-class Italians to Bay Ridge, middle-class Orthodox Jews to Borough Park, and working-class Jews to Brownsville. Jamaica filled with African American families seeking more space than Harlem could offer, while planned communities in Jackson Heights and Sunnyside filled up with native-born New Yorkers starting families and commuting to work in Manhattan.10

The enormous reach of the city and the diversity of its people suggest that residents might have a difficult time fashioning a coherent identity for the metropolis and that they would feel little kinship with their millions of fellow New Yorkers. Even as dense urban development spread, the city remained so vast that it still held almost every possible type of settlement. A New York address could indicate an estate on Staten Island, a dairy farm in Queens, a seaside summer home on Far Rockaway, or a towering skyscraper in midtown. And yet New York managed to cultivate a distinctive personality of its own and to inspire fierce loyalty among its residents.

Because newspapers saturated New York, they played an especially important role in familiarizing readers with the broader city and in making the metropolis feel like a village.11 The New York World and the New York Journal, at the peak of their popularity in the late 1890s, each printed enough copies to reach one in every three New Yorkers, or three of every four Manhattan residents. The World and the Journal—and later, in the 1920s, the New York Daily News—circulated so widely that they provided common languages for residents. Other papers carved out more specialized, niche audiences. The New York Tribune attracted wealthy suburban Republicans, the Globe appealed to middle-class women and mothers, and the Morning Journal earned the nickname “the washerwoman’s gazette.”12 Working-class conservatives read the Sun, most businessmen read the Times, and the intellectual elite took the New York Evening Post.13 The city offered nine dailies in foreign languages (four German, two French, and one each in Czech, Yiddish, and Italian).14 Neighborhood, ethnic, trade, religious, and political groups’ weekly papers added to the panoply. And the borough of Brooklyn printed three daily papers of its own. All of these papers created and strengthened smaller communities within the city.

Even the biggest papers did not reach the entire urban population, so no single vision of New York’s identity and community made its way into the lives and minds of all of the city’s residents. But every New York paper, from the Amsterdam News to the Jewish Daily Forward to the Herald Tribune, offered a vision of New York as a whole, a print version of the city that residents browsed, criticized, and partially adopted as their own. Each cast its readers in relationship to the wider city. The city and the citizens that appeared in newsprint helped New Yorkers to envision a metropolitan community and to make meaningful places for themselves within it.

A Concerned Public

The mass metropolitan dailies of late nineteenth-century New York sketched an urban community for readers in part through their civic reporting known, in its most aggressive form, as “muckraking.” Editors embraced muckraking partly out of self-interest, for these articles boosted newspaper sales by uncovering previously hidden, and often scandalous, urban problems. Yet muckraking—and its counterpart, the newspaper charity drive—changed city culture and altered urban lives in very real ways. Together, these two types of material established the idea that the urban public, regardless of class or political party, shared both concerns and responsibilities.

In mid-nineteenth-century journalism, class and party loyalty had trumped any broader civic identity, and the newspapers took it as their job to choose a side, not to solve a problem. When New York’s newspapers covered the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett, for example, the Sun rallied its working-class readers in solidarity with the poor prostitute Jewett, while the slightly more genteel Herald asked its readers to stand with Richard Robinson, the wealthy patron suspected of her murder.15 Neither paper looked at the case through a wider civic lens. Neither one examined the police system that allowed prostitution to thrive along Thomas Street, and neither one discussed any systemic change that might prevent women like Jewett from winding up in such a dangerous occupation.

In the late 1880s and the 1890s, New York editors endeavored to expand their audiences beyond a single party or class—which meant that they had to enlist readers’ loyalties in new ways. Some papers tried to make New Yorkers feel that whenever they bought an issue, they were joining a community of readers who chose “the best” paper in the city. “An exclusive story is supposed . . . to instill in the reader interest and pride in ‘his paper’s’ triumph,” explained Lincoln Steffens. “It is to the new journalism what common opinion was to the old, a good shared by the reader with his paper.”16 Both Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst used their newspapers’ size and popularity to make readers feel like a part of something important, trumpeting their circulations on their papers’ mastheads and on signs on their buildings.17

Late nineteenth-century New York papers also began to use populist—not partisan—language that drew many different kinds of readers together rather than setting them against each other. In 1883, Joseph Pulitzer described his paper’s mission in politically independent language: “An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”18 This manifesto aligned the New York World with the interests of the great majority of New Yorkers and defined the enemy as just a handful of demagogues, plunderers, and privileged urbanites. Pulitzer’s paper created a we that was far more expansive and inclusive than that in partisan papers and asked the reading audience to unite in pursuit not of party goals but of public welfare.19

The New York World, and also its rivals the New York Journal and the New York Sun, adopted populist stances with an eye to expanding their circulations. But when these papers stated their intentions to watch out for all city people’s interests, readers began turning to them to solve urban problems. “If you have any fault to find with anybody or anything of a public nature,” stated the 1889 New York World, “put it in as concise form as possible and address it to ‘The Grumbler.’”20 Respondents complained about all kinds of urban irritations, from noisy gangs of boys who kept the neighbors awake all night to streetcar conductors’ bad breath. An 1889 survey taken by the New York World indicated readers’ confidence in newspapers’ abilities to effect change through investigations and editorial campaigns. When the World asked readers what it could do to improve itself, dozens of readers wrote in not to suggest changes to the paper’s format or its beats but instead to suggest specific causes the paper ought to take up. They wanted it to reform the city’s garbage business, to investigate factories for evidence of contamination, to campaign for better treatment of animals. The most imaginative readers pictured the World as a national or even international force, asking the paper to build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean or to change the country’s name to the United States of Columbia.21

Partisan papers had purposely avoided reporting on municipal problems, for they did not want to call attention to their own parties’ flaws. Partisan papers had also failed to investigate local concerns because they were too busy talking about their party’s state- or national-level platforms and campaigns.22 And while New York City’s entrenched political system had caused large-scale urban problems to go underreported, the city’s sheer size and complexity had also obscured them. Information often failed to travel through the city’s many layers. Working-class immigrants used filthy equipment in meatpacking plants or worked under exploitative conditions in garment factories, but their knowledge rarely traveled beyond their circles of friends and coworkers. Politicians themselves knew about the graft and corruption that ruled New York’s intricate system of wards, aldermen, and commissioners, but that corruption remained hidden from most voters. Such a complex and stratified city sheltered plenty of secrets for reporters to uncover, especially if they were willing to break free of partisan politics.

New York’s newspapers came into their own as civic stewards when they began exposing exploitation and fraud—when they began muckraking. The muckraking model required that reporters not simply wait for news to surface but that they go looking for hidden problems. Some of these reporters dug up dirt on city, state, and national political systems. Others exposed city businesses’ immoral practices, from watering down milk to fixing prices for railroad tickets.23 Elizabeth Cochrane, who wrote under the name “Nellie Bly” for the World, routinely went undercover to expose terrible conditions in insane asylums, prisons, hospitals, factories, and nursing homes.24 Jacob Riis, who covered the police headquarters for the New York Tribune and then the New York Sun, wrote about the misery he witnessed in the tenements, sweatshops, and flophouses of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Muckraking articles offered voyeuristic pleasures, and they could be doubly shocking when they exposed political corruption or dire poverty that existed right under readers’ noses. Riis’s photographs, later published in his book How the Other Half Lives, were clearly intended to both stun and fascinate middle- and upper-class readers with their images of squalid barrooms and alleyways.25 Yet muckraking reporters also assumed and expected that readers would feel a sense of connection to their city as a whole—not just to their own class, party, neighborhood, ethnicity, or trade—and that the connection translated into a duty to solve city problems. Their articles consistently spoke of interconnected and interdependent cities. An 1897 World editorial described the spreading dangers of the slums: “It is in such places that small-pox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, consumption and all the most deadly diseases breed, to spread until the cleanest and wealthiest quarters are involved. . . . The old proverb which says that it is our concern when the next wall is burning fits this situation exactly. If we do not drag up the slums, the slums will drag down New York.”26 In this urban vision, a problem in one part of the city became everyone’s problem.27

Though New York City newspapers toned down their fiery language and energetic exposés in the 1890s and early 1900s, their model of civic-minded, activist, nonpartisan news coverage slowly became standard in mainstream metropolitan papers nationwide. Newspapers also passed the torch to magazines, which further developed muckraking into both a literary genre and a national sensation.28 When newspapers positioned themselves as crusaders for the public good, they joined many Progressive organizations that were circumventing traditional party politics and establishing new structures for addressing urban problems. Settlement houses, city clubs, housing commissions, and business bureaus all tried to improve conditions in cities through independent monitoring and action. Reformers established new appointed government positions—such as city managers, school superintendents, and health commissioners—so that officials would spend more time fixing endemic problems and less time worrying about their chances for reelection. As newspapers inspired some of these efforts and publicized others, they catapulted cities into an age of energetic reform and established a norm of nonpartisan problem solving.

Metropolitan newspapers assumed even more involved roles within their communities when they founded charities of their own. Churches’ donations and services were failing to meet the needs of the growing and diversifying turn-of-the-century cities. Churches in homogenous new urban or suburban neighborhoods had little contact with needy populations in urban slums, and Protestants often neglected the city’s Catholic and Jewish populations.29 Neighborhood congregations could seem too small to effectively counter cities’ large-scale problems such as tuberculosis, malnutrition, and child labor. Meanwhile, many older municipal aid organizations, such as asylums, poor houses, orphanages, and free hospitals, had atrophied into mere warehouses for the poor. Newspapers, by contrast, were often well positioned to channel aid to those who needed it. Editors might know more about the city’s poor than most churches or volunteer organizations, since their reporters covered the city’s slums each day. And on their pages, they could mount large-scale campaigns that raised funds from hundreds of thousands of readers at once.

Newspaper charities became vehicles through which readers could engage with and improve their communities. In 1882, the New York Tribune sponsored the first long-running newspaper charity, the Fresh Air Fund, which sent tenement children on two-week vacations in the countryside. The Tribune kept the fund’s director on salary; he wrote articles that appeared in the paper nearly every day through the spring and summer, soliciting donations.30 The New York World, Journal, and Herald followed in the Tribune’s footsteps. During the depressions of 1893 and 1897, those papers set up funds providing free ice, clothing, coal, and food. By 1900, the New York Times was running appeals for both the Sick Children’s Mission and the Little Mothers’ Aid Association.31 The New York Times and the Brooklyn Eagle later instituted “Neediest Cases” drives that ran during the holiday season.32

Though all of these charities cast readers as community members who cared for each other, their approaches differed. The charities of the World, the Journal, and the American offered temporary relief for acute crises, distributing coal to poor families during a frigid spell in winter or taking up a collection for the family of a slain police officer.33 In this they resembled the mutual aid societies of working-class communities. The middle-class and upper-class readers of the New York Times and the New York Tribune meanwhile, steeped in a culture of Progressive reform, were likely to value highly systematic aid efforts, and they had the money to sustain those efforts over years or even decades. Readers of these papers might also be relatively unfamiliar with (and potentially quite interested in reading about) the poor.

Charity articles offered readers a risk-free way to learn about and sympathize with New York City’s poorest residents. On the street, middle-class and prosperous New Yorkers often kept their guard up against the poor, expecting them to beg, peddle, or even steal. When reading the newspaper, those same New Yorkers could let down their guard, for print protected them from the unpredictability of an in-person encounter. Writers often focused on child subjects because they seemed less threatening to readers than poor adults and because few readers would be likely to blame children for their own poverty. Articles encouraged readers to see subjects as deserving, lovable individuals rather than as mere types. “No one can help liking 11-year-old Jimmy Sharp, and no one can help smiling into the joyous little face, with its brown eyes, wide mouth, and straight, narrow nose,” explained one 1918 “Neediest Cases” profile.34 The New York Tribune cannily printed letters from the beneficiaries of its Fresh Air Fund, putting readers into intimate (print) relationships with those receiving aid. “Dear Mama: I think that you would not have a good a time as I have in a 100 years—a boy and me is getting lots of apples under the trees but we don’t take the apples off the trees, and how are you getting along—I am getting along very nice and did you hear anything of grandma’s foot—I hope it is well.”35 This child’s enthusiasm and stream-of-consciousness writing may have reminded some readers of their own children.

In charity articles, editors deftly rendered the fragmented city as a caring community. Readers could participate in and join that fantasy of New York by donating to newspapers’ causes. Nearly all charity drives printed lists of donations every day or week. A list of Fresh Air Fund donors in the 1890 Tribune read:

The Parsonage . . . 7.00

Mrs. W. H. Vanderbilt . . . 1,000.00

H. N. G. . . . 5.00

Sunday-school class of young girls of the Congregational Church, Durham, Conn. . . . 2.2536

By gathering such different names together on a page, around a shared cause, these lists conjured a community in which every member mattered. At the same time, newspaper charities showcased New Yorkers’ generosity and caring by reprinting the letters that came in with donations. “Please give this money to the Neediest Cases,” wrote Elihu Robinson of Newark, in a letter received and then reprinted by the New York Times. “My sister and I saved it for Christmas gifts for our family, but we decided that these cases need it more.”37 When their drives finished, editors detailed the heartening changes made possible by readers’ donations. “The widowed mother whose seven children were weak and ill from malnutrition now has enough food for them,” explained a follow-up article. “The children look like a different family, so healthy and rosy are they, and even the feeble grandmother of this home seems to have renewed her youth.”38 Every time newspapers attributed their charities’ successes to readers’ collective actions, they made contributors feel part of a benevolent and effective group.

Newspaper editors did not start charities out of generosity alone; they founded them to improve their public image. Metropolitan papers had grown into powerful corporations by the turn of the century, and critics accused publishers of profit-mongering tactics no different from those of oil or steel barons. Critics also charged newspapers’ sensational stories with debasing public morals. One relatively simple way that an editor could improve his paper’s reputation was to found a charity. “We invite the attention of chronic pessimists,” said the New York Tribune in 1890, “who are constantly complaining that the press is an organized agency for assailing private reputation, debauching public morals and popularizing frivolous gossip and personalities, and that it possesses no redeeming features, to the following tabulated results of thirteen years’ successful operation of the Fresh-Air Fund.”39 Papers cast themselves as heroes when they printed melodramatic stories and images in which newspaper workers swooped in to rescue desperate families (fig. 3.1).40 Charity efforts that focused on children also helped to counter newspapers’ reputations for exploiting child workers. Distribution managers hired very young boys, sometimes orphans, to sell their papers on street corners. The boys worked for low wages, and many slept on the sidewalks. If New Yorkers were not already aware of newsboys’ troubles from encountering these boys themselves, they learned about their situation from Children’s Aid Society founder Charles Loring Brace, who took up their cause in the 1850s, or from novelist Horatio Alger, who turned newsboys into plucky heroes in serialized stories and bestselling books.41 When the Times publicized the Sick Children’s Mission or the Tribune promoted its Fresh Air Fund, each paper cast itself as a benefactor—rather than an enemy—of children.

3.1 The background of this image shows the Journal’s delivery wagon fighting through the wind and snow with its cargo of food and fuel. Captions under the round images say “The arrival of the Journal relief wagons in Monroe Street” and “Bringing food to the starving Sheridans, 105 Orchard Street.” New York Journal, 20 January 1897, 8.

It seems that New York City newspapers successfully positioned themselves as generous and caring institutions, for needy New Yorkers began to turn to newspaper editors for help. Files of letters to Joseph Pulitzer include hundreds of requests for jobs, money, and publicity. Some correspondents praised the World’s charitable reporting before asking for assistance. “You have been the means of helping so many by stateing [sic] their case in the columns of your valuable paper. I am in hopes you will help me a little,” wrote Mrs. Louisa Baker. “Will you please state my case to the public and receive all contributions?”42

Muckrakers focused readers’ attention on urban problems that politicians and partisan papers had neglected for years and encouraged readers to think critically about how to solve them. Newspaper charity articles, in contrast, acted as more temporary salves. They did not examine the causes of poverty, hunger, or child labor but simply aimed to ease the suffering of victims. Still, both types of news created similar expectations that filtered into New York’s political and social world. Jacob Riis’s articles and photographs inspired citizens and politicians to pass child labor laws, to construct city playgrounds, and to expand the Croton aqueduct that supplied the city with uncontaminated drinking water.43 Elizabeth Cochrane’s exposé prompted an investigation and overhaul of the city’s insane asylums. The New York Times’s crusade against abusive business practices at the New York Life Insurance Company persuaded legislators to reform the industry.44 Charity articles successfully mobilized New Yorkers; readers of the New York Tribune, for example, donated anywhere from $18,000 to $52,000 to the Fresh Air Fund in every year between 1882 and 1912 and sent between four and fifteen thousand tenement children annually on countryside vacations.45 Newspapers’ vision of urban community was in many ways just that—a vision, one that never even reached many residents. Yet by stressing the idea that city dwellers ought to care about the health and welfare of all others, New York newspapers did fashion their reading audiences into more involved and reform-minded publics.

Inside the City’s Many Spheres

At the turn of the century, New Yorkers’ everyday lives took place within a diminishing slice of a vast city. If residents wanted to envision and grasp the entire city, they had to use their imaginations. Daily newspapers exposed readers to many facets of the city that they never saw in person, and thus helped them to imagine the city as a whole. Papers chronicled the city’s cultural expansion, describing many new professions, entertainments, and specialties. They also reported on its physical expansion, familiarizing readers with the streets of its new neighborhoods, the tops of its skyscrapers, and the depths of its sewer system. Over the years, reporters developed sophisticated techniques to not only tell readers what had happened at a particular place and time but also to make readers feel as though they had been at the scene. These articles did not call explicitly on New Yorkers’ sense of community, nor did they rally for change the way that muckraking and charity articles did. Yet their information could deepen readers’ attachment to, and investment in, the city as a whole. Right when the city seemed to outpace readers’ understanding, metropolitan newspapers took it on as their job to report on all of New York’s facets, constructing “conscious community” not from small-town gossip but from big-city news.

Even basic newspaper reporting offered a more complete view of one city day than readers could ever get through direct experience. As early as 1835, the New York Herald had promised to take readers everywhere at once: “We shall give a correct picture of the world—in Wall Street—in the Exchange—in the Post Office—at the Theaters—in the Opera.”46 The New York Sun printed urban dispatches under the title “Life in the Metropolis. Dashes Here and There by the Sun’s Ubiquitous Reporters.”47 These “ubiquitous” reporters became readers’ eyes and ears all over the city. Announcements of everyday events, too, carried readers far and wide. The 1887 New York Tribune’s column of “What Is Going on To-Day” listed:

Board of Aldermen, noon.

Irish National League, No. 61 Union Square, 8 p.m.

Knights of Labor conspiracy case, Yorkville Police Court.

Brooklyn Microscopical Society reception, Adelphi Academy, 8 p.m.

Knickerbocker Bowling Club reception, Tennis Building, 3 p.m.48

While listing gatherings that readers might want to attend, the column also gave them an overview of the day’s happenings—a bird’s eye picture of the day that only reading, not experience, could provide.

In the mid- and late nineteenth century, writers covering the day’s biggest civic functions and most important meetings used special reporting techniques to mimic in-person experience, giving readers more of a stake in each event. Reporters painted the settings of a Unitarian book club meeting or a Board of Trade banquet, so that readers could visualize where the action had played out. They listed several dozen names of the most prominent people presiding or attending. They then printed the meetings’ speeches, toasts, and conversations verbatim, so the reader heard nearly as much talk as an actual attendee: “‘Suppose we adopt this badge. The world won’t stop if we change it next year.’ ‘That’s it!’ ‘That’s the talk!’ came from the different members.”49 In another article genre, which emerged in the 1870s and which flourished well into the twentieth century, a curious reporter sought out and interviewed some New Yorker familiar with a specialized slice of the city. Reporters described their entrance into the scene, so that readers, too, could feel that they had stumbled across an interesting urban happening. “A WORLD reporter tramped across the sands of Long Beach, L. I., the other day and made a call on Capt. Van Wicklin, who is in command of Station 33, with a watchful eye to the wind for the slighted signs of an approaching storm,” began an 1889 article.50 Reporters recorded their questions as dialogue, which allowed each reader to adopt the questions as his own:

“Are there many bald people in New-York?”

“A great many more than is dreamed of,” said the wig-maker, with a significant smile.”51

As reporters interviewed the city’s specialists and mined their expertise, they turned readers into momentary connoisseurs of rarefied city realms. The worlds of wig makers, circus performers, rescue workers, and casting directors all briefly opened up to them.

By the turn of the century, many papers started to move beyond “you were there” coverage of civic meetings and “curious reporter” interview articles and experimented with illustrations. At first, editors printed a few pictures alongside articles, helping readers to imagine the scene. The 1889 article on the Long Beach rescue workers, for example, showed the inside of the station house and depicted the men launching a boat.52 When the halftone process made it possible to reproduce photographs, the World used photomontage to create detailed, atmospheric pictures of Coney Island evenings and days in Central Park (plate 5). In glossy rotogravure sections, editors reproduced paintings currently on display in the city’s museums and galleries, allowing readers to briefly “visit” each exhibit. These illustrations tackled the same task as papers’ descriptive articles, carrying readers to new places as vividly and realistically as possible.

Editors turned their papers into even more exciting portals to urban experience as they crafted separate sections for theater, sports, and business. Each of these sections promoted readers’ interest and investment in especially rich veins of urban life. Larger theater sections, emerging around the turn of the century, gave reporters space to write much more in-depth commentary. (See fig. 3.2.) Papers turned their reviews into entertaining dramas in themselves, as they outlined plays’ premises and principal characters, then revealed the characters’ secrets: “They are horror-stricken at discovering, in the first act, that she has fallen victim to the charm of a married army officer named Aynesley Murray,” explained a 1906 review in the American and Journal, “and is about to bear him a child.”53 The New York American even printed entire scenes from plays currently running on Broadway.54 One New York newspaper reader, housebound by illness, explained why she appreciated this thorough coverage. “As it is not possible to visit art shows, theater, opera concert, or lecture,” she said, “I am able to keep informed by the criticisms of pictures, the plots of the new plays, the actors who are to appear and the famous singers. Armed with the information gleaned from the newspapers, I am prepared to discuss any of these matters intelligently.”55 Theater sections also provided an up-close perspective that turned readers into Broadway insiders. Reporters took readers backstage and let them listen in on industry conversations in columns such as “Theatrical Gossip” or “Heard in the Greenroom.”56 Articles described the tricks of the theatrical trade, specifying the methods that actors used to work themselves up into an onstage fury or explaining how actors fashioned elegant-looking costumes out of paper, paint, and fabric scraps.57 A New York Times article on the coming opera season pictured not just the opera stars but the elegant occupants of the box seats and the more boisterous crowds in the cheap seats as well.58 When the 1913 World caricatured and named New York’s theatergoing “first nighters,” all of whom never missed an opening performance, readers could feel as if they knew the Broadway regulars.59

3.2 Newspapers illustrated their theater articles with images of the actors and actresses appearing onstage and with pictures of dramatic scenes. New York American and Journal, 14 January 1906, 38.

Sports sections deployed similar techniques to describe the city’s many races and matches, transforming readers into spectators and fans. Where sports articles early in the nineteenth century had reported only the bare facts, late nineteenth-century reporters went into much greater detail.60 A reporter covering an 1889 handball match first described the physique of each player: “Lawlor is about the medium height, weighing about 160 pounds. His well-knit form showed off well in his tight-fitting blue uniform, and was in striking contrast to his small opponent.”61 The writer then relayed the match minute by minute: “Lawlor had rolled up 15 aces on his first hand, when he lost the ball on a short stroke,” he explained. “On Courtney’s second hand he did considerable to cut down the big lead of his heavier opponent. He piled up eight aces, when Lawlor got the ball away from him by sending it far back over his head.”62 Soon, New York newspapers were routinely printing a paragraph for every inning of a Yankees or Dodgers game, every round of a highly anticipated boxing match.63 Slang-filled, energetic descriptions of sports pages in the 1910s and 1920s conveyed, maybe even exaggerated, all the excitement of the live event. A 1917 article in the Sun described a hockey match: “A few seconds later from a hot scrimmage in front of the Green earthworks, Jewitt caged the rubber and in 10:15 Peabody smashed a shot that caroomed off Garon’s shins into the Winged Fist cage. On the next face off Smith whizzed down the ice, darted from behind the net and smashed a sizzler past Smart.”64 By the 1910s, papers were also printing spectacular action shots that conveyed some of the energy and thrill of the game (fig. 3.3).

3.3 Newspapers of the 1910s printed action shots conveying the energy of the game. New York American, 2 October 1910, sec. L-2, 5.

Sports articles not only brought the reader to the scene but also inducted that reader into a community of sports fans. To begin with, game reports created a sense of shared interests by using language that aligned writer, reader, and spectator behind the home team. “Up to the time we went in to bat in the ninth it looked like a shutout,” reported the 1908 New York Times on a Giants-Reds baseball game. “Our Master Doyle had made a presentation in a brief but well-chosen error in the second inning and the two runs scored in that frame looked like all the official recorders would be called upon to set down. But such was not the case. We made two runs in the ninth.”65 Words like “we” and “our,” the “enemy” and the “champs” placed the reader in a loyal group of New York sports fans. Newspaper articles brought readers into New York’s fierce and loyal cheering squad by sharing inside knowledge and vocabulary. They drew up tables of batting, pitching, and fielding records. The 1920 Daily News showed readers exactly how Brooklyn’s pitcher hurled the ball, how the centerfielder gripped the bat, and how the shortstop caught line drives.66 After looking at the sports pages, readers would know New York’s baseball coaches as “Robbie” or “Uncle Wilbert.” They would know the Yankees’ Babe Ruth as the Sultan of Swat, Tarzan of the diamond, or the Bambino.67

When an 1889 world championship series pitted New York against Brooklyn, newspapers played up the rivalry but did not choose sides. The World ran two separate accounts of each game, in parallel columns, told from the Brooklyn and New York points of view:

The brave Brooklyn boys appeared on the grounds a little before 2:30 and were warmly welcomed. They warmed up with a brilliant fifteen minutes’ practice, and then sat down to watch the New Yorkers try to imitate them. They muffed and everything.

When the bell rang, the Brooklyns shambled out to their positions like nine prize oxen at a country fair. Did they look like winners? Well, scarcely. There was not a man among them who did not handle himself like an overgrown fumbled school-boy.68

Even though this series played out before Brooklyn joined metropolitan New York, the paper treated the Brooklyn team, and Brooklyn fans, as equal members of the greater New York community. Newspapers’ sports coverage made clear that fans’ more local and personal loyalties could be compatible with a broader New York identity.

Even business sections, dry as they might seem, could strengthen readers’ bonds to the city by letting them vicariously participate in one of the city’s specialized realms. Reports on major New York contracts and sales allowed small-time businessmen to follow the kinds of big-business deals that they would never participate in themselves. In its regular column “What Brokers Think of the Market Outlook,” the New York American interviewed various firms for market assessments and predictions. Readers could weigh Marshall, Spade & Co.’s opinions against those of J. S. Bache & Co., as if they had personally consulted both.69 Columns such as “Chat from Wall Street” or “Gossip of Wall Street” offered insider opinions and alerted readers to the hot topics among brokers and bankers. “There has been a great deal of loose talk about the war materials the Allies have been buying or negotiating for in the United States,” relayed the New York Tribune’s business column, sounding as gossipy as a theater or society article. “The trouble has been mainly that people in the financial district have had only the vaguest ideas about what a shrapnel shell, for instance, was.”70

As New York City expanded upward and outward, newspapers carried readers into all of the city’s new spaces. Newspaper features took readers up to the tops of the city’s new skyscrapers and showed them the dazzling views. The World enlisted the men cleaning the outside of Saint Patrick’s cathedral to take pictures from the tallest spires; the Times and the Herald Tribune published city views taken from blimps and planes (fig. 3.4).71 The Herald Tribune’s caption under a bird’s-eye shot helped readers locate landmarks that they might not easily recognize from the air—Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, the steamship Leviathan at harbor.72 Circulating a common set of images among hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who often inhabited very different urban realms, newspapers built up shared mental pictures, visual trademarks, and an agreed-on physical reality for the city.73 These views were of special value in New York, where the tight grid, mostly flat terrain, and relative absence of squares and plazas made it hard to get any visual distance. The images helped readers map out the paths they themselves traveled and to see how their territory fit into the rest of the city. Newspaper readers could now imagine their lives in relationship to the entire metropolis.

3.4 A 1910 New York American magazine piece tried to reproduce the feeling of standing high above the city. The caption under the photograph read: “A remarkable photograph from the thirtieth story of a skyscraper. To get its best effect, lay the page on the floor and look down on it.” New York American, 2 October 1910, magazine section, 2.

Real estate sections, too, gave readers a stake in the city’s expansion and helped them to assemble a more comprehensive vision of the physical city. The pace and variety of construction could make downtown seem like an anarchic, never-ending construction zone. But real estate news revealed an underlying plan. Articles explained why sites were being cleared and printed sketches of the buildings that would rise there. Pictures of Flushing’s blocks of apartment buildings, Bronxville’s single-family homes, and Manhasset Bay’s impressive estates helped readers to visualize suburban neighborhoods and understand exactly how the city was growing.

Other newspaper material let readers get intimately acquainted with the physical city by peeling back surfaces and revealing levels, layers, and systems. Reporters shadowed sewer inspectors, tunnel diggers, and watershed engineers.74 A 1904 World special subway supplement imagined city life unfolding on several levels at once; it pictured a bustling landscape above ground and an equally bustling one below.75 A feature on New York’s “Seven Levels of Transit” (fig. 3.5) showed readers the intricate infrastructures that made the city run. In each case, reporters drew attention to systems that most New Yorkers used or benefited from but never saw. “This floor is inlay Italian marble,” explained the architect of the new Madison Square Garden to a reporter in 1925. “When we have our hockey or skating, we simply run the water in on it, turn on our freezing plant which is directly under the floor and we have ice before you can say Jack Robinson. Thirty-five miles of freezing pipe under your feet and you never dreamed it.”76 All of this attention to New York’s hidden structures made the city more intelligible to its own residents and stoked a collective sense of wonder at the modern marvel that was New York City.

3.5 In this cross section of New York’s levels of transit, elevated and surface rail lines cross the city while freight and subway tunnels run underground. The blimps and their landing stations form the illustrator’s imagined seventh level. New York World, 14 March 1909, cover of special “Transformation of New York” section, American Newspaper Repository, Rubenstein Library, Duke University.

Almost every local article that appeared in New York newspapers between 1880 and 1930 included an address. Addresses mapped the news onto the city, so that each story seemed less like a random fragment and more like a piece of a larger whole. An article on a car crash, for example, might list the addresses of the drivers, the victims, and any witnesses quoted. Addresses allowed readers to place a typical story of a robbery or an elopement in relationship to themselves. And addresses not only mapped events in physical space but also mapped people in social space. An address on West 103rd Street in Manhattan, on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, or on Pacific Street in Brooklyn each hinted at the kind of dwelling, the income level, and even the ethnicity of the resident. Most literally, addresses told readers that each person belonged somewhere. They reminded readers that despite the clamor of the streets and subways, the city sorted itself out at the end of the day and everyone returned to their home address, their designated spot in the metropolis.

As newspapers pictured and explained the city in ever-greater detail, they gave readers the raw material to turn New York, enormous and mystifying, into their hometown. Regular readers of the paper knew where the city spread, what the different areas looked like, how high into the air and how deep into the ground it stretched, and how everything connected. Newspapers offered disparate groups of readers comprehensive, collective experiences of the city. They spread a shared passion for the home teams, a shared sense of pride in the city’s theater or opera scene, and a shared awe at New York’s impressive infrastructures and towering skyscrapers. Of course, not every New Yorker was able to (or chose to) view New York City in this way. New Yorkers reading foreign-language papers, or reading no papers at all, did not sample the same pictures and descriptions of the metropolis. But mainstream daily papers did give millions of New Yorkers the tools to define their city and to feel attached to it.

Hardened Hearts and “Human Interest”

Urban papers mounted a sensory and emotional assault on their readers. The front pages, especially, often depicted cities as places of violence, rupture, discord, and loneliness. Committed to reporting all major events, newspapers were constantly announcing deaths, robberies, and accidents. Theodore Dreiser, when working as a reporter for the New York World, found newspapers’ renderings of extreme wealth and poverty to be, in his words, “so harsh and indifferent at times as to leave me a little numb.”77 Numbness, however, was not simply an unfortunate by-product of reporting or reading the news: it was part of the point. When newsreaders learned to block out, filter, and mediate disturbing information, they were learning a crucial urban survival skill. At the same time, editors carefully counterbalanced all of this disturbing material, inventing the human-interest genre in the process. Newspapers thus fed readers two very different narratives of the city—one sunny, one dark—each useful in its own way.

Reporters needed to jump from happy to tragic situations without letting their emotions interfere. “A general worker thinks nothing of reporting a murder, a wedding, and a missionary meeting in the afternoon and spending half the night in the street in front of the house where a widely known man is lying close to death,” wrote journalist John Given. “He takes everything as a matter of course, and, thoroughly competent, never loses his head.”78 Reporters who let stories affect them deeply did not last long on the job. Dreiser, for example, was a skilled writer with an eye for detail, but he found the work so emotionally draining that he gave it up.79

Journalists also needed to be ruthless about cutting unnecessary information, episodes, and people from the news. “THE SUN Condensers are men who can see at a glance what is interesting in an article, and what is useful, and what is needful, and what is of no account,” explained an exhibit catalog, “and they ‘kill’ without mitigation or remorse.”80 The importance of events for individual lives did not matter as much as their interest for readers. “If a man falls off the roof of a six-story building and is killed or badly injured, the occurrence is certainly news, although it is not very important, for accidents of this general character are of daily occurrence in the large cities,” explained Given. “But were a man to fall from the top of a six-story building and escape unhurt, the occurrence would be regarded by all editors as news of far more than ordinary worth.”81 Bradford Merrill, of the World, showed a typical editor’s skill at weighing the “news value” of events without any sign of sentiment, moral judgment, or political involvement. In his notes to his boss, Joseph Pulitzer, he discussed which scandals were first-page versus third-page material, which strikes merited two columns versus one, and whether a recent poisoning deserved a headline.82 Journalists blocked out the tragic, momentous, or disturbing implications of their stories—which, if considered deeply, might overwhelm them—in order to concentrate on the task at hand.

The product that reporters and editors assembled required skimming and filtering by readers as well. As papers expanded to twenty, then fifty, then a hundred pages, it became impossible to read every word or every section. Yet each portion of the paper seemed to shout for readers’ attention. Sensational words—“GRUESOME,” “ABANDONED,” “DEATH-KNELL,” “SEDUCED”—called out from headlines, in capital letters. “ONE MINUTE, PLEASE!” requested a column full of local news, pleading for a moment of readers’ time.83 Reading straight through the jumble of hundreds of articles was not only disorienting but time consuming as well. “What is the use of reading the marriages and deaths in cities where you are unacquainted, advertisements where you do not mean to purchase, time-tables when you do not mean to travel . . . police news of strange places, tit-bits of scandal about strange people?” asked reader Julia McNair Wright in 1882. “This reading everything in the paper is dangerous, as filling the mind with disconnected trifles, and rendering almost impossible a continuous train of thought and study.”84 Even when newspapers added headlines and sections that helped readers locate the articles most relevant to them, newspaper pages still demanded that readers constantly jump back and forth between incongruous ideas—an experience that McNair Wright found trying and even damaging.

News language and layout could shock readers; so too could the scale of the events that papers reported. The 1883 Tribune’s column of local news notes told readers:

The police last week made 1,496 arrests.

There were 7,157 arrivals at Castel Garden last week.

The free baths were used last week by 191,746 men and boys and 78,831 women and girls.85

As such data became more available, and as the city grew ever larger, these numbers swelled to stupefying sums. In 1912, the city consumed four and a half billion pounds of food, reported the World. In 1916, 763,574,085 people rode the subway, noted the Times.86 Next to New York’s enormous sums and numbers, individual lives could seem pitifully small and insignificant. Even the classified listings could alienate and overwhelm. Each classified ad had been placed by an individual—looking for a job, trying to sell something, offering a service. But in the newspaper, each ad appeared minuscule, relatively unimportant, and almost invisible in the mass. In New York, events that would make it onto the front page in a smaller city were often shunted to the back. When the new whale at the Aquarium received twenty thousand visitors on his first day there, the World noted it in just a small article.87 When the mayor and ten thousand spectators attended the opening ceremony for a new road across Jamaica Bay, “the largest vehicular trestle in the world,” the Times reported it only briefly on page 25.88 How important a part could an individual play in the life of New York City, a reader might wonder, if the actions of ten thousand people barely made news?

While the substance and scale of New York City news was surely unnerving, it provided useful training for the sensory overload of urban life. Just as readers had to learn to block out information if they wanted to ever finish the paper, pedestrians had to learn not to closely study each passerby, not to stop and read every sign plastered on a fence, not to gawk at every store window display, if they were ever to make it down a city street.89 Newspapers’ odd juxtapositions, too, rehearsed readers for urban experience. In order to step from dirty streets into luxurious shops, from grimy and squealing subway cars into silent marble libraries, contrast had to come to seem a normal, or at least a manageable, part of life. If readers could learn to glance over newspaper stories about children killed by polio alongside advertisements for mink coats, that skill would serve them well. A passage from John Dos Passos’s novel Manhattan Transfer suggests that some readers even came to find the alarming headlines of the paper relaxing: “He sat in a deep leather chair by a window smoking a thirtyfive [sic] cent cigar with the Wall Street Journal on his knee and a copy of the Cosmopolitan leaning against his right thigh and, with his eyes on the night flawed with lights like a crystal, he abandoned himself to reverie: Economic Depression . . . Ten million dollars . . . After the war slump. Some smash I’ll tell the world. BLACKHEAD & DENSCH FAIL FOR $10,000,000. . . .”90

Daily news forced readers to incorporate disappointment and tragedy into their understanding of life in the metropolis. The city could appear utterly indifferent to the violence on its streets and to the suffering of its residents. “When the murder was committed the sidewalks were full of people passing up and down, shouting New Year’s greetings and blowing tin horns,” noted an 1889 Sun article. “No one was found who could tell of any excitement or disturbance in the region.”91 The circumstances of deaths could make the city seem a particularly lonely and cruel place. “In trying to save enough money to bring his family from Russia and from the scenes of the recent massacres at Kishineff,” explained the 1903 Tribune, “Nathan Longbart, forty-five years old, of No. 5 Elizabeth-st., deliberately starved himself to death and died early yesterday.”92 Many New Yorkers seemed to die alone, without friends or family or even a known identity. And the New York World received so many reports of missing persons that it began printing a list of them every Sunday, with notes on hair color, age, and the place they were last seen.

Newspapers’ dark humor helped readers to protect their emotional reserves, teaching them to live with, and even laugh off, the cruelty, anonymity, and danger of New York life. In an 1898 World cartoon, “The American Sky-Scraper Is a Modern Tower of Babel,” every possible thing seemed to go wrong. Workers dumped cement on each other, broke out in fights, fell off the scaffolding, knocked each other with steel beams, and accidentally electrocuted themselves.93 Richard Outcault, creator of the Yellow Kid, turned grim urban reality into entertainment. In his cartoon images of tenement life, people got run over by carriages, hit by automobiles, and beaten with clubs. One of Outcault’s drawings, “The Day after ‘The Glorious Fourth’ down in Hogan’s Alley,” showed scrappy children swathed in bandages, on crutches, missing arms and legs, all due to Fourth of July fireworks. “Pleeze keep quiet,” read a sign on a fire escape, “fur mickey is dern near dead.”94 These cartoons did not exaggerate. New York construction sites killed and maimed huge numbers of workers and passersby in these years, and traffic accidents took an enormous toll as well. If readers fully considered and absorbed each tragedy in the news, the newspaper would leave them stricken, paralyzed. Instead they had to learn to see the word “suicide” and not read the article or to go ahead and read it but withhold their full sympathy. Out on the streets, New Yorkers had to walk by dilapidated tenements without thinking too much about the people who lived inside; to brush past street vendors and newsboys; to pretend not to see beggars sitting on the curb.

While newspapers’ daily deliveries of bad news may have desensitized readers to the city’s tragedies, contrasts, and overwhelming size, they could actually prime readers for systematic urban action. Their articles highlighted urban problems to be solved. Readers might then use their honed screening and prioritizing skills to discern patterns and to think in a detached way about solutions. The more abstract material, which turned New York into batches of numbers and images, helped readers to understand and assess the city as a whole. A World magazine feature called “The Busiest Hour on Earth” (fig. 3.6) provided a social scientific overview of a single hour in New York City; its statistics (“5 buildings catch fire,” “123,000 ride the subway,”) could be analyzed and perhaps used to improve life in the city. Most Progressive-era reformers employed this kind of surveying, categorizing, and prioritizing logic. City planners who designed municipal projects such as bridges and parks displaced thousands of city residents but improved the lives of hundreds of thousands more. Legislators who implemented zoning laws and labor laws inconvenienced some landlords, builders, and employers but benefited many more tenants and workers over time. Doctors and social workers concerned with public health stepped back from individual cases and assessed broader threats such as tainted water supplies, germ-ridden garbage, and chronic malnutrition.95 Newspapers both paralleled and furthered turn-of-the-century trends away from moralistic and toward statistical ways of thinking, away from episodic reforms and toward more comprehensive efforts.

3.6 Some of the statistics in “The Busiest Hour on Earth” seem merely to entertain, such as “500,000 people dine” or “8 people get married.” But others—on fires, accidents, and arrests—seem to call for action. The clock face creates a sense of urgency, as the viewer imagines all of these incidents unfolding as the hour passes. New York World, 17 June 1906, magazine section, 2, American Newspaper Repository, Rubenstein Library, Duke University.

Among all of the bad news and overwhelming statistics, New York newspaper editors sprinkled human-interest articles—small-scale stories that would not traditionally be considered newsworthy. New York editor James Gordon Bennett pioneered the form in the 1830s, when he sent his reporters to local courts in search of entertaining domestic dramas and neighborhood feuds. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Sun’s editor Charles Dana refined the art of the trivial but amusing news article and regularly worked human interest onto the front page. An 1881 Sun front-page article called “Cupid’s Work with an Egg,” for example, told the story of a Tennessee poultry farmer who managed to meet and marry a Brooklyn woman by writing his address on an eggshell.96 By the early twentieth century, human interest had become a distinct reporting genre with conventions and rules of its own. “A human interest story,” explained one journalism manual, “is primarily an attempt to portray human feeling—to talk about men as men and not as names or things. It is an attempt to look upon life with sympathetic human eyes and to put living people into the reports of the day’s news.”97 Claiming newspaper space for these stories—sometimes front-page space—sent the implicit message that the dramas of everyday life deserved attention, even in a city as big as New York. Editors likely ran these articles to add to their papers’ appeal as entertainment. Readers could handle only so many articles on local accidents and international diplomacy; surely they would appreciate some lighter fare. Yet human-interest stories offered something more than leavening for the rest of the news. They gave readers chances to rekindle a sense of empathy and to revive their faith in their neighbors.

Human-interest stories provided a respite from the high stakes and dire endings of most news articles by describing little urban moments that carried no real consequence for the subjects or the reader and where nothing at all went wrong. “A white cat peeped out of a footman’s boot in the show window at 1201 Broadway on Saturday afternoon, and, after taking a leisurely survey of the store, turned her head around sedately toward the street,” relayed the 1885 Sun. “A dozen people had already gathered to see what she was going to do.”98 Another reporter chronicled a man’s spontaneous twenty-block race with a streetcar; the only point was to let readers share a moment of delightful and entertaining urban surprise.99 In contrast to so many other news reports, human-interest stories usually turned out fine. “Hetta Holst is 5 years old and lives at 130 Hudson street, Hoboken,” began an 1897 story. “She played in the street yesterday afternoon and had an unusually good time, for she found a lot of other girls and boys and wandered away with them.”100 The story described her mother’s panic and all the measures she took to find her daughter—but ended with Hetta wandering right back home at the end of the day.

Such articles often pointed out the everyday generous acts of New Yorkers, providing a counterpoint to the indifference and cruelty that New Yorkers read about, witnessed, and perhaps participated in themselves. The New York Herald Tribune sent raggedly dressed reporters to churches in elite neighborhoods to test how well they practiced Christian charity; the articles then praised the congregations’ welcoming and judicious responses.101 Reporters noted local butchers who gave Christmas turkeys to poor families in the neighborhood; they described citizens who found and returned valuable jewelry.102 They profiled model citizens, such as the socialite who nursed cancer victims or the volunteer emergency worker. “For twenty years he has assisted in rescues and risked his life time and again,” explained the World. “Yes, Adolph Hofstatter has worked for the joy of working—doing some good to his fellow beings—and asking no other reward.”103

Human-interest stories created a counternarrative to the one most visible on the front pages, a story of a city where sensitivity and kindness had not, in fact, been stamped out. A New York Times feature reassured readers that as violence played out in the headlines, a quieter and more generous story unfolded each day in newspaper offices:

Maybe you gentlemen will notice at times hard-luck stories in the papers—such as a woman left with a family by a man who has bolted or has been, perhaps, killed at his job by an iron girder dropping on his head. . . . Well, go into any newspaper office and ask if this isn’t true—next day along comes a bunch of envelopes containing dollar bills with merely a note, unsigned, or at the most initialed which reads something like this: “Please send to the poor woman and family you mention in this morning’s issue,” or “-re enclosed clipping.” . . . It would surprise you the amount of anonymous generosity there is in that town.104

Editors may have taken up human-interest reporting to revive the humanity of jaded reporters, too. “No ordinary reporter can work a police court or hospital run day after day for any length of time without losing his sensibilities and becoming hardened to the sterner facts in human life,” explained journalist Grant Milnor Hyde. “Gradually his stories lose all sympathy and kindliness and he writes of suffering men as of so many wooden ten-pins.”105 According to Hyde, the task of seeking out funny and touching moments of city life rescued reporters from total cynicism and detachment. Human-interest articles did not seek to actively improve the city, as charity articles did, but they put city dwellers—both readers and reporters—on the watch for moments of grace.

Tragic news and human-interest stories, when combined, conveyed a curious mix of detachment and empathy. Yet that balance characterized the urban reforms of the Progressive era, and indeed, these strains of newspaper material schooled readers in the motivations and methods of Progressive politics and urban action. Disastrous and overwhelming news trained readers to think about urban problems. Human-interest stories reminded readers why those problems were worth solving.

Middle-Class Cosmopolitans

Just as news writers traveled out to all corners of the physical city and into various specialized realms, they also crossed social divides. Reporters described the lives of the very poor and the very rich and narrated tours of New York’s many ethnic enclaves. These feature articles modeled an urban cosmopolitanism, by which reporters—and, by extension, readers—felt at ease in many different social worlds.106 To some degree, readers could carry that cosmopolitan attitude into their daily lives, perhaps growing more curious about their neighbors and more adventurous in their travels. Yet ultimately, readers still lived in a fragmented, stratified city. What newspapers offered was a vicarious experience, most often narrated from a white, native-born, middle-class perspective. And while articles seemed to tell readers that they could temporarily venture across social divides, they also emphasized a more permanent social hierarchy. Newspapers’ attitudes toward class, race, and ethnicity, then, were never transgressive. Yet they could be progressive. Newspapers did celebrate the city’s class and ethnic diversity to an unprecedented degree, and they supplied a surprisingly inclusive vision of the urban public.

Newspapers’ features on New York’s theater, business, and sports worlds conveyed a delight in metropolitan living, with its density of specialized spheres, its abundance of expertise. Features on immigrant institutions conveyed a delight in cosmopolitan living, in which residents took pleasure in the global offerings of their city. Many articles framed travels to immigrant quarters as actual journeys across the globe. “The place will prove itself a veritable treasure-house to him who cares to study foreign life in some of the aspects in which it is offered to us in New York,” wrote a New York Sun reporter who had visited a local café full of Parisians. “They lean on their elbows over the French illustrated papers as they sip the green mixture and puff lazily at cigarettes which they manufacture themselves.”107 Years later, a Sun reporter making the rounds through local ethnic restaurants described the meals as “quite like making little journeys into foreign lands, with none of the expense or inconvenience of travel.” Standing before an Indian eatery, she wrote, “We hesitated at the bottom of the stairs and then clambered up into Ceylon.”108

On the one hand, reporters like this took real interest in the cultures that immigrants had brought to New York City and their detailed reporting allowed readers to take an interest, too. A 1904 article on an East Side Viennese cabaret described and illustrated the dining room, the waiters, the audience, and the actors.109 Writers taught readers immigrant vocabulary; one reporter quoted a Williamsburg woman calling another a “mafena”—“‘unfortunate one’ in Yiddish,” he explained.110 Another reporter sprinkled Italian words and melodrama though his article the way that residents of that neighborhood might do themselves: “Oh, sad the day, oh, evil hour, when the stars in their courses exerted their most malefic influence and impelled Herrmann Rushmeyer into strife with Francisco and Domenico Messina, barbieri, illustrissimi, whose tonsorial parlor adorns No. 1648 Lexington avenue.”111 By taking care to familiarize readers with ethnic and immigrant cultures, reporters implied that these cultures were worth learning about.

On the other hand, reporters often treated other cultures as consumable goods, there for more privileged visitors to sample and enjoy. Reporters talked about immigrant spaces as discoveries, to be savored and kept somewhat secret. “Thus far only a handful of Americans have discovered it,” said the reporter in an article on the Viennese cabaret, “and they are inclined to guard it jealously from invasion by the rabble, lest it lose its Old World flavor and acquire a Manhattanese tang.”112 And travelogue articles tended to write from the stance of an outsider who experienced immigrant cultures as entirely new and foreign phenomena. The Sun reporter sampling ethnic cuisines, for example, described “strange, insidious dishes.”113 The majority of readers were bound to be outsiders to any particular New York group or New York place. For this reason even reporters at the New York World, which sold well among immigrant readers, wrote about immigrant groups as if looking in the from the outside. Yet this perspective passed subtle judgments on both reader and subject. It positioned the imagined reader as culturally neutral and the subjects as culturally exotic.114 It seemed that the foreign-born were always written about, not for. These articles also ignored or erased the violence and hardships that brought immigrants to New York City. Reporters were interested in foreigners not as refugees, or as economic migrants, or as subjects of a budding U.S. empire but simply as colorful characters.

New York newspapers paid far less attention to the city’s African American neighborhoods than its immigrant ones. One of the only features on New York City African American life ever to appear in a mainstream newspaper was Timothy Thomas Fortune’s column “The Afro American,” which ran in the New York Sun from 1895 through 1898.115 Fortune, himself the editor of the black weekly the New York Age, reported on the achievements of African Americans across the nation: lawyers, veterans, athletes, and politicians. He wove in notes on the travels and the deaths of prominent black Americans. He commented on the social and political status of African Americans, providing statistics on Southern lynchings, for example, or on black colleges. We can imagine why the Sun’s editors may have decided to run the column. Many black New Yorkers read mainstream daily papers, instead of or in addition to black weeklies.116 A column devoted to African American interests and communities could potentially persuade them to buy the Sun rather than the World or the Herald. The column might also draw white readers who wanted to know more about happenings among African Americans. Yet the column was short-lived. We do not know whether it was the Sun or T. Thomas Fortune who ended its run. Perhaps the column failed to mesh with the very attitudes—curious, dilettantish—that appeared in other features about the city’s minority groups. There were no colorful characters in this column, no accented English, no voyeuristic peeks into hidden spaces. For most white, middle-class New Yorkers, African American culture did not hold so much exotic appeal, at least until the era of jazz. And the column’s mildly political, community-building approach meant that it did not function as pure entertainment.

As flawed as they were, news articles on New York’s minority ethnic (and, to a lesser extent, racial) communities did feed a broader cultural shift toward tolerance and cultural pluralism in the early twentieth century. By keeping immigrant life in the public eye, news articles may have encouraged readers to consider to what degree immigrants would and could assimilate. Their celebrations of New York’s sheer variety of ethnicities, religions, and languages helped to initiate broader debates about widening the circle of cultural inclusion and tolerance in the city and the nation. It was this intellectual climate in which writers such as Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne proposed radically new definitions of what it meant to be an American—definitions that made room for immigrants to keep their ethnic traditions.117

By the late 1910s and 1920s, news reports still assumed that readers did not know about all the traditions of New York’s ethnic groups, but they were less likely to depict those traditions as strange or surprising. Many immigrant communities had been established for long enough by the 1920s that perhaps they did not seem so exotic or surprising to reporters or readers; meanwhile, immigration quotas enacted in 1924 limited the influx of new arrivals. So the more neutral news tone may have reflected reporters’ growing identification with (and lack of anxiety about) their immigrant subjects. An index of local events on the back page of the 1920 Daily News straightforwardly announced the beginning of the Jewish holiday Sukkot and a Brooklyn exhibition of Gaelic dances.118 Similarly, when papers reprinted excerpts from the weekend’s Episcopalian, Catholic, Methodist, and Jewish services, the excerpts passed no judgments and assumed no particular viewpoint.119 Articles increasingly stressed understanding, rather than simply enjoying, other cultures. A 1920 New York Times reporter explained that fewer Chinatown residents wore a queue these days because the fall of the Manchu dynasty meant that the hairstyle was no longer mandatory for men in China.120 A 1925 article on Brooklyn’s Lithuanian population described the group’s language, religion, political parties, and typical occupations. It explained the Lithuanian habit of wearing amber beads as a reminder of home. It even discussed the difficulties of the immigration experience, which would have been a rare topic in an earlier era. “Yes, I have been a citizen 10 years,” stated one of the article’s subjects, “but I always feel I am a foreigner, in the subways, on the streets, even at home.”121

Articles on New York City’s wealthiest residents, even more so than those on immigrants, were mainstays of the feature news. For the relatively few readers who belonged to the city’s elite, these articles functioned as regular news and simply relayed what their acquaintances had done lately. For working-class or middle-class readers, articles on the rich welcomed them (in print) into circles where they would never be welcome in person.122 New York newspapers followed the doings of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts so closely—running multipage features on their weddings, their hobbies, and their business affairs—that any New Yorker could gossip about those families the way they gossiped about their neighbors. The papers ran profiles of business tycoons that made readers feel as though they had chatted with and observed New York’s richest men themselves. “If he is sitting in an arm chair he likes to rest his elbows on the arms,” relayed a New York World profile of Jay Gould. “Sometimes he leans forward and sometimes back, and he generally throws one leg over the other.”123 In newspapers’ society pages, readers could see who had sailed for Europe and which families were hosting the season’s most extravagant balls. By the turn of the century, society pages printed glamorous full-length photographs of the week’s debutantes and brides; in the 1910s they ran pages full of portraits of the wealthiest New Yorkers’ children.

Many articles about the world of the rich let readers vicariously enjoy its pleasures. Detailed descriptions invited readers to ogle the parties, clothing, and houses of the wealthy. When newspaper photographers were allowed into the drawing rooms of the elite, they brought back images of interiors dripping with gilt ornament, hung with tapestries, and upholstered in silk.124 The society pages’ wedding announcements described the dresses, table decorations, and bouquets at fashionable young couples’ celebrations. Articles reprinted indulgent menus from gatherings at Delmonico’s or Sherry’s.125 By the 1920s, even real estate advertisements gave readers glimpses into the domestic spaces of the well-to-do, showing the floor plans, lobbies, and views that residents of luxury apartment buildings would enjoy. News coverage served as something of a print corrective to the city’s very real social barriers. As one downtrodden character in Manhattan Transfer says about the paper’s rotogravures of New York’s glitterati: “It passes the time to look at them, I like to keep up with what’s going on in New York a little bit. . . . A cat may look at a king you know, a cat may look at a king.”126

Occasionally, news articles on the wealthy conveyed disbelief or distaste for their overindulgent ways—reinforcing papers’ implicit middle-class perspective. The land it took to build the new Pell mansion on Seventy-Fourth Street, noted one writer, could fit six ordinary mansions, or ten tenement buildings: “That is to say, 928 people could live, as some New York people do live, in the space which he, his wife and the combined collections of porcelains and china will occupy.”127 A New York World two-page spread picturing every last Astor real estate holding in New York offered a visual representation of that family’s disproportionate wealth and power.128 A 1906 article on a society woman printed a table of her estimated yearly expenses, including her automobiles, furs, jewels, balls, stables, losses at bridge, and restaurant meals—and milked the details for shock value. “It was a startling revelation to the public,” the article stated, “that a woman with no other charges upon her than her personal expenses could not live on an income greater than the salary paid to the President of the United States.”129 While articles on the city’s elite might convey criticism, they rarely expressed outright anger or condemnation. It was against newspapers’ interests to demonize the rich, for many of these papers’ stockholders, advertisers, and editors were themselves members of the city’s upper crust. Moreover, middle-class journalists and their audiences were mostly uninterested in radical critiques of a capitalist system that benefited them as well.

Meanwhile, newspapers did not shunt all of their reporting on New York City’s poor into charity articles; they ran a variety of features that made slums intelligible for readers afraid or unwilling to visit in person. Writers made “beats” out of the city’s pockets of deepest poverty—the Lower East Side, the Tenderloin, and Hell’s Kitchen—and depicted them as foreign and forbidding places.130 “Low openings in the street houses, no larger than a stable door, give entrance to the alley,” explained a World reporter visiting the Lower East Side’s “Murderer’s Alley.” “The entrances are not more than ten feet wide, paved with bits of stone covered with layers of filth.”131 The newspaper printed a map to show readers exactly where the alley lay and included sketches of the alley’s fire escapes, its garbage, and its ragtag inhabitants.

Feature articles offered readers lessons in the culture of the tenements by detailing poor New Yorkers’ expressions, accents, and pastimes, while again insulating readers from the risks and discomforts of personal interactions across classes. Reporters relayed conversations with street children or interviewed hobos for their life stories (fig. 3.7). The Sunday comic Hogan’s Alley took readers into a fictional tenement neighborhood where the Yellow Kid and his band of friends staged sports matches, rallies, and fights (plate 6). On weekdays, the Kid appeared in a small column, A Leaflet from the Yellow Kid’s Diary, in which he seemed to take the reader into his confidence as he described the daily happenings of his life. The comic strip offered an imagined friendship between the reader and the Kid—a friendship that would have been difficult to cultivate in person in the stratified, mistrustful, and splintered city.

3.7 A New York Times reporter talked to the unemployed men who spent their days on park benches and told readers about the life paths that had brought the men there. Portraits carefully rendered the “park benchers” as individuals and let city dwellers do one of the things they had likely trained themselves never to do—stare at strangers, especially strangers who might want something from them. New York Times, 13 November 1904, magazine section, 7.

Feature articles introduced readers to one last faction of their community—the criminal underworld. Articles on crime may have helped the city feel less like a mysterious menace, simply by bringing its darkest corners to light. Features clarified gambling terminology, explained how New York’s mafia chose assassins, and schooled readers in the distinction between a “simp,” a “broad,” and a “moll” (different kinds of female accomplice).132 Images took readers into spaces that criminals inhabited, from the basements where crimes were plotted to police detectives’ investigation rooms to the exercise grounds at Blackwell’s Island.133 Both the New York Journal and the tabloid New York Daily News regularly printed photographs of tenement crime scenes and sketched in the culprits or victims as they would have appeared.134 Excerpts of dialogue let readers learn the vocabularies and accents of the city’s toughs and addicts while keeping a safe distance. In 1915, gangsters described their purchase of counterfeit heroin: “We done it. We was crazy an’ we done it. It was little brown pills. That’s all they was—just little brown pills you crumble one up between your fingers and let it melt on the tip of your tongue. You gets effects immediate. It was just like the guinea said—it was better than the old stuff.”135 While editors supplied their readers with illicit-seeming information on the underworld, they simultaneously communicated a law-abiding moral code. Reporters often adopted the perspectives of law enforcers, from police cracking down on railroad crimes to detectives ferreting out hotel grafters, and sent the message that offenders would eventually be found out and punished.136

New York newspaper material depicted many kinds of residents as valid members of the urban public and even hinted that cosmopolitan knowledge might belong to more than just the middle and upper classes—but made it quite clear that New Yorkers could not move fluidly or permanently into other social strata. Features quoted all kinds of New Yorkers commenting on their very different neighbors. A New York American and Journal piece quoted a saloonkeeper’s observations of the Astor family, which had visited his saloon on a “slumming” tour.137 Richard Outcault depicted the children of Hogan’s Alley staging mock high-society events such as operas, golf tournaments, literary societies, and dog shows. Yet such features ultimately underscored the city’s social divides by showing that passing knowledge and brief contact could never erase social distinctions. The American and Journal printed the saloonkeeper’s reaction to the Astors in dialect, emphasizing his lowly place in the city’s social hierarchy. The New York Times quoted a museum guard who professed to see no value in the art and culture that middle- and upper-class New Yorkers held dear.138 When the Yellow Kid went to a classical music recital, he left halfway through:

I says come on Kitty, dis show ain’t no good no how, der pyanner ain’t in it. Well, I wasn’t goin’ ter see Kitty left on de music business, so we jist took er cable car and went downtown an’ took in er show on der Bowery, where we heard singin’ wot was singin’.139

Reporters only made entertaining features out of cross-class encounters that remained short and sweet. An 1897 World illustration showing Chinese immigrants visiting the Natural History Museum treated their presence as a curiosity since readers might expect to find Chinese people only in Chinatown. Because the Chinese guests were there as temporary tourists, the illustrator made light of it.140 When New Yorkers crossed social divides in more permanent ways—for example, when they formed romantic relationships across racial, class, and ethnic lines—newspapers treated them not as admirable cosmopolitans but as scandalous and dangerous examples.141

The eventual disappearance of the Yellow Kid may point to New Yorkers’ discomfort with those who blurred social boundaries. Artist Richard Outcault sent the Kid on an illustrated world tour in 1897. He met Europe’s kings and queens, toured the Louvre, and visited Saint Mark’s cathedral in Venice. The Kid certainly never blended in with his refined surroundings, but as he mixed with and thumbed his nose at the global elite, he may have made William Randolph Hearst, the New York Journal’s editor, a bit uncomfortable. The Yellow Kid disappeared from newspaper pages in 1898.142 Outcault continued to devise adventures for a mischievous kid character, but his name was now Buster Brown, and he was a middle-class boy who got into scrapes and was then punished by his mother. The escapades always finished with Buster reciting a semi-apologetic, often misguided lesson. While Buster was just as much of a troublemaker as the Yellow Kid, he stayed comfortably within his middle-class world. He debuted in the Journal in 1902 and ran as a syndicated strip through the 1920s.

When newspaper articles assumed the perspective of the middle class looking out on the rest of the city, they suggested that the city drew its character from all of these other groups rather than from the middle class itself. It was the poor and working class whose accents gave the city its distinctive sound. It was the immigrant neighborhoods that gave the city its endless variety. It was the rich, in their carriages and furs, who made it glamorous. Articles encouraged readers to sample what all of these groups had to offer—but also to limit their interactions to brief journeys or vicarious newspaper visits. When feature news encouraged readers to pay close attention to the people around them, it did two things at once. It fostered curiosity across class and cultural lines, transitioning New York toward a slightly more open model of community and citizenship. Yet it also positioned middle-class observers as the most legitimate urban citizens. According to newspapers, it was the middle class that was best equipped to enjoy, to understand, and even potentially to change everyone else.

An Urban Brand

In the 1910s and 1920s, New York papers began to self-consciously craft an identity for the city, most often in their “metropolitan” sections. While newspapers sometimes used “metropolitan” as a label for the region around and including the city, in these sections the word served as a marker of urban character. The New York World debuted its metropolitan section just after the turn of the century.143 By the 1920s, nearly all of the city’s mainstream dailies ran equivalent sections. Metropolitan sections and other feature stories fashioned a city identity in part by depicting an urbane and freewheeling culture taking shape in the city. Reporters, columnists, illustrators, and cartoonists of this era mixed with broader circles of actors, musicians, and producers. These New Yorkers perfected a new kind of glib sophistication; they then wrote about it in newspapers as well as in two new magazines, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.144 Writers displayed more detached and cynical attitudes than they had in previous decades. Their articles signaled a transition away from the sincere and moralizing Progressive culture of urban reform and toward the more private, hedonistic, and skeptical urban life of the 1920s.145

New York City newspapers also created an identity for the city by attempting to find the common threads that made life there distinctive.146 In this, newspapers worked alongside other organizations that packaged and branded the city for others. Tourist agencies and business bureaus distilled and defined New York’s distinctive qualities in order to attract visitors and investors.147 Artists and filmmakers both developed a visual shorthand for New York that viewers across the nation and the world would understand.148 Metropolitan sections communicated their urban “brand” most elegantly in their illustrated headings, which showed iconic New York scenes of bustling streets and sweeping skyline views (figs. 3.8–3.10).

3.8 The left side of the “City Life Section” heading shows a more genteel part of town, with a hotel marquee, a line of automobile taxis, and a leafy park. The right side shows a tenement district, complete with fire escapes, an elevated train, and more humble horse carts. The image is matter-of-fact, though, avoiding the “sunshine and shadow” extremes common in the reporting and images of earlier decades. New York American, 2 October 1910, 1M.

3.9 A busy shopping street, as seen at night in the rain. Most of those pictured are well-off shoppers, but there are a few other urban types sprinkled in—a policeman on the corner, and a newsboy. New York World, 30 March 1913, metropolitan section, first page, American Newspaper Repository, Rubenstein Library, Duke University.

3.10 The Manhattan skyline, as seen from Staten Island or perhaps the Statue of Liberty. New York Tribune, 24 August 1919, sec. 7, page 12.

Newspapers seized on the idea that the uniqueness of New York City life lay in its contrasts. A 1930 advertisement for the New York American’s Sunday edition riffed: “Exciting city. . . . City tumbling all over itself . . . yet commanding the world of affairs. . . . City of abject poverty . . . yet piled high with unprecedented wealth. . . . City of warm hearts, lost in its coldness . . . motherly city, holding a world of sufferers to her breast. . . . Compelling city, intriguing in every phase of the melee which is its paradoxical life.”149 Rather than presenting the contradictory nature of metropolitan life as troubling or unsettling, the ad rendered the contradictions as true manifestations of a New York spirit. In making peace with urban contrasts in much of their feature material and especially in their metropolitan sections, newspapers signaled (and furthered) a transition away from a turn-of-the-century civic culture of zealous reform. Newspaper reporters showed less outrage at urban injustices than they had at the turn of the century; many of their articles instead paired worldliness with political complacency.

Editors carefully constructed certain 1910s and 1920s features to make the city seem like a small town—and ran others that just as deliberately depicted it as a massive metropolis. Its small-town qualities, according to these features, made New York City a friendly, connected, and intelligible place, while its size made it truly great. The New York Times ran a column of urban vignettes called “Our Town and Its Folk.” The Tribune called its version of a metropolitan section “In Our Town.” The Amsterdam News printed city observations under the title “Listen, Folks Listen.”150 By insisting that New York was a “town,” full of “folks,” these columns depicted the urban public as friendly and humble. The Journal’s 1930 column of local news read more like a conversation between neighbors and chums than ever before:

Louis Adler, who’ll build that 105 story shack in the money district, looks like B. A. Rolfe.

Lowell Brentano, the book man, is looking for a job.

The William Kolmers have a boy, Mozeltoff!151

Even as the city’s population topped five million, society columns still told readers when prominent New Yorkers had returned from a vacation, as if the reader would drop by and welcome them home. Papers increasingly adopted the small-town practice of reporting the everyday achievements of residents. In the 1920s, New York papers sent reporters to high school sports games for the first time. In spring, they printed graduation rosters of local colleges—even though it took multiple pages to print several thousand students’ names. The lists lent the city the feel of a smaller town, where every reader could spot their nephew or their neighbor’s daughter in the local paper.

Many Progressive reformers had lived uncomfortably with the scale of modern metropolises and worked to make them function more like small towns and less like massive cities.152 Moving into the 1920s, however, newspaper editors and writers seemed to see no conflict between New York’s small-town and big-city qualities and seized on New York City’s size as something to celebrate. Papers transformed anything New Yorkers did into impressive statistics, from the number of eggs they ate to the number of drivers registered in the city—each time implying that the sheer size of the city made the place remarkable, extraordinary.153 A 1928 booklet put out by the New York Sun, Facts about New York, listed the number of telephone calls placed in the city in the last year, the value of products created by the city’s textile industry, and the acreage of New York’s different parks.154 Articles reminded readers that their city’s structures were some of the biggest and most impressive in the world. A 1925 article on the new Madison Square Garden deemed the building New York’s equivalent of the Grand Canyon.155

Like the travelogue articles sprinkled through newspapers in the late nineteenth century, material in metropolitan sections turned urban vignettes into a genre of entertainment. (See, e.g., fig. 3.11.) Columns with titles like “Mirror of City Life” or “Bits of Life in the Metropolis” offered quiet glimpses of single moments, such as two women carrying a chair down a nighttime alley or a grasshopper crossing the street in Times Square.156 When readers wrote letters of appreciation for these columns, they recognized small-scale urban observation as a legitimate journalistic art. “These sketches seem to show a keen sense of observation and a vivid manner of noting the impressions,” wrote one reader of the Tribune’s “In Our Town” section. “I thought I knew every nook and angle of this village,” wrote another, “but it seems your staff are ferreting out new and interesting bits every week.”157 Metropolitan features could turn the city into an aesthetic experience, which required training to fully appreciate.

3.11 Cartoonist Tony Sarg let readers survey all of the human dramas unfolding on a single subway platform: lost hats, lost children, collisions, crushed packages, and many, many newspapers. This image did not provide a statistical sampling of things that could be changed, as had the 1909 New York World illustration “The Busiest Hour on Earth.” Instead, its detailed snapshot of a single city moment meant only to entertain. Tony Sarg, “The daily 5 o’clock race and riot at Brooklyn Bridge, the very vortex of New York’s melting pot.” New York Tribune, 19 October 1919, graphic section, 2.

New York was a place, according to newspaper material, that could make or break anyone who lived there. As papers (along with fiction, film, and other forms of media) integrated this make-or-break quality into the city’s identity, they actually bred a slow acceptance of—rather than outrage at—New York’s extremes of rags and riches. Cities’ potential to launch or destroy the lives of young hopefuls had been a cause of concern, even panic, in the mid- and late nineteenth century. Novels told cautionary tales of young men undone by drink and gambling, or aspiring actresses pulled into prostitution.158 Newspaper reporters seemed to confirm what many turn-of-the-century Americans had been taught to fear: that cities had the power to draw ordinary people into bad situations. Articles described young girls taken on as thieves’ apprentices, men who were sucked into organized crime rings, and children who became heroin addicts after first encountering the drug on playgrounds.159 Some obituaries profiled New Yorkers’ downward spirals: “Joseph Langan, formerly a prominent politician and well-to-do business man in Brooklyn, counting as his friends the late Hugh McLaughlin and the late Judge John Courtney, shot himself in the head while confined in a cell in the De Kalb avenue police station yesterday.”160 Yet the papers also told stories of New Yorkers’ breakout successes and their paths to fame. One article profiled a waiter who had been “discovered” working in a hotel and then sent to train for an opera career; another told of a man who moved from the New Mexico desert to become a football star at Columbia University.161 Papers recounted immigrant success stories, from that of Emanuel Solari, Swiss immigrant and founder of a posh New York restaurant, to John Jacob Astor, German immigrant and real estate mogul.162 Some obituaries repeated the narrative of upward mobility; many told readers how the recently departed had founded prosperous companies or won powerful political positions. The high stakes that seemed to hover over individual decisions and pursuits could lend a particular drama—a New York drama—to the most everyday of actions and the most humdrum of lives. Years of reading about New Yorkers’ successes and failures could teach readers to view these extremes as simple facts of city life.

Metropolitan reporters of the 1910s and 1920s had become so practiced in the art of urban observation that they began to comment not just on colorful “others” but even on the group that they themselves belonged to—the New York middle class. Perhaps by the 1920s, a decade of relative urban prosperity, many New Yorkers felt secure enough in their middle-class status to laugh at it a bit. The Times ran an anthropological profile of New York’s tribe of “white collars”:

The white collared people get little publicity. They get married occasionally and, if they live in Brooklyn, the local papers mention it. Often they are among those present at euchres and the affairs of political clubs. They report for work at 9, most of them, and quit at 5, with an hour for lunch. They spend an average of 30 cents for lunch, and often must walk four blocks for it. Sometimes the white collars lose their situations, and then they wait in outside offices and meet new baldheads, who ask more questions than a district attorney.163

According to such articles, a New Yorker’s extensive social knowledge made him not only familiar with a wide range of New York types but self-aware and sarcastic enough to identify and make fun of his own type as well. The 1921 World, similarly, mocked urban professionals and their total lack of neighborliness. “New York’s chiefest charm is that you don’t know your neighbors. That’s why I moved to New York from out among the Buckwheats,” explained one writer. “I glory in my splendid isolation. . . . It’s the New York idea.”164 By poking fun at the white, middle-class New Yorkers who were most likely to be reading these daily papers, metropolitan sections cultivated a reading population that could discern and lampoon nearly anything—but that was less interested in earnest engagement and efforts toward change.

Newspaper material crafted an increasingly understated and assured sense of New York City’s superiority. Papers’ images of soaring skyscrapers implicitly positioned the city as a modern metropolis. So did celebrations of the city’s subways and its electric grid. Articles and advertisements occasionally described New Yorkers as ahead of their peers in the world of fashion and culture. “New York tailors, as usual, have slipped a season ahead of the rest of the country,” said an ad for a city tailor. “Weber and Heilbroner have slipped ahead with them.”165 In 1930, the New York American characterized its audience as “thousands of modern-minded New Yorkers,” city residents with “a zest for New York and its glamorous life.”166 New York newspapers never clamored, though, for the title of capital of the modern world. To harp too much on New York’s unparalleled wealth or sleek modernity would perhaps indicate an insecurity that New Yorkers did not feel. As early as the turn of the century, New York papers kept their boasting toned down: “New-York goes about its business and knows that it is New-York, and that is enough,” explained the Tribune. “Let the little ones crow or yelp or snarl among themselves. What is all that to a city which knows itself great?”167 New York, the biggest city in what was becoming the most powerful nation in the world, did seem to take its rising status in stride. Yet as this self-satisfied strain appeared more frequently in newspapers, it may have encouraged readers to spend more time enjoying their marvelous city and less time thinking about how to reform or improve it.

* * *

New York City’s journalists lived in the biggest, most diverse city in America; they seemed to try especially hard to conjure civic identity and pride in their articles and to encourage urban stewardship. Yet newspapers in dozens of other cities also told readers how to care for, cope with, and enjoy their growing cities, using tactics and trends we have seen in New York. Because most other cities were not quite as secure in their status as New York, their visions of the urban public could be less capacious.

Civic debates that surfaced in newspapers outside New York both rested on and helped to build readers’ sense of “their” city. A number of papers created official columns for this civic commentary, including “Special Queries” in the 1910s Philadelphia Bulletin, “Thoughts of Our Readers” in the 1910s Milwaukee Journal, and “Friend of the People” in the 1920s Chicago Tribune. Muckraking articles more explicitly set the expectation that city people would care about and take responsibility for their neighbors. In 1880s’ Chicago, Nell Nelson of the Times exposed dangerous conditions for women workers.168 In Kansas City, the Star exposed an attempt to monopolize the streetcar system and successfully campaigned for public parks and free baths.169 There remained many editors, though, who believed muckraking articles would only embarrass their cities. A reader praised the Charleston News and Courier’s bold opinions on national politics but wondered why it could not be similarly bold in its local reporting: “It is never looking for sensations, never sticking its nose into the nether places to find out what is wrong. For this reason Charleston is poorly informed as to itself.” The city’s papers, this reader believed, “do not educate their own people in political progressiveness.”170

Like New York Tribune articles for the Fresh Air Fund, charity articles around the country raised money, sold copies, and depicted a print community that readers could join. A 1921 Philadelphia North American article that publicized its aid efforts for disabled children described the fundraising “porch parties” held all over town and printed photographs of the children who would be helped by the funds.171 The Cleveland News enlisted readers and teachers to nominate needy children for its Christmas drive and ran stories on exceptionally generous donors.172 Newspapers in smaller cities often chose to raise money for good causes without calling attention to local problems. When the Tacoma Ledger and the Tacoma News raised money for a high school stadium or a YMCA building, they improved the city without admitting that there was anything wrong with it to begin with.173 In all cities, charity drives let readers feel good about their newspapers and themselves. Yet as the reading public watched itself come together to improve the city, the poor remained outside of the conversation, welcome to express only gratitude.

New York City’s newspapers guided their readers toward an entitled and empowered cosmopolitanism, allowing them to sample the ideas, cultures, and people that had migrated to their rich and powerful city. Newspapers in other cities did not always work in quite the same way, since those cities claimed a smaller share of the nation’s rising wealth and power. Perhaps especially in the South and West, newspapers were a bit more likely to write certain populations out of the feature news or even to demonize them.174 Yet most papers did adopt some form of “travelogue” writing and used it to introduce readers to populations and neighborhoods that they might not be familiar with. These articles, even if on a small scale, stoked curiosity about ethnic difference and framed diversity as a signature urban trait. They also enshrined the white, middle-class, native-born reader as the paragon spectator and citizen and relegated all other populations to peripheral roles.

News reporters in many cities crossed widening class divides in ways that readers could not; their reports made cities temporarily traversable and intelligible to readers. When Theodore Dreiser investigated the destitute Saint Louis household where a man had murdered his family, he gave readers a voyeuristic peek into the family’s bedroom, closets, and kitchen cupboards.175 Society reporters everywhere carried readers into upper-class worlds of lavish ballrooms and expensive fashion. “Mrs. Earling will wear a gown of white lace and Miss Isabel Earling will be gowned in cerise velvet,” explained the Milwaukee Journal in an article on a Christmas dance. “In the ball room there will be Christmas trees behind which the orchestra will be stationed.”176 Yet papers in midsize cities tended not to milk poor neighborhoods for all their horror, or to express much envy or indignation in articles about the rich. Working within the smaller social circles and smaller economies of cities like Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Buffalo, editors had to be careful not to lose readers, advertisers, or friends with sensational reporting and populist rabble-rousing. Editors in midsize cities may also have been reluctant to call attention to the ugly inequalities around them. New York City editors did not have to worry that their exposés would keep people from visiting, moving to, or investing in New York. Editors elsewhere, less confident in their cities’ national and global status, likely worried about just that.

In nearly every city, shouting headlines, gruesome details, and overwhelming quantities of bad news could numb both readers and reporters. “I have schooled myself to scan the titles and omit the perusal of scandals and crime as much as possible,” explained a reader in Saint Louis. “I find that ignorance of these subjects adds to my peace of mind.”177 Readers searching for reassurance and stability might have paid special attention to the addresses in the news. Even in cities not so logically gridded and numbered as New York (and where it thus took more knowledge to be able to place an address on a map), the practice of printing addresses helped to locate the news in space, organizing what might otherwise have felt like chaos. Editors across the country also commissioned human-interest stories to balance out the cruelty and coldness of the daily news. The editors of the 1910 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, so accustomed to chronicling robberies, happily ran the headline “Found $1,000 Pin. Liveryman Picked Up Piece of Jewelry Where He Lost It.”178 A reader thanked the Baltimore Sun for its human-interest material: “After glancing through the daily press, recounting the toll of the tragic and dramatic happenings, this page is a relief to the mind, and appears to the wandering reader as a recuperating retreat from the turbulence of humanity.”179 Papers’ bad news, in aggregate, offered a sort of training in disinterested analysis and Progressive problem solving, while good news salvaged a sense of cohesion and community.

While few papers outside of New York printed metropolitan sections in those decades, most ran features that defined and publicized their cities’ distinctive traits. Many cities constructed local identity out of local history—usually that of city founders and prominent families. The Philadelphia Public Ledger created fictionalized columnists—“Anne Rittenhouse,” who penned fashion columns, “Girard’s Topics of the Town,” and “Peggy Shippen’s Diary”—out of touchstone figures from the city’s past.180 Unlike New York reporters, who rarely compared their city to others, writers elsewhere used contrasts and rivalries to distinguish their hometowns. “Let us be glad that we are Baltimoreans,” wrote H. L. Mencken on the Evening Sun’s editorial page. “Just suppose an unkind fate made us Pittsburghers.”181 Mencken’s paper fostered civic identity and civic pride through self-congratulatory contests; it gave a yearly prize for the best garden in the city and a yearly medal for the most beautiful new building.182

This variety of metropolitan branding left a mixed legacy for urban community. It strengthened readers’ bonds to their cities by pinpointing and celebrating cities’ unique qualities. But articles that slickly packaged up their cities moved urban culture away from Progressivism’s earnest engagement and quest to improve urban community and toward a culture of urban observation, enjoyment, and self-satisfaction. Newspapers’ extensive local coverage and their increasingly savvy presentation of their hometowns gave rise to a new phenomenon, in which anyone could experience the city, or feel that they belonged to the city, just by reading a newspaper.