A spatial interface to twenty essays on the objects and themes of the exhibit as well as the objects and landmarks
More informationThe important landmarks that stood at this important Broadway intersection over time and by site
More informationA look at the technical processes along with the men and women who made all these cultural commodities in New York
More informationHannah Wirta Kinney
Claire McRee
Kelsey Brow
Andrew Gardner
Kirstin Purtich
Kirstin Purtich
Claire McRee
Laura Kelly-Bowditch
Kelsey Brow
Virginia Fister
Martina D’Amato
Zahava Friedman-Stadler
Virginia Spofford
Virginia Spofford
Martina D'Amato
Virginia Fister
Andrew Gardner
Thomas Hogan
“Up Among the Nineties”
From Harper’s Weekly [August 11, 1868], p. 520
1868
Woodcut
Closed: 16 1/8 × 11 1/2 in. (40.8 × 28.4 cm)
Library, Bard Graduate Center
Ice cream offered rich and poor alike a common respite from the brutal heat wave that felled New Yorkers in July of 1868, “a July week of hot days and suffocating nights” to which the title of Hogan’s image and the accompanying article refer. However, Hogan’s scene and the article it illustrates reveal the profound class contrasts as to where that ice cream was consumed—between the “fashionable” Broadway group in an “elegant saloon” and a “ragged band” of “Bowery waifs,” who “do not deign to lunch on Broadway.” Striking juxtapositions of social types were common in the mid-century illustrated press, helping astute Harper’s Weekly readers to decode class difference and navigate the urban landscape.
— Andrew Gardner + Virginia Fister