New York Through the Eyes of the Flâneur
by Anna Von Holten
Introduction
“We have a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about the streets. Whenever we have an hour or two to spare, there is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy–walking up one street and down another, staring into shop windows, and gazing about as if…the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind”(Dickens 1).
Charles Dickens opened his work Sketches by Boz in 1836 with this observation from his titular character. Dickens identifies his Boz as a flâneur, an aimless wanderer who takes in the scenes around him. Flaneurs in literature and film make observations anchored in their historical period. The social conditions reflected through fictional flâneurs make culturally relevant statements entwined with the spaces they occupy. New York City artists often use street life rife with culture for a character to observe and ponder. Works set in the 1950s and 1960s reflect the upheaval and tension prominent in the city due to urban planning and gentrification. Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, when compared with historical accounts of policy and development in New York, reveal how New Yorkers conceived of the spaces they lived in. In the period of Robert Moses and its aftermath, how streets are used in New York literature reveals the value of the fictional flaneur in identifying social conditions and injustices that are still relevant to us today.
Historical Context
First proposed in 1946, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, otherwise referred to as the LOMEX, was a project that was contested by New Yorkers for decades. Many people found a great issue with urban planner Robert Moses in his quest to make the city more suitable for the 113,000 daily crosstown car trips in the downtown area. Even in 1960, approval for the artery through Washington Square Park was delayed by the “vociferous opposition of the inhabitants of the improvement route” (“Do We Want That Expressway” 18). The protest against Moses’ LOMEX came in the wake of the destruction of San Juan Hill as part of the Slum Clearance Act, as well as the Cross Bronx Expressway that was detrimental to many people’s way of life in the South Bronx.
San Juan Hill was a bustling, lively community with a diverse array of inhabitants: Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and many European immigrants found their way home in the rich cultural area. Moses characterized the space as “the worst slum in New York'', and used racially and medically charged language describing slums as a cancer that must be removed, according to Yamar Bonilla, a professor of Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (Tsioulcas). However, the decimation of San Juan Hill came with major demonstrations from the people of the area in response to Robert Moses’s unveiled plans for a cultural center and university campus in 1955. Protests stemmed from the claim that the lively, diverse community would not be the same once the inhabitants were relocated. Small businesses depended on the social capital that came with the familiarity of the neighborhood and would likely fail once their longtime customer base was spread out amongst other areas of the city. Inhabitants fought to keep their community; they articulated the collective loss of culture that would result from the clearing of their neighborhood to newspapers and held rallies with picket signs reading “No Homes, No Culture” (Zipp 423). Eventually, the highbrow culture of Lincoln Square would prevail over the working-class neighborhood as Moses would say in the groundbreaking ceremony in 1959, “You cannot rebuild a city without relocating people. You cannot make an omelet without cracking eggs'' (Zipp 420).
Robert Moses was keen on “cracking eggs'' for his transportation projects as well. The plans for Cross Bronx Expressway were revealed in 1945, but the finished six-mile and six-lane scar would not be used until approximately twenty years later. Construction blazed through the hilly terrain of the Bronx and 10 neighborhoods, predominantly in the South Bronx (Caratzas 1). After rents in Harlem soared due to the Harlem Renaissance and redlining, many middle-class Black families relocated to the South Bronx for its large residences and clean air (Dubose-Simons 543). What was once a thriving community with many Black professionals and recent European immigrant families was now destroyed by the gaping below-ground highway that Moses conceived. After construction finally ceased in 1963, New Yorkers widely regarded the South Bronx as irrevocably damaged by the rush of cars pulsing through it.
Throughout the decades-long struggle against the LOMEX, New Yorkers saw development tear through their cities with alarming speed and little input from the public. Writing by contemporaries Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford emerged from the discourse surrounding the development of New York revolving around the need for the automobile with books published in 1961, The Death and Life Of Great American Cities and The City In History. Positioned in a time of great debate over urban planning, the works of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford and their public reception embody New Yorkers’ willingness to participate in and learn about the possibilities of their city. New Yorkers saw the value in the rituals and dynamics of the neighborhood, and could see their own lives reflected in the works of Jacobs and Mumford. Their success as author-activists indicates widespread reflection about the reign of Robert Moses and whether or not one man should be able to wield the power to pen a line on a map and displace thousands of families.
New Yorkers wanted to hold close the diversity and dynamism of their city, and their voices finally triumphed over the construction of the LOMEX after many demonstrations. Activism against the project took different forms of public action. Shirley Hayes led protests with slogans like “Save The Square”, and Jane Jacob disrupted a meeting discussing the expressway by tearing the minutes from the stenograph, addressing the audience and inviting over 10 people on stage and was arrested (“Jane Jacobs” 28). The loud voice of the protest led city officials to scrap Robert Moses's plans for the LOMEX. The success of the Washington Square and Greenwich Village protests is indicative of a reassessment of who the streets belong to and how they should be used.
Flâneurism Defined
Flâneurism depends on a sense of wandering thought and was traditionally conceptualized by wandering feet. However, in a modern context, an idle walk done simply to observe is a rigorous definition of flâneurism that does not make the term accessible to a wide range of people. Therefore, I will examine flâneurism as any walk or commute in which the participant is making observations or reflecting on their surroundings. “Botanizing on the asphalt” as conceived by Walter Benjamin is not built on mere naive wandering, but may have a destination in mind. Walter Benjamin wrote of the flâneur as the writer who entered the marketplace and tried to capture what he saw in a panorama (Benjamin 1). The act of seeing the panorama of possibilities in people, buildings, and cultures of the city while on any kind of excursion outdoors is what I will examine in my research. Moreover, this more liberal definition expands who can be a flâneur. Problems arise when flâneurie depends on “the ability to see the city from a detached position”, which thinker Michael De Certeau held as the goal of every urban dweller. The modern, inclusive flâneur is integrated into the city, but still is able to make critical and conceptual observations based on the crowd and cityscape encircling them from whatever their vantage point of class, race, or gender. This definition includes characters in several works of New York authors that pose as unique literary tools that expose the social concerns of New Yorkers.
Flaneurism in practice requires a sense of aimlessness, but in literature, a goalless meander across the city is often written by an author with a clear purpose in mind. Charles Dickens was an author that pioneered the concept of the flaneur as a vehicle to identify injustices in the city and social conditions that Dickens wished to remedy. His unnamed narrator in his series The Uncommercial Traveller is horrified by the situations of beggars in the streets, and sheds light on the conditions of poverty in London. From a detached, placeless perspective as a traveler looking to neither sell nor buy, Dickens's protagonist only proclaims he travels for “the Human Interest Brothers.” His character functions to create empathy and spread awareness about an issue Dickens was very passionate about and sought to change in his city (Willis 240). A few years after publishing, London reformed its streets with the MBW, or the Metropolitan Board of Works, to remedy much of what Dickens wrote about, including a sewage system and a sanitation department (Willis 243). Dickens’s protagonist in his work The Uncommercial Traveller was a way to raise public outcry about something routinely seen in the streets and name it an injustice.
Literary Analysis
Ralph Ellison’s nameless narrator in his novel Invisible Man functions in a similar manner in his expedition through Harlem that he takes to orient himself in the city as someone from the Jim Crow South. The narrator describes himself as invisible because of the way people seem to refuse to see him or acknowledge him in a meaningful way, and the novel documents a journey of political and racial realization. The Invisible Man returns from a harrowing experience at the “factory hospital” and emerges on Lennox Ave. He awakes restless after sleeping in a kind elderly woman’s apartment and feels the need to get away from his thoughts.
On his walk, he witnesses an elderly couple shoved out of their apartment by policemen with their belongings strewn on the ground. The narrator describes a sense of “uncleanliness” at looking at the spectacle but is frozen by shame from leaving (Ellison 261). An onlooking crowd begins to form and becomes violent when one of the policemen strikes the old woman. Ellison’s narrator begins to gather the couple’s fallen belongings, and, stunned, sees the elderly man’s emancipation documents. “It has been longer than that, further removed by the time” is what the narrator tries to convince himself (Ellison 266). However, the paper serves as impetus for the narrator to make a speech: he exclaims “we’re a law-abiding people and a slow-to-anger people” to the manic crowd (Ellison 269). Halted, the crowd argues with the narrator that they are angry, and need to take action. The narrator provides them with a different, more nihilistic solution, and declares the couple “dispossessed” of not just their home, but of their entire lives, as their years of labor have resulted in nothing (Ellison 272). In a way, they are invisible too, invisible to the laws of the nation that protects them, a country that continuously enslaved them. The narrator identifies the policeman as the law and states: “he says he’ll shoot us down because we're a law-abiding people”(Ellison 273). The crowd is made to see the futility of violence and takes on a different approach. Recognizing the irony of the Black condition to follow law that does not see them, the crowd begins to merely ignore the eviction and help the couple reorganize their home. No matter how they react, the white man will see nothing but violence. The crowd clearing the street is labeled a riot and the narrator almost arrested for inciting it. Though the narrator did not intend to come across this scene and act as he did, he exposed the monolithic way that white people in New York view Black residents, and the futility of trying to convince them otherwise. Ellison’s flâneurism in the novel Invisible Man leads his character to a major injustice unfolding before him, for which he feels a call to action to fix. He brings to the crowd’s attention the social conditions of living as a black person in Harlem, which he says is a constant state of dispossession of livelihood and identity.
Jane Jacobs and Ralph Ellison have fairly comparable ideas within their writing regarding self-sufficient neighborhoods and community streetlife. The two writers never engaged in discourse with each other, or acknowledged one another in their work. However, living in the same city at the same time allowed the same observations to seep into their writing. Ellison wrote his novel The Invisible Man at the same point in time that rents were skyrocketing in Harlem as banks refused to give loans to predominantly Black areas – the cause of a migration of Black residents who could afford to leave to the South Bronx. Evictions from those who could not afford rising rent prices were increasingly common in this time, which Ellison responds to in his novel. Jane Jacobs challenges a different government interference with the community, urban planning, but reaches similar conclusions as Ellison’s characters in his novel Invisible Man.
The scene in Invisible Man directly correlates with Jane Jacob’s argument for a streetlife that is monitored by the community in her work the Death and Life of Great American Cities. Just as the crowd protects the elderly couple from their eviction in Invisible Man, Jacob’s campaign for “eyes on the street” calls for community organization against injustice. The sentiment behind Jacob’s argument is the function of streets to be plainly visible by those that inhabit them in order for those native to the area to be able to react to crime or violence as it occurs. She maintains that the streets that are safest are not the most patrolled, but instead the most watched. Jacobs describes the daily rituals of the members of her neighborhood as well as those who pass by as integral parts of a larger, symphonic “street ballet”(Jacobs 54). The familiarity as well as the public nature of Jacobs’s Hudson St. is what she credits for its safety. Eyes are always around, ready and willing to step in on a crisis or when something simply seems off about the dance’s melody. Jacob’s methodology takes police out of the equation entirely, and is distrustful of an outsider’s ability to serve justice for a community. In the same way, the crowd of Harlem natives took to defending the elderly couple and recognized that evicting them was simply unjust. The crowd took action against something that was not right with their community and protected one of their own, which follows Jacobs’s model exactly.
Preceding Ellison’s character’s encounter with the eviction is his encounter with a vendor selling yams. The nameless narrator is brought to tears as he remembers how down South people heckled Blacks for enjoying yams, and thinks about how ashamed his college president would be to “sneak chitterlings,” how an accusation like that would be worse to his reputation than “raping a woman of 90 years”(Ellison 259). Curiously, the narrator remembers yams as something universally enjoyed yet also universally hidden, so as to not raise taunts and ridicule from others. In the narrator’s old school, to acknowledge enjoyment of yams was equated to acknowledging Blackness due to racial stereotypes. Spontaneously buying warm, buttered yams from the vendor is what makes the narrator realize he will no longer place importance on what others think about him. “What a waste, what a senseless waste!”(Ellison 260) is what he wistfully thinks to himself as he bites into the bursting yam, thinking of all the times he tried to hide his culture and identity due to a stereotype. For the narrator, yams represent a Black inferiority, and he was hesitant to buy one in order to hide his Black identity and show that he was not proud of being Black. In this interaction with the city, the narrator realizes that Black culture is nothing to be ashamed about, and resolves to no longer act for white approval. The city provides the narrator with insight into his actions, and he abandons his pretense of hiding his Blackness with the revelation “I yam what I yam!”(Ellison 260). The narrator transitions from acceptance of who he is to a sense of pride in his culture in the exchange with the yam vendor. The flâneurism of Ellison’s nameless narrator to clear his mind revealed societal pressures within the Black community in America and exposed the revel and glee the narrator experiences from leaving behind the idea that his identity is shameful.
The scene of the vendor and the narrator represents another idea parallel in Jacobs’s argument: the neighborhood as a self-governing organ (Jacobs 113). Again, a close reading of the two authors as they reach from the same source material of observations of the city reveals they find a similar answer in their respective writing. Jane Jacobs defines the community this way because she believes its growth is an organic process; only the inhabitants can decide what businesses belong and how the neighborhood develops. In Ellison’s novel, the vendor sells something so integral to Black culture it brings our narrator to tears. He and his wife occupy a special niche that can only be satisfied in a community like Harlem. The community, in turn, patronizes his business, allowing him to remain selling his yams and hot fried pies and other commodities that make our narrator think of the indigestion he will have from eating them so fast after such a long time denying himself. The neighborhood essentially functions to decide that a yam vendor belongs in Harlem. Jacobs’s argument entails the neighborhood’s ability to decide for itself with its patronage what businesses reside within it, instead of a larger force of government or urban planning deciding for it. Jacobs wishes to bring to light that Moses-era urban planning does not take into account the cultural value of people like the street vendor and instead supports a uniform street that does not serve the community that resides on it. Both Ellison and Jacobs see the necessity of cultural assets like the yam vendor that are integral to the community but not recognized by authority as highbrow, valuable culture.
Other prominent works of the time addressed issues that were relevant to its contemporary audience. Published in 1970, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters describes gentrification in Brooklyn in the late 60’s. The novel is centered on a middle aged, upper middle class married couple, Otto and Sophie, who move to Brooklyn when Otto’s firm relocates. The pair find themselves forever trying to confirm superiority over the community that came before them, who they call “slum people” (Fox 12). The childless couple repeatedly notes status symbols within their home and outside of it, a pretentious air that covers a disdain for the community they moved into. While on their way to a dinner party, Otto glances back at is his apartment and the block they reside on, calculating:
“With one or two exceptions, each of the houses on the Bentwoods’ block was occupied by one family. All of the houses had been built during the final third of the last century, and were of brick or brownstone. Where the brick had been cleaned, a chalky pink glow gave off an air of antique serenity. Most front parlor windows were covered with white shutters. Where owners had not yet been able to afford them, pieces of fabric concealed the life within behind the new panes of glass. These bits of cloth, even though they were temporary measures, had a certain style, a kind of forethought about taste, and were not at all like the rags that hung over the windows of the slum people. What the owners of the street lusted after was recognition of superior comprehension of what counted in this world, and their strategy for getting it combined restraint and indirection” (Fox 12).
Otto looks to the houses that are well kept and newly bought with a sense of pride. He sees firsthand that the inhabitants of his block are rising in social class. Interestingly, he notes that this process requires that the native community be replaced by the single family dwellers that make the apartment glow with their wealth. The other neighbors who do not fit his ideal are merely “exceptions” in his mind, as he knows it is likely they will soon be gone, too, as he observes “one boarding house remained in business, but the nine tenants were very quiet, almost furtive, like the last remaining members of a foreign enclave who, daily, expect deportation”(Fox 12). The original community feels their displacement, and in Otto’s mind, are resigned to it. Otto’s language both depersonalizes and makes them seem alien to the area. He thinks of them as “tenants”, as opposed to neighbors, and compares them to foreigners when in fact his pristine, ideal neighborhood was built around theirs. What is clear from Otto’s observations about his new community is that he perceives his neighbors’ social mobility as his own, and deems the low income people that they replace as stagnant and uncultured.
Otto’s character and the observations of his flâneurism are a critique of the transition of Brooklyn from a thriving, diverse community to a monolith of white, higher income people. Fox’s commentary on gentrification in the 60’s strikes a chord with the idea of “urban drama” that New York urbanist Lewis Mumford describes in his 1961 work The City In History. Mumford describes the loss of diversity as the loss of culture and dynamism that is vital to a city environment (Mumford 113). In this work, he penned “the silence of a dead city has more dignity than the vocalisms of a community that knows neither detachment nor dialectic opposition, neither ironic comment nor stimulating disparity…Such a drama is bound to have a fatal last act”(Mumford 114). Mumford offers this foreboding warning against development like Otto relishes on his block, believing that differing opinions and backgrounds are crucial for a city to be a place of meaningful, dialectic interactions. In his work as an urban planner, Mumford abhorred infrastructure that kept people apart like the LOMEX, and later in his career sought for ways for people of all ages to come together on the street. Mumford warns against a New York City constructed merely to create capital, as its major projects and developments optimized the city for those with wealth and in the prime of their lives to spend money. In his writing as in his work, Mumford believed completely homogenous populations like the one Otto yearns for, who all have wealth and white shutters, do not have the same vital discourse and are doomed to fail. Both Mumford and Fox mirror the notion that New York is meant for people to interact and grow together, and in order to preserve this ideal, diverse neighborhoods and at-risk populations should be protected.
Sophie’s character notices the population of native Brooklynites that Otto dismisses with more nuance. She, too, disparages the dirty streets and those who litter them, but acknowledges the encroaching gentrification as a process of replacement and loss (Fox 13). Earlier in the novel, she asks her husband “What happens to the people in them when the houses are bought? Where do they go? I always wonder about that.” When her husband has no answer but offers instead that those that buy the houses are “pioneers”, she rebuts “It doesn’t take courage. It takes cash” (Fox 5). Sophie puts a lot of energy into the morality of their situation throughout the novel, which clarifies in this statement of self-realization that they are a wave of gentrification. She acknowledges the community they are pushing out of Brooklyn as people.
This distinction from her husband is how Fox chooses to orient her character before her walk with Otto. Sophie’s mind wanders over surroundings as the couple pass the Arab sector by Atlantic Ave. Sophie is entranced by the rich smells of leather and sesame paste, and listens as “a thin Eastern wail slid out of a store no bigger than a closet. Inside, three men were staring down at a hand-operated record player” (Fox 14). Unlike Otto, Sophie sees culture in the “slum people” that Otto abhors. The tone of her observation is neutral, but she sees the unique qualities of how this neighborhood interacts with each other and spends time together, just as she is about to go spend time with her friends. Sophie notices the parallels between them and herself, but also notes their practices with a distanced curiosity. Sophie is able to see the value of neighborhoods like the Arab sector while knowing that their probable displacement due to gentrification is something she is a part of.
How Fox wrote of the space that the three Egyptian men Sophie encounters occupy in an unconventional way is also reflected in the work of Arthur Tress. Tress is a renowned photographer who produced Open Space in the Inner City, a project funded by the New York State Council for the Arts, documenting New York’s areas of impromptu congregation, respite, and recreation. Beginning his project in 1968, Tress reveals the ways open spaces such as rooftops, shorelines, and even landfills were used unofficially in the same way one would use a designated city park (Burssard). The scope of Tress’s work spans to urban deterioration as a result of overcrowding, automobile congestion, and pollution (Burssard). Tress’s project documents the tensions and transitions of outer boroughs and inner city areas and how people adapt to their spaces. The picture below documents how a young man in Brooklyn finds peace with his domesticated pigeons on a rooftop, far removed from the conglomerate structure of buildings below. Tress documents the way that his subjects use space in order to cement their presence and impact on the city. In a similar way to Tress’s subjects, the men observed by Sophie are also using the storefront in a way that it was not designed for. Their cramped, intense focus is offset by the bustle of the streets, and they use the space as they can to come together with the record player. The men observed by Sophie are also using the storefront in a way that it was not designed for. Their cramped, intense focus is offset by the bustle of the streets, and they use the space as they can to come together with the record player. The men are confined to the storefront to enjoy the sounds of their culture that Sophie can only discern as a “Eastern wail”. The notion of their foreign culture as well as their belonging in Brooklyn is exemplified in the unique way they inhabit the storefront, much like the way Tress documents the young man who uses the rooftop. Fox finds the same tension with space and the wider implication of displacement and inadequate facilities that Tress explores in the late 1960’s.
Conclusion
As exemplified by Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, flâneurism in literature can relay culturally relevant messages and expose social conditions of the city that characters traverse. Ellison’s work reveals to its audience the nuance of Black identity in the city as his character grapples with acceptance and eventually pride, as well as the idea that Black people in the city live with a different set of rules as “law abiding people” expected to comply with a government that does not see them as equal citizens. Paula Fox’s later novel reveals the moral condition of gentrification and the loss of culture that the process relies on. Both works engage with ideas of development and the function of a neighborhood that thinkers Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and Arthur Tress also conceived in their analytic works. The ability of the flâneur to reveal so many rich ideas anchored in the history they walk through speaks to the value of flâneurism as a literary tool to convey to the audience pertinent ideas about their reality.
Through flâneurism in literature, we can examine cultural shifts over time and how changes in the environment affect collective ideas. With this, it is crucial to acknowledge the importance of responsible development that prevents a disconnect from the environment and history. “Urban transportation projects which are performed more quickly, arbitrarily and unconsciously have devastated the historical pattern of a region”(Bektas). The transformation befell the city under the designs of Robert Moses along with the concerns of New Yorkers was well documented by works like Fox’s and Ellison’s. Flâneurism in literature prevents the collective political memory loss of the social conditions and the historical problems of an area or population. Preserving environments that people celebrate and changing the aspects that challenge them should be the main focus of city development, as activist Jane Jacobs advocates. The flâneur in literature documents collective perspectives on spaces, which serve better when the spaces are still around to be remedied and revered.
Work Cited
Bektas, Leyla. (2014). Flâneur's Cadde-i Kebir Walk: Seeing Beyoglu's Past Through Walter Benjamin. Moment Journal. 1. 296-311. doi:10.17572/mj2014.2.296311.
Bussard, Katherine A. “Arthur Tress, Open Space in the Inner City (1971)”. Princeton Art Museum
Caratzas, Michael. “Past Meets Futurism Along the Cross-Bronx: Preserving a Significant Urban Expressway.” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism, vol. 1, no. 1, 2004, pp. 25–35. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25834928. Accessed 19 Dec. 2022.
Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz. FORGOTTEN BOOKS, 2022.
DuBose-Simons, Carla J. “Movin’ on Up: African Americans in the South Bronx in the 1940s.” New York History, vol. 95, no. 4, 2014, pp. 543–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/newyorkhist.95.4.543. Accessed 19 Dec. 2022.
“Do We Want That Expressway?” The New York Times, August 27th 1960 p. 18 https://nyti.ms/3VRe8vn
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Random House, 1952
Fox, Paula. Desperate Characters. Norton and Company, 1970.
"Jane Jacobs Is Arrested At Expressway Hearing." The New York Times, 11 Apr. 1968, p. 28. https://nyti.ms/3W3ipfy
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961.
Moses, Robert Proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. October 14th 1946
"Open Space in the Inner City (Arthur Tress), 2015-20," Princeton University Art Museums collections online, December 19, 2022, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/107681.
Severo, Richard “Mrs. Jacobs Protest Results in Riot Charge” The New York Times April 18th 1968 Accessed 12/11/2022 https://nyti.ms/3Fispek
Tress, Arthur. Open Space In The Inner City. State of New York, 1971.
Silver, Nathan “Plans For The Planners” The New York Times, May 5th, 1968. Accessed 12/11/2022 https://nyti.ms/3BqzPLm
Tsioulcas, Anastasia. “Revisiting San Juan Hill” National Public Radio, October 7th 2022. https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/2022-10-07/revisiting-san-juan-hill-the-neighborhood-destroyed-to-make-way-for-lincoln-center
WILLIS, MARK. “DICKENS THE FLANUER— LONDON AND ‘THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER.’” Dickens Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 4, 2003, pp. 240–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45291937. Accessed 22 Nov. 2022.
Zipp, Samuel. “The Battle of Lincoln Square: Neighborhood Culture and the Rise of Resistance to Urban Renewal.” Planning Perspectives, vol. Vol. 24, no. No. 4, 28 May 2008, pp. 409–433. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02665430903145655?journalCode=rppe20#:~:text=Organized%20resistance%20to%20relocation%20at%20Lincoln%20Square%20brought,opposed%20to%20that%20on%20offer%20at%20Lincoln%20Center., DOI: 10.1080/02665430903145655. Accessed 18 Dec. 2022.