Travel to New York City - New York - USA - Culture

New York City - New York - Culture

N.Y. Yankees

IMAGE:Botanical Gardens By 1922, this exuberant era was being called the jazz age, named for the ragtime-and-blues-derived syncopated music from uptown Manhattan that was the new rage of smart-set revelers. Jazz did not originate in Harlem, to be sure. New Orleans claims that distinction, and Chicago claims a significant role in its development. But with the dominant role that Tin Pan Alley played in publishing, recording and distributing popular music, New York was on its way to becoming the major crucible for all American music by 1910. From 1938 to 1947, New York became the recognized capital of world culture, but its triumphs came IMAGE:Metropolitan Opera House in chiaroscuro, as full of darkness as of light. The city never regained the economic superiority over the rest of America that it enjoyed in the pre-Depression 20's. As blacks and Puerto Ricans arrived en masse, more than a million whites departed for the ballooning suburbs. The 40's marked the first decade in which more people left New York than came. Frank Sinatra, an Italian-American fan of Billie Holiday who started out as a singing waiter at the Rustic Cabin in Englewood, N.J., took the city by storm in his first appearance at the Paramount Theater on Dec. 30, 1942. Although he quickly became a global phenomenon, the Paramount remained his special turf, the "home of swoon," as one fan called it.

The city of New York is a great creation of modern American culture, but to the eyes of a medievalist the histories of the European, Byzantine, and Islamic Middle Ages are documented in its streets and buildings:

In the museums of the city we find a wealth of artistic, manuscript and architectural objects from the middle ages.
In New York's buildings we can trace the history of medieval architecture.
The ethnic and religious communities which make up the city have preserved, and in some cases developed, religious and cultural tradition which had their roots in medieval societies.
The contrast between "medieval" and "modern" cannot be taken as absolute - elements of medieval technology survived until the Industrial Revolution [and later], and can be seen in the Colonial heritage of New York.

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