Analysis Of The Gorgeous Incongruities

The “Gorgeous Incongruities”: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth Century New York, shows the reader the major differences between modern day New York City and Nineteenth Century New York City. In Nineteenth Century New York, the streets were used to parade social class ranking, as well as to in some ways judge those who walk the streets, which is depicted in the first few sentences of the article. However, when one goes into the city today, it couldn’t be any more different. It’s not about how rich someone is, or how poor someone is. Quite frankly people today could care less about those around them.

The article, The “Gorgeous Incongruities”: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth Century New

It seems that in Wharton’s images of the city everyone cares about what other people are up to. Where as, now when one walks around the city there is very little interaction, and very little caring of what others are doing. People who are in the city now very rarely care about the actions of those around them. “Edith Whartons characters were not free in their behavior on the streets of New York; they were intensely guarded in their displays, aware all the time of how their public communicated their identities”. According to the author, this resembles a sense of public in which public space refers to a place under scrutiny, or removed from privacy of the

Almost 85% of the population lived less than two miles from union square, otherwise known as the city’s population center. In this section of the article the author touches on different types of people found within the city’s limits. In the 1860’s New York city, much as it is today, was defined by extremes in wealth and poverty, ethnic and racial diversity, and power. However, one major difference between 1960’s New York and todays New York is the social class system. In thw 1960’s the social class system in the city was very unstable, where as today, in my opinion, it is much more stable. Really, our social class system anywhere is much more stable now than it has ever been. The streets of the city in the 1960’s not only provided transportation corridors, but were also runways to show off social class and political power. I enjoyed that the author brings up the important icons of the city known as Broadway and Fifth Avenue. These two icons had become important for portraying the city. Which, in all honesty, when one who is not from the city thinks of New York, the first two places one most likely thinks of is Broadway and Fifth Avenue, because to us that is the city. Along with Broadway and Fifth Ave, came Wall Street, and along with that addition came symbolic streetscapes that were usually highlighted in contemporary accounts. In my opinion these are the areas that make the city what it