The Inevitable and the Invisible: Stories of Race and Class in Two New York Museums.

Abstract

The Invisible and the Inevitable: Stories of Race and Class in Two New York House Museums examines the direct and indirect forces that shape two historic sites, and by extension, narratives of American racial and class identity embedded in the built environment. Both the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan and the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn bear witness to a significant chapter in U.S. urban history: the post-war devastation of U.S. cities caused by federally subsidized white suburbanization, deindustrialization, and capital flight. But instead of telling this story, the museums obscure it—by leaving it untold. The house museums tell neighborhood stories about the distant past, but New York’s present urban formations are the products of the recent past, a period absent from both museums’ accounts: a period during which mixed-race, mixed-class cities were transformed into hyper-segregated sites of purposeful disinvestment. Thus, racial and class formations that have been determined by land use policy are naturalized in the landscape. To walk through these neighborhoods is to absorb an implicit social geography. I argue that, because they are invested with cultural authority, the museums take implicitly acquired ideas and, without making them explicit, subtly legitimate them.

This dissertation argues that neither museum can tell accurate stories about the past without acknowledging two important factors that have shaped their surrounding neighborhoods: First, the federally backed extraction of wealth from mixed-race cities, especially under the FHA beginning in the 1930s, wealth that was delivered to racially exclusive white suburbs, and second, the cultural consolidation of racial whiteness that both facilitated and resulted from mid-century suburbanization.

Furthermore, the same structures that channeled material wealth from mixed-race cities to the racially exclusive white suburbs continue to channel the resources necessary to construct public memories today. As a result, these museums participate in the social construction of the inevitable white middle class and the invisible black middle class.